Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at some 1940s photographs of belongings that ended up in the subway system’s lost-and-found department. And, with the Democratic primary now less than two months away, we’ll also get details on the campaign for the House seat being vacated by Representative Jerrold Nadler of Manhattan, who is retiring.
A man who had lost his dentures walked into the lost-and-found office for the subway system. He tried on all the false teeth, partial plates and bridgework that had been turned in, and walked out.
None of them was his, he said. None of them fit.
No, this is not a joke. It happened — in the 1940s. And no, no one bothered to wash the dentures before he put them in his mouth.
Daniel Moyer, a co-owner of a gallery in Brooklyn, knows all this from yellowed, typewritten manuscript pages stashed with black-and-white photographs of items in the lost-and-found office that the man visited. The office, in College Point, Queens, was a repository of the banal and the bizarre. In one photograph, there’s a rowing machine. In another, there’s a stethoscope. The inventory also listed birdcages (but no birds), a folding bed and “a snake pickled in alcohol.” Plus, hundreds of wallets and watches.
The photographs surfaced in a collection that Moyer’s Daniel/Oliver gallery will display at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, which opens today at the Park Avenue Armory, and they are oddly clinical. If you’ve ever lost your keys, maybe not on the subway but perhaps in a security line bin at the airport, you know the feeling of loss conveyed in the photographs — and the frustration of having to replace what you had taken for granted.
Hey, this is New York: If you were hoping for sympathy from whoever wrote the manuscript with the photographs, fuhgettaboutit. “How people can lose such things as these puzzles even the blasé clerks of the lost and found bureau,” it said.
The subway lost property office was not the only one that caught a photographer’s attention in the days of Speed Graphics, one-shot flashbulbs and black-and-white film that had to be loaded in darkness. An engagement ring sparkles in a photo from the Police Department’s lost-and-found room.
“This flawless diamond ring awaits its owner,” the caption on the back of the photo said, before adding a caution: “Police sometimes plant false clues to trap the brash con man or gal who’d attempt to trick them out of articles.”
Another cache of photographs came from the Hotel Pennsylvania, once the largest hotel in the world, with a telephone number that served as the entire lyric for a Glenn Miller song in the big-band era: “Pennsylvania 6-5000” (or “Pennsylvania Six Five Oh Oh Oh” in the last line). One of the captions with the photographs of the hotel’s lost-and-found center noted that “the shelves of this fairly large room are jam-packed with everything under the sun” — left-behind luggage, coats, robes and medications.
A commercial photographer named Hans Reinhart took the pictures at the subway office, apparently on assignment for International News Photos, a part of William Randolph Hearst’s media empire. The typewritten manuscript was headed “Subway Flotsam” and described items like a Navy officer’s uniform, a five-foot-tall radio and musical instruments lost because “professional players often doze off after late jobs.” They wake up just as the doors are about to slam shut at their station, the manuscript explained, and run out without remembering their cymbals, clarinets or guitars, all of which Reinhart dutifully photographed.
At the time, the lost-and-found department was run by the city’s Board of Transportation, which was abolished in 1953 with the creation of the New York City Transit Authority, now part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. These days, a spokesman said, about 100 items are turned in every day; about 10,000 items are on hand — including, as of last week, two sets of dentures.
It turned out that the choppers the man tried on were not the only ones mentioned in the typewritten manuscript with the Reinhart photographs. The manuscript said the lost-and-found department also auctioned off unclaimed items.
One woman who lost her false teeth went to the auction “and bought them back when she could have just picked them up,” Moyer said. “But failing to do so, she had to pay something like $5 in the 1940s to buy her own dentures back.” That is the equivalent of roughly $90 today.
“The crazy part,” said Oliver Lott, the gallery’s co-owner, “is that there were other people bidding.”
Weather
Expect cloudy skies before it gradually becomes sunny. Today’s high will near 64 before dropping to 46 tonight, as the skies clear up.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until May 14 (Solemnity of the Ascension).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Anywhere else in this city, this wouldn’t even be a discussion; it wouldn’t even be a conversation. It’s park space.” — Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, on a dispute over a parking lot for judges that was carved out of a park decades ago.
The latest Metro news
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Redesigning part of Park Avenue: New York City plans to widen the median on an 11-block stretch from East 46th Street to East 57th Street, transforming one of the city’s least usable green spaces into, at the very least, a decent place to eat a sandwich.
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Airports to get transponders: The Port Authority will install trackers on rescue vehicles at the three major New York airports after federal investigators said the lack of one on a fire truck played a role in the deadly collision with an Air Canada jet at LaGuardia last month.
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Mamdani’s candidate concedes: Lindsey Boylan, the candidate backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani in a contentious City Council race in Manhattan, conceded to Carl Wilson, a community activist and legislative aide who had the support of many prominent Democrats.
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Father and daughter plead guilty in forgery scheme: They sold some 200 fakes of works by artists such as Banksy, Picasso and the Native American painter Fritz Scholder. Prosecutors said they commissioned an artist in Poland to paint many of the counterfeits that sold for a total of more than $2 million.
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What’s it like playing against Messi: Julian Hall and Adri Mehmeti are two teenagers who play soccer professionally for the New York Red Bulls and are expected to hold their own against Lionel Messi, the most famous footballer in the world.
Schlossberg turns to Pelosi for a campaign ad
The private polls released by several of Jack Schlossberg’s rivals have all put him narrowly in the lead in the crowded field for the House seat being vacated by Representative Jerrold Nadler of Manhattan, who is retiring.
Two state assemblymen, Alex Bores and Micah Lasher, are not far behind Schlossberg, the grandson of John F. Kennedy. Among the others in the race are George Conway, a former Republican turned antagonist of President Trump; Nina Schwalbe, a public health expert; and Laura Dunn, a civil rights lawyer.
Schlossberg, 33, has built his campaign on pulling away from the Democrats’ old guard. He has tried to portray his opponents as old-fashioned, risk-averse establishment figures who have not been able to block Trump.
But for his first paid advertisement, Schlossberg turned to Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the former House majority leader, who is 86. She appears in a 30-second ad for Schlossberg, saying that he has the kind of energy that could help propel Democrats back to power nationally.
My colleague Nicholas Fandos writes that the choice of Pelosi reflects the unique challenge facing Schlossberg: He may have star power and youth, but he is still trying to persuade aging voters who form the Democratic base that he is serious enough and experienced enough to represent Nadler’s storied district, home to corporate chieftains, media empires and cultural meccas.
Schlossberg said that Pelosi was an obvious choice, calling her “the backbone of our party.” He also said that his critique of his party’s aging officials did not apply to her.
“I put her in a category of her own,” he said. “She has magic that doesn’t age. It wins.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Tompkins Square Park
Dear Diary:
I live next to Tompkins Square Park. On Sundays, I like to grab coffee, stand outside the dog park gate and watch the dogs play.
On a particularly heavy Sunday, I found myself wanting to be among the dogs, hoping to lift my spirits.
My chest tightened as I walked through the gate past the sign that said: “No people without dogs.”
Once inside, I sat on a bench, trying to relax and blend in. A man sitting beside me struck up a casual conversation.
“Which one’s yours?” he asked after a moment.
I pointed to a black-and-white terrier far away.
He followed my finger, paused and smiled.
“That’s my dog,” he said.
— Lynn Nguyen
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post Lost and Found in the Subway: Dentures Galore appeared first on New York Times.
