The MetroCard’s 28 Years As a Blank Canvas

The MetroCard, as regular Curbed readers know, will soon disappear from our underground landscape. This system has never been perfect (cough SLIDE AT THIS TURNSTILE AGAIN cough) but it was robust and pretty good technology, and over the next three decades we got what we paid for. OMNY, its replacement, includes the option of a rate card, but most of its transactions will be entirely electronic, carried out via mobile phones and credit card chips. Physical fare carriers will not disappear: around one metro user in eight does not have a bank account and many others do not have a smartphone. So there are and there will be OMNY cards that they can buy. But most transit riders won’t.

Many of us treat MetroCards as disposable items, to be recycled or thrown away when they run out. Immediately after their introduction, however, the MTA realized that the visual blandness of this object also meant that it was a tiny blank canvas, or at least the back of it. To that end, in January 1994, the agency began selling commemorative editions, and a community of collectors soon coalesced to buy, sell, and trade. Lev Radin, who had just arrived from the former Soviet Union, had been a stamp collector in the USSR, and when his son brought home from school a MetroCard with an advertisement on the back, Radin thought, “Oh , it’s interesting .” (It was also a cheap collectible he could get into without a lot of start-up capital.) Eventually he befriended fellow enthusiasts and MTA insiders who helped him find the rarest cards; there’s only one, he says, missing from his collection of thousands. It’s a surprisingly large community of collectors, stretching far beyond New York “I’ve met collectors in Australia and New Zealand,” he says. Are Australians interested in railway memorabilia or New York artefacts, or is their interest in collecting through another vector?” “Gift cards,” he says with a small smile.

As the MetroCard prepares to leave the cityscape, we asked Radin to share some highlights from the past 28 years.

As some New Yorkers will recall, the first MetroCards were not gold with a blue logo, but the reverse. This one shows an expiration date of December 1995, which means it was issued in 1994, among the first available to the public. “They used to expire after about a year,” says Radin. Now it’s closer to around 16 months.

Early in the MetroCard’s run, the MTA experimented with other colors and materials. The FOR TEST ONLY card was probably used by an employee of the MTA or its supplier, Cubic. The “9.5 MIL” rating on another indicates its thickness, 9.5 mils (there have been others tried). The latter two are purely color tests, predating the arrival of the standard gold MetroCard we all know today. They’re paper, with no actual magnetic tape, and they’re a shocking sight in an alternate universe, like this blue Coca-Cola can which went viral some time ago.

It’s a Dial-a-Mattress ad. (Leave out the last s for “subway”?)

Issued when the MetroCard launched in January 1994, this four-piece set included a letter from MTA Chief Peter Stangl noting that the card could be used “not only for transit fares, but also for phones audiences and many other uses. Notable today: the one-way fare was $1.25.

The agency tried to follow through on this plan for payphones, printing instructions for making calls on the back. It did not take off and the program was quickly aborted.

Every major sporting event receives a commemoration, in part because getting fans to use public transportation is so much better than having everyone drive to the ballpark. Six were issued for the Subway series in 2000; Radin explains that two of them were scrapped before they were issued, and the other four are really hard to find, as many were destroyed after a logo copyright dispute between MasterCard and Major League Baseball. .

From left to right : Photo: Marcus McDonaldPhoto: Marcus McDonald

From above: Photo: Marcus McDonaldPhoto: Marcus McDonald

From left to right : Photo: Marcus McDonaldPhoto: Marcus McDonald

From above: Photo: Marcus McDonaldPhoto: Marcus McDonald

It is difficult to say exactly which cards are the hard to find, but these two are serious candidates. The New York Time the card was preloaded with fares and slipped into delivery copies, as a promotion, and only about 1,000 were issued. (They sell to collectors for “thousands of dollars” now, Radin says. Another with a Daily News logo is even harder to find.) The Continental Airlines one doesn’t look special, but it was never released and has no expiration date, so thoroughgoing collectors covet it even more. There are, he says, twelve known to exist.

From left to right : Photo: Marcus McDonaldPhoto: Marcus McDonald

From above: Photo: Marcus McDonaldPhoto: Marcus McDonald

Rizzi, the Brooklyn-born artist, produced his first special edition in the early days of the card. The one bound in the book below was never published in the United States, only in Germany.

Photo: Marcus McDonald

Photo: Marcus McDonald

Rangers fans know.

If you bought a card before the US opened in 2000, most had an American Express advertisement on the back. A select few, scattered across the system, were signed up with autographs from Martina Hingis and Michael Chang. There was an implication that these were genuine Sharpie signatures, but Radin believes they may have been mass printed.

From left to right : Photo: Marcus McDonaldPhoto: Marcus McDonald

From above: Photo: Marcus McDonaldPhoto: Marcus McDonald

It’s probably these two: Supreme (2017) and Biggie (2021), celebrating hip-hop culture in their respective ways, each released in editions of around 50,000 copies. They, along with Rizzi’s Art Cards, arguably do the most with that little wallet-sized space. The Biggie quickly found a extremely enthusiastic follow-up.