When The New York City Subway Was The Most Dangerous Place On Earth

Published July 2, 2014
Updated November 11, 2024

Venture back to the 1980s in this photo gallery, when the New York City subway was the most dangerous mass transit system on the planet.

The New York City subway of today is what one might lightly call “starkly different” from its predecessors. In the 1980s, over 250 felonies were committed every week in the system, making the New York subway the most dangerous mass transit system in the world.

Over the course of a decade, New York public transportation would lose over 300 million riders, largely due to its reputation as a hotbed of crime and drug use. In the gallery below, we take a look at what the New York City subways were like in the 1980s:

We also recommend watching this video of taking the subway from Union Square to Coney Island in 1987:

Thank you to Time and Steven Siegel's Flickr for some of the images above.


And if you enjoyed these photographs of New York subways in the 1980s, check out our other posts on the summer of 1969 in New York and the most incredible photographs of New York City.

author
Alexander Baldwin
author
Alexander is a cofounder of All That's Interesting with an undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia in History and Economics and an MSc from the School of Oriental and African Studies in Economics.
editor
John Kuroski
editor
Based in Brooklyn, New York, John Kuroski is the editorial director of All That's Interesting. He graduated from New York University with a degree in history, earning a place in the Phi Alpha Theta honor society for history students. An editor at All That's Interesting since 2015, his areas of expertise include modern American history and the ancient Near East. In an editing career spanning 17 years, he previously served as managing editor of Elmore Magazine in New York City for seven years.
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Baldwin, Alexander. "When The New York City Subway Was The Most Dangerous Place On Earth." AllThatsInteresting.com, July 2, 2014, https://allthatsinteresting.com/new-york-subways-1980s. Accessed August 21, 2025.