For $900, This Subway Seat Could Be Yours

In an expression of fandom usually seen at movie premieres or concerts, crowds of people on Thursday morning lined up for blocks in Brooklyn to enter a yard sale.

At 9 a.m., tall, chain-linked gates rattled open and the people in line, the earliest of whom had arrived at 1 a.m., flooded into a graveled yard to shift through hundreds of signs, bright yellow and orange seats and other collectible items from North America’s largest subway system.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the agency that runs New York City’s subway and bus networks, had organized the first day of the pop-up sale on a cold fall morning in a remote storage yard. That did little to deter the scores of treasure hunters digging through transit artifacts like looped metal handholds and globe-shaped exit lights. Most of the signs for sale had been in use in the transit system before being decommissioned after station renovations or when station names were changed.

Vivian Ng, a manager in the M.T.A. department that repurposes and sells surplus items or those that are no longer in use, said the sale “started off as a creative way to meet with our customers and sell these signs,” which previously had only been sold online. The first in-person sale was a success and the rest is history, Ms. Ng said. “The customers and the public have really been showing up,” she said.

This year, for the first time, the annual event allowed walk-ins rather than just appointment-only participants. This is the fifth year the sale has been held by the transit authority, which uses the proceeds to help keep the system running. The M.T.A. declined to disclose how much the sales had raised. The two-day event is scheduled to continue until 2 p.m. on Friday.

Though grousing about the city’s transit system is a common past time among New Yorkers, many of the people at the sale said they had an affection for the subway, whose distinct white on black signage and color-coded network of routes are recognizable around the world.

In another indication that this was not your average garage sale, some items had price tags in the hundreds of dollars, with circular metal M.T.A. signs selling for $500, MetroCard signs for nearly $600 and unused plastic bucket seats for $900. (Used seats were cheaper.)

Emily Akers, 28, an event producer, was hoping to buy a sign for the Grand Army Plaza subway station, the stop closest to her childhood home in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope.

“The M.T.A. is its own character in the story of New York City,” she said. “And I think a lot of native New Yorkers, like, have that love-hate relationship with it, which is also part of the charm.”

Ms. Akers and her brother bought a pair of the orange subway car seats, which are currently being replaced throughout the system. They also sprung for a sign displaying an oversize image of a MetroCard, the transit pass that is being phased out, like the subway token before it.

The simple but distinctive design flair seen throughout the over-century-old subway system traces its origins to the 1940s, when the three separate companies that made up the train network were unified and placed under government control.

At that time, a passenger entering the system would have to decipher the ad hoc signage, with different typefaces and messaging, left behind by the previous operators.

In 1967, transit officials hired the firm Unimark to develop a uniform design plan, which resulted in the white on black signage that is still in use today, said Jodi Shapiro, the curator at the New York Transit Museum.

The new design plan changed not only the typeface and the color of signs in the system, but aimed to be more thoughtful about their placement to avoid overwhelming passengers, she said. “This was a way to decrease clutter of signs and also make it less confusing,” she said.

Gene Ribeiro, a deputy chief in the transit authority’s marketing production department, which oversees the development of some signs, said the idea that his team’s handiwork could end up in a collector’s home made him proud. “We take pride in our craftsmanship,” he said.

On Thursday, Emily McDevitt, 34, and Joseph Filocamo, 29, a couple from Brooklyn, were in search of a subway sign to commemorate where they had first met, at the 14th Street-Union Square station. They left the sale with a sign from the station and a pair of orange seats.

“We got here at 6 in the morning, because there was no way I was leaving without these seats,” Ms. McDevitt said.

By 11 a.m., Devine Covington, 42, a building manager who lives in Brownsville, Brooklyn, was standing in line to pay for three items: a bag of subway tokens, and two small signs.

Despite its imperfections, Mr. Covington said, the subway was the connective tissue that united the city. “It branches us through the city. It’s our means of transportation,” he said. “We’re able to transfer from borough to borough, meet new people, exchange different stories."