By Stephen Nessen
sep 5, 2025
Gothamist
While most commuters bury themselves in books, catch up on emails or zone out with noise-cancelling headphones, a rare breed of straphanger studies how people use the transit system and interact with each other.
Those would be the New Yorker’s exalted cartoonists, who are celebrated in a new exhibit showcasing 100 years of cartoons about the subway.
The show makes clear that subway etiquette has been fodder for the magazine since it was first published in 1925.
Jodi Shapiro, the curator of the New York Transit Museum, reviewed 500 New Yorker cartoons spoofing people talking loudly on the trains, manspreading and sneaking a peek at what others are reading.
“ Everyone thinks it's kind of a new thing, but it's been around since time immemorial,” Shapiro said.
The exhibit, “A Century of The New Yorker’s Transportation Cartoons,” is open at the Transit Museum’s annex at Grand Central Terminal until October.
One cartoon from 2019 by artist Ellis Rosen shows two cowboys — one standing on the platform and one in the doorway of an A train — in an Old West-style standoff. “You ain’t gittin’ on this train until I git off first,” the caption reads.
“ In my family this was a very important subway etiquette rule that should be enforced, in my opinion,” Rosen said. “ Normally you're making fun of etiquette, but in this case, I take this very seriously. So, I couldn't make fun of it, I just had to make fun of the offenders of that particular rule.”
Not unlike a reporter who rides the subway looking for potential stories, Rosen said he rides looking for characters, humor and breaches of etiquette.
“ I just stare at people. It's not good. I gotta stop, but you just can't help it," he said. "People come on, people come off and then you start thinking, 'What are they doing? What are they up to?' And then you try to remind yourself, 'I wonder if there's a cartoon in any of this?'"
"And sometimes you get lucky in the subway," he added. "You get lucky more often than anywhere else in my experience.”
Rosen said he tries to avoid falling into the trap — familiar to reporters as well — of only portraying the worst of the subway system.
“Sometimes I worry that I'm looking out for bad etiquette, just so I can be righteously mad at them,” he said.
But Shapiro chimed in to note that’s part of the experience.
“ That's a very New York thing. Just like waiting to get mad at something,” she said.
But even more than that, the subway cartoons depict what it’s like sharing a space that is often cramped, dirty and unpleasant but also somewhere people have to be. That sentiment is captured in the very first subway comic in the New Yorker from 1925. A man wipes grime off a subway car window next to a sign that reads, “Please! Help Us Keep The ‘L’ and Subway Clean."
It isn’t clear if he’s following the advice, or just clearing off the gunk so he can see which stop he’s at.
“It kind of captures what it's like to live here, without actually explaining to people what it's like to live here,” Shapiro said.
