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  The Routes Not Taken

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Raskin, Joseph B.

  The routes not taken : a trip through New York City’s unbuilt subway system / Joseph B. Raskin.

  pages cm

  Summary: “A history of unrealized plans to expand New York City’s rapid transit and commuter rail systems”—Provided by publisher.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8232-5369-2 (hardback)

  1. Subways—New York (State)—New York—Design and construction—History. 2. Subways—New York (State)—New York—History. I. Title.

  TF847.N5R37 2014

  388.4'2097471—dc23 2013018741

  Printed in the United States of America

  16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1

  First edition

  For Nicholas and Natalie, who never fail to fill me with pride,

  my parents, who have never owned a car,

  and Karli, who has had to put up with a lot while I was writing this book.

  Contents

  Preface

  1. Building (and Not Building) New York City’s Subway System

  2. Sound to Shore: The Unbuilt Brooklyn–Queens Crosstown Line

  3. Why the No. 7 Line Stops in Flushing

  4. The Battle of the Northeast Bronx, Part 1

  5. Buy Land Now, Ride the Subway Later

  6. Ashland Place and the Mysteries of 76th Street

  7. To the City Limits and Beyond

  8. The Battle of the Northeast Bronx, Part 2

  9. Building the Line That Almost Never Was

  10. Other Plans, Other Lines, Other Issues in the Postwar Years

  11. What Happened to the Rest of the System?

  Appendix A: The 1944 Service Plan

  Appendix B: The 1947 2nd Avenue Service Plan

  Appendix C: The Cast of Characters

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Preface

  “This is the D train to Curtiss Airport. Next stop, Gun Hill Road.”

  My desire to tell the story of the New York City’s unbuilt subway lines and the efforts to bring subway service to the areas not now served by rapid transit began by accident more than twenty years ago.

  At that time, I was working in the Queens borough president’s office, handling transit issues. The Archer Avenue line was opening, and would use old track ramps running from the Queens Boulevard line east of the Van Wyck Boulevard station.

  Those ramps had always been there and I had no clue as to why. There had been a few articles in the Long Island Press and other newspapers about a third platform that had been built above the Roosevelt Avenue–Jackson Heights station on the Queens Boulevard line for a line that was going to be built to the Rockaways, but I had never seen anything written about the ramps.

  This was intriguing. I read through the collection of New York Board of Transportation plans in the borough president’s map room. These materials concerned the subway lines and stations that were built in Queens and the other four boroughs of New York City.

  There was also an envelope containing a map. It looked like an old subway map, except that it included much more than the subway lines that were in operation at the time and the elevated lines that had been demolished over the years. The map also showed other lines, stretching across the entire width of Queens, as well as parts of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, that were never served by subways.

  It was a copy of the 1929 plan for the expansion of the subway system, known today as the “Second System.” This was even more intriguing. I made a copy of the map and showed it to my dad. One of the lines on the map was an extension of the Concourse line that crossed Bronx Park, and traveled along Burke Avenue and Boston Road into the Northeast Bronx. He grew up on Adee Avenue, a block to the south of Burke Avenue.

  He remembered the plans for the Burke Avenue line and told a story about seeing work being done there in advance of its construction. During the 1930s, when he was a teenager, he saw people working for the Board of Transportation doing preliminary engineering work along Burke Avenue (see Chapter 8). He followed them as they did their work, asking many questions (knowing him, he undoubtedly had a lot of serious questions, but also a lot of wise guy comments).

  We lived in the Rochdale Village housing development in southeastern Queens. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority had been planning to build an extension of the Queens Boulevard line past Rochdale as part of the 1969 “New Routes” program, a further extension of the Archer Avenue line. The Southeast Queens line, as that route had been designated, would have turned south from Archer Avenue, gone under the future home of my alma mater, York College, and along or adjacent to the Long Island Rail Road’s Far Rockaway branch, past Rochdale, to its terminal stop at Springfield Boulevard, by Springfield Gardens High School, my old school. There would have been four stops on the line; one of them would have been at Baisley Boulevard, two blocks from my building.

  The MTA built the Archer Avenue segment of the line and opened it on December 11, 1988. They also built the part of the line that ran under York College’s campus (which is now used to store trains). The tunnel ran toward South Road, a block below the campus and right across the street from the LIRR.

  That’s where the construction stopped. The Southeast Queens line went the way of most lines proposed in previous decades, a victim of the financial crisis that crippled the economy of New York City and State in the 1970s.

  Preliminary engineering work had been done for the entire length of the Southeast Queens line. I found this out on a visit to the Archives of the New York Transit Museum, where I discovered preconstruction photographs, including a number of images of a large field on the other side of the LIRR tracks from Rochdale Village.

