The cumbersome phrase “Long Island Rail Road lost and found” might conjure up images ripe for a Pixar animated short — a dank little broom closet filled with half-empty plastic bins that contain things like one-eyed rag dolls flashing saccharine needlepoint smiles, winning scratch tickets and wedding rings. Its door is manned by a guy named Mo who calls himself a “curator,” and thriftily charges fifty cents for a peek at the goods. The LIRR lost and found at Penn Station is, as it turns out, nothing like that sad, animated movie at all — it’s a place filled with the eclectic leavings of weary travelers who were just too frenzied to remember their wedding dress or brass knuckles, and its guardian is a helpful fellow named Henry Felton who has helped reunite quite a lot of distressed people with their discarded minutiae. Except umbrellas — nobody ever gets their umbrellas back.
DNAinfo New York recently took a gander at all the wonderful trinkets that LIRR passengers have left behind in recents weeks, things like: a wedding dress, a duffel bag stuff with eight thousand dolla dolla bills, a salad bowl, a Louis Vuitton bag, a Spider-Man bag, Spider-Man, a wedding ring set that would also make an excellent Pixar short, a bible with five thousand dolla dolla bills stuffed inside (probably Corinthians because modern people are imagination poor), a pair of Dorothy slippers, a whole box of puppies (not really), a whole box of kittnes (again, not really) and a melange box of puppies and kittens. Felton says that he doesn’t always find fun stuff — sometimes he finds weapons, and once he even found a prosthetic limb. If nobody comes to claim their guns or prostheses a company in Alabama pays the MTA $35 per box (no matter the contents) and resells the indefinitely lost items to other people, creating a Brave Little Toaster situation among diasporic inanimate objects.