Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [836]
Different lines served different clientele and had correspondingly different styles. Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue El, which transported a predominantly middle-class ridership, was built for delight as well as convenience. Its dainty green stations, topped by graceful iron pavilion roofs, were designed by landscape artist J. F. Cropsey to simulate tasteful cottages and contained heated, gas-lit waiting rooms for gentlemen and for ladies. The trains that pulled up were equally ornamental, their Pullman palace-style cars manned by conductors in braided blue flannel uniforms.
The Third Avenue line, a working-class conveyance, was not quite as spiffy, though it had its devotees. The Marches—a fictional middle-class couple in William Dean Howells’s Hazard of New Fortunes (1890)—were thrilled by the theatricality of nighttime rides on it, by the “fleeting intimacy you formed with people in second-and thirdfloor interiors.” You might see, as you passed their windows: “a family party of workfolk at a late tea, some of the men in their shirt-sleeves; a woman sewing by a lamp; a mother laying her child in its cradle; a man with his head fallen on his hands upon a table; a girl and her lover leaning over the windowsill together.” At 42nd Street, the Marches noted, you could look south along the long stretch of “track that found and lost itself a thousand times in the flare and tremor of the innumerable lights.” The couple gazed in fascination at “the coming and going of the trains marking the stations with vivider or fainter plumes of flame-shot steam.”
Not everyone was quite so taken with the trains. Many of those in the windows the Marches swept by complained furiously about ear-splitting noise, soot and cinders, and those “plumes of flame-shot steam”—which seemed far less picturesque at close quarters. Stephen Crane, stirred to more mordant imagery than Howells’s, wrote of the darkened Bowery where “elevated trains with a shrill grinding of the wheels stopped at the station, which upon its leglike pillars seemed to resemble some monstrous kind of crab squatting over the street.” The truly powerful denizens of Fifth, Park, and Madison had already banned elevateds from their avenues. Finally, in 1883, some of the more affluent owners of properties abutting existing lines sued the elevateds and won, the Court of Appeals ruling they had been illegally deprived of “light, air and access.” The prospect of a series of heavy damage payments effectively halted all further elevated construction in built-up sections of Manhattan.
Apart from this victory, disgruntled citizens made little headway in attaining redress of grievances because of the elevateds’ structure of ownership. At first, the spurt of el building in New York had paralleled the outburst of railroad construction on the national level and involved many of the same players. Rival financiers, aware of the elevateds’ enormous potential, had taken control of them and engaged in the same free-for-alls that characterized rail warfare at the continental level. In New York City, however, the combatants were able to come together and obtain the monopoly control—and bonanza profits—that eluded them in the national arena.
The early contenders had leased their shares to a holding company, the Manhattan Elevated Railway Company. Jay Gould and Russell Sage swallowed it up in 1881 by