Now, after 44 years, the price was doubling.
So the lead-up to Dime Day was, naturally, marked by widespread anger and controversy. In fact, one legal battle made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Well before then the issue of whether to increase the fare had challenged many mayors, become the subject of campaign promises and provoked fierce clashes with powerful interest groups.
Of course, all fare hikes are unpopular, including the one set to go into effect on April 21 with riders grumbling about having to pay for an unreliable system. In 1970, dozens were arrested while protesting an increase. In 1995, an increase was unsuccessfully challenged in federal court as a civil rights violation.
But none were as fiercely contested as the first one. The nickel fare held steady through two world wars, the Great Depression and 10 mayors. New York City kept the same fare long after other cities, including Chicago and Philadelphia, had raised their fares.
“Almost every transit property in the United States raised its fare in the 1920s, and because of the political pressure and the fact that the fare had become a political issue, New York didn’t,” said Peter Derrick, the author of “Tunneling to the Future: The Story of the Great Subway Expansion That Saved New York.”
But as a result, he said, the subway started “to fall apart because there was never enough money to keep the system going, to keep the system operating, as well as to maintain it.”
The nickel fare was part of the agreement the city had with the companies that operated the subway, the Interborough Rapid Transit and Brooklyn Rapid Transit Cos., both of which came to be widely reviled by New Yorkers for their poor service. The IRT sought to set aside the contract and raise the fare. The city challenged the move in a case that reached the Supreme Court. The case was sent back to state courts, where the company ultimately lost.
When the two privately run lines were unified with the city-run line in 1940, the fare remained a nickel.
The push to raise the fare gained steam after World War II. Ridership was soaring — on weekdays in 1946 average ridership was more than 6.4 million — and the city was emerging from years of wartime spending cuts. The subway had become crowded and unsafe and significant investment was needed to upgrade and expand the system.
A resolution put before the City Council declared that the subway was “in such a deplorable state of neglect and disrepair as to be a disgrace to The City of New York and a menace to public safety, heath and decency.”
The city was operating the subway at a loss forcing it to spend less on other services like hospitals, schools, prisons, parks and libraries and other critical functions. (The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state agency controlled by the governor that now operates the subway, was not created until the 1960s.)
The nickel fare was also seen as preventing pay raises for city employees, including transit workers, and critics argued that the city was essentially providing a free service to riders.
The real estate industry lobbied for a fare increase because property owners were seeking relief from a municipal tax used to help pay for the subway, though they did not find much support.
“There wasn’t a lot of sympathy among working people for the complaints of real estate that they’d have to lift a heavier burden in terms of financing the government,” said Joshua Freeman, a history professor at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “This was a moment where there was a pretty strong kind of — today we call it populist, I might even call it class-based — kind of way of thinking about these public problems.”
Increasing the fare would hurt many New Yorkers struggling to make ends meet.
“It was a real concern,” Freeman said. “The doubling of the transit fare represented an actual significant pinch in the standard of living of working New Yorkers, the vast majority of whom used public transportation to get to work.”
The mayor, William O’Dwyer, had originally been opposed to raising the fare, arguing that it would amount to a “harsh and unbearable tax” on low-income families. But O’Dwyer, realizing that the city faced a growing financial crisis, appointed a committee to consider the issue.
The committee found that it was “confronted with the panorama of a city bursting at its seams and our community asking for increased public services” and that such services were suffering. The panel recommended a fare hike and O’Dwyer, facing what some described as the “inexorable arithmetic” of the city’s finances, became the first Democratic mayor to break with the party’s commitment to the nickel fare.
The mayor was aided by fissures among some labor groups, who had long been opposed to a rise. Some came to see a fare raise as the only viable path toward a wage increase for transit workers and in a prominent move, Michael J. Quill, the leader of the Transport Workers Union, split with other labor groups and supported an increase.
An editorial in The New York Times captured the mood of the moment when it noted that “we watched the skies yesterday, and City Hall probably did too, to see whether the heavens would fall after the Mayor announced the end of the five-cent fare, but nothing happened.”
The day of the fare increase, described as a “siege of dimes” in an article in The Times, turned into something of a spectacle. The mayor had been on vacation in Puerto Rico but flew back to supervise the change. Hundreds of police officers were deployed to subway stations during rush hour to prevent chaos as passengers adjusted to the new fare.
The city had prepared for months, adjusting and testing thousands of turnstiles to ensure they would accept dimes.
Hundreds gathered at midnight to witness the last nickel and first dime fares at the Times Square station. There Carmen Gherdel, 30, of Queens, was the last one to pay 5 cents, while Esther Pollack, 22, of Brooklyn, became the first to pay a dime.
While there were some delays and confusion, as well as faulty turnstiles, New Yorkers quickly adapted. The Times noted that the "heat-plagued men and women of Gotham poured through changed-over subway turnstiles after midnight last night, meekly as sheep turn into a familiar fold, dropping dimes instead of nickels without protest."
The increase would leave a lasting legacy, playing a role in the eventual formation of the transportation authority as a way of insulating the subway, including debates about the fare, from the kind of political gamesmanship that kept the fare a nickel for nearly half a century.
The 1948 increase “sets the stage for what you now ultimately have today where there have been regular fare increases over two- or three-year periods to keep up with inflation,” said Andrew Sparberg, a transportation historian and the author of “From a Nickel to a Token:
The Journey from Board of Transportation to MTA.’’ “People are always going to be angry about the subway fare but they realize that it’s going to go up regardless of whether they like it or not.”