Subway History

A relic of a naming convention lost to time. (Photo by flickr user wallyg)

Today, we celebrate a birthday. The venerable A train, made famous by Billy Strayhorn in 1939, is 77 years old for it was at midnight on September 10, 1932 that the A and its local sister the AA started operating along the 8th Ave. IND lines.

The Independent Subway line has, unsurprisingly, a long and tortured history. It took 12 years from the point of conception to open just the 8th Ave. line and parts of the original IND system did not open until 1988, 56 years after the first A train rolled up the tracks. Meanwhile, the Second System, which I explored in depth last year, has never materialized, and we’re still waiting for the Second Ave. Subway to arrive.

While you can read a complete history of the IND at NYCSubway.org, I want to put aside historical skepticism and look instead at the reports of the new subway’s opening. The Times covered the event in great detail, and the article is a gem of 1930s New York City reporting.

The opening itself was not marked by any ceremony. The line took seven years to build, and it cost $191.2 million. By mid-1932, the city was looking for someone else to operate the trains, but amidst a Great Depression, no one stepped forward. Paul Crowell reported on the first passengers to reach the platform:

There was no official “first train,” no official opening ceremony, no laudatory speech-making program. The chains which have blocked access to the turnstiles were removed just before midnight last night, and those who dropped their nickels in the turnstile slots were free to board a train at any station along the line. The full operating schedule has been in effect since Wednesday afternoon, and at every station on the line, uptown or downtown, a local or express was available within a few minutes after the prospective rider reached the station platform.

At Times Square, New Yorkers gathered en masse to await the opening of this new subway line with its brand new R1 rolling stock, wide platforms and mezzanine express stops. Crowell writes of the maddening crowds all waiting to drop their nickels into the turnstiles:

The largest crowd to board trains immediately after the official opening was at the Forty-second Street station. At that point Mr. Delaney gave the signal to throw the turnstiles open to the public. The first person to drop his coin into the slot was Billy Reilly, 7 years old, of 406 West Forty-sixth Street, who had been waiting several hours for his first ride on the new line. He got a preferred place on line when, Mr. Delaney learned that he was born March 14, 1925, the day ground was first broken for the new subway.

At this station, as well as at Columbus Circle and Thirty-fourth Street, a carnival spirit was manifested by those who waited to board the first trains. They rushed through the turnstiles, cheering and shouting and rushed down the stairways to the platforms. The first train to pull in was a southbound express. It was filled to capacity and carried the first load of straphangers to ride on the new line. Fifteen minutes after this train pulled out there was still a line in front of the main change booth at the Forty-second Street entrance of the station.

Of course, not everything was smooth sailing for the A train. One passenger alleged that the turnstile had eaten his nickel, called the new line a “rotten subway” and ran off to catch his train. Other rowdy teenagers stuck gum into the turnstile slots as lines grew long. That’s the 1930s equivalent of “Swipe Again at This Turnstile.”

Meanwhile, New Yorkers celebrated the night away, and many came out just for the spectacle of it. According to Crowell’s reporting, 2808 passed through the Times Square turnstiles between midnight and 1 a.m. on a Saturday, and at 2 a.m., the trains were still packed. “Of this number not all were riders, however, for many were satisfied to pay their nickel, make a complete inspection of the new station and return to the street,” Cowell wrote.

As the MTA and city and state officials have proclaimed the Second Ave. Subway an eventual boon for the Upper East Side, so too did New York officials proclaim the IND for the West Side. “The opening of the Eighth Avenue subway, will, in my opinion, do more constructively to bring about the rejuvenation of the west side than any other single known factor,” one-time Governor and then-head of the West Association of Commerce Alfred E. Smith said.

