![\"Joseph](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/6b7fb1345966d5b1720f01be4ffda20696-LF01F.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Joseph A. Duffy, a subway-lost-and-found staffer, poses in March 1946 with the latest batch of turned-in hats.
\n Photo: Hans Rinehart\/Courtesy of Daniel\/Oliver Gallery\n <\/p>\n
Although exact statistics are scant, it\u2019s pretty clear that there are way fewer sets of dentures lost on the subway than there used to be.<\/p>\n
A set of Reinhart\u2019s photographs spent the better part of a century in the files of Brown Brothers, one of the biggest photo-licensing agencies of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. That archive of prints is in the process of being broken up for sale, and a few hundred of those boxes, including this set of 36 prints plus a clutch of introductory material and captions, have made their way to Daniel\/Oliver<\/a>, a gallery in East Williamsburg. Its owners, Daniel Moyer and Oliver Lott, have a fondness for unorthodox and vernacular photo collections like this: Lott points out that even the uncredited work can often evoke pictures made by, say, Walker Evans or Ed Ruscha<\/a>. There are actually two similar sets in this batch, one appearing to date from 1943 and one from 1946; Moyer and Lott can\u2019t figure out exactly how that ended up happening, and neither can I. (\u201cMaybe it was a war thing,\u201d Moyer offers; it does seem plausible that the first version was held from publication in wartime, and then it was reshot when the news was a little less solemn and austerity started to loosen up. Or did INS\u2019s subscribers simply like the results enough for a sequel?)<\/p>\n How do we know this? In the mid-1940s, Hans Reinhart, a photographer working with International News Photos (the Hearst syndicate\u2019s old picture service), shot a feature devoted to the subway\u2019s lost and found. \u201cA Fortune in Flotsam\u201d was the title atop INP\u2019s accompanying brief story, and it included Reinhart\u2019s extraordinary pictures of the piled-up abandoned goods. The lost and found at the Board of Transportation \u2014 a predecessor to the MTA \u2014 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. A big square tin of black pepper. An even bigger can of shellac. Every few months, the unclaimed stuff was auctioned off, mostly to dealers in secondhand goods. The umbrellas went in lots of ten dozen, selling for $6.50 to $8.50 per. An exception was made for guns, which were not resold; they were dumped in the sea, except during the war, when they went toward the scrap-metal drives.\u00a0(These days, the MTA\u2019s office gets about 68,000 items per year, more than half of them cell phones or wallets<\/a>.)<\/p>\n A set of doctor\u2019s instruments, left in the subway and never claimed.\u00a0<\/p>\n A strongbox turned in to the NYPD containing not only jewelry but also cash.<\/p>\n Musical instruments, per the reporter, tended to turn up late at night because sleepy performers would doze off on the trains, then bolt awake and jump off at their stops, leaving their instruments behind.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHow so many people can forget a crutch in a subway train and walk off without it,\u201d wrote the editor who captioned these photos, \u201ccontinues to baffle the staff at the lost property office.\u201d<\/p>\n \n Photographs: Hans Rinehart\/Courtesy of Daniel\/Oliver Gallery\n <\/p>\n It\u2019s also not quite clear when and where they ran in print or if they did at all. Newspaper stories from that era are not very well catalogued, and neither the old bound indices nor searches of the New York City Transit Museum\u2019s archive<\/a> and newspapers.com<\/a> have so far turned up anything. The group of prints includes a few extra photos from the NYPD\u2019s own lost-property office \u2014 including one of a revolver \u2014 and the gallery also has a third, larger, somewhat similar set of photos made at the lost-and-found of the Hotel Pennsylvania<\/a>. They\u2019ll all be on view at the ABAA New York International Antiquarian Book Fair from April 30 to May 3 at the Park Avenue Armory.<\/p>\n Some of the photographs involve the lost-and-found clerks, posing with stuff that\u2019s been turned in, and others are just still-lifes of the items themselves, piled up in unsettling quantities. In many cases, they\u2019re vignetted by the light of the flashbulb, falling off to darkness at the edges of the frame, and they pick up an otherworldly quality, something straight out of film noir. It\u2019s a hoary observation to say they look haunted, but, I mean, a large array of crutches in a dark underground room? Or a big pile of unclaimed brassieres? Or a random set of medical instruments?<\/p>\n Thomas F. Williamson, lost-property clerk, catalogues eyeglasses as they come in.<\/p>\n A curious array of findings:\u00a0shellac, black pepper, laundry starch, stuffed bear.<\/p>\n Not to mention the underthings.<\/p>\n \n Photographs: Hans Rinehart\/Courtesy of Daniel\/Oliver Gallery\n <\/p>\n Which brings us to, yes, the teeth. The editor\u2019s captions tell us that there were \u2014 take a deep breath \u2014 hundreds of sets of dentures turned in each year, fewer than half of which were eventually claimed. (Today, it\u2019s apparently about one set per week<\/a>.) Thomas Williamson, one of the lost-property clerks at the board, told the INP folks that one man came by and \u201cinsisted on examining our false teeth, looking for a set he had lost months previously. He tried every pair without washing them beforehand. Yep, you\u2019re right, none fitted him.\u201d I will remind you here, once your rising gorge settles back down, that not only were they unwashed; they had been found in the New York City subway.<\/p>\n \n Mmm-hmm. Those sure are a lot of teeth. The Daniel\/Oliver guys say they are looking to sell the photo collection as a whole because it works best as a complete document. Besides, as Lott puts it, \u201cwell, who is the sort of collector for these individually? The teeth are not for everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n Sign Up for the Curbed Newsletter<\/p>\n A daily mix of stories about cities, city life, and our always evolving neighborhoods and skylines.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n![\"Mmm-hmm.](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/555a8dc9cb0e42c1bbdd7afef7b6dc1d19-LF08F.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Hans Rinehart\/Courtesy of Daniel\/Oliver Gallery\n <\/p>\n