Subway History

In certain respects, New York in the 1970s was a much different place than it is today. Long before the Disney-fication of Times Square and the gentrification of many neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs, the city was a dangerous place to live. Yet, its transit offerings were robust enough that even Sesame Street celebrated them. In the latest video making the rounds, the narrator acknowledges as much: “New York is one of the few places where you can get around without a car.”

This 90-second clip is a gem of a time capsule. It focuses on the various ways in which city denizens can get around town without a personal car, and the part on the subway is, obviously, my favorite. We complain a lot about the current state of the city’s public transit system, and while those complaints certainly are valid, it’s easy to lose sight of far we’ve gone.

As the woman taking about the subways says in the video, 35 years ago, the subways were crummy. “You get pushed; you get shoved,” she said. “Sometimes you get mugged in the subway during the daylight. I remember when public transit was the pride of New York. What happened?”

Of course, as some things change, the more they stay the same. “New York is almost broke,” one woman says. “You know why? Because too much money is going to the suburbs. They’re killing us.”

This one’s been making the rounds lately. I enjoyed this glimpse back into New York City Subway history, and I always appreciate a cameo of the K train, the original route to use the Chrystie St. cut. It will make for a fun ten minutes of nostalgia on a Friday morning.

If you want to know the technical details, the filmmaker offered up an explanation on the YouTube page:

The story: in 1986 I made a round trip through the USA and Canada. The starting point was New York. So I filmed some scenes in Manhattan. And was going in the underground at 43nd St & Times Square. I filmed with a big ARRIflex 16mm camera with a 120m magazine with 7250 Kodak 16mm color reversal Tungsten 400 ASA film and a Schneider Cine Xenon 1:2/16mm lens. This equipment is good for 10 Minutes recording duration at 25 f/sec.

After I time a man comes to me and said, he’s a cameraman at ABC and filming at the subway is strictly forbidden without any permission and police is on the other end of the platform. So I was leaving the station, but I had these beautiful pics of the old times in the New York subway. At the same time I recorded the stereo sound with a SONY WM-D6C with two Sennheiser micros in stereo.

In 1986 I edited the pics to the song of the band “London Beat” — “9am at a New York subway”. About 25 years later I was uploading this movie to YouTube. But SONY Music was locking my movie because of the copyright of the song. So I deleted the audio track und was uploading the silence version. After the great response to this video of the New York subway of 1986 now I opened my archive once again with the original film and composed it with the original stereo sound to this over 10 minutes long “directors cut” of all scenes, I filmed at this day in June 1986.

Enjoy.

City Hall Loop Station, November 15, 1903. Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society

Earlier this morning, the New-York Historical Society posted the above photo to its Facebook profile. The still itself is from a day in November in 1903, but the society published it today because today is the 111th anniversary of the groundbreaking for the IRT.

On March 24, 1900, work began on the city’s ambitious effort to build the subway. Construction was to last for two years, but in the grand tradition of public works projects, the IRT did not open for service until 1904.

“The completion of this undertaking,” Mayor Robert Van Wyck said at the time, “will be second only in importance to that of the Erie Canal…This made our city the commercial and financial metropolis of the world, with a population of three and a half millions of people, for whose accommodation and comfort this rapid transit underground road is necessary. The contrast exhibited between the two periods is striking and instructive. De Witt Clinton saluted in 1825 a city of one hundred and sixty thousand souls. We speak to a population of three and a half millions. Then the slow stage coach was the only means of passenger transportation, now it is superseded by steam and electricity.”

Last year on this date, I fondly commemorated the groundbreaking. Today, the subway infrastructure still makes New York City possible. Where will we be in another 111 years?

As I’m in Philadelphia for a few days this week, I’m not going to be around to cover all of the breaking subway news and snow service watch. I did, however, want to make sure that some fresh content finds its way to the site, and I’ll be running a few of my archived pieces. I first ran this look at a proposed subway line to LaGuardia back in January. After this week’s blizzard, the airport has reopened, but subway service to LaGuardia remains but a dream.

The Fiorello H. LaGuardia Airport in Queens is one of the nation’s most infuriating urban airports. It is so close to midtown and Manhattan’s Central Business District that a commuter in a hurry could make the trip in 30 minutes. Yet, it’s so far away because congestion frequently creates trips to Queens that last an hour and 30 minutes. The only public transit option to the airport is a packed and slow bus that, on a good day, goes from 125th St. and Lexington to the airport in a half an hour.

Over the last few decades, city officials have become quite intimate with the problems plaguing LaGuardia, and many have tried to fix it. The N train, whose northern terminus is less than three miles away from the LaGuardia terminals, is so tantalizing close to the airport and yet so far away.

