Rapid Transit Comes to the Bronx: How It Helped in the Development, Growth and Prosperity of the Borough

By Gregory J. Christiano

After the merger of New York City and lower Westchester in 1874, there was a heightened interest in extending rapid transit lines across the Harlem River into this new section of the city. The newly acquired land was a mixture of hamlets, towns, villages, and farms on the fringes of urban development. There was great potential for economic growth. But it wasnt until 1882 when the first company was formed to provide transit service to what was to become the Borough of the Bronx. Continuation of elevated lines from Manhattan provided a suitable and adequate method of traveling to and from the city. This stimulated construction plans and many residential and commercial buildings arose dramatically along the routes. Here was material for a thrilling drama! Suddenly, rapid transit transformed dozens of sleepy, rural, unrelated communities into vibrant, cohesive, growing neighborhoods, itching for investment and economic development. Here is a history replete with flashes of genius as well a sordid spirit of greed. There were battles, schemes, and high ambitions, but in the end, great things were achieved. Our present generation can pay tribute to that remote past which gave us the city we know today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543450415

Gregory J. Christiano

Gregory Christiano, freelance writer, researcher and retired cartographer, is a published author of short stories, poetry, articles and essays, as well a two plays. He has contributed to numerous anthologies, magazines, journals and newspapers. Awards include: VSA Arts of New Jersey, Prose-n-Poetry, the Bronx County Historical Society among others. His eight chapter novella, Invisible Universe, appeared in a popular Chinese SciFi magazine in 2007. The novella can be accessed online. Born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx, he currently resides with his wife of 38 years in New Jersey. They have a son and met the challenges of raising two developmentally disabled daughters who are currently in residential programs. Gregory is writing a series of historical works covering the Bronx. He is also researching the origins, development and spread of 19th Century baseball in the New York City area.

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Copyright © 2017 by Gregory J. Christiano.

ISBN:                  Softcover                              978-1-5434-5042-2

                             eBook                                   978-1-5434-5041-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Cover Photo: Third Avenue El looking north from 183rd Street.

Photo by Kenneth Palter, used by permission of William Palter.

Rev. date: 09/13/2017

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Contents

Introduction

SECTION I

Early Planning to Extend Service to the Bronx (1913)

Design and Structure

The Fourth Ave Improvement

The Suburban Rapid Transit and the New York, Fordham and Bronx

The Dual Contracts

Enlargement of Interborough Company’s Territory

Extent of the Dual System (1913)

Rapid Transit Facilities more than Tripled

Growth and Development of the Dual System

Steps Necessary to Lay Out and Build Rapid Transit Roads

Progress of the El and Rapid Transit in the Bronx

SECTION II

Background History

Congestion in the City

The First Rapid Transit Bill

Route of the Third Avenue El in the Bronx

Pioneer Plans for the Subway

The Huckleberry Road

All Roads Lead to the Bronx (Routes and Their Stations)

The Unbuilt Rapid Transit Routes

APPENDIX

Elevated Railroad Extensions

Chronology of the Elevateds

(Manhattan and the Bronx)

A Brief History of the Third Avenue El In The Bronx

A General Outline on the Development of the Bronx

Notes

To the Third Avenue El with all the adventure, magic and memories it brought to my childhood.

This is second in a series of non-fiction books about the Bronx.

Introduction

S INCE THE HORSE and buggy days, transportation in New York City has been a major municipal problem. From stage coaches to horse cars, steam trains, cable cars, storage battery cars, trolleys and high speed subway trains, transportation in the city has always been a priority for the City Fathers, then as it is now.

Rapid transit in New York was discussed during the Lincoln administration, when New York merchants organized the Metropolitan Street Railway Company in 1864. The company sought legislation for the construction of an underground railroad from the Battery to Central Park via Broadway, Herald Square and Sixth Avenue, but the street car interests blocked the subway idea for 50 years. Public clamor for relief became louder and more influential.

In 1866 a law was finally passed to authorize construction of an elevated railroad operated by a propelling cable from stationary engines. This original concept failed and was replaced in 1870 with small steam locomotives pulling a two to three car train. Talk of an underground system persisted as smoke and cinders from elevated locomotives started fires and scared horses who bolted and ran, as well as the residents along the routes closing their windows to keep out the soot and smoke. The deafening noise of the clack and clatter and screeching was another reason.

In 1869, Alfred Ely and his Beach Pneumatic Transit Company of New York began constructing, in secret, a subway line beneath Broadway in which air pressure in the tube pushed the cars. This line was completed in 1870 and ran 312 feet from Warren Street to Murray Street. Then Mayor A. Oakey Hall and other officials ventured on a trip of inspection but financial difficulties and the impracticable pneumatic method squelched further progress.