  This was completely engrossing and led to my obsession with doing research on the plans to expand the New York City subway system. The most famous of these lines is the (until now) unbuilt 2nd Avenue subway, but that’s just one part of a much larger story. Other lines had equally long and colorful stories. I visited the various libraries in the New York metropolitan area to find microfilm editions of old newspapers to look for articles on the old plans and documents pertaining to those lines, and learned about a part of the history of the New York transit system that I had never known of before.

  The year 2004 marked the centennial of the opening of New York’s first subway line, the inaugural route of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. In the following century, that one line, running from City Hall to Harlem, expanded into one of the largest and most heavily traveled rapid transit systems in the world. Its development spurred the expansion of New York City’s population from concentrated areas adjacent to downtown to its farthest reaches. On a number of occasions it could have taken on different and more substantial forms.

  There were demands to expand the subway system even before the first
lines opened. This resulted in a series of proposals for construction of new lines or expansion of existing ones. The city and state governments, the various agencies and authorities that administered operation of the transit system, and civic, business, and transit-oriented organizations put these plans forth.

  Some plans never got beyond the planning, preliminary design, or engineering phases before being halted. Others proceeded further. There are tunnel and station segments throughout the New York City subway system built for lines that were never completed. A platform under the IRT’s Nevins Street station has remained unused for over a century. Other proposals underwent radical changes before they were actually built.

  No proposal for a line enjoyed an easy path from inception to implementation. In most cases, my question actually was how lines have ever been built, rather than why they weren’t. This was due to a range of political, economic, and logistical concerns that beset every project. How the government and governing agencies responded to these concerns led to the subway system taking on its present form.

  Economic conditions affected proposals to expand the system. One plan, the second phase of the IND system, was made public in 1929, six weeks before the stock market crashed (this plan contained the original proposal for the 2nd Avenue line, long the symbol of dashed dreams for an expanded subway system). Plans released in the late 1960s were starting to move forward when the city and state were hit by the financial crisis of the 1970s, forcing cessation of the work.

  Long-term plans for the system were deferred in the interest of meeting urgent short-term needs. Plans for the construction of the 1940s and 1950s versions of the 2nd Avenue line were sacrificed to carry out necessary work to upgrade existing subway lines and rolling stock, even though voters approved a transportation bond issue in 1951 that was specifically meant to finance construction of new lines. Several plans failed to proceed due to heavy political opposition over such wide-ranging issues as who would operate the new lines, or whether some would be built as elevated lines.

  An example is the Brooklyn–Queens Crosstown line, today’s G train. The line as we know it was proposed in 1924 and built in the 1930s. It had first been proposed as an elevated line in the 1870s but didn’t proceed, due to opposition from the business and residential communities along the route. Similar proposals met a similar fate through the early 1920s, although a very small section of the elevated line was built away from the Queensboro Plaza station in the Long Island City section of Queens. Even after the Crosstown line was proposed as a subway, it was a still source of controversy, but in a different way, as communities in Brooklyn fought to have the line built through their neighborhoods.

  Some plans disappeared as they evolved into other plans that were superior to what had been proposed, enjoyed greater political support, or triggered less opposition. In other cases, elected officials and civic and business groups had the vision to see that an expanding subway system would further the economic growth of their communities.

  Another unbuilt line that had particular resonance was the one planned along Utica Avenue in Brooklyn. In 1910, real estate interests in the Rugby section attempted to sell properties along Utica Avenue, using a never-built subway line as the key selling point for buying those properties. One real estate company that had made a significant investment in Rugby made a similar effort on Staten Island in anticipation of a subway tunnel from Brooklyn that was never built.

  That same hope for a subway line along Utica Avenue led other property owners to attempt to create a special assessment district to finance construction of a subway line. Similar consideration was given to the creation of an assessment district to finance construction of a subway line along Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn well to the south of its current terminal.

  In the 1960s and 1970s, properties along 2nd Avenue were developed around the locations of where subway stations were planned. Zoning variances were granted for developers who would build station entrance areas into their properties. Plans for other lines proposed at that time discussed how their service areas would develop as a result of the opening of the new lines.

  A number of years ago, I went into the New York Public Library at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street on a summer day and started to scan through the daily editions of the Bronx Home News. I was rewarded by finding a wealth of information on the efforts to build the Concourse line extension along Burke Avenue not available elsewhere. By using other libraries and resources, I was able to read newspapers like the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Long Island Daily Press and find how transit issues evolved on a daily basis. For most of its existence The Brooklyn Eagle called itself the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Similarly the New York Post has also been called the New York Evening Post and the New York Post and Home News. The different names are used where appropriate.

