1904 NYC 1st day subway ticket

[rholmes]

Originally Posted by steve B

I'd have to think it would be of interest to railroad/subway fans, and there are plenty of them.

Now if you had a ticket to NYs first subway, I'd have already sent a PM even though I probably couldn't afford it.

First subway what, Steve? Series?

Here's a scan of the ticket, for anyone curious. The 4,185th ticket sold for the NYC subway. So far no-one I've spoken to about it, including a couple of older dealers in New York ephemera, has ever seen one this early sold publicly. It does say on the back of the ticket that you were supposed to "drop in gate box before entering train," so my guess is only a few sneaky people wanting a souvenir kept them. As I said in my earlier post, the Museum of the City of New York has ticket #1, and the New York Historical Society has one numbered 13-thousand-something.