All aboard! This train is on schedule to meet the dead.
For one day only, the New York City Transit Museum is pulling out its old 1930s IND R1-9 cars for a Nostalgia Ride to Green-Wood Cemetery.
The cars made their debut when the Independent Subway, the first subway company operated by the city, opened in 1932 and continued to run until 1977, according to museum officials.
On Saturday, courageous straphangers will board the vintage fleet, which will be adorned with special lights and spooky decorations, at the new 96th Street/Second Avenue station on the Upper East Side and ride to 25th Street in Brooklyn, where they’ll get off for a picnic and twilight tour of Green-Wood.
A tour guide will lead the group through tombstones and past mausoleums of famous actors, politicians, artists and inventors who influenced New York City history from the Victorian era onward, including Tammany Hall "Boss" William M. Tweed, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, composer Leonard Bernstein, abolitionist the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and more.
"Exploring New York’s historical cemeteries, especially one as important as Green-Wood, gives you a chance to learn some of the personal stories of people who shaped the city’s history and continue to have impacts today," said Shaelyn Amaio, the museum’s producer of public programs. "Halloween is a time when some believe that the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead are blurred, and we think that makes it a great time to look to the past in order to think about the present."
IF YOU GO
The Nostalgia Ride to Green-Wood Cemetery is Saturday from 2:30-8 p.m. | departs 96th Street–Second Avenue | sold out | nytransitmuseum.org
