'Just a pure weird moment': Art project takes over Manhattan subway kiosk

Field Notes · 2026-08-03

On Saturday afternoon the paper kiosk on the downtown B, D, F and M platform at West Fourth Street station was open for the first time in years. Nothing was for sale. Visitors found free zines, a "train aura" photo booth and a very limited supply of lucky rat foot keychains.

The project is Al Mullen's. Mullen makes Public Transport Magazine, the free guerrilla subway zine that has run writing from Jia Tolentino and David Cross. But the striking thing is not that an artist filled a dead newsstand. It is that the MTA let him.

The kiosk is part of the transit authority's Vacant Unit Activation Program, which hands unused retail space in the subway system to artists and makers who want to install something in it. The MTA launched the program in 2023 as demand for subway retail leases shrank. Rather than chase tenants for rooms too small or awkwardly shaped to rent, the authority gives them away to whoever will make them strange.

West Fourth is open on Saturdays and Sundays for the next year. Mullen plans puppet shows, stand-up comedy and live music. He hopes to stock the kiosk with hand-drawn guides to all 472 subway stations. So far he has six. Jack Handey wrote the guide to 23rd Street. Tolentino wrote the one for Hoyt-Schermerhorn, describing the station as "an essential worker" or "a grilled cheese and carrot juice."

The interesting thing is not the zines. It is that the institution made the call. To fill a ten-square-foot room the subway could have chased one more advertiser. Instead it decided a free comedy kiosk was the better use of the space. The MTA itself said the program exists to make stations "more welcoming and whimsical spaces for riders."

The same authority that runs the trains decided the empty kiosk was worth more as a place to be entertained for six minutes than as a lease. Mullen put it simply: "I think if we could be entertaining for six minutes, it's a huge success."

"a childlike exploration of what it's like to be a New Yorker — if you're also a dinosaur."
— Rex's Dino Store, the previous kiosk activation at Grand Army Plaza

The original report: Gothamist, by Stephen Nessen.

---

Public infrastructure, put to a stranger use than its designers planned. Until the next transmission.