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Getting a piece of subway history

By Marlene Naanes | mnaanes@am-ny.com

May 2, 2008

Discarded station stops, destination signs and entry globes sit in the former MTA headquarters on Jay St. in Brooklyn. (Dave Sanders)

People all over the world have gotten their hands on a little piece of transit history through an obscure division of New York City Transit, a department that five years ago was better known for selling scrap metal and recycling motor oil.

Interior designers have bought train doors to deck out stylish apartments, a New York-themed golf course owner in Thailand bought subway station signs and a Connecticut attorney spent thousands on his personal collection of transit history.

"It's people from all walks of life from retired transit employees from people who just like subways or buses," said Mike Zacchea, head of the Asset Recovery department. "We get odd requests, too, we have people looking for doors who'd have thunk it?"

The division was surprised by interest in its items when it sold $200,000 worth of vintage Redbird car parts. About 1,300 of the red 1950s- and 1960s-era cars were stripped of items and then sunk off shore lines to create artificial reefs.

The division received its highest volume of phone messages in December 2004, with 400 inquiries resulted in a record $8,300 worth of sales.

Zacchea has since been selling old train station signs on the MTA's Web site.

In the Transit Authority's former headquarters on Jay Street, about 200 Redbird grab handles, 120 air-pressure gauges, and various train and station signs are scattered on one floor. Memorabilia made up $75,000 of the department's $1 million-plus in revenues in 2003, and has fallen steadily to $19,000 last year.

The floor of the Jay Street building may become a lot more crowded this summer as transit plans to retire more lettered-line cars, sending them to watery graves but saving collectibles. Zacchea does not expect as big an influx of buyers like he saw with the Redbird sale. Nor does he know how much longer transit officials will sell collectible train parts as the last of the old trains are retired in the coming years.

"The newer technology trains don't have quite the kind of interesting pertinences that the Redbirds had," he said. "All the hand grabs have been replaced by straight stainless steel rails. There's not much of a nostalgia market or a collectible market for that."

Train buffs have long purchased transit-sanctioned memorabilia like bus fare boxes and handfuls of tokens from the New York Transit Museum. But like any collectibles market, the not-so-sanctioned methods have been around since the system's beginnings.

Former employees have saved parts of trains before they were retired, scrap dealers have marketed items themselves and people have reportedly stolen transit property.

The market for transit memorabilia is still hot, collectors say. And while the asset-recovery department items can sell for up to $1,000 right now, older items on Ebay can go for even more.

Sellers like Georgia-based software designer J.R. Ramsay have sold hundreds of collectibles for thousands of dollars.

Ramsay fell in love with the subway when he and his wife watched the ball drop for New Years 2001 and began buying vintage train-destination roll signs. He's spent about $30,000 on the signs, cut them up and framed them to sell, making about a 10 to 15 percent profit in the past few years.

Already he's seen the signs he buys increase from a couple hundred dollars to the thousand-dollar range. The supply will decrease, he believes, and the demand will increase.

"It'll get bigger as people get older and the trains get more and more mechanized and they used the LED lights," he said. "People will want to remember their childhood. There's nothing romantic about LED lights. They're boring."