The technical details of the new subway, meanwhile, were impressive. The city, in fact, learned from the previous mistakes of the Interborough Rapid Transit planners. While the IRT served as the city’s first subway, many of its stations are far too close together, and some key stops are built on curved sections of the tracks. Trains can’t maintain or achieve top speeds as they navigate the Union Square curve or run from Bowling Green to Wall St. to Fulton St. Crowell noted the changes:

Subway stations have been located with respect to the density of population in connection with running distances between stops. The stations are at least 600 feet long, with provisions for extension to 660 feet if necessary. They will accommodate ten-car trains with ease. They are lighted under a new system designed to eliminate shadows. All platforms are straight-edged, locations on curves having been avoided.

The cars are designed in accordance with the view of a committee of experts which gave its services without charge. Tests conducted by the board’s engineers indicate that the trains can be loaded and unloaded in 33.3 percent faster time than those on the B.M.T. and Interborough. Each car will seat 60 persons and provide standing room for 220.

And thus a subway line was born. Today, we take the IND for granted and wait for the Second Ave. Subway. Will we witness “gay midnight crowds” when the 33-block, four-stop extension of the Q train opens up in 2017 or 2018? Will we witness a spectacle and a ceremony or will just shrug its collective shoulders? If history is our guide, it will be a momentous night indeed.

I grew up three blocks away from the West Side IRT station at 96th and Broadway. For the first six years of my life, I learned the subway from the front windows of the 1, 2 or 3 trains. The 2 — the old red birds — were my favorite until one day in 1989 when the MTA introduced the 9 train.

Six-year-old Benjamin was smitten. It was a brand new subway train that would stop at his home station and skip some far-away stations in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx in which I as a child never set foot. I was disappointed when I realized that the 9 trains were just 1 trains with a different bullet, but to me, that 9 always looked like a big grin. It was a welcoming child.

In high school, I came to enjoy the 9 train. During my junior and senior years, I would take the subway from 96th St. north up Broadway to 242nd St. before walking up Post Road to my school on 246th St. Each day, I would hope for a 9 train because, in my mind, it was faster. The 9 train skipped four stops north of 125th St. while the 1 skipped only three. It was simple subway math.

After high school, the 9 train faded from my subway conscious. On Sept. 11, 2001, the MTA suspended 9 train service as they had to change a slew of routes to accommodate for the damage to the subway system in and around Ground Zero. While the 9 returned a few days after the one-year anniversary of those terrorist attacks, it was but an afterthought. Less than three years later, it would be wiped from the map, a victim of the northern Manhattan population boom that continues to this day.

Last week, I missed an anniversary of the 9 train, and today, I’d like to revisit the origins of this train. The first nine train rolled off the line Monday, August 21, 1989, twenty years and six days ago. Donatella Lorch reported on this service addition for The Times:

The new service provides ”skip-stop” service between 6:30 A.M and 7 P.M. on weekdays, freeing the old No. 1 local to skip four stops between 137th and 242d Street. The purpose, says the Transit Authority, is to provide a faster and less crowded ride for people in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan. Not everyone believes this will happen. Some passengers say they will spend more time on platforms, transferring or waiting for the right train to come along…

”It slows me down because I have to change trains for no good reason,” complained Frank Gary as he waited yesterday evening at 137th Street for an uptown train to 157th Street. ”I knew about it this morning so I did not get confused.”

Jared Lebow, a Transit Authority spokesman, said the new line would save up to three minutes on a ride from South Ferry to 242d Street. That’s not much, he said, but cumulatively, over the course of a day, enough time is saved to get more use out of the trains. He also said that a total of 28 No. 1 and 9 trains would now run during each rush hour, instead of the 25 that used to run on the No. 1 line.

For 16 years, residents of northern Manhattan complained about the 9 service. While those of us passing through enjoyed the luxury and perceived speed of the seat-saving skip-stop service, people in Marble Hill, Inwood, Washington Heights and Harlem felt slighted by the MTA.

