"In the mid-1940s, Hans Reinhart, a photographer working with International News Photos, shot a feature devoted to the subway's lost and found. 'A Fortune in Flotsam' was the title atop INP's accompanying brief story, and it included Reinhart's extraordinary pictures of the piled-up abandoned goods."
"The lost and found at the Board of Transportation - a predecessor to the MTA - was then receiving about 16,000 items per year, 2,500 of those being umbrellas. But there were weird one-offs, too. Five pigeons (presumably the bred-for-racing kind, not the standing-on-a-statue-in-the-park kind). An electric clothes iron."
Reinhart's photographs, documenting lost items on the subway, are now being sold after decades in an archive. The collection includes 36 prints from the mid-1940s, showcasing the subway's lost and found, which received around 16,000 items annually. The gallery owners appreciate the unorthodox nature of the collection, which evokes the style of notable photographers. The lost and found items included a variety of unusual objects, highlighting the eclectic nature of what commuters leave behind.
Read at Curbed
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]