Interior New York Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street (1905)
A camera mounted on the front of a subway train rides the new IRT line from Union Square at 14th Street to Grand Central at 42nd Street, following another train through the tunnel while a specially lit work car on a parallel track illuminates the ride.
Interior New York Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street was filmed for Biograph by cameraman G. W. Bitzer only months after New York’s subway opened in October 1904, preserving a rider’s-eye view of a system still novel enough to be worth a film of its own.
Background
Shot by Biograph cameraman G. W. Bitzer on May 21, 1905, barely seven months after the IRT subway opened on October 27, 1904, Interior New York Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street mounts a camera on the front of a train and rides it from Union Square to the old Grand Central Station. Because the tunnel was too dark to film normally, Biograph ran a second, specially lit flatcar on a parallel track to illuminate the ride while the camera train followed just behind another train through the tunnel. The film was added to the National Film Registry in 2017.
What to watch for
Notice how much the film relies on brute technical improvisation rather than any narrative or performance — the lit work car, the forward-mounted camera, and the choice to trail another train through the dark are all solutions to the basic problem of photographing something invisible to the naked eye. It’s also simply a document of novelty: barely half a year after the subway opened, the ride itself was still considered spectacle enough to justify a film, and watching it today offers an unfiltered rider’s-eye view of a transit system New Yorkers would soon take entirely for granted.