By 2005, the need for this service had greatly diminished. In fact, as the skipped stations had grown in ridership, Transit had to restore full-line service to Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, and 12,000 per day experienced more frequent service when the 9 was axed. “Skip-stop service on the 1 line is an idea which today doesn’t make sense for our operations or our customers,” Lawrence G. Reuter, the president of New York City Transit at the time, said to Sewell Chan in 2005. “By eliminating skip-stop service, the majority of riders along the 1 line will benefit from shorter travel times and will no longer have to stand on platforms as trains pass them by during rush hour.”

The last 9 train rode up and down the West Side IRT local tracks on May 31, 2005, and it passed quietly into subway lore. Twenty years ago last week, it debuted, and now it is but a memory in the minds of New Yorkers, a fleeting part of straphanger past.

As the first week of 2009 dawns, we’ll soon be hearing a lot about more about the MTA’s finances. The authority has public hearings on the Doomsday budget set for this month, and at some point, the state legislature will begin to deal with a Ravitch-inspired bailout plan.

But in the meantime, let’s hop into the Wayback Machine. We’ll visit a time when the MTA had money and decided to spend all on us! Those were the days, eh?

The time is 2005, and the MTA has determined that they will enjoy a $928-million budget surplus for that fiscal year. That number would in fact eventually reach $1.04 billion. As The Times explained at the time, the surplus “stemmed from the unusually high real estate taxes and low interest rates.” We now know all too well what happens when unusually high real estate taxes turn into unusually low real estate taxes, but we’ll get to that later.

In an effort to give something back to the riders, the MTA in October announces a plan for discount holiday fares. Immediately, this move is decried as “a marketing gimmick” by city experts. This move will cost the MTA $100 million of their surplus with the rest going to reducing some unfunded pension liability, enhancing subway security and expanding service.

Experts were skeptical. “Why is the M.T.A. engaging in feel-good, short-term gimmicks rather than convincing riders and business leaders that it has sensible, long-term plans for a balanced operating budget and a fully funded capital budget?” James A. Parrott, chief economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute, said to Sewell Chan.

Some city officials wondered about the rational behind the move. “Whom does this actually benefit?” Preston Niblack of the city’s Independent Budget Office said to The Times. “It does not really solve any structural issues. It’s great from a public relations point of view, but it does not address long-term needs.” It never does.

In the end, the MTA Board approved the plan but not without dissent. Some board members feared the discount offerings would lead the public to believe the MTA had full coffers at a time when internal documents were predicting a $900-million deficit for as soon as 2009. (They clearly underestimated.)

In the end, the program earned mixed reviews, and transit advocates maintained that the money should have been reinvested in the system and used to shore up the MTA’s shaky future financial picture. Even in 2006, hindsight was 20/20.

Now, three years removed from the days of discount fares, the MTA has gone from a surplus to a deficit of a size larger than the one predicted in 2005. If the agency knew that their finances were going to head south, why didn’t they urge a Ravitch Commission-type investigation sooner? For years, we’ve know that real estate tax revenue is no way to fund a transit system, and now we’re paying the press.

At some point, the MTA’s finances will improve, and the agency may once again be saddled with the “problem” of a surplus. But for now, we can just look back on 2005 as a moment in time when transit funding seemed secure, and the riders got a discount, misguided as it may have been.

This afternoon, I went on the media tour of the new South Ferry 1 train terminal. The station looks great, and later tonight, I’ll post the pictures and my recap. As I look to the future of the system in that post, let’s step back in time to 1905 for a ride up some very familiar terrain.

The video above comes to us via Metafilter. It is, according to that site, a video from G.W. “Billy” Bitzer, D.W. Griffth’s famed cinematographer. He mounted a camera on front of one train and shot six minutes of footage from 14th St./Union Square to the Grand Central station.

The subways were just seven months old at the time, and it’s amazing to see how everything looks the same. It’s easy to recognize the familiar curve on the local tracks as what is now the 6 departs 14th St. heading north. At around the 0:48 mark, note the now-closed 18th St. stop. The only difference is train car and the appearance of Grand Central. All in all, it’s a remarkable piece of subway history.

“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.