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