New York subway turns 122: the 9.1-mile, 28-station line that opened on this day in 1904

The New York City subway turns 122 today. On October 27, 1904, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) opened the underground line that became the foundation of today's system: 28 stations along a 9.1-mile route through Manhattan.

A first train driven by the mayor

At 2:35 p.m. that day, Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. took the controls of the inaugural train at City Hall station. He was meant to drive only ceremonially, but stayed at the controls all the way to 103rd Street. At 7 p.m. the line opened to the public for a nickel, and more than 100,000 people paid to ride on the first day.

The first route ran from City Hall in lower Manhattan to Grand Central Terminal, west along 42nd Street to Times Square, then north to 145th Street and Broadway in Harlem. The network grew fast: the Bronx in 1905, Brooklyn in 1908 and Queens by 1915.

An earlier air-powered experiment

New Yorkers had actually ridden underground 34 years before the subway opened. On February 26, 1870, inventor Alfred Ely Beach unveiled Beach Pneumatic Transit beneath Broadway: a single passenger car pushed by air through a tunnel about 312 feet long, with a station fitted out with chandeliers, a grand piano and a fountain stocked with goldfish. It never became a citywide network, but it wrote the first page of New York's underground story.

122 years on

Today the subway has 472 stations and is one of the very few rapid-transit systems in the world that runs 24 hours a day. The original showpiece, City Hall station, closed at the end of 1945 because its short, curved platform could not fit longer trains; its Guastavino tile vaults and chandeliers remain, and downtown 6 trains still loop through it. From a nickel first ride to the city's daily pulse, that 9.1-mile line still sets the rhythm of New York.