Miss Subways

[1]John Robert Powers was no longer involved in selection by 1963 when the contest changed to "public vote ... by post card."

The first winner of the public vote was Ann Napolitano who was an executive secretary at the advertising agency Doyle, Dane & Bernbach.

"[5] In 2004, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, in conjunction with the New York Post, brought back the program, now named "Ms. Subways," for one year only.

"[4] "The contest provided the main plot device of Leonard Bernstein's 1944 musical On The Town, in which a smitten sailor on leave searched for 'Miss Turnstiles.

[7] "Unlike Miss America, these queens represented the full spectrum of their constituency, mainly Irish, Italian, Latina and Jewish.

"[4] The New York Subway Advertising Company was owned by Walter O'Malley, who moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1958.

"[10]In 1983, when there were public calls for the contest to continue, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority representative stated that it would be "irrelevant and socially unacceptable," and thus not viable, to restart Miss Subways.

Her goal: a flight instructor's rating'), they focused on women's ambitions, and in the 1940s or the 70s or [2000s], that's a rare rose to find clamped in the teeth of mass advertising.

Yet there it was, and there it more or less firmly remained, probably because the contest was structured during World War II, when more than three million women were offered paying work for the first time, and were thus riding the subways, not to mention operating them, in much greater numbers than before.

Miss Subways' journey tracks a clear underground parallel to the prescribed roles of her sisters' above: While the civilian women of World War II may have been crucial to the work force, the purpose of housewives, as Betty Friedan puts it, 'is to buy more things for the house.'

From the exhilarating peak of December 1942's Marguerite McAuliffe, 'whose aim is to be a doctor as good as her dad,' and November 1943's Cecile Woodley, whose 'main interests are her job and the Navy ... enthusiastically O.K.

's skiing, Mozart and Katharine Hepburn,' we slide submissively toward Irene Scheidt, June 1950, whose 'fondest hope is a trip to Bermuda.'

A panel of local celebrity judges including NY1 reporter Roger Clark awarded the title, sash, and crown to performance artist Lisa Levy.

Miss Subways returned to Littlefield for the 2019 event and the winner was Dylan Greenberg, a trans queer musician and director who fronts the band Theophobia.

In 2023, the City Reliquary revived the event at the Sideshows by the Seashore Theater of Coney Island USA,[15][16] no longer in partnership with Riders Alliance.