New York’s growing pains had to be relieved. In 1891 Mayor Hugh J. Grant appointed a Board of Rapid Transit Commissioners. In 1984 the law was revised to permit a referendum by the voters on the question of municipal construction and ownership of a rapid transit subway. (New York City Transit System, Information Guide to Subways and Elevated Lines Board of Transportation of the City of New York, 1948). The people favored the question and removed the opposition (namely, Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed) that had plagued a solution of the transit problem since the 1860s.

In 1900 bids for construction of the first subway were opened. John B. McDonald was awarded the contract for $35 million. August Belmont, a banker, backed McDonald. Ground was broken in front of City Hall on March 24, 1900, by Mayor Robert A. Van Wyck. The first section of the Interborough Rapid Transit line as it was called was completed in 1904 and ran from City Hall to Broadway and 145th Street via Lafayette Street, Fourth Avenue, 42nd Street and B’way. Mayor George B. McClellan presided over the formal opening of service on October 27th, 1904.

Expansion of the subway system soon followed…

In 1874 the Bronx was called the Annexed District. It had only been incorporated in the New York City limits in 1898. There were only two ways of connecting from Manhattan to the Bronx. One, through the Harlem Railroad’s smoky inferno under 4th Avenue (Park Ave.), and the other by a combination of the Third Avenue elevated road to the terminus at 129th street and the Harlem River. At the Harlem Bridge there was waiting a horse car on what became known as the ‘Huckleberry Road,’ (so called because it was so slow that passengers had time to get off the coach, walk to a nearby field and pick huckleberries and then get on board again). A trip from City Hall to the Northern Bronx by this route was an undertaking in the nature of an exploring expedition. It passed through the villages and towns of Mott Haven, Morrisania, Tremont, Williamsbridge and West Farms. Here was a combination of farms, precarious building lots, Avenues of mud roads, telegraph poles, road houses, blacksmith shops, lumber yards, coal yards, villas, swamps and all those other elements in the march of improvement that made, and to some extent still make, our suburbs the dreary, unkempt, untidy fringes of our urban development. (Valentine’s 1927 Manual page 54).

The tortures of a trip on a train from Manhattan Island to the Bronx involved hardships of an incredible nature. With the thermometer at 90̊ through the 4th Avenue tunnel with every window and ventilator tightly closed, will never be forgotten by those who lived to tell the tale. (Valentine’s 1927 Manual page 54).

The first suburban-style dwellings after the 1874 annexation to New York City continued to follow the railroads. Tremont, Fordham, Bedford Park, Williamsbridge and Woodlawn Heights along the New York Central’s Harlem Line; Park Versailles, Van Nest and Westchester along the New Haven Railroad; Highbridge and Morris and Fordham Heights along the New York Central’s Putnam Lines, and in the early 20th Century, Morris Park and Eastchester along the New York and Boston Railroad.

Subway ridership had declined steadily peaking at 2.1 billion in 1947. Elevated railways in Manhattan were seen as a thing of the past. The structures began to be demolished systematically all within a few years of each other: Sixth Avenue in 1938; Ninth Avenue in 1940 (connection to Jerome Avenue was left to accommodate a shuttle to the Polo Grounds at 155th Street. This was eventually razed after the N. Y. Giants moved west in 1957); Second Avenue 1942, Third Avenue 1955 (the section of elevated in the Bronx from 149th Street to Gun Hill Road remained until it was dismantled in 1973 and replaced with Bx55 bus route). But the elevated ironwork still rumbles over the streets in the Bronx… along Broadway to its terminus at 242nd Street and Van Cortlandt Park¹; above Jerome Avenue, past Yankee Stadium, to Woodlawn; White Plains Road Line stretching from 149th Street to East 241st Street near the Yonkers-Mount Vernon border; adjoining from East 180th Street to Dyre Avenue (not elevated but open along a depressed trench); and finally the Pelham Bay line along Westchester Avenue covering the East Bronx ending at Pelham Bay Park.

There was a desperate need for some sort of rapid transit in the city to alleviate this congestion. It was clearly and eloquently expressed in an article appearing in the New York Tribune Friday, February 2, 1866:

OUR CITY’S NEED.

Several hundred thousand persons – rich and poor, male and female, wise and simple – earn their living by personal effort in that narrow corner of this island which lies south of Grand-st (sic). We cannot live here: for most of area is needed for stores, banks, offices, factories, workshops, &c; and it is inconvenient to live across the arms of the sea on either hand. We want to live up town, or in the adjacent county of Westchester; and we want facilities for getting quickly, cheaply, comfortably, from our homes to our work and back again.

