It was one of the worst commutes in years. A power outage stranded more than 3,500 New York City subway riders in stuffy, crowded train cars for more than two hours on Dec. 11, 2024, during the evening rush.

Firefighters evacuated riders from the disabled trains, but not before some passengers were forced to relieve themselves between cars, according to people who were present. The ensuing delays, which affected the A, C, F and G lines in Brooklyn, stretched well into the morning, snarling the commute for thousands more riders.

But the foul-up didn’t start on the tracks — it began about 40 feet beneath the sidewalk, in a concrete bunker called a substation, like this one.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the New York City subway, operates 225 of these substations. They provide the electricity that keeps trains moving.

Some are deep underground, while others are in fortresslike buildings close to train tracks. Dozens of the facilities are nearing 100 years old, and some components have gone decades without substantial upgrades.

The electrical outage in 2024 started after a critical failure in a Downtown Brooklyn substation that dates to the 1930s. Heavy rainfall most likely seeped into equipment and caused an explosion so forceful that it knocked a door off its hinges, according to the M.T.A.

Without adequate electricity, trains that were closest to the damaged substation could not move, and their ventilation systems shut down.

Such major failures are rare, but are responsible for some of the subway’s worst logjams, said Jamie Torres-Springer, the head of the authority’s construction and development division.

“That’s what causes the most difficult, painful disruptions in the system that drive people out of their minds,” he said.

In hopes of preventing the next nightmare commute, the M.T.A. is making the biggest investment in power in its history. Transit officials plan to spend $4 billion on new power systems by 2029, including upgrades to 75 subway substations. That’s three times as many as were renovated during the last major round of repairs, which ended in 2024.

They have their work cut out for them.

Hidden beneath a steel-trap door on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, 36 steps below the surface, is one of the system’s oldest remaining substations.

“This is a blast from the past,” said David Jacobs, the M.T.A.’s acting general superintendent for power stations, who donned a hard hat and safety glasses on a recent weekday before disappearing into the underground space.

The substation, near 73rd Street and Central Park West, was built in the 1930s, and is expected to be renovated during the current blitz.

A dirty tarp hung in one corner of the cavernous room, to catch water that seeped through worn concrete. Rows of machines hummed with the constant surge of power feeding the electrified third rail on nearby tracks.

It takes about 2 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity to run the subway system annually. That’s enough power to light 128,000 homes for a year.

The substations’ main function is to convert raw, high-voltage electricity from the electrical grid into lower-voltage power that can be delivered to the third rail.

But the aging equipment has become progressively less efficient and reliable, and harder to maintain.

The substations are spaced out across the city, to help keep electricity flowing to trains even if one of them malfunctions. But the equipment has sometimes failed when asked to carry an extra load, leading to cascading problems.

Last year, there were 758 “major incidents” on the subway, ones in which 50 or more trains were delayed. Substations cause a small but disruptive share of the problems, according to M.T.A. data.

“Power is everything,” said John Ross, a recently retired transit worker who was dispatched to help after several service disruptions in the subway, including the outage in 2024. “When it breaks, it breaks good.”

M.T.A. officials assessed the condition of every substation in recent years, and found that 36 percent of the equipment was in poor condition or in need of replacement.

While the main purpose of the upgrades is to reduce train delays, the changes have other benefits. The M.T.A. is installing a new signal system that relies on wireless technology to automatically control train movement.

The system, known as Communications-Based Train Control, or C.B.T.C., will allow trains to operate more reliably. It will also enable transit workers to monitor train traffic more closely from a dedicated room in Midtown Manhattan, known as the operations control center.

But switching to that signal system requires upgrading the rest of the subway’s archaic equipment. “In order to run more trains, we need more power,” Mr. Torres-Springer said.

For Mr. Jacobs, 36, who joined the M.T.A. nearly two decades ago as an electrical apprentice, working with machines younger than him would be a welcome change.

Today he runs a department of almost 400 people, and much of the work remains hands-on: diagnosing problems in the machinery by reading small flags with numbered codes, searching for replacement parts that are no longer manufactured, and generally eking out more life from obsolete machines.

