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+--- Thread: Happy Birthday, New York City Subway! (/showthread.php?tid=172725)
Happy Birthday, New York City Subway! - $tevie - 10-27-2014
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/10/happy-birthday-new-york-city-subway/381958/
http://www.constructioncompany.com/historic-construction-projects/new-york-city-subway/
Re: Happy Birthday, New York City Subway! - $tevie - 10-27-2014
Film here: http://www.visualnews.com/2011/09/13/newly-opened-in-1905-a-trip-on-the-new-york-subway/
Re: Happy Birthday, New York City Subway! - SteveG - 10-27-2014
The sentiment in the article is nice, but NYC had massive mass transit with elevated railways for a couple of decades before the underground ones.
For instance: the Siegel Cooper department store at 18th street and Sixth avenue, was built in 1896 with large display windows on the first AND second floors, so that people riding the elevated could shop the windows
Here's a picture of the store today, note the second floor display windows.
The Sixth Avenue El was demolished in 1939 to be replaced by the current subway line.
The New York World · Tuesday, August 27th, 1878
East Side Rapid Transit; Trains clattering over the elevated iron road up the Bowery and Third Avenue. The east side branch of the New York Elevated Railroad fulfilled part of the promise of rapid transit yesterday by beginning to run trains from the South Ferry to the Grand Central Depot in Forty-second street. All matters had been thoroughly arranged before the first trip was made; the exact running time that the new engines could make was decided upon and a schedule had been carefully arranged. There were but few stations, however, at which passengers were picked up and dropped. Those were at South Ferry, Hanover square, Fulton street, Eighth street and Forty-second street. The first trip was made from South Ferry to Grand Central Depot at 5:30 A. M., and the distance traveled in twenty-five minutes.
A reporter of THE WORLD road on a train that left South Ferry about 1 P.M. This station is a common one for both branches, and many crowd in waiting started for the door when the agent called out "All passengers for the east side or Third avenue." There were two handsome cars on the train of maroon color, touched with gold and light paints, and glistening with varnish. The engine also was new and was provided with a regular locomotive cab. The cars within were finished entirely in wood, the seats being of perforated pattern now so common, and running lengthwise of the car. The roofs were slightly decorated, and there was an appearance of neatness without the attempt at elegance of the Metropolitan road.
While the reporter was examining the cars with a critical eye the train was already far on its way through the narrow down-town streets. Through Pearl street it ran, making a deafening clatter with the rattle of the road itself, the grinding of the wheels and the reverberations from the buildings. People in the street below, however, seemed to pay no attention to the engine and cars and the horses stood quietly in front of their trucks and carts, without drivers near, and munched their fodder. In Third avenue the horses of the surface cars and of wagons jogged along, people looked into shop windows and not to the sky, and the only difference was the train, having more room on each side, did not make so much noise. By this time, after one or two stops, the two cars were comfortably filled, several of the passengers being women. The reporter, for lack of anything else to do, attempted to read the store signs, as he was rapidly carried along. Only the big ones were readable. A woman knitting at a window was unpleasantly confounded with a man pressing hats, and a barber in the second story of a house, leisurely shaving a customer, became by a sort of dissolving view arrangement a fat German woman energetically spanking a child.
Cooper Institute suddenly loomed up -- a dark mass. There was not much of the journey left after this, nor much novelty. There was the same round of women sitting at windows, sewing and occasionally half lazily looking at the cars that shot past their houses; and of people quietly walking along the streets, until the train turned to Forty-second street, frightened a team of horses attached to a brewer's dray and then halted at the Grand Central Depot.
The construction of the east side branch of the New York Elevated road was begun about the 1st of last November, under contracts with the New Jersey Iron and Steel Company, the Passaic Rolling Mill Company. J. B. & J. N. Cornell and A. R. Whitney Brother, the railroad company furnishing the plans and specifications. There are two different kinds of structure on the new road. The longitudinal girders and columns are substantially the same on both branches, but on Front and Pearl streets, as far as Franklin square, the columns are straight up to the cross girders. The remainder are curved. On Third avenue, above Fifth street, the two tracks are connected by arched girders. Mr. Walter Katte, the chief engineer of the road, said yesterday that he thought the road would be finished to Sixty-first street about October 1st and to Harlem before the 1st of January. Each car will accommodate forty-eight persons.
Bonus: Inside Siegel Cooper 'World's Largest Store'.
Re: Happy Birthday, New York City Subway! - $tevie - 10-27-2014
Architecture was so spectacular back then!
Re: Happy Birthday, New York City Subway! - SteveG - 10-27-2014
You can see the outside of the store today. The original columns with the ornate tops are still there. The first floors of many of the stores in the Ladies Mile are intact and the wonderful architecture has been restored. The buildings are very large and the area has the original buildings for Macy's, Lord & Taylor, B. Altman, W. & J. Sloane, Arnold Constable, Best & Co., and Bergdorf Goodman and other retailing giants (who moved uptown to even bigger places).
Read it here=> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies%27_Mile_Historic_District The Ladies' Mile Historic District
Re: Happy Birthday, New York City Subway! - hal - 10-27-2014
From $tevie's link:
More than 100,000 people rode the train that night, though not without a fight. "Indescribable scenes of crowding and confusion never before paralleled in this city marked the throwing-open of the subway to the general public," wrote the New York Times. "They fought, kicked, and pummeled one other in their mad desire to reach the subway ticket office."
In other words
Re: Happy Birthday, New York City Subway! - Fritz - 10-28-2014
some days it smells 100 years old
Re: Happy Birthday, New York City Subway! - eustacetilley - 10-28-2014
Meanwhile, three decades earlier:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit
Yet a couple of decades before that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobble_Hill_Tunnel
¬Eustace
Re: Happy Birthday, New York City Subway! - mrbigstuff - 10-28-2014
good book for casual reading:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Race-Underground-Incredible-Americas/dp/0312591322
yeah, first referring to Boston. but it was very close!