AND now, another image from the dawn of Forgotten New York, from 1998-2000, thereabouts. At this remove, I’m not sure where I fired off this photo, but by the tiling and color band in the background, it’s in an IND station somewhere. I call these the iron maidens of the subway. It’s a very heavy revolving metal door, controlled by the insertion of a token in the popup fixture in the metal box at right. Once the token was inserted you were able to push the door where the convenient “Push Here” sign indicated. When I was a kid up to age 6 or so, these were too heavy for me to handle. They could be found at entrances where there was no token booth; for example, the R train has an entrance/exit to the southbound train at 4th Avenue and 85th, where one of these iron maidens was located. Sometimes they could also be found in spacious IND stations far away from the booth.
With all the farebeating going on these days, I recommend the MTA return to the iron maiden concept and convert them to the OMNY phone/bank card tap system, since swiped MetroCards are supposed to begin a phaseout during 2025. I had never witnessed a farebeater even attempt to defeat an Iron Maiden: squeezing under them would be problematic except for the smallest, thinnest farebeater, and even that can be addressed by making the revolving door closer to the ground. The metal bars on top prevent any notion of climbing over.
Janno Lieber, are you reading this?
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2/12/25
13 comments
It looks like the sign might say “Flushing Ave.”
They are probably scared to bring them back as there is always a lawyer
under every rock and cranny these days just a waiting to pounce.
We once had to weld a strip of channel across the tops of these high fences
in a housing project because when the poor sweet innocent drug dealers ran
from the police they sometimes impaled themselves on the spikes
Chris: It would be cheaper for the MTA to reinstall these turnstiles and resolve the lawsuits as they arise (they arise no matter what anyway) than to continue to absorb the costs of fare-beating.
Could be Flushing Avenue station on the crosstown G Line
FU…. something avenue on the G line?
There’s another type that’s just bars, I think. Maybe City Hall station, or somewhere in lower Manhattan.
Definitely the IND Crosstown Line, Green Tiles, two tracks, side platforms.
There are many stations that have something similar, albeit much less sinister looking, for exits in unmanned station areas.
I also believe that the MTA needs to bring back the Iron Maidens. They would go a long way toward solving the fare beating problem. The problem is making them reliable for constant use. One of the reasons they were
removed was that they broke easily under heavy use and people were trapped inside. I honestly can’t think of any other way to defeat the fare-beating.
Yep. Blew up the image- as others have noted, definitely Flushing Ave.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/triborough/5170499821/in/photostream/
This seems to be the modern Iron Maiden turnstile. This is the only type the MTA should use. Problem solved.
That should do the trick
Some of us can probably recall when particular models of the “iron maidens”, extant during the late ’70’s and early ’80’s, had some bizarre, exploitable “fault” wherein a miscreant could place something innocuous-looking, but strong — cannot recall what would work — down amongst the bars at the bottom, on the side opposite from the “pass-through”. When the rotating bars came into contact with these, they stopped, and certain types were not designed to rotate backwards (i.e., be used as an exit). Therefore the “chamber” created by the now-immobile mechanism could move neither forward nor backward, and the person trapped inside could not reach the item blocking the free rotation, wherein the ne’er-do-wells would demand payment, in the form of wallets, purses, etc., to grant release to the victim. Which, naturally, would *not* be granted.