Fugitive Materials<\/a>. The boxes turned out to be an inimitable trove of subway documents and ephemera spanning seemingly every organization and company ever involved in NYC public transit, from its earliest days until the early 2000s.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s the lifelong collection of Hugh A. Dunne, a subway historian and collector who briefly worked for the MTA. The Daily News once nicknamed Dunne \u201cMr. Subways\u201d for his encyclopedic subway knowledge and presence at virtually every subway crisis of his time; he also walked over half the system\u2019s 600 miles of track. After Dunne died in 2005, it appears his estate sold the collection to a different bookseller, who eventually sold it in turn to Orr\u2019s friend in Virginia. Orr then bought it from him.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d driven there with a friend and I was like, \u2018Sorry, you gotta drive back home alone,\u2019\u201d said Orr. \u201cI rented a U-Haul and filled it up with those boxes. I just felt like I couldn\u2019t pass on it. I felt like I could steward it to a good home and give it the light that it deserves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anna Rawls for Gothamist<\/p>\n
Once the 30 or so bankers boxes of subway treasures were back in Brooklyn, Orr began the process of cataloging everything.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been an ongoing organizational nightmare,\u201d said Orr, who was in his office, laughing while sifting through a box containing documents about the Public Service Commission, an early regulating body. Orr started Fugitive Materials six years ago after a decade in the rare books world, motivated by a desire to focus on the underground and oppositional materials he\u2019d found poorly represented in the industry\u2019s mainstream.<\/p>\n
Anna Rawls for Gothamist<\/p>\n
Some five of the boxes contain Dunne\u2019s personal correspondence as well as memos defaming him. \u201cThis one keeps calling him an alcoholic,\u201d said Orr, pulling out one faded Xerox of a handwritten letter. \u201cHeavy drinker, four Manhattans for lunch, always a bottle on his desk. And they\u2019re blaming him for reopening the Franklin Avenue Shuttle,\u201d a passion project Dunne helped push to become a reality.<\/p>\n
There are training materials and codes of conduct spanning the departments and decades; official maps, fan-made maps, handwritten train timetables, unpublished drafts, internal memoranda, exchanges between transit officials, designers, historians and fellow collectors. A box of internal newsletters produced in the early 1900s. Reams of handtyped notes about specific subway cars \u2013 when they were in service, when they were in the shop and when they were taken out of service for good.<\/p>\n
Anna Rawls for Gothamist<\/p>\n
\u201cJust boxes and boxes and boxes of unseen reports,\u201d said Orr, handing me one from 1911. \u201cThis is from the Interborough Metropolitan Street Railway Company,\u201d he said, head down in a box, handing me another piece of paper.<\/p>\n
Some of the internal documents from the \u201970s and \u201980s have vibrant, pop art-like graphic design. \u201cIt\u2019s just, like, internal weird staff stuff that nobody was ever gonna see, and yet it looks f—ing awesome,\u201d said Orr, holding up an electric blue manual.<\/p>\n
Orr is still cataloging everything in the collection, but already he believes it\u2019s \u201cunmatched in terms of what\u2019s out in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dunne, a native New Yorker, became a subway obsessive at a young age, joining and eventually becoming president of major subway fandom organization the Electric Railroader Association. In 1979, while planning the Diamond Jubilee Exhibition, Dunne was brought on as a historian and later became the assistant to the president of the New York City Transit Authority, or \u201chead foamer\u201d as Orr puts it.<\/p>\n
Anna Rawls for Gothamist<\/p>\n
In the world of rail fans, the word \u201cfoamer\u201d is used to describe diehards, because their devotion is such that they (figuratively) foam at the mouth while ogling trains. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen anyone foam so hard,\u201d said Orr of Dunne and his archive.<\/p>\n
Orr aims to place the collection, which he\u2019s calling The Hugh A. Dunne New York Transit Archive, at an institution \u2013 past clients have included Harvard University, Oxford University, the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum \u2013 by year\u2019s end. He hopes it can assist generations of researchers.<\/p>\n
\u201cI personally think that the story of the New York City subway is the story of one of the most successful socialist projects in the United States, this public-private partnership that literally changed the geography of the city,\u201d Orr opined over a box brimming with MetroCards. \u201cThere’s a million reasons the subway is important, and the history of how it has come to exist and maintain is really important. One hundred years from now, who knows who could be using this and how that might affect the ways they think about the subway. It’s an incredible amount of research.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Archivist Daylon Orr was visiting a bookseller friend in Virginia this summer when, in the back corner of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":354508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-354507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/354508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}