7 New York City-Themed Trading Cards
A brief look inside my collection of trading cards, featuring 7 cards related to NYC
I have written before about my interest in paper ephemera—that is, pieces of paper that are only meant to be around for a short while. I like to seek them out and research them. But I don’t usually keep them. They accumulate quickly and take up precious apartment space. Instead, I strive to find them a new home by selling or donating them.
There is, however, one category of ephemera that I like to keep, at least some of the time: cards.
Relevant to this Substack, a lot of important trading card history took place in New York City. Card design is unquestionably an artistic expression, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art has both some of the oldest known playing cards and one of the most valuable baseball cards in its collection. In addition, some of the first baseball cards ever printed were produced here in Manhattan, and famed card publishing company Topps was originally founded in Brooklyn.
Alas, I will save all that for another post. In this post, I dig through my collection and share some of the (far less historic) cards that I own.
2016 Marriott Marquis New York Hotel Key – Kinky Boots
The word “card” is of course not as obscure as “ephemera,” but it is just as hard to define. After all, business cards, greeting cards, postcards, and sports cards are all cards, and they can range in purpose, size, utility, and composition. They’re not even always made of card stock. I have encountered cards, for example, that are also stamps, posters, stickers, CDs, and books. Sometimes they’re miniature pieces of art, like baseball cards, and sometimes they’re game pieces, like Pokémon cards. I am often drawn to Broadway-related anything, and a plastic hotel key card containing an advertisement for Kinky Boots is the sort of oddball card that is perfect for me.
There are a few annual events that sort of mark the passage of time for me, and I count down the days every year. One of them is the Broadway Flea Market & Grand Auction. Not only does it raise money for Broadway Cares, an organization dedicated to fighting AIDS, but it lets me treasure hunt for Broadway-related cards and ephemera. It was during last year’s Broadway Flea that I picked up the Kinky Boots key card for a dollar.
2021 Dramatic Forces The Lights of Broadway Show Cards – Black Playwrights on Broadway 2021
There is actually one dedicated trading card booth every year at the Broadway Flea Market; it’s for the Lights of Broadway series of cards. It’s published by Dramatic Forces, a theater production company, all featuring illustrations by artist Justin “Squigs” Robertson. Every year there are a limited number of cards exclusive to the flea market. In 2021, one of the cards celebrated a historic first for Broadway: every new play that season was written by a Black playwright.
I saw three of the plays represented on the card, with my personal favorite being Clyde’s, written by Lynn Nottage, a playwright whom I’ve praised in a previous post. She’s the woman shown at the center of the card image who also wrote the libretto for the musical MJ, which, as of this writing, is still playing on Broadway.
1965 Topps #5 – American League 1964 RBI Leaders
My personal history with trading cards began in the mid-90s when I was one of millions of kids collecting them. I remember hoarding them in a blue Epson printer box and spending long weekend afternoons mining the box for overlooked diamonds. My favorite cards, which were often organized into separate boxes and binders, were players from the Baltimore Orioles, my hometown baseball team that I still follow today.
Many details stick in my memories, especially the art and graphic design. I remember the garish yellow of the 1992 Fleer baseball set just as vividly as I remember impatiently ripping the pack open while Ma, my grandmother, drove back to her townhouse in Baltimore. Many years later, when Ma’s health started to decline and she needed to move out of that home, I remember stumbling upon a binder of Orioles cards that I had left behind in her basement.
This Brooks Robinson card came from neither my childhood collection nor the basement binder. Rather, I bought it much later from my friend M.’s brother. The older I get, the pickier I am about what cards I will buy or even keep. But I’m unlikely to ever offload a vintage card featuring an Oriole as prominent as Brooks Robinson. It just so happens that Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees was also an RBI leader in 1964.
2012 Wizards of the Coast Magic: The Gathering Return to Ravnica #73 – Pack Rat
The early 90s also marked my introduction to Magic: The Gathering, a card game where players build “decks” out of the cards and play against other decks. I still play Magic and sometimes even feel an unexpected rush of nostalgia over a specific card. I’m sad to report that there was no surprise binder of Magic cards in Ma’s basement, which would have been a far more lucrative find.
For many years I stopped playing Magic—until 2013, that is, not long after Pack Rat was printed. I purchased a box of mixed Magic cards for around $15 on eBay. My friend D. told me he played too, so I invited him to come over and we spent the day building decks and battling them against each other. I felt ten again! We became Magic evangelists to friends and friends-of-friends, resulting in a playgroup of a few dozen people that miraculously persisted for several years.
2017 Leaf Pop Century #PC-21 – Jesse Eisenberg
The experience of opening a pack has changed a lot over the years. There have nearly always been “inserts,” dating back to the very first baseball cards, which were themselves the inserts for tobacco (and later, gum). Companies included inserts like stamps and posters, and through the 80s, inserts included “All Star” cards, puzzle pieces, or stickers. The nature of inserts advanced in the early 90s, specifically with Upper Deck’s 1990 autographed Reggie Jackson card, and Donruss’ 1991 serially numbered cards. This way of thinking about alternate versions of cards has since ballooned.
