Subway History

A glimpse of a long-shuttered pedestrian tunnel underneath 6th Ave. (Photo by flickr user newpennstation)

Everyday, thousands of New Yorkers destined for Midtown exit the 34th St./Herald Square station and walk north along Sixth Avenue. Most do not realize it, but they are tracking the path of an underground complex that ranges north from 35th to 40th Sts. and connects the Herald Square subway station to the 42nd St./Bryant Park stop. That passageway, closed for nearly 20 years, is just one of the many secrets the subway system hides right before our eyes.

This passageway dates from the construction of the IND, and it originally opened, as the Municipal Arts Society recounted, in 1940. A piece from the May 4 New Yorker that year introduced the city to the tunnel as a work in progress:

It’s a passageway running from Thirty-fifth Street to Fortieth, connecting with both the Thirty-fourth and Forty-second Street stations. The idea is that it will relieve congestion at these points by distributing passengers over a greater area. If you add the length of the station platforms to the length of the underpass, you have something impressive – a stretch of more than nine blocks, from Thirty-third Street to north of Forty-second. There will be a catch to using this as a summer promenade, however. There will be turnstiles at the ends of both station platforms, so it will cost ten cents to make the entire distance. The arrangement should nevertheless be a boon to adventurous strollers in the summer of 1941…At the south end, once you’re through the turnstile, you will be able to wander on indefinitely underground: through territory of the BMT, the Hudson & Manhattan terminal, Saks-Thirty-fourth Street, Gimbel’s, the Pennsylvania Station – a whole world in itself.

For years, the passageway served as a short cut away from the crowds on 6th Ave., but as the subway system fell into ruin, so too did these less-than-secure areas underground. Eventually by the 1980s and early 1990s, homeless people outnumbered commuters, and long, dark passageways were hallmarks of the unsafe subways. Junkies and pushers sprung up in area that bred graffiti and saw nary a cop – or station agent – patrolling the grounds.

Resembling what we might see in a movie today, these tunnels were ominous, and in 1991, after years of police complaints, disaster struck in the form of a horrific rape. A 22-year-old woman from New Jersey was sexually assaulted in that 6th Ave. tunnel on a weekday afternoon in March, and her attacker used construction equipment to shield the crime. The MTA’s reaction was swift. They barricaded that long tunnel and offered a mea culpa. The authority had kept open the passageway despite police requests because they feared a public outcry from homeless advocates. The crime though tipped the balance.

A now-shuttered passageway between 7th and 8th Aves. at 14th St. (Photo via NYCSubway.org)

That now-forgotten tunnel under 6th Ave. wasn’t the only casualty of an unsafe and unpatrolled system. Throughout the system, the MTA shuttered various isolated crossovers and passageways that many deemed to be unsafe. “Although it may be inconvenient for some people to walk the long way around,” Beverly Dolinsky, then of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Council, said, “I think most riders won’t mind because of the increased feeling of safety.”

Included in those closings were a walkway outside of fare control that connected the IRT stop at 14th St. and 7th Ave. with the IND station at 14th and 8th; free connections between the uptown and downtown platforms at 28th St. along the 6 and 23rd St. on the R; various staircases at the C/E station at 50th St.; and assorted understaffed areas in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan. Few of these passageways and staircases have reopened in the intervening twenty years, and most have been lost to the vagaries of time and subway history. That Gimbel’s tunnel is but a memory from another era.

Today, the subways are safer than they’ve ever been in part because the more dangerous high-crime areas have been off limits for two decades, and yet, that fear always lurks in the minds of New Yorkers. With station agents set to be eliminated, many wonder if we’re in for a repeat of the shiftiness of the the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, new technology and innovation – cameras, more efficient police beats – make the subways safer, and maybe one day, the MTA, with the right investment project, can reactivate these old passageways and restore lost transfer points.

In fact, Vornado is proposing to do just that. In a sweeping plan that would overhaul the Herald Square-Penn Station area, the real estate company has called for the reopening of the Gimbel’s tunnel. Their ambitious transit renovations would reconnect the 34th St./Herald Square complex with the 7th Ave./Penn Station stop, and instead of a dual fare at either end of the tunnel, the connection would be free. This underground dream that would see 34th St. resemble the Rockefeller Center are a long way from reality, and for now, these various passageways shuttered throughout the city remain the ghosts in the subway machine.

For many New Yorkers, the name Robert Van Wyck will conjure up images of traffic on the expressway near JFK Airport that bears his name. Perhaps some will know him as the city’s first mayor after the five boroughs were unified, and others will know tales of the way Van Wyck’s ice trust scandal cost Tammany Hall the 1901 mayoral election.

What many do not know about Van Wyck is that he is the man who, with one well-placed shovel, started construction on the New York City subway systems. As the MTA Board voted to cut service yesterday, we let the 110th anniversary of the day construction started on the subway slip by us announced. It was then a day of celebration for the city, and New Yorkers in 1900 thought Tunnel Day would be commemorated annually well into the future. This year, the MTA gave its nod to history by cutting off some of the city’s lifeblood.

