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NEW YORK — Growing up, Alvaro Hernandez always ran for the window seat on the subway. His older brother sat in the seat next to him, and his parents sat in the seats immediately perpendicular to them both, so they could watch them.
This seating arrangement encouraged subway riders to engage with one another, Hernandez said.
"Everyone would talk about what they're going to do, what they're going to cook," he said, referring to summertime F train excursions to Coney Island. "And they'd invite you to where they were going to be."
New Yorkers are celebrating a seating arrangement - and its memories - after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) recently announced the imminent replacement of the R46 fleet.
"The change that's happening now with this new sort of move away from the kind of conversational to the long-bench seats, and actually more standing room, feels a little bit seismic for people because it is," said Concetta Bencivenga, director of the New York Transit Museum.
Delivery of the latest order of the replacement car - the R211 - is expected in 2027. It is unclear when the R46 will be completely retired, but riders are sounding off on social media.
Some are lamenting the ability to get cozy in duo-seaters with their boo. Some regret that they can no longer isolate themselves in the corner seat window. And others, like Hernandez, will miss the opportunity to easily take in the scenery as the train eclipses the underground and heads south aboveground toward the beach.
"I used to love it when the subway would go from indoors to outdoors," Hernandez said. "I used to kneel down and look out the window and it was like looking at my own world."
• An iconic car
To understand the significance of the R46 train car, you have to understand a bit of subway history. The New York subway system stands out for the expansive territory it covers, said Andrew Sparberg, a transportation historian and retired railroad manager.
"You would not have had the five boroughs of New York without the subway system," he said.
But what most people now know as the MTA began as three distinct lines: the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), the Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT) and the Independent Subway System (IND).
The IRT, or the A division, was built for speed and would come to be the numbered train lines. One of its slogans was "City Hall to Harlem in 15 minutes," and the trains, Bencivenga said, delivered.
The BMT and IND, the B division, were built for comfort on long day trips out of Manhattan, to places such as Coney Island or Rockaway Beach, Bencivenga said. These lettered trains were wider and longer, and they featured seats against the windows - longitudinal - and perpendicular to the windows - transverse.
"They were really built to be a little bit more conversational," Bencivenga said.
The R46, a 50-year-old B division train car, is in service on the A, C, and N, R, Q, W lines; 696 of the original 754 cars were in service as of October. But its design stems directly from the comfort cars of yesteryear - at the time outfitted with rattan seats.
"It was really a different physical relationship to the passengers," said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. "Here, you are sitting there against the wall and you're looking out at people standing in front of you or people opposite you, where the others have much more eye contact."
Several car models have been retired since the MTA's inception, but the R46, with yellow and orange seats and wooden paneling, is "very iconic," Bencivenga said.
"If you came on this with no other identifying information, if you stepped on this, you would very likely be able to surmise that you were in New York," she said of the train. "In the real world, there are very few experiences nowadays that will kind of invoke that sort of visceral reaction, right? When you step on board, you're like, ‘Yep, got it.' And that's this."
• Out with the old, in with the new
The subway has been in headlines lately for violent incidents, including a woman being set on fire on an F train in December. Trouble on public transit has long been central to the story of New York: Bernhard Goetz's shooting of four young Black men in a subway car became a worldwide flash point in 1984; Daniel Penny's choking of Jordan Neely led to outrage in 2023. But for many New Yorkers, the joys of a mundane ride eclipse those infamous moments.
For Hernandez, 54, the train car reminds him of dance-battling crews during the early years of hip-hop. On the weekends, he and his friends from Brooklyn would ride around the five boroughs, looking for kids to breakdance battle. Everyone had a different job in a crew, he explained. There was always the guy carrying the boom box. One would carry the drinks and the munchies for the long trip. His job, he said, was to carry the backpack full of spray paint for graffiti.
Timmhotep Aku, 45, another native New Yorker, also associated the R46 with a sense of nostalgia.
"Riding the train with girlfriends and sitting smushed together in the back-to-back 'love seats' will always have a place in my heart," he said.
Star Navarro, 25, said he likes the "retro style" of the car and dislikes the overall push toward "sleek and modern," which ruins the atmosphere on the train.
But while New Yorkers may feel nostalgia for the look and feel of the classic car, in this case, experts say, the new cars really are for the better good.
The R46 is not reliable, Sparberg said. The R46 has less than half the reliability rating considered "good," he said, and nearly a quarter's worth of the railcar that's replacing it, according to the MTA.
Even more important, Moss said: New cars introduced to the train system will be a lot more information dense. According to an MTA news release, the new cars will feature security cameras in every car, more accessible seating, brighter lights, clearer signage and wider seats.
"Before, because people were looking at the advertising, they were looking at each others' newspaper headlines, there was more visual connectivity on the train among the passengers," Moss said. "Now, each person is a self-contained producer and consumer of their own information, but they are more connected to the outside world, which I think is very important for emergencies."
Sparberg agreed, saying the audio and visual elements will increase accessibility on the new trains. Bencivenga explained that the longitudinal seats in the R211 will allow for more standing room and streamline passenger circulation - measures meant to decrease the "dwell time" the train is stopped at the platform and ultimately produce a more efficient ride.
But who's to say the R46's retro-cool design might not circle back into fashion?
After all, the open gangways of the R211 were first sported in the 1925 Triplex a century ago.
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