It's
been over a decade since the MTA did away with subway tokens, those
dirty metal bits of New York-ness that seemed unremarkable until,
suddenly, they were gone. Since then, rumors have swirled about the fate
of the 60 million tokens once in circulation—where were they? Now, we
have an answer.
The
question of what the MTA did with all those tokens—tons of them—is an
ongoing bit of lore in NYC. Back in 2003 when the tokens were
decommissioned in favor of Metrocards, The New York Times wrote that "the
agency will not say what will become of the remains, 60 million of
them, except that it has no plans for disposing of them." The same year, Gotham Gazette reported that 41 million of them had ended up in a "vault somewhere in Queens." And earlier this week, a listicle from Thrillist about the NYC subway brought up the fate of the tokens once again. "After a few calls to the MTA, it seems what happened to them is still largely a mystery," they write.
It's a
romantic thought: An anonymous warehouse, perhaps in some industrial
part of the city, where piles and piles of bronze tokens glitter in the
darkness. I got in touch with MTA spokesperson Kevin Ortiz to find
out for sure. Turns out, my dream was just that. Ortiz says that 45
million of the tokens were scrapped—meaning that they were melted down
and turned into scrap metal for other uses. "We still have
an inventory of approximately 9 million tokens of different varieties
that are sold to licensees as part of agreements to use the tokens for
marketable items like cufflinks, watches, golf markers, etc," he says.
Of course, nine million is still plenty of tokens—but nowhere near enough for Scrooge McDuck to swim through.
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