Archivist Daylon Orr was visiting a bookseller friend in Virginia this summer when, in the back corner of his friend’s warehouse, he noticed a giant stack of boxes labeled IRT — the acronym for Interborough Rapid Transit Company, a former private operator of what would become the New York City subway.
“I was like, dude, what is this?” recalled Orr, 31, who runs the Crown Heights-based archive and rare books brokerage and publisher Fugitive Materials. 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.
It’s the lifelong collection of Hugh A. Dunne, a subway historian and collector who briefly worked for the MTA. The Daily News once nicknamed Dunne “Mr. Subways” for his encyclopedic subway knowledge and presence at virtually every subway crisis of his time; he also walked over half the system’s 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’s friend in Virginia. Orr then bought it from him.
“I’d driven there with a friend and I was like, ‘Sorry, you gotta drive back home alone,’” said Orr. “I rented a U-Haul and filled it up with those boxes. I just felt like I couldn’t pass on it. I felt like I could steward it to a good home and give it the light that it deserves.”
Once the 30 or so bankers boxes of subway treasures were back in Brooklyn, Orr began the process of cataloging everything.
“It’s been an ongoing organizational nightmare,” 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’d found poorly represented in the industry’s mainstream.
Some five of the boxes contain Dunne’s personal correspondence as well as memos defaming him. “This one keeps calling him an alcoholic,” said Orr, pulling out one faded Xerox of a handwritten letter. “Heavy drinker, four Manhattans for lunch, always a bottle on his desk. And they’re blaming him for reopening the Franklin Avenue Shuttle,” a passion project Dunne helped push to become a reality.
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 – when they were in service, when they were in the shop and when they were taken out of service for good.
“Just boxes and boxes and boxes of unseen reports,” said Orr, handing me one from 1911. “This is from the Interborough Metropolitan Street Railway Company,” he said, head down in a box, handing me another piece of paper.
Some of the internal documents from the ’70s and ’80s have vibrant, pop art-like graphic design. “It’s just, like, internal weird staff stuff that nobody was ever gonna see, and yet it looks f---ing awesome,” said Orr, holding up an electric blue manual.
Orr is still cataloging everything in the collection, but already he believes it’s “unmatched in terms of what’s out in the world.”
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 “head foamer” as Orr puts it.
In the world of rail fans, the word “foamer” is used to describe diehards, because their devotion is such that they (figuratively) foam at the mouth while ogling trains. “I’ve never seen anyone foam so hard,” said Orr of Dunne and his archive.
Orr aims to place the collection, which he’s calling The Hugh A. Dunne New York Transit Archive, at an institution – past clients have included Harvard University, Oxford University, the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum – by year’s end. He hopes it can assist generations of researchers.
“I 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,” Orr opined over a box brimming with MetroCards. “There'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.”
