“I do ride [the trains] every day, and, yes, it is a museum. It’s a living, rolling active museum… We bring two million people to work in the morning, and those same two million people, well, we’ve got to bring them home at night. We’re not allowed to lose too many of them.”
A Redbird’s swan song
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Subway car on the National Mall during the 2001 New York City program. Photos © Chao-Hwa Chen, 2008 -
Some Folklife Festival artifacts are just too big to save. The multi-ton, sixty-foot-long “Redbird” subway car that the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) sent to the National Mall as part of the 2001 New York City at the Smithsonian program fell into this category. This subway car strap, which was salvaged from the car after the event, reminds us of the fabulously restored car and the engaging MTA employees who accompanied it to the nation’s capital.
The subway is an essential part of New York City culture; some people call it “New York’s Sixth Borough.” The largest subway system in the country, New York’s subway features 714 miles of track, 20 separate lines, and 472 stations. It runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and daily transports more than 4 million riders to jobs, appointments, events, and entertainment.
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The subway car is towed across the George Washington Bridge from its yard in Inwood, Manhattan—on its way to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 2001. Photo by Budd Williams/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
In 2001, the Smithsonian invited five MTA employees to the Festival to talk about their jobs and mass transit’s integral relationship to New York City. The MTA maintenance and repair shop also restored an entire 1960s “Redbird” R-33 subway car prior to sending it to the National Mall on a flatbed truck.
Like thousands of others, this subway car was manufactured by the St. Louis Car Company, Missouri, sometime in the 1960s. These R-33 models were nicknamed “Redbirds” because of the red color they were painted during the 1970s to discourage graffiti. The model was being phased out in the early 2000s, and after the Festival, the Smithsonian’s Redbird joined hundreds of other decommissioned NYC subway cars that were dumped off the Delaware coast to create an artificial reef. This strap was saved as a Festival souvenir.
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2001 Festival tech and production team pose inside the Redbird. Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives
Such straps—which in earlier models were made of leather—hung from train ceilings and overhead handrails to provide extra handholds for passengers on crowded trains. MTA employees refer to cars packed with people holding onto straps a “swinging load.” Since the early 1900s, New York commuters have been nicknamed “straphangers.” During the 2001 Festival, thousands of visitors were able to walk through the refurbished car, hear MTA conductors and engineers talk about their jobs and adventures beneath the streets of New York, and recreate a true NYC subway experience by holding onto a strap.
