Manspreading has been a problem on public transit for 60 years

Manspreading is nothing new.

Men’s habit of taking up too much room on public transportation seats has gotten a lot of attention lately, with the MTA — which runs New York’s subway — launching an official campaign against manspreading last month.

But as a new exhibit at the New York Transit Museum shows, manspreading — and all other sorts of public transit etiquette issues — has been around for decades.

Thanks to New York Magazine for spotting these fascinating vintage ads, drawn by artist Amelia Opdyke-Jones and featured in the museum’s new exhibition “From Sitting to Spreading: Subway Etiquette Then and Now.”

In the late 1940s, these ads were printed in the Subway Sun, a long-running etiquette campaign published by a precursor to the MTA and designed to look like a newspaper. As you can see, subway riders of yore also had problems with:

One problem that didn’t exist in the 1940s: people blaring music on their phones without headphones.