Wednesday, March 23, 2022 – GETTING USED TO THE ELEVATED TRAIN ROLLING PAST YOUR WINDOW

By admin

WEDNESDAY,  MARCH 23 2022


630th Issue

THE ELEVATED TRAIN

OUT YOUR WINDOW

FROM EPHEMERAL NEW YORK

Henry Ives Cobb Jr. (March 24, 1883 – August 1974) was an American artist and architect who lived and worked in New York, New York. He is known primarily for his paintings of scenes in and around Manhattan, especially Central Park. He was a member of the American Institute of Architects and the Art Students League of New York, as well as the Society of Independent Artists and the Royal Academy.

38 Greenwich Street in 1914

That description gives us an idea of the feel of Gotham in the late 19th century, when steam-powered (later electric) elevated trains carried by trestles and steel tracks ran overhead on Ninth, Sixth, Third, and Second Avenues.

The upside to the elevated was obvious: For a nickel (or a dime during off hours), people could travel up and down Manhattan much more quickly than by horse-drawn streetcar of carriage. New tenements, row houses, and entertainment venues popped up uptown, slowly emptying the lower city and giving people more breathing room.

Bronx, undated

The downside? Dirt and din. The trains and tracks cast shadows along busy avenues, raining down dust and debris on pedestrians. (No wonder Gilded Age residents who could afford to changed their clothes multiple times a day!) And then there was the deafening noise every time a train chugged above your ears.

Now as unpleasant as the elevated trains could be in general, imagine having the tracks at eye level to your living quarters. Life with a train roaring by at all hours of the night was reality for thousands of New Yorkers, particularly downtown on slender streets designed for horsecars, not trestles

Allen Street north of Canal Street, 1931

“The effect of the elevated—the ‘L’ as New Yorkers generally call it—is to my mind anything but beautiful,” wrote an English traveler named Walter G. Marshall, who visited New York City 1878 and 1879.

“As you sit in a car on the ‘L’ and are being whirled along, you can put your head out of the window and salute a friend who is walking on the street pavement below. In some places, where the streets are narrow, the railway is built right over the ‘sidewalks’…close up against the walls of the houses.”

Maybe these unfortunate New Yorkers lived in a tenement before the trains came along, and they couldn’t find alternative housing after the elevated was built beside their building. Or perhaps in the crowded city teeming with newcomers at the time, a flat next to a train was the best they could find with what little they had to spend.

Wrote Marshall: “The 19 hours and more of incessant rumbling day and night from the passing trains; the blocking out of a sufficiency of light from the rooms of houses, close up to which the lines are built; the full, close view passengers on the cars can have into rooms on the second and third floors; the frequent squirting of oil from the engines, sometimes even finding its way into the private rooms of a dwelling-house, when the windows are left open—all these are objections that have been reasonably urged by unfortunate occupants of houses who comfort has been so unjustly molested….”

Allen Street, 1916

Eye-level elevated trains continued into the 20th century, with above ground subway tracks as well as older els making it more likely that New Yorkers could find themselves with a train rattling and shaking their windows.

And it’s still an issue today, of course, even with those original el lines long dismantled. Tenements and apartment buildings near bridge approaches, tunnel entrances, and above ground subway tracks are still at the mercy of mass transit in a city still of narrow streets, single pane windows, and rickety real estate.

Convergence of the Sixth Avenue and Ninth Avenue Els, 1938

WEDNESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

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TUESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

HUDSON TERMINAL

Hudson Terminal was a rapid transit station and office-tower complex in the Radio Row neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Opened during 1908 and 1909, it was composed of a terminal station for the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad (H&M), as well as two 22-story office skyscrapers and three basement stories. The complex occupied much of a two-block site bounded by Greenwich, Cortlandt, Church, and Fulton Streets, which later became the World Trade Center site.

The railroad terminal contained five tracks and six platforms serving H&M trains to and from New Jersey; these trains traveled via the Downtown Hudson Tubes, under the Hudson River, to the west. The two 22-story office skyscrapers above the terminal, the Fulton Building to the north and the Cortlandt Building to the south, were designed by architect James Hollis Wells of the firm Clinton and Russell in the Romanesque Revival style. The basements contained facilities such as a shopping concourse, an electrical substation, and baggage areas. The complex could accommodate 687,000 people per day, more than Pennsylvania Station in Midtown Manhattan.

The buildings opened first, being the world’s largest office buildings upon their completion, and the terminal station opened afterward. The H&M was successful until the mid-20th century, when it went bankrupt. The railroad and Hudson Terminal were acquired in 1962 by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which rebranded the railroad as Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH). The Port Authority agreed to demolish Hudson Terminal to make way for the World Trade Center, and the railroad station closed in 1971, being replaced by PATH’s World Trade Center station. While the buildings were demolished in 1972, the last remnants of the station were removed in the 2000s as part of the development of the new World Trade Center following the September 11 attacks in 2001.

JOHN BACON, CLARA BELLA, LAURA HUSSEY, GLORIA HERMAN ALL GOT IT RIGHT

Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff

All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island
Historical Society unless otherwise indicated

[Top photo: MCNY x2010.11.2127; second photo: New-York Historical Society; third photo: MCNYx2010.11.4; fourth photo: CUNY Graduate Center Collection; fifth photo: MCNY MNY38078; sixth photo: MCNY MN11786]

Tags:Elevated trains Gilded Age NYC, Elevated trains New York City, Houses Near Elevated Train Tracks NYC, Mass Transit NYC in the 19th Century, NYC Mass Transit, Old Photo El Trains NYC, Tenements Near Elevated Tracks NYC
Posted in Bronx and City Island, Gramercy/Murray Hill, Lower East Side, Lower Manhattan, Transit 

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