NEW YORK—Tucked away in a corner on the lower floor of Grand Central Terminal with only a small doorway to signify its existence is perhaps one of the station's most fascinating places: the lost and found.
The place itself is unimposing with simple white walls and blue and green plaster tile floors. But at the end of the hall and behind a wooden framed window lies a room filled with gizmos and gadgets. Shelves line every wall of the storage room with backpacks and purses filling the majority of the room. Plastic gray bins marked with labels such as "May cell phones" line the shelves contains all the phones found that month.
Dan Brucker, a Metro North spokesman and Grand Central Terminal's resident historian, is familiar with the workings of the lost and found. A stout, friendly man with Woody Allen glasses, he often greets the station's employees with a good-humored laugh and a wave. In the 20 plus years he has worked for the station, Brucker has seen just about everything from common gadgets like cell phones and walkmans to unusual belongings like artificial limbs and dentures find their way to the lost and found facility.
Every month the station receives over 1,600 items left by passengers on the trains. As traffic to the station increases, the number of forgotten items has increased. Despite the vast amount, the department boasts an 80 percent success rate in reuniting the forgetful owners with their belongings, and the success rate for returning laptops is at 100 percent.
First, the crew members drop off items they find on the trains in large bins placed throughout the station, explains Brucker. The items are then collected by lost and found employees, tagged with information and placed in a padlocked box. Then they make their way into police evidence bags.
A large part of the department's success, says Brucker, is contributed to detailed analysis and cataloging of everything brought into the lost and found, a process that rivals the meticulous attentiveness given to police evidence. That's not surprising, as the lost and found had cooperated with MTA police to streamline the process.
"We then put everything on an Internet databank," said Brucker. "People can go in and plug in all the information about what they lost. It makes it easier for us to find it."
Not all lost item find happy endings with their owners however.
On Monday morning, a man walked up to the storage window and announced he had lost a pair of sunglasses on the train a week earlier. A clerk brought him a box filled to the brim with glasses of various colors, all tagged with the exact date, train number, and seat location where they were found. The man sifted through a bit, but walked away disappointed.
Sometimes, items left in the lost-and-found find their way there and stay. Most of the time, they are expendables such as a paperback book or an umbrella that the owner had deemed unworthy being reclaimed. However, that doesn't stop the lost-and-found crew from trying.
"We would call them over and over again," says Brucker. "We tell them 'Hey, you have your stuff here. Please come and get it.' They don't come. So, we call them again and tell them, 'Your item is here," but they just don't show up."
Unusual items have also found their way into the department. Once, crew members found a pair of dentures lying on a train. Days later, a man walked into the lost and found office claiming one of them to be his. With no official way to verify his claim, the man popped the teeth into his mouth as proof. Another time, a Bassett hound wandered onto a subway train and strayed into the station.
The most unusual, says Brucker, was when staff members found a vase filled with ashes. For weeks they had no lead on who it belonged to. One day, a petite elderly lady strolled in and claimed it to be hers. She had left it on the train after her husband had died as revenge for lying to her about falling asleep on the train when in fact he was having an affair with a mistress.
"The lady thought: Well, if you like the train so much, you can just stay there forever," said Brucker. "She came in three weeks later and told us the story. I guess we got the last laugh on that."
Amongst other unusual items left in the storage room are singing dolls. On the shelf of one wall, a talking and singing Ray Charles doll sits smiling with a President George W. Bush doll that sings "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen." The two have been with the department for years, and employees have dubbed them the "lost-and-found mascots."
Though unusual, but quite commonly found, are artificial limbs left on the overhead storage of he trains. According to Brucker, those are found quite frequently as army veterans often pass through the station.
"A lot of the times, they [the veterans] are uncomfortable with the artificial limbs so they take them off and use their canes instead," said Brucker. "When they get off, they take their cane and leave their arms or legs."
Frequently found are also toy trains.
"It's funny. Leaving a train on a train," says Brucker
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