  As my research went on about the unbuilt lines, I learned about the passionate battles that were fought to get a subway line built, those between communities over where and how it would be built, and, ultimately, what form it would take. Familiar names would show up, albeit in a new context—Fiorello H. La Guardia, Robert Moses—but also names I had been completely unfamiliar with, such as James J. Lyons, George A. McAneny, John Purroy Mitchel, William E. Harmon, George W. Pople and Nathan Straus, Jr. I learned who Major Edward Deegan and Henry Bruckner were. Going through all these newspapers provided a much deeper understanding of everyday life in New York City decades ago.

  Through my research, I was able to learn about other places and other issues that broadened my understanding of why the unbuilt lines were so important to the areas they would have served. This book is not a comprehensive study of every proposal. There have been far too many of these plans to fully recount here. What I want to do is give you a picture of some of the major proposals, the people behind them, and the times in which these initiatives were issued.

  I hope all of this comes out in my telling of an earlier, less remembered time in the history of New York City.

  1

  Building (and Not Building) New York City’s Subway System

  Robert A. Van Wyck, the first mayor of the Greater City of New York, broke ground for the first subway line, near City Hall, on March 24, 1900. George B. McClellan, the third mayor of the five boroughs, officiated at its opening on October 27, 1904. It took four years, seven months, and three days to build the line from City Hall to West 145th Street in Harlem.

  Things rarely went that quickly again. The New York Times article about the groundbreaking spoke of building extensions to areas like Staten Island “before this town is very much older.”1 It wasn’t the first time, and definitely not the last, that a promise to expand the subway system went unfulfilled. More than a century later, Staten Island still awaits subway service.

  For as long as there have been plans for a subway system, people have wanted to build it farther—to the city’s limits and beyond. In some cases, their efforts have resulted in lines being built; other ambitions went unfulfilled. Some plans will soon achieve a degree of success after decades of failure.

  A series of agencies were responsible for planning the growth and development of the subway system in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

  The first was the Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners (RTC), created in 1894. As work on the first subway line was underway, the RTC considered the next steps to expand the system. On May 9, 1902, RTC President Alexander E. Orr wrote to Chief Engineer William Barclay Parsons, instructing him to begin “the preparation of a general and far-reaching system of rapid transit covering the whole City of New York in all its five boroughs.”2 Parsons developed proposals for expanding the system into Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens during 1903 and 1904. Parsons resigned on December 31, 1904; an overall plan was released on March 30, 1905. His successor, George S. Rice, prepared a second plan, which was released on May 12.

  The RTC was responsible only for planning the lines. The responsibility for operation rested with another agency, the State
Board of Railroad Commissioners. Governor Charles Evans Hughes3 wanted one agency to regulate public transit, railroads, and all other public utilities. Despite protests that local authority was being abrogated, Hughes signed a law sponsored by State Senator Alfred R. Page and Assembly Member Edwin A. Merritt on June 7, 1907, creating the New York State Public Service Commission (PSC). The legislation split the state into two PSC districts: the first consisted of New York City’s five boroughs, and the second the rest of the state. The RTC’s last act was approving construction of Brooklyn’s 4th Avenue line from downtown Brooklyn to Sunset Park on June 27.

  There were doubts about the PSC. “The public has heard so much of the Utilities Commission that it expects the impossible,” the New York Times quoted an unidentified expert on transit issues saying a few weeks after they came into existence. “I believe that the new board will come in for quite a good deal of criticism before it accomplishes anything, but this does not mean that the Commissioners are at fault. If in two years the commission has improved the rush hour service on the various lines to any marked extent, it will have accomplished a great deal. The best it can do in the next few months will be to improve the midday, Theatre hour, and early morning service.”4

  The 4th Avenue line was included in a proposal made to the RTC by Brooklyn Borough President Bird S. Coler in 1906. He called for a line to be built from Pelham Bay Park to Fort Hamilton and Coney Island, running along Westchester Avenue, Southern Boulevard, and 138th Street in the Bronx, 3rd Avenue and the Bowery in Manhattan, and Flatbush Avenue and 4th Avenue in Brooklyn after crossing the Manhattan Bridge. A branch would run to Coney Island via 40th Street, New Utrecht Avenue, 86th Street, and Stillwell Avenue.5 The New York Board of Transportation would use this concept four decades later in plans for the 2nd Avenue Trunk Line. In 1906 this was the start of what would eventually become the first major expansion of the subway system.