“I do love this equipment,” he said with a smile.

But he’s ready for an upgrade to something built in this century.

“It’s like a B.M.W. versus a 1940 Cadillac.”

Film

‘Make Way for Tomorrow’ (1937), directed by Leo McCarey

The log line: After the bank forecloses on their home, an elderly couple must separate, each living with a different one of their adult children. 

The pitch: “It’s a film that Orson Welles famously said ‘would make a stone cry,’” says Sachs, 60, about McCarey’s movie, singling out a long sequence at the end that depicts “a date through certain lobbies and bars of New York City that offers a snapshot of Midtown in the ’30s.” 

‘The World of Henry Orient’ (1964), directed by George Roy Hill

The log line: A wily 14-year-old girl and her best friend follow a ridiculous concert pianist, on whom they have a crush, around the city.

The pitch: Hill’s 1960s romp inspired Sachs’s film “Little Men” (2016), which is about boys around the same age as these protagonists. “It’s an extraordinarily sweet film that also seems, to me, very honest,” he says. 

‘Coming Apart’ (1969), directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg

The log line: Rip Torn plays an obsessive psychiatrist who secretly films all the women passing through his home office, inadvertently capturing his own mental breakdown. 

The pitch: Shot in one room with a fixed camera, Ginsberg’s film “really feels of a time,” says Sachs. It’s also “very sexual and very free,” reminding him of what’s possible when it comes to making movies. 

‘Deadly Hero’ (1975), directed by Ivan Nagy

The log line: A disturbed, racist cop saves a cellist from a crook, only to become her tormentor. 

The pitch: Harry, 80, and Stein, 76, were extras in Nagy’s film, which stars Don Murray, Diahn Williams and James Earl Jones as the cop, the cellist and the crook, respectively. The pair call the movie “[expletive] weird,” but also say that their day rate — $300 — “was the most money we’d ever made on anything” up to that point.

‘News From Home’ (1976), directed by Chantal Akerman

The log line: An experimental documentary by Akerman, a Belgian filmmaker who moved to New York in her early 20s, the film features long takes of the city and voice-over in which the director reads letters from her mother. 

The pitch: “I’m intrigued by how beauty contains sadness in the city,” says Sachs. Not only is her film a “beautiful record of the city” but it captures “what it is to be alone here, to have left some sort of community and, in particular for Chantal, separated from her mother.”

‘Wolfen’ (1981), directed by Michael Wadleigh

The log line: Albert Finney stars as a former N.Y.P.D. detective who returns to the job to solve a violent and bizarre string of murders. 

The pitch: Wadleigh’s film is not only a vehicle for Finney, says Stein, it also “has a lot of footage from the South Bronx when it was still completely destroyed” by widespread arson in the 1970s.

‘Losing Ground’ (1982), directed by Kathleen Collins

The log line: Collins’s film — the first feature-length drama for a major studio directed by an African American woman — observes a rocky relationship between a college professor and her painter husband.

The pitch: Sachs calls “Losing Ground” “a revelation.” The characters are “so human and fascinating and extremely modern,” he says, adding that he loves a movie that “exists in some very complete version of the local.”

‘After Hours’ (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese

The log line: In Scorsese’s black comedy, an office worker (Griffin Dunne) has a surreal and bizarre evening of misadventure while trying to get back uptown from a woman’s apartment in SoHo. 

The pitch: Harry and Stein recommend this zany tale and borderline “nightmare” for the way it captures a bygone era of New York. “It’s this great image of [Lower Manhattan] when it was still raw, you know, Wild West territory,” Stein says. 

‘Downtown 81’ (shot in 1980-81, released in 2000), directed by Edo Bertoglio

The log line: Bertoglio’s film is a striking portrait of a young artist who needs to raise money so he can return to the apartment from which he’s been evicted. 

The pitch: Jean-Michel Basquiat stars as the artist in this snapshot of life in New York during the ’80s. Despite all the drama surrounding it — postproduction wasn’t completed until 20 years after filming, and for many years the movie was considered lost — the film is notable, says Stein, because “it’s got all the characters and all our buddies in it.”

These interviews have been edited and condensed.

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