March 24 in 1900 was a Saturday, and that afternoon at 1 p.m., Mayor Van Wyck took a silver shovel made by Tiffany and with a handle constructed from wood from the “Lawrence,” Commodore Perry’s flagship from the Battle of Lake Erie, to the front steps of City Hall. There, above a now-defunct stop, he broke ground amidst a throng of politicians and IRT officials. Today, the subway system stretches for miles and miles, and the shovel is with the Museum of the City of New York.

As we reflect on a subway system that will soon lose service and a map that will be short two lines, we look back at Van Wyck’s words on that day. He was a politician who understood the importance of mass transit in New York City. “The completion of this undertaking,” he said, “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.”

Alexander Orr, president of the city’s Rapid Transit Commission, echoed Van Wyck’s words. “The removal of the spadeful of earth by our respected Mayor, which, according to the programme, we are soon to witness,” he said, “will be the inauguration of a system of municipal transit which, if courageously carried out, will continue to stimulate our marvelous development, and knit together all the sections of this great city in fact, as they have been lately united in name.”

I wonder what Orr and Van Wyck would think of the system today. It stretches far beyond the imagination of the IRT’s Contract 1, but the stations look much the same as they did in 1904. The city, then willing to invest heavily in transit, and state have shirked their responsibilities, and the MTA has been left with no choice but to scale back service the city needs. Orr’s and Van Wyck’s prognostications came true; the subways have knit together all sections of this great city, but who will realize that today and come to a sagging system’s eventual rescue?

After the jump, an excerpt from The Times article from March 25, 1900 about the groundbreaking ceremony. The writer, a name lost to time, waxes poetically about Tunnel Day.

When the New York City subway system was built in the early 1900s and later expanded throughout the 1930s, the route planners had a difficult task at hand. Using the city as they knew it then and the city as projected later, they had to extrapolate routes based on need. It’s tough to know in 1904 which stops should be served by an express train and which shouldn’t in 2010.

Nowhere in the system is this problem more evident than along the West Side IRT — known familiarly as the 1, 2 and 3 trains — at 72nd St. and 59th St./Columbus Circle. With its too-narrow platforms and mid-avenue stationhouses, the 72nd St. station has been a mysterious express stop nearly since day one. It’s not at a major above-ground landmark, and it’s not a fork in the system as 96th St. is. There, the express trains head east and toward the Bronx while the 1 continues north under Broadway. At 72nd St., the stop simply serves as a way point between the run from 42nd St. to 96th St.

Meanwhile, 13 blocks to the south sits Columbus Circle. In 1904, it served as the entryway to Central Park, but today, it is a bustling hub of people with commercial and office space to the west and tourists to the east. As a major transfer point between the 6th Ave. and 8th Ave. IND routes and the West Side IRT, Columbus Circle is the seventh busiest subway station in the system. In 2008, over 20 million straphangers passed through the station. Despite the obvious popularity, it is not an express stop.

Those who frequent the Columbus Circle station have long wondered about the lack of an express stop, and the perfect storm of conditions in the mid-1950s nearly turned 59th St. into an express service. Let’s jump into the archives to relive that bit of subway history. In 1954, Robert Moses, then head of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, oversaw the construction of the New York Coliseum at Columbus Circle. Despite his lukewarm support of and outright hostility transit throughout much of his career, this time, he wanted something from the subways and asked the Transit Authority to consider turning 59th St. into an express stop. He nearly got his way.

In August 1954, as construction commenced on the Coliseum, the TA supported a $172 million work plan for 1955. In that plan included an $11.6 million project that would have turned Columbus Circle from a local-only stop into an express station along the IRT. The work would have been massive. The two local tracks would have been pushed out with the platforms remaining in place, and an express bulb in the middle of the two express tracks would have been constructed there. The track layout would have resembled the current design of Penn Station along the IRT. Meanwhile, the express platforms at 72nd St. would have been walled off, and that station would have become a local-only stop.

The plans themselves though never made it off the drawing room floor. The TA approved a contract for the work in March 1955 after the Board of Estimate had approved the plan the previous December. By 1956, though, as work hadn’t yet begun, TA head Charles Patterson had already come out against the plan. He wanted to simply lengthen the five-car platforms at 59th St. and believed that to be adequate to serve the ridership growth anticipated by the opening of the Coliseum.

That lengthening was, of course, how this story ends. The IRT platforms were lengthened in the 1950s to accommodate longer train cars, and 59th St. was no exception. The express plans were discarded. Every few decades, a civic group calls upon the MTA to explore adding an express stop to 59th St. In 1997, the American Institute of Architects passed a resolution with detailed plans — available here as a PDF — calling for that express stop modification. It went nowhere.

Now, Columbus Circle is amidst a massive renovation that won’t bring express service to it along the IRT but will make the station nicer and easier to navigate. For now, we’ll just have to watch as those express trains zoom past a logical stopping point, and we’ll blame August Belmont for his lack of foresight. Mostly, he was right about where to place those IRT stops, but at 59th St., the future proved him wrong.

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.