When Isla Agir’s glasses were knocked from her hands and onto the southbound No. 6 line track at 14th Street-Union Square last Thursday morning, she wasn’t sure she would be reunited with them.
“It’s going to cost me, if I buy here, $8,000,” Agir said of her Italian-made Lombardo frames. “They have the thinner lenses with the three effects and the blue vision, so it was not my intent for them to fall.”
By that same night, the 57-year-old Manhattan woman had the glasses back in her possession after a crew of MTA workers used a pole with a “grabber” claw to pluck them from the south end of the local track.
They had been returned for holding to station agent Luis Gomez, who donned latex gloves to clean them with disinfectant wipes.
“I remembered the first wagon — the first car — and I saw them directly drop down under the middle of the train,” Agir told THE CITY. “When I went back later, I looked, I didn’t see, so I went upstairs and asked the person who worked there for help.”
Help would eventually arrive from Harlem in the form of an MTA “Combined Action Team.” Its members had been at the 145th Street station, walking the platforms with flashlights aimed at the B and D line tracks while looking for a Samsung Galaxy phone.
The searches at 145th Street and at Union Square were among the thousands of dropped-property calls MTA workers respond to each year, according to agency data.
The objects aren’t always easy to spot.
At 145th Street, the Galaxy phone described by its owner’s daughter as being in a pink case on the northbound B track was actually in a dark case — and on the southbound D.
“She was overjoyed, she said, ‘Thank you so much,’” station agent Natasha Simon said after notifying the daughter that the phone had been recovered and would be stored for her to reclaim it.
The workers then headed upstairs to St. Nicholas Avenue to await their next call, which dispatched them to 14th Street.
“On the 6 line, track southbound,” signal supervisor Godwin DeWeever said during a call with the MTA’s operations control center. “Glasses?”
Numbers provided to THE CITY by the MTA show there have been more than 6,700 dropped-property calls so far this year. There were 11,147 in all of 2024, 12,054 the previous year and 10,490 in 2022.
Among the more-curious items pulled from the tracks: a trumpet at the 39th Avenue stop on the N/W lines in Long Island City, Queens; a 32-inch television at the Burnside Avenue station along the No. 4 in Morris Heights, The Bronx; and even a pair of dentures from the No. 6 line’s Bronx terminal at Pelham Bay Park.
Butter-fingered riders are usually grateful to the workers who retrieve their stuff out of the path of subway trains, the fishers say.
“They try to give you tips,” said Vladimir Mushinsky, an action team member who more commonly responds to calls about malfunctioning signals. “I say, ‘No, no, no!’”
Keep It Moving
Since 2015, MTA data shows that transit workers have recovered more than 8,400 mobile phones from the tracks, followed by more than 700 eyeglasses.
“Citi Bikes, shopping carts from the grocery store,” said Daniel Campbell, superintendent of a team made up of track inspectors and signal and third-rail maintainers. “It seems all types of stuff makes its way onto the tracks.”
Wireless AirPods and headphones are increasingly becoming dropped-on-the-tracks casualties in the subway, with more than 700 calls alone this year, according to the MTA. That’s second only to the 1,200 calls about dropped mobile phones.
“It’s daily — it can range from one or two [calls] a day to upwards of 10,” Campbell said. “And that’s in addition to the other calls affecting service.”
The responses are carried out with safety protocols designed to protect workers and to keep trains moving with little or no impact on service. The operations control center and train operators are told in advance of a dropped-property crew’s location, with workers waving flashlights to further alert those operating the trains.
“All of that is to just keep things moving, for us to work in between trains without disturbing service,” Campbell said.
A 22-year-veteran of New York City Transit, Campbell added that riders who spill things onto the tracks can increase their chances of having items recovered if they provide specific location information to the MTA.
Those can be numbers on station walls or nearby staircases or elevators, the direction of subway service and whether the track is local or express.
“The more detail, the better,” Campbell said.
In Agir’s case, her attention to detail when reporting her dropped glasses helped shave how much time workers spent finding them, even if they at first retrieved a battered pair of blue sunglasses that were coated in subway scum.
“I don’t know, those look like they’ve been there a while,” Campbell said when they picked up the first set of less-expensive looking shades.
A few minutes later and further down the track, the workers spotted Agir’s glasses.
She said she would have no problem putting them on again, adding that she never considered going onto the tracks herself.
“No, no, no, I know the stories — when I study English, they show us,” she said. “I’m just so happy, I’m thankful for those workers.”