When the New York City subway opened on October 27, 1904, the first train departed from the Old City Hall station. “What made it very unique was the configuration of the station: it was built on a loop,” says Justin Rivers, a historian with Untapped New York. “Because of the angle of the turn, they had to figure out a way to make the station beautiful, because it was the ceremonial first station.”

Known as “The Jewel in the Crown” of the subway system, the station represented a pinnacle of decorative art and craftsmanship, says Jodi Shapiro, curator at the New York Transit Museum.

The station was designed by the architecture firm Heins & LaFarge, who hired Rafael Guastavino, a Spanish building engineer known for his vault constructions, to create a series of repeating arches along the tightly curved track. He decorated the walls and ceilings with his signature tiles set in geometric patterns. It's the only station featuring Renaissance Revival elements.

“The station includes chandeliers with bare light bulbs, designed not only to illuminate but also to boast the modern convenience of electricity—which had only been introduced to homes and businesses in 1888,” Shapiro adds.

As it turns out, the station’s unique construction led to its downfall. To keep up with increasing ridership, cars were added to subway trains, but, according to Rivers, there was no way to extend the station to accommodate new trains since it was built on a curve.

On top of that, “everybody was using the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall [station], which was 600 feet away, and could go downtown and uptown,” Rivers says. Old City Hall station closed on December 31, 1945, but its elegant features remain underground to this day.

While the station is generally closed to the public, annual tours are available through the New York Transit Museum. Savvy subway riders can also catch a glimpse of the old City Hall station if they stay on the 6 train at the Brooklyn Bridge stop. The old station is visible as the train turns around and heads back uptown.

Annoyed that London built an underground transit system first (in 1863), inventor Alfred Ely Beach took it upon himself to design and patent his own pneumatic subway. This early subway would be powered by giant fans that propelled the car through a narrow tube—and then, reversing, sucked them back.

“He created this circular tube under Broadway in the middle of the night—nobody knew he was doing it, because this was not blessed by the city,” Rivers says.

According to Shapiro, Beach built his subway “as proof of concept that pneumatic tubes—already in use for moving mail across the city—could also be used to move people across the city underground.”

The pneumatic subway officially opened to the public on March 1, 1870 following a ceremonial launch on February 26. It was a short ride, intended as a demonstration, running one block from Murray Street to Warren Street. Beach hoped to eventually expand the subway so it could jettison passengers all the way from City Hall to Central Park at a speed of one mile per minute.

Beach rented out the basement of Devlin’s, a gentleman’s clothier on Broadway, and created a parlor-like “reception room” featuring a fountain with goldfish, grand piano, chandeliers, paintings and seats. The pneumatic subway car was made of wood, and “about half as large as a streetcar, cushioned, lighted, ventilated, and elegant in all its appointments,” according to the New York Times.

A ticket to ride New York City’s first subway cost 25 cents per person—roughly $6 in 2024, Shapiro explains. “Despite this enormous expense, over 400,000 people rode it in its first year,” she says. All proceeds from ticket sales went to the Union House for the Orphans of Soldiers and Sailors, the New York Times reported.

“Beach intended to expand his pneumatic system, but by the time he received permission from the city to do so, support from both the public and his financial backers had waned,” Shapiro explains. The pneumatic subway closed shortly after, in 1873.

When workers were excavating the BMT Broadway Line in 1912, they dug into the pneumatic tunnel and discovered the tunneling shield Beach had used to construct his tube, the car, the piano and other parts of the waiting room, Shapiro says. “You can basically go in on one end of the R/W City Hall station and walk the whole length of what would have been the pneumatic tube,” Rivers says.

In most cases, accessing the subway requires entering a station. However, a few buildings throughout the city feature their own subway entrances and exits.

One example is the Manhattan Municipal Building, which was built over the Chambers Street and Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall subway stations. “It was the first building to be planned and constructed with direct access to the subway below, and has a vaulted arcade designed by Rafael Guastavino,” Shapiro says.

The Chrysler Building also has its own entrance to the 4/5/6 line via Grand Central-42nd St. station. “The IRT actually did not want Walter Chrysler to connect the building, but he did it anyway, at his own expense, and it’s still there today,” Rivers says.

Another example is 770 Broadway, which has its own entrance from the Astor Place station. In the late 1800s, retail magnate John Wanamaker wanted to expand his operations—coincidentally on a site that was also part of the route of the first subway line. The Astor Place station opened on October 27, 1904, but Wanamaker’s store didn’t open until 1907.

To generate excitement about this direct access once the store opened, Wanamaker issued a map of the first subway line in 1904. Shapiro says this is believed to be the first subway map ever produced.

There are a handful of other buildings with their own subway entrances, some of which are functional—like ones in Rockefeller Center and the New York Life Building—and others that have signs indicating their past lives, but doorways that are blocked off, like the Knickerbocker Hotel in the Times Square station, and Clinton Hall in the Astor Place station.

Subway globes have been a feature of the subway system since it opened, but starting in the 1980s, they were color-coded to communicate different messages to straphangers.

“Green globes meant there was a token booth, with a booth agent, that was open 24/7 and you could go into the system through that staircase at any time,” Shapiro explains. “A red globe meant there were no manned token booths, and you could not enter the station at that particular staircase—but you might be able to exit there.” A yellow globe indicated a part-time booth, where you might be able to enter the station with a token through a HEET (high entry/exit turnstile), she notes.

But this color-coding system was short-lived. The yellow globes were discontinued in the early 1990s, and the bottom half of the globes “were replaced with white half-moons to help illuminate the staircases,” Shapiro says.

Today, green globes mean that a station is open, while red globes mean the entrance or the exit is not open to public use.

Many New York City Subway stations are decorated with ceramic plaques that hold special meaning for the station. The technical term for a decorative ceramic plaque, like the ones in some IRT stations, is a “faience.” These glazed architectural tiles depicted numbers, letters and symbols that quickly communicated the location of a station to passengers.

“When the first subway line was being planned and built, Chief Engineer William Barclay Parsons frequently emphasized that much of the ornamentation would not only be visually pleasing but also meaningful,” Shapiro explains.

For example, at Columbus Circle, the faiences feature caravels: vessels used by Portuguese and Spanish explorers. The ones at the 33rd Street station depict eagles holding shields bearing the number 33, emblematic of the former 71st Regiment Armory at Park Avenue and 33rd Street. At Fulton Street station, there are faience mosaics of Robert Fulton’s steamboat, the Clermont.

Some of the most intriguing faiences are the beavers of Astor Place. “It was a showcase station when the system opened up in 1904 because Astor Place was always considered to be an area of high wealth,” River explains. Why beavers? The Astor family started their wealth through the beaver pelt trade.