It's been half a century since the city was in the grip of a 12-day transit strike, the first citywide shutdown of the buses and subways. NY1's Jose Martinez takes a look back.

For 12 bitter days in January 1966, Transport Workers Union Local 100 Chief Mike Quill led more than 30,000 workers in the first strike against the Transit Authority.

According to a 1010 WINS report from the time, "The subways stopped running, the buses returned to their garages and New York was in the grip of its first citywide transit strike."

The strike started January 1, the day of Mayor John Lindsay's inauguration.

"It is an act of defiance against 8 million people," Lindsay said at the time.

Fifty years later, the walkout is remembered for cementing the TWU's confrontational image, expressed in Quill's famous response to a judge who had found him guilty of contempt and ordered him behind bars.

"The judge can drop dead in his black robes," Quill said.

Joshua Freeman, who wrote a book about the history of the TWU from 1933 through the end of the '66 strike, said the walkout remains a pivotal moment in city labor history.

"Transport workers won a big pay increase, other benefits," Freeman said. "And other workers looked at this and said, 'You know, this kind of works.' So it promoted unionization and was followed by a number of other very big strikes."

That includes two more transit strikes, as well as the passage of the anti-strike Taylor Law.

"The '66 strike was a tremendous success on every level," said John Samuelsen, the current president of TWU Local 100. "And the legacy of that strike is that it established a militant strain within TWU that exists until today."

Sonny Hall, a city bus driver at the time of the '66 strike who later became international president of the TWU, said the pain of walking off the job was worth it to those on the picket lines.

"So out of a strike that was a difficult strike to take and to actually work through, it built the union," Hall said. "And so in that stage, it was very worth it."

Fifty years later, the strike's leader has his name on an MTA bus depot and a Bronx corner under the elevated train tracks.

Quill didn't get to enjoy the fruits of the labor battle. He died of heart trouble a little more than two weeks after the strike ended.