Last week, in his “Why Train” segment, NBC 4’s Andrew Siff posted just this question. “What about the train to LGA?” asks Siff. In a one-minute piece, he mentioned how, 12 years ago, city and MTA officials were heavily invested in a plan to extend the N to LaGuardia, but in the face of other pressing transit needs and widespread community opposition, the agency eventually shelved this much needed link to LaGuardia.

So what then were the plans that engendered widespread community outrage and still cause politicians to chime in now and then, nearly a decade after the MTA discarded the idea? Let’s hop in the Wayback Machine and explore some Giuliani-Era transit developments.

The plans to extend the N to LaGuardia first came to light in 1998 as city officials recognized the need to build better access to the airports. As part of a $1.2 billion package with funding coming from the MTA, the Port Authority and the city, Giuiliani put forth a plan to build an airtrain to JFK and extend the subway to LaGuardia. The JFK line — built over preexisting rights-of-way — survived. The LaGuardia plans, obviously, did not.

The first and biggest problem the city faced in Queens came about because of the proposed routes. The preferred route would have extended the N along 31st St. north onto Con Edison’s property at the edge of Astoria and then east along 19th Ave. to the Marine Air Terminal. The MTA also considered an eastward extension along Ditmars Boulevard, a plan to reroute LaGuardia-bound N trains from Queensboro Plaza through the Sunnyside rail yard and along the eastern edge of St. Michael’s Cemetary to what Newsday called “elevated tracks parallel to the Grand Central Parkway.” A barely-acknowledged fourth route would have seen trains head east via Astoria Boulevard.

On the surface, these plans seem no worse than building the Second Ave. Subway through densely populated neighborhoods on the East Side. In Queens, however, the MTA would have had to build a spur line off a pre-existing elevated structure, and all of the plans called for the train to LaGuardia to run above ground through significant portions of Astoria. So while airport access ranked tops amongst Queens residents transit expansion wishlist, no one wanted to see Astoria further scarred by elevated structures.

The Daily News termed the opposition response NAMBYism — Not Above My Backyard — and nearly every single Queens politician opposed the idea. Some preferred the Sunnyside alternative, but at the time, NYCDOT said plans to widen the Grand Central Parkway would interfere with the train proposal. Others called upon an extension from Long Island City to skirt the borough from 21st St. along the East River to the airport. Still others preferred a longer Willets Point extension of the LIRR to the airport.

Peter Vallone exemplified the opposition. “Extending the elevated track will cause unnecessary hardship to residents and businesses in the area,” the City Council member said in 1999. “The MTA wants to go their way, not our way.”

In the end, despite opposition, political support for the plan from City Hall continued well into the 21st Century. With the backing of Mayor Guiliani and Queens Borough President Clare Shulman, the MTA’s 2000-2004 Five-Year Capital Plan included $645 million for the LaGuardia subway link, and even though a $17 million planning study was the project’s only expense, in late 2002, Mayor Bloomberg threw his weight behind the LaGuardia extension as a key post-9/11 revitalization plan.

Finally, in mid-2003, the Queens communities won the battle as the MTA announced plans to shelve the airport extension. With money tight after 9/11 and Lower Manhattan on the radar, then-MTA Chair Peter Kalikow said that the agency’s attention had turned to the JFK Raillink from Lower Manhattan, another plan that never materialized, and that the agency was prioritizing the 7 Line Extension, the East Side Access Plan and the Second Ave. Subway over the LaGuardia N train extension. “LaGuardia is a good project, but you have to prioritize,” Elliot Sander, then at NYU, said. “In terms of political support from City Hall, Albany and Washington, it’s moved back in the queue.”

And so in the end, we sit here in 2010 with the same travel options to LaGuardia as we have always enjoyed (or suffered through). The M60 remains the best public transportation option, and the MTA is in no position to take another crack at sending the subway to the airport. Oh, what could have been.

This one comes to us via the Transit Museum. Enjoy this ride back in time on an actual Nostalgia Train.

A 1958 subway map shows local service only at 59th St. and Lexington Ave.

When IRT and BRT officials signed their half of the Dual Contracts in 1913, the area around midtown east was not the commercial hub it is today. While Bloomingdale’s attracted its fair share of shoppers, the Queensboro Bridge had opened only four years earlier, and the area was just beginning to grow. For reasons of both anticipated demand and engineering, the IRT plans up Lexington Ave. included only a local stop at 59th St.

