Until a few months ago they were a pretty ordinary presence at the New York metro stations. Now there are those who paid about $3,000 to put one in the living room.
The old MetroCard automatic emitters, withdrawn at the end of last year with the passage to OMNY, were auctioned by MTA and in recent days the first buyers went to recover them in a Maspeth warehouse in Queens.
Over 60 MetroCard Vending Machines are finished. The interest was remarkable: according to MTA 380 offers arrived and at least 31 machines are already sold and paid.
Among the buyers is Noah Mallin, 54 years old, who lives in Manhattan and spent approximately $3,000 for a MetroCard Express Machine, the smallest model that accepted only credit and debit cards. She will set her up in her apartment along with other objects related to the subway, a passion she shares with her teenage son.
“Having a piece of the city’s history is quite exciting,” Mallin told Gothamist. He lives in New York since the 1970s and considers the car an object that tells a part of the city he grew up in.
Taking her home, though, is not very simple. The Express version also weighs about 210 pounds, just under 100 pounds. The larger machines are over a thousand pounds, about 450 pounds, and are just over two metres tall. The MTA has left the buyers the task of organizing and paying the transport.
Brian Moore, a 39-year-old artist who in the past lived in New York, bought one and took her to his studio in Los Angeles. In NY1 he said that shipping through the US could cost him more than the car itself. He would like to try to restore at least one part of the electronics and does not exclude that sooner or later the emitter may appear somewhere in Los Angeles.
Those sold by MTA can no longer distribute MetroCard. Before the auction the agency removed the internal computers and electronic components, leaving substantially the envelope of the old machines.
The MetroCard Vending Machines had appeared in the subway in 1999 and for more than twenty-five years they were used to buy and recharge the tiles. The latter were removed from the stations at the end of 2025, when the sale of MetroCards ended and OMNY became the payment system used by MTA.
Not all abandoned machines are auctioned. Hundreds were disposed of, while some specimens were donated to public schools. They will receive one of the Stuyvesant High School and Transit Tech Career and Technical Education High School; another will be held in the central offices of NYC Public Schools at Tweed Courthouse.
They may not be the last objects of the MetroCard era to end up in the hands of collectors. The MTA still retains millions of tiles ever sold and is evaluating whether to destroy them or put at least one part at auction.
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