Manhattan's Lost Streetcars
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About this ebook
Stephen L. Meyers
In Lost Troll eys of Qu een s an d Long Isl an d, Stephen L. Meyers gives t hese lines--more than 20 of them--new life. With exceptional images and fascinating detail about things like the tiny storage battery cars and the trolleys that met all the trains, he traces the streetcar era from the late 1800s to the mid-1930s. The author of Manhattan's Lost Streetcars, he is a longtime member of the Electric Railroaders' Association in New York and other rail groups.
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Manhattan's Lost Streetcars - Stephen L. Meyers
gay."
INTRODUCTION
Lost
streetcars? Some streetcars were over 40 feet long, over 8 feet high, and more than 9 feet wide. So how could such an entity be considered lost?
Like all too many American items, things can fall through the cracks, even while in plain sight. Manhattan’s street railways are a major case in point. At one time, well over two dozen street railways plied the streets and avenues of Manhattan while hundreds lived only as paper
companies, yet today barely a handful are even recollected. The long-running Third Avenue Railway and the doughty Queensborough Bridge trolley might come to mind because they hung around
until the mid-1950s. But each of those previously mentioned multitudinous entities had its own history and personality. Yet the stories of such companies as the schizophrenic New York and Harlem, the symbiotic Eighth and Ninth Avenues Railway, and even the high-profile New York Railways are lost in the mists of America’s industrial history. They, and many other of Gotham’s street railways, were instrumental in making New York City’s center, Manhattan, the heart of America’s most successful urban complex. This volume will attempt to identify and follow the rise and fall of a business that once had well over 470 miles of tracks, carrying millions of passengers daily and then virtually disappearing without a trace.
The logical question would be, why did they get lost? The answer is quite complicated but generally falls into three major categories.
First, they had value and were consolidated into larger systems, such as the Metropolitan Street Railway, which for about a decade, either owned or leased every streetcar company in the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx and even ran some lines in suburban Westchester County. During that period, the individual companies lost their corporate identity and operated under the name of the consolidated operating company.
Second, the companies built lines in areas where there was insufficient traffic to keep them solvent, so they went broke, were abandoned, and completely disappeared. An excellent example was the 28th and 29th Streets Crosstown Railway, which never should have been built and, early on, sunk without a trace.
Third, the companies, usually the consolidated systems, died a natural economic death because they had outlived their usefulness. Sometimes because of a poor product: New York Railways, which in its death throes in the 1935–1936 period, were operating a fleet of streetcars designed in 1898, the newest of which was built in 1912, and the product was perceived as being old fashioned. And some never understood the strength of their competition, the subways and elevated rapid-transit lines. And finally, some expired because of political considerations, either real or manufactured. The plant of the Third Avenue Railway was reasonably modern, but the stated objective of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was to rid the city of streetcars. And, by using their franchises as leverage, he did.
This book will attempt to explain the rise and fall of the street railway industry in prose and picture. Some of the photographs are old and quite rare, but all reflect the specific ways in which the streetcars of Manhattan impacted on the city’s development. You might be surprised.
THE BEGINNINGS
The term MABSTOA probably means little to the average New Yorker, but it is an acronym for New York City’s major bus-operating entity, the Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority. They run the buses seen on the streets of Manhattan and the Bronx. And while you might recognize the route numbers on the buses, such as M-104 and M-15, you might be surprised to hear that the M-104 line was preceded by the 42nd Street, Manhattanville and St. Nicholas Avenue Railway (founded in 1878), and the M-15 is the successor to the Second Avenue Railroad (franchised in 1852). These are just two of the dozens of street railways that once covered Manhattan.
This volume will attempt to explain the origins and to track the economic lives of those surface railways that helped to form the traffic patterns of Manhattan’s streets and explore those twists and turns of fate that changed the complexion of street traffic. But first we will draw some guidelines for this book. Although officially New York City consists of five boroughs, it is usually presumed that when the term New York City
is used, it refers only to Manhattan. As a matter of fact, for years streetcars and buses coming over bridges from other boroughs into Manhattan carried New York
on their destination signs.
Manhattan is an island approximately 12½ miles long and about a mile and a half in width at its widest point. It was settled by the Dutch in the 1600s and lost to the British less than a quarter of a century later. The city was originally settled at its southernmost point, South Ferry and Bowling Green, and extended to the north, spreading out to its East River and North (Hudson) River boundaries as it grew. Around 1830, it became the major entre port for immigrants to the New World. The arrival of the immigrants quickly changed everything.
New York was suddenly overwhelmed by the waves of these new settlers. The southern triangle of Manhattan was inundated by the new populace and strained at the seams. Housing became overcrowded, and the twin curses of crime and disease followed. For the next 75 years, this situation festered, but a strange partial remedy came out of this chaos. It was one of those unexpected inventions that changed forever the format of American cities. The discovery was the railroad—not only the steam-powered railroads that opened up the country but the horse-drawn variety as well. It proved the concept that a city could spread outward and still be a single political, social, and economic entity.
On April