Four storytellers will take the stage inside a subway station that hasn't carried a paying passenger since 1946, and only one of them will be lying. On October 22 at 6 p.m., the New York Transit Museum in Downtown Brooklyn will host a transit-themed edition of the live storytelling series NYC's Secrets & Lies, inviting audiences to sit in the museum's authentic decommissioned station and try to sniff out fact from fabrication.
Called Transit Tales, the event puts four accomplished storytellers in front of the crowd to share narratives drawn from underground transit lore, according to BroadwayWorld. Three of them will deliver completely true accounts. One will present an elaborate fabrication designed to blend in seamlessly. Audience members will analyze clues using scorecards throughout the evening before voting to unmask the liar, with winners walking away with exclusive walking tour tickets and other prizes.
The show is the creation of Christa Avampato, who developed, produced, and hosts NYC's Secrets & Lies and also works as a licensed New York City tour guide and author, per BroadwayWorld. Avampato is an award-winning young adult author of the Emerson Page series who holds a Master's in Sustainability Leadership from Cambridge University and works as a digital media product manager at Carnegie Hall, according to a Medium post detailing her background. She founded the production company Double or Nothing Media to build live projects that fuse historical research with performance.
A Series Born in a Speakeasy, Now Underground
NYC's Secrets & Lies didn't start beneath the streets. The series launched in January 2018 at the Lower East Side speakeasy Caveat and has since traveled to venues across the city, including The Hidden Jewel Box Theater inside the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the South Street Seaport Museum, as Untapped New York has reported. Each stop blends investigative history, competitive sleuthing, and live performance into a single evening.
Among October's featured storytellers is Dr. Edith Gonzalez, a historical archaeologist with four graduate degrees whose research centers on transatlantic slavery and 18th-century Caribbean bioprospecting. She earned her doctorate from the CUNY Graduate Center and serves as a Science Advisory Fellow to The Story Collider, where she regularly presents live non-fiction narratives.
Inside a Station That Time Forgot
The setting itself carries its own real history, and it's the kind of tale that could easily be mistaken for one of the evening's fabrications. Court Street Station opened on April 9, 1936, as the terminus for the Independent Subway System's HH shuttle, a two-stop run between Court Street and Hoyt-Schermerhorn Streets, but it closed to regular passenger service on June 1, 1946, after low ridership caused by its proximity to other downtown stations, according to Wikipedia. Despite the closure, its tracks remain live and connected to the active IND Fulton Street Line, which is how transit workers are able to move vintage subway cars directly onto the platform for museum exhibits, per the same account.
New York's subway system has no shortage of similarly strange footnotes for a storyteller to mine. From 1941 to 1976, the transit system ran the Miss Subways contest, with placards of local women viewed by an estimated 5.9 million daily commuters in 1957; in April 1948, the contest made history by crowning Thelma Porter as the first Black winner of an American beauty contest, according to FOX 5 New York. Manhattan's Old City Hall station, a 1904 landmark famed for its Guastavino tile arches and brass chandeliers, closed on December 31, 1945, because its sharply curved platform couldn't fit longer 10-car trains, as Business Insider has reported; it's now accessible only through guided tours the Transit Museum runs for its members.
A Milestone Year for the Museum
Transit Tales arrives during the New York Transit Museum's 50th-anniversary year. The museum originally opened on July 4, 1976, as a temporary two-month Bicentennial exhibition organized by transit workers, but stayed open permanently after proving far more popular than anyone expected, according to the MTA. Housed entirely within the decommissioned station, it is now the largest museum in North America dedicated to mass transportation, holding an archive of more than 1 million historical artifacts.
To mark the anniversary, the museum has also launched a citywide 50-location transit history scavenger hunt and special nostalgia rides aboard 100-year-old D-Type Triplex subway cars running between Court Street and Hoyt-Schermerhorn, per the MTA's announcement. Tickets for Transit Tales are on sale now for $15 for the general public and $10 for Transit Museum members, and attendees will get evening access to explore the museum before testing their historical instincts against the four storytellers on stage.