Almost from the start, subway planners came to rue that decision and worked to rectify the omission. In 1914, Alfred Craven, the chief engineer of the Public Service Commission, issued a studied on the IRT’s two 59th St. stations. In the plan, he endorsed converting 59th St. at Columbus Circle into an express stop — a plan that never came to fruition — but “report[ed] adversely upon the application to convert the 59th Street Station of the Lexington Avenue line into an express station.”

Beyond that brief mention in a one-paragraph Wall Street Journal article, details of Craven’s decision are lacking. As far as I can surmise, the chief engineer couldn’t sign off on the IRT’s wishes because the work required to construct a station along the express tracks deep underneath both the local tracks and the BMT 60th St. tunnel would have been either too challenging or too expensive at the time. After all, the express level at 59th St., 73 feet below Lexington Ave., is among the deepest IRT stations in the system, and planning for a station after the fact would have been cost-prohibitive in 1914.

The local-only station opened in 1918, As the decades wore on, the need for an express stop somewhere between 86th St. and 42nd St. became acute. The platforms at Grand Central/42nd Street were dangerously overcrowded with IRT passengers switching from local to express trains, and with more passengers entering the IRT via a transfer with the BMT at 59th and Lexington Ave., the Bloomingdale’s stop seemed to be the ideal choice for a new station. By the mid-1950s, it was after all the fourth busiest IRT stop, behind only Grand Central, Fulton St. and Union Square.

In 1954, it seemed as though Midtown East would finally get its IRT express service. A front-page article in The Times screamed out the news, perhaps too optimistically: “East 59th Street I. R. T. Station To Be Express Stop in 2 Years.” At the same time that the Transit Authority requested money to turn Columbus Circle into an express stop, they did the same for the Lexington Ave. station due to “the rapid development of the East Side of midtown.” For $5 million, the TA planned to build the express platform below the BMT level. Escalators were to help usher passengers into the bowels of the subway system.

An illustration shows the cross-section of the 59th Street subway complex at Lexington Ave. (Via The Times)

The money wouldn’t come through for another five years. In 1959, the TA again voted for an express stop at 59th Street. This time, the project carried with a $6 million price tag and a mid-1963 completion date. The agency planned to cart out 17,000 cubic yards of dirt and construct two 14-foot-wide platforms that would span 525 feet — or the length of a ten-car train. “New high-speed escalators” would connect the express platforms with the BMT mezzanine and the IRT local level above.

To accommodate the work, the East Side riders suffered through years of service delays. From 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. every night from March 1, 1960 until mid-November 1962, the TA ran only local service along Lexington Ave. The project though was well worth it to TA planners. They believed it would reduce crowding at Grand Central; allow for more convenient transfers between the BMT and IRT express lines; and ease crowding on the 42nd St. shuttle and complaints over the long walk from the IRT by providing a more convenient trip to Times Square.

“Providing this rapidly growing section of the city with subway express service is only one of the benefits,” TA chair Charles Patterson said in 1959. “It will greatly reduce crowding at Grand Central. It will take a good deal of the load from the Grand Central-Times Square shuttle. For many it will eliminate the bother of transferring. For others it will make the transferring easier and faster.”

On November 15, 1962, at 11:40 a.m., a southbound express train ushered in this new station. The project cost a total of $6.5 million — or slightly over $47 million in today’s dollars — and took around three months less than anticipated. As part of the celebration, the first train through the station was a new red bird designed to mark the TA’s $100 million modernization and platform-lengthening campaign along the IRT lines.

Today, we take for granted the express service patterns and often assume how it is today is how it always was. As this express stop opened nearly 50 years ago, it’s certainly easy to forget a time when only local trains served what is now, with nearly 19 million annual passengers, the 9th busiest stop in the system. So as we look back at a time without express service, ponder where else in the system an express station would do wonders for transit. As history has balanced out the subway map, express and local service patterns have emerged to meet demand — unless of course it’s the other way around.

I found myself yesterday alighting down the stairs to the Brooklyn-bound platform at the south end of the 6th Ave IND stop at 34th St. station when I stopped to do a double-take. Instead of telling me that I could catch the B and the D on the express tracks or the F and the M on the local side, the sign that greeted me told me to expect the F or the orange S on the local tracks. The orange S? What is this mysterious shuttle?

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen an orange S pop up along 6th Ave. Last year, an astute reader sent me a photo of the S on a B train, and I delved into the history of the Grand St. shuttle. That train operated on the express tracks between W. 4th St. and Grand St. This other orange S was a local, and it helped alleviate the pressures of Manhattan Bridge construction as well.

