Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [835]
Installing district steam heating mains, Scientific American, November 19, 1881. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
HIGH ROLLERS
Conduits below were matched by conduits above, as the system of elevated railroads was spurred to fruition by the need to accommodate the city to the growth of corporate enterprise. Rapid transit made the skyscrapers possible by ferrying vast numbers of uptown workers to the downtown high-rise business district, and indeed the “els” accelerated tall-tower construction by driving property values sky high and making efficient use of space ever more desirable.
During the depression, the availability of cheap labor had galvanized promoters to win passage of a Rapid Transit Act (1875), which authorized handing out franchises to private entrepreneurs, and by the early 1880s locomotives were steaming up and down Manhattan. On Ninth Avenue, Charles Harvey’s old road, rebuilt and extended, reached 81st Street in mid-1879, spurring long-delayed development on the Upper West Side. By 1881 the track continued on to 110th Street, where, at the spine-tingling height of sixty-three feet, it swerved giddily eastward to Eighth Avenue, then loped on up to the Harlem River at 155th. At 53rd Street a crosstown feeder linked the Ninth Avenue line to the Metropolitan (formerly the Gilbert) Elevated Railway, whose trains chugged at twelve miles an hour up from Rector Place to Sixth Avenue and on to Central Park.
After December 1878 the New York Elevated Railroad Company’s Third Avenue El stretched from South Ferry up to 129th Street. The company obligingly ran cars all through the night—“Owl Trains” every 15 minutes—which conveyed homeward late workers in the newspaper offices or carousers out on the town, rolling northward across the gloomy and still largely untenanted Harlem flats while the lights of Astoria twinkled across the water in the distance. From 1880 it was paralleled by the Manhattan Railway Company’s Second Avenue road that ran north from Chatham Square.
The new transport lines were not restricted to Manhattan. At first, Third Avenue El passengers bound for the Bronx could only transfer—for a separate fare—to the socalled Huckleberry Line, a horsecar that meandered along the Annexed District’s Third Avenue so slowly that passengers could hop off, pick huckleberries in the fields, and reboard the same car. After 1886, however, the Suburban Rapid Transit Company (1880) ran an elevated service that crossed the Harlem River on an iron drawbridge and (by 1891) traveled up Bronx’s Third Avenue through Mott Haven, Melrose, and Morrisania to 177th, spurring a building boom along the corridor. Passengers bound for the Annexed District could also connect with the New York and Northern (which became the New York Central’s Putnam Division) running up through Highbridge, Morris Heights, and Kingsbridge. Or they could catch the New York and Harlem Railroad, whose ash-spewing locomotives carried them up the Bronx’s central corridor, past Mott Haven’s solid brick clock-towered station, through Melrose, Morrisania, Tremont, Fordham, Williamsbridge, and on past Woodlawn’s country mansion station with its landscaped flower beds, to White Plains and points north. Wealthy folk could simply hop the Hudson line to Riverdale.
Steam engines at the Franklin Square Station of the Second Avenue El. At the left are the offices of Harper & Brothers, the largest publishing house in the United States at the time. Harper’s Weekly, September 7, 1878. (©Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
Southbound travelers, once they reached the Brooklyn Bridge—which opened with great fanfare in 1883—could take a cable-drawn car,