Street Railroads and Omnibuses have their uses; but we have reached the end of them. They are wedged for hours at night and morning with men, women, boys and girls sitting, standing and hanging on; it would not be decent to carry live hogs thus, and hardly dead ones; they are unchangeably too slow; and their capacity is exhausted. To put on more cars or construct more roads is only to monopolize our streets and virtually drive all carriages out of them

Gentlemen of the Legislature! give us both the Underground and Aerial Railway. Don’t let their promoters kill each other’s project; for we badly need them both, and with them we may come and go ten to twenty miles per day in forty to eighty minutes, instead of thrice the time as present. Don’t let the lobby make the bills, but make them yourselves, and see that they are framed in the general interest of the public and not of the stockholders exclusively. Let the City have a slice of the profits, if profits there shall be; and let those who ride feel that their comfort, safety and advantage has been considered in the promise. Such roads made ten years ago, would have saved our State Millions of taxable property which has been absolutely forced over into Jersey in search of room to live. Our rents, already fearful are going up 20 to 30 per cent! And there is no sense in scolding the landlords! They take what they can get, like everybody else. Give us a chance to breathe!

______________________________________________

SECTION I

Early Planning to Extend Service to the Bronx (1913)

B ETWEEN 1886 AND 1905 the Suburban Rapid Transit’s Third Avenue Line was the only one servicing the Bronx. The company built the first leg of its original system through the vacant North New York subdivision of Mott Haven reaching Tremont in 1891. The el stimulated construction and many building plans rose dramatically in Mott Haven. Nicholas and John Cotter, the largest builders of apartment houses in the period, built groups of flats throughout North New York. These closely built city house were constructed all along the route.

Suburban became part of the Manhattan Railway Company, the owner of Manhattan Els. The onset of the 1893 depression influenced transportation mogul Jay Gould to extend services only to the Third Avenue corridor where immediate profit could be made. The 1893 depression slowed building. Along other parts of the transit route, there was a slow insertion of frame and brick housing (brick apartments) which gave an urban cast to the Third Avenue corridor years before the subway appeared in 1905.

After initially increasing land values, elevated transit lines exerted a depressing effect upon properties along the route. By 1929, lower Third Avenue looked like portions of Third and Sixth avenues in Manhattan where the el structures kept land values down. Values in the more northerly reaches of the elevated line were still rising, however.

The Dual Contract of 1913 eventually gave the Bronx two new transit routes – the Jerome Avenue and Pelham Bay Lines (currently the #4 and #6 trains) and extensions of its older ones, the White Plains and Gun Hill Roads lines additions to the Westchester Avenue/Southern Boulevard subway and Third Avenue El. By 1930 the city government constructed a fully underground subway in the Bronx – the city-owned Independent D line under the Grand Concourse. Both the el and later the subway increased land values. And building activity wherever they ran and left dense urban areas in their wake.

Mass transit had made a difference in the Bronx. All the lines plowed through both settled districts and vacant blocks, thus causing infilling of previously built sections and creating whole new urban neighborhoods in the underdeveloped areas beside their tracks. The city built water mains, 20 schools and 8 bridges between 1879 and 1908. The Third Avenue, McCombs Dam and Broadway bridges replaced older crossings; the Willis Avenue, Madison Avenue, 149th Street, Washington and University Heights bridges created new links to Manhattan. The Harlem Slip Canal was completed in 1895.

In Upper Manhattan, the El makes its first appearance as a subway rider travels north on the Numbers 1 and 9 lines for a 13-block stretch, from 122nd street to 135th Streets along Broadway. Just as quickly the train drops underground again, and then emerges into the light at Dyckman Street in Inwood. It then glides by Substation No. 17, a century-old red-brick electrical depot, its ornamental reliefs and wrought-iron roof brackets making it a neighborhood landmark. The Dyckman Street station and three others to the north, at 207th, 215th and 225th Streets, along with the 125th Street station, remain the last holdouts of the elevated subway in Manhattan, a paean to the four lines that were destroyed.

At Dyckman Street, the street-level station sits on a concrete island. Passengers and pigeons alike have no trouble entering. The image of an owl appears. The owl is a simple cut-out, an outline drawn on a sheet of shiny metallic plastic and suspended by a thread from the station ceiling with black netting. It works reasonably well as a scarecrow as part of a pigeon-deterrence program.

Elevated stations are easier to clean because they are exposed to nature and the rains and wet weather is welcomed by the maintenance people. And the cleaners enjoy the open air and sunshine when it returns.

Keeping trains moving in poor weather is surprisingly easy. Snow generally falls through the gaps in the tracks. Only on some stretches does