This shuttle began service in May of 1997 and ran only late at night. It operated from Queensbridge to Second Ave. as a local route as the MTA readied the 63rd St. Connector. This shuttle again ran during 2001 while the northern tracks of the Manhattan Bridge were closed. It operated from 21st St.-Queensbridge to Broadway/Lafayette via the 63rd St. tunnel. It went into service on July 22, 2001 and ran only until December 16, 2001. On that day, the MTA finally realized its dream of connecting the 63rd St. tunnel with the rest of the Queens Boulevard line. The V train was born as the F took over the shuttle’s route through the 63rd St. tunnel. (For more on the V train and its controversial origins, check out my requiem for the lost line.)

I have to believe that the reappearance of the orange S bullet is a direct result of the sign change that eliminating the V train precipitated. My guess is that someone at 34th St. pulled off the new orange M sticker and left exposed the original metallic sign with its orange S. For now, until Transit crews cover it up, a forgotten part of the Manhattan Bridge reroutings is on full display for confused tourists and stunned natives alike to see.

The vast majority of New Yorkers do not realize that November 1 is the anniversary of the deadliest subway crash in New York City history. On this day in 1918, a BRT train running along the Brighton Line took a steep curve at over 30 miles per hour and slammed into the walls. At least 93 people died in that accident, and the reverberations were immediate. While the BRT changed its operating practices, the city renamed Malbone St. to Empire Boulevard since so many families in Brooklyn felt the impact of the collision. What follows is the post I ran on Nov. 1, 2008, the 90th anniversary of the accident.

“Scores Killed or Maimed in Brighton Tunnel Wreck,” screamed the Page One story in The Times on Saturday, November 2, 1918. The night before, a speeding train crashed coming around a sharp curve in the Malbone St. tunnel on the Brighton Line. Over 90 people died, and the accident remains the single deadliest crash in New York City transit history.

For weeks and months afterwards, the Malbone St. crash dominated the news, and the details are rather gruesome:

A Brighton Beach Train of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, made up of five wooden cars of the oldest type in use, which was speeding with a rush hour crowd to make up lost time on its way from Park Row to Coney Island, jumped the track shortly before 7 o’clock last evening on a sharp curve approaching the tunnel at Malbone Street, in Brooklyn, and plunged into a concrete partition between the north and south bound tracks…

The first car left the rails a few feet in front of the opening of the tunnel and rammed one end of a concrete partition separating the northbound from the southbound tracks. It was thrown at right angles across the roadbed in front of the entrance to the tunnel. The other cars cut right through it, the second car smashing it to bits and the whole train passing over the wreckage and coming to a stop 200 feet down the tracks inside the tunnel.

Packed together as in a box without structural strength to give them any protection, the passengers in the first car were crushed and cut to pieces. Not one is believed to have escaped. After breaking through the first car, the rest of the train dashed it against the partition wall and strewed wreckage and passengers along the tracks ahead, where the wheels of the cars following passed over them. Only splintered fragments of wood and broken and twisted bits of iron and steel remained of the first car.

The second and third cars, leaving the rails after their impact with the first, ran sidewise into a series of iron pillars supporting the roof of the tunnel at intervals beside the partition. The pillars cut great gashes in the sides of the cars, which were still traveling at high speed, and mowed down the passengers who were standing striking the heads of some from their bodies.

The left sides of the second and third cars were stripped away. Scores of men, women, and children were flung by the impact out of these cars against pillars and the concrete wall, where they were killed instantly or ground under the wheels after falling back upon the tracks. Some who were not flung from the car were killed inside when they fell upon the broken iron of seats, splintered timbers and iron beams which projected through the shattered bottoms of the car. Passengers on the platforms were nearly all killed instantly. One dead man was found impaled on a broken bar of iron, which had run underneath the car, but which broke and shot up into the air like a javelin in the crash.

Furthermore, the impact on the B.R.T. company and the concurrent motorman strike was immediate. Police arrested B.R.T. officials, and the motorman strike ended a few hours later. Over the next few months, Brooklyn grappled with this horrendous accident. At one point, nearly everyone in Brooklyn knew someone impacted by the crash, and in the aftermath, the city changed the name of Malbone St. to Empire Boulevard. The connection between the crash and the name of the street would forever scar the victims’ friends, neighbors and family.

Today, what is rather remarkable about the famed Malbone St. crash is how it has largely been lost to time. The BMT Brighton Line now runs a slightly different route, and the extremely sharp curve is now a part of the Franklin Ave. Shuttle tracks. The tunnel and tracks themselves are rarely used, and the accident is rarely mentioned in the history of the city.

Over the weekend, Flatbush Gardener memorialized the accident by remembering every single victim. It is a fitting tribute to one the city’s most tragic events.

For the full text of The Times article, click here.