The most desirable cards, called “hits,” refer to cards that have a physical relic such as a piece of clothing or sports equipment inserted into the card or are autographed by the card’s subject (or both). I am currently in the midst of an art project, one where I have pages of cards that collectively show all the ways that cards can be collected. Though I have no special affinity for Queens-born actor Jesse Eisenberg, he is nevertheless now enshrined in the “relics” page. I was less intrigued by the actor than by the unusually thick card itself, with the actor-worn fabric swatch taking up practically the whole front of the card!
1993 Topps #98 – Derek Jeter
Before the pandemic, it was common to find packs of cards in big box stores like Target or Walmart. When the world shut down, a trading card craze swept the country. Even though people weren’t visiting in-person stores as often for a while, card collecting was a perfect pandemic hobby. Let me count the ways:
It could be done at home.
It could expand or contract into the space available. It could be contained to a small corner of an apartment (relevant to many NYC inhabitants) or spread out across a large, unused room.
For sports cards in particular, it scratched the itch of engaging in sports at time when live sports events weren’t happening.
It was a fun, nostalgic way for many to spend part (or all) of a government stimulus check.
Once stores started to open up and people were visiting Target and Walmart again, something changed: the packs of cards were gone.
If you did find them, you struck gold. In mid-2020, a pack of Pokémon or baseball cards bought at retail price easily sold for two to three times that online. In fact, I remember the MLB Flagship Store in Manhattan opening mid-pandemic and instituting a strict limit of one box of cards per person. It was one of the only times I ever found sealed boxes in the wild of highly in-demand products that one could easily “flip” for hundreds of dollars.
This scarcity did not last forever. Within a few months, the MLB Store did away with the one box limit because it stopped mattering. Supply caught up to demand. A reseller today buying retail sealed boxes hoping to make a quick buck is in for a rude shock, a phenomenon reminiscent of buying cards in the 1990s. Practically every card printed then is now considered part of the “junk wax” era and nearly valueless. Only a few classic cards, such as this 1993 rookie card for New York Yankee Derek Jeter retain any value whatsoever—and even that has tanked from its $30 mid-pandemic highs to around $10 today.
1910 Between the Acts Theatres Old & New (T108) – Booth’s Theatre, New York
In 2021, as the world opened up, I decided to plan a trip around that year’s Philly Non-Sports Card Show. I took an Uber to a large exhibition hall and saw dozens of people lined up to get inside. I remember one woman in particular who was carrying a pistol case, sporting a no-nonsense expression, and wearing a T-shirt reading, “Trump won. They know it. I know it. You know it.” (Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in NYC anymore.) I slowly realized they weren’t lined up for a card show, they were lined up for a gun show. I started to worry. Did I mess up the date? The location? Maybe there are still cards somewhere inside? I double-checked on my phone, which said the non-sports card show was still going on. After walking over a mile(!) around the perimeter of the building, I found Hall B with the show I wanted. And maybe 10% of the turnout.
If the gun show was Midtown Manhattan, the card show was a quaint neighborhood in Queens. It had maybe 30 or so tables, including a couple I recognized from previous card-related events. I learned just how small the non-sports card world is. There were a lot of the same cards over and over: Star Wars, Garbage Pail Kids, Marvel; cards of flags, celebrities, and historical figures; Pokémon, Pokémon, Pokémon. I found myself feeling a little let down and not really wanting any of it. I was still determined to come home with something though. One of the few purchases I settled on was this card that was over a century old and featured Booth’s Theatre. The theater in this card, not to be confused with the current Booth Theatre on Broadway, experienced brief success after its 1869 opening but was unfortunately sold in 1881 and demolished in 1965. Both the Booth’s and Booth theaters are named for the actor brother of infamous assassin John Wilkes Booth.
The Rest of My Cards
Most of my collection has nothing to do with New York City, aside from possibly being the city in which I bought it. Apart from Baltimore Orioles and Magic: The Gathering, there are a handful of other categories for which I’ve accrued modest card collections:
Broadway
Fine art
Venezuela
Emphasis on modest. Most of my collection fits in one corner of a cupboard, and additions have become infrequent. The joy I get from physical cards is connected to the memories they evoke, and the reality is that most of my memories are not best encapsulated by a small piece of card stock. But sometimes, memories are only important through the lens of retrospect. Should I ever leave NYC, the cards I’ve found among the places here will serve as new memories. Maybe then I’ll also have space for another card box or two!
I just launched a newsletter where I open a pack of baseball cards. I didn't pull anything amazing this month, but I'd love to trade you for that Eisenberg card someday.