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Harry Barrett sported a dandy pin studded with 15 diamonds when he lined up for a ride into New York City history as one of the first paying passengers on the subway. Barrett, who lived at 348 W. 46th St. in Manhattan, got his 5-cent ticket moments after the subway officially opened for business at 7 p.m. on Oct. 27, 1904. He boarded a downtown train packed with people clutching the stiff new leather straps. And in a New York minute, he realized that his $500 diamond pin was missing.
Barrett got off at 28th Street, quickly found his way to a police station and reported, according to the New York Sun, what he described as "the first subway touch."
History was being made the day the subway opened, and everyone in New York knew it. If one couldn't be the first to buy a ticket - at the Brooklyn Bridge station, the honor went to an anonymous middle- aged Brooklyn woman who picked up her skirt and raced down the rubber-covered stairs three at a time to beat out the rest of the crowd - there was always the distinction of being the first crime victim. The point was that the subway was going to make New York one of the world's great cities, and it seemed that every New Yorker wanted to be aboard.
It will take more than silk top hats, big mustaches and ruffled Victorian dresses to replicate that grand day when the MTA throws a celebration to mark the subway's centennial today. It also will require a dose of the wild optimism that vibrated through New York with the symphony of chiming church bells, factory whistles and foghorns that sounded across the city to announce the first train had set out from the City Hall station.
Any true re-enactment of the subway's first run also requires New York to discard the jaded weariness it was known for even a century ago and to look at the world wide-eyed, nervous, giddy. The first passengers were in such a rush to experience the speed and glamour of the subway that an irritated ticket agent reminded them it would still be there tomorrow: "It'll be runnin' when you folks is dead."
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