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By Root 7346 0

Avenue—and did so with great good cheer, as most of the incorporators were associated with Tammany, and many of the aldermen received blocks of stock as thankyou presents. Workingmen’s spokesman George Henry Evans protested this cozy symbiosis, arguing that while the road was a good idea, it wasn’t necessary to “give a regiment of rich aristocrats the exclusive privilege of increasing their wealth by the profits of it. We have already too many laws to favor capitalists.” In 1831, however, the Court of Chancery upheld the legislature’s right to delegate the power of eminent domain (an attribute of sovereignty) to a railroad (a private corporation), even if that company would permit only its own cars to use its tracks.

Construction of the Harlem began in February 1832. The rails were bolted not to wooden ties but to foot-square granite blocks, which, as they rose several inches above street level, made crosstown traffic a teeth-jolting ordeal. In the meantime, John Stephenson, a local omnibus operator, built the John Mason, which closely resembled a traditional stage, driver perched above in front. In November 1832 horses pulled the John Mason along the Bowery from Prince Street (near old St. Patrick’s Cathedral) up to 14th Street, speeding its thirty passengers along smoothly at a seven to twelve miles per hour clip. Soon the New York and Harlem’s tracks reached Fourth Avenue and 27th Street, where the line built a depot complex that included company offices, a produce terminal, and stables for the horses.

In the fall of 1833 the tracks reached their first formidable obstacle, Murray Hill; driving a tunnel (still in use) through solid Manhattan schist from 32nd Street to 42nd Street would take until 1837 to complete. In the meantime, tracks were laid on wooden ties through mid-island rural terrain and the village of Yorkville, near 86th Street. Between 92nd and 94th streets, another tunnel was cut (in 1836) through the domelike rise of Mount Pleasant, where the line opened the Prospect Hall hotel, in hopes of enticing passengers to visit the fields and woodlands bordering the East River. Finally the engineers and laborers forded Harlem Creek and adjacent marshlands with a 658-foot timber viaduct, and from there reached the Harlem River terminus by 1837.

By 1838, therefore, it was possible to travel from City Hall to Harlem for twenty-five cents, but south of 27th Street the cars were pulled by horses. The NY&H had intended to use engines all the way, but a clamor against noise, smoke, sparks, and danger—one blew up in 1834—led to a city ordinance requiring the line to use horses in its lower regions. At 27th Street, just before diving under Murray Hill, the horses were unhitched and a little steam locomotive hooked up (to the chagrin of Peter Cooper, whose house at Fourth Avenue and 28th Street, once amid open country, now lay a block from the station and the railroad’s cattle pens). Downtown the Harlem’s cars—the first street vehicles to be operated on iron rails in the United States—became known as “horsecars,” and, along with the other lines that soon followed, they became a regular part of the downtown transport system.

In time the horsecar would challenge the omnibus for control of the city’s streets. It was more stable, easier to pull, more maneuverable, and lower to the ground, and it could negotiate cobblestoned, potholed thoroughfares far more smoothly. In the thirties, however, omnibuses still ruled the roads. There were eighty in service by 1833, 108 by 1837. Indeed the New York Gazette and General Advertiser suggested in 1834 that New York might well be termed “the City of Omnibuses,” as they generated much of downtown’s “noise and bustle.” Asa Greene, in his guidebook, A Glance at New York (1837), reported that it was “almost as much as your life is worth” to cross Broadway south of City Hall Park. “To perform the feat with any degree of safety,” Greene counseled, “you must button your coat tight about you, see that your shoes are secure at the heels, settle your hat firmly on your head, look up street and