The Routes Not Taken Page 2
Rice expanded on Coler’s proposal, proposing that ten new subway lines be built to serve Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn by 1916. Rice thought that Queens would be well served by trolley service through the Belmont Tunnel, then approaching completion (but not put into service for eight years as a subway tunnel, used by the Flushing line), and over the Blackwell Island’s Bridge, which would open in 1909 as the Queensboro Bridge.6 This led to the release of the PSC’s first major plan, the Tri-Borough Plan.
The heart of that plan was the Broadway–Lexington Avenue line, running from the Battery to Woodlawn and Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. The Tri-Borough Plan would begin to build toward subsequent plans, containing elements of the Lexington Avenue, Broadway, Jerome Avenue, Pelham, 4th Avenue, West End, and Brooklyn–Queens Crosstown lines.
The Tri-Borough Plan was not well received. The Flatbush Taxpayers Association protested the lack of a Nostrand Avenue line.7 The Queens Borough Transit Conference protested that its borough had been ignored. “We will resort to the courts if necessary if Mayor [William Jay] Gaynor and the Board of Estimate and the Public Service Commission insist on developing the outlying sections of Brooklyn and the Bronx at the expense of Queens,” said the Conference Chairman, James J. O’Brien.8
Figure 1-1. The routes of the Tri-Borough Plan. (Queens Borough Chamber of Commerce)
Mayor Gaynor had qualms. The PSC wanted the Tri-Borough Plan lines built as a system independent of the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit Company) and the BRT (Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company). Gaynor wanted to base the subway system’s expansion on extensions of existing lines. This difference in philosophy lasted for years and affected the Tri-Borough Plan. When the time came to open bids for constructing and operating its lines, the PSC found that no one submitted offers. Moreover, the IRT and BRT appeared to be dragging their heels on extending their lines.
It wasn’t until William Gibbs McAdoo sought to link the Tri-Borough routes with his Hudson and Manhattan Railroad system and further expand them9 that the IRT and BRT considered expansion. In January 1911, a committee from the Board of Estimate consisting of Manhattan Borough President George A. McAneny, Bronx Borough President Cyrus C. Miller, and Staten Island Borough President George Cromwell met with the PSC and began the process that led to the issuance of the Dual Systems Contracts in 1913.
The IRT and BRT maneuvered back and forth to gain authorization to operate the lines that the Committee and the PSC were considering, offering to operate all or many of the new lines. Both companies staged PR campaigns to gain favor with both the general public and elected officials.
When the PSC approved the Dual Systems Contracts in March 1913, plans to extend service to northeast Queens, Staten Island, and along Utica Avenue in Brooklyn were deferred—permanently, as events turned out. Construction of the Crosstown line, a north–south route between Brooklyn and Queens proposed by the BRT was postponed for more than a decade; when work began, it was part of a transit system operated by the Independent City-Owned Subway System (IND). Lower-level platforms and connecting tunnels that had been built at the IRT’s Nevins Street station in anticipation of that company being awarded the franchise for 4th Avenue line (along with the tracks running over the Manhattan Bridge and along Lafayette Avenue in Brooklyn) have sat unused by trains for more than a century.
Nonetheless, the lines built under the Dual Systems Contracts represented the single biggest extension of the subway system to that point. The IRT would stretch farther out into the Bronx and well into Queens and Brooklyn. The BRT (later to become the BMT) would rebuild the lines they were operating in Brooklyn, expand farther into that borough and Manhattan, and extend into Queens.
However, the PSC was still viewed as slow and cumbersome, as it had functions and responsibilities beyond the transit system. In 1919, the doubts that had been expressed when the PSC took control over the transit system were still being discussed. Questions were raised as to how their operations could be streamlined. One person who thought he had an answer was New York’s new governor, Alfred E. Smith. In his inaugural message Smith called for change:
There is widespread dissatisfaction, particularly in New York City, with the Public Service Commission.
In the First District, a radical change should be made in the structure of the commission itself if it is to accomplish results. At the time of its formation in [1907] there was expressed grave doubt as to whether or not it would work out well. There were many who believed that the function of constructing rapid transit railroads for the City of New York should be divorced from the function of regulating public utility corporations generally. In my opinion experience has demonstrated that they were right.
For years the trend in New York City, as well as in the state, has been towards single headed commissions to the end that the responsibility may be fixed upon one man. During the recent war the Federal Government taught us the lesson that results may be best obtained by a single executive clothed with proper power when any great work is to be carried out successfully.10
Smith signed the legislation creating the position of transit construction commissioner on May 3, 1919, offering the post to William Barclay Parsons, then serving with the army in France; Parsons declined. Smith turned to New York City’s commissioner of plants and structures, John Hanlon Delaney.
Delaney is not well remembered today, but he was the dominant figure in the New York City transit system for twenty-five years. He grew up in North Adams, Massachusetts, working in the printing trades, and came to New York in 1892. In less than a decade, Delaney became the president of the Printers’ Union and then moved into management. In 1913, Governor William Sulzer asked him to serve in the New York State government as an efficiency expert. Mayor John F. Hylan appointed Delaney commissioner of plants and structures in 1918. A year later, he became transit construction commissioner, supervising the construction of the subway system, with Smith promising a more hands-on approach to advancing transit capital programs.
Figure 1-2. John H. Delaney in 1928. (Photo courtesy of the Queens Borough Public Library, Long Island Division, Chamber of Commerce of the Borough of Queens Records)
John Delaney was a political insider who developed a strong knowledge of transit issues. More than two decades before the consolidation of the subway system, he saw the virtues of unification.11 In 1921, the New York Times wrote that Delaney “worked in accord with the Board of Estimate and with all of the influential Democrats in the city. Much of his time in office was occupied in studying the transit problem, and he was soon recognized as an expert on the subject. He gets along famously with the traction [subway] officials as well as with the city officials, and it was understood that his plan for solving the traction problem was the practical solution of the matter.”12
Delaney appointed Daniel Lawrence Turner, another major figure in the history of the subway system, to the position of chief engineer. He had worked for the Board of Rapid Transit Commissioners and the PSC as the original parts of the subway system were being built. He followed Delaney to the Board of Transportation and would later work with the New York State Transit Commission, the North Jersey Transit Commission, and the Suburban Transit Engineering Board. He would also play a major role in the development of the Regional Plan Association’s Plan for New York and Its Environs in 1927.
Turner had the task of developing plans to expand the subway system. He knew the need to start planning. “Since the Dual System contracts have been under construction, the attention of the Public Service Commission and of the Transit Construction Commissioner necessarily has been devoted to the completion of these contracts,” Turner wrote. “But it has been recognized that a new transit program was imperatively necessary. Therefore, in the Fall of 1919, which was as early as the commissioners permitted, I undertook to formulate a comprehensive transit plan.… The time has now arrived when we must look ahead again and provide plans for and begin the work of construction on the enlargement of the rapid transit system.”13
The p
lan Turner drew up, released in September 1920, would be ambitious at any time in the history of the transit system. He laid the foundation for the subsequent plans to expand the system, envisioning the development of the outer regions of all five boroughs. His belief was that transit should be built ahead of development, anticipating growth, rather than reacting to it.
Figure 1-3. Daniel L. Turner in 1929. (Brooklyn Daily Eagle)
Turner called for five new trunk lines and nine new crosstown lines in Manhattan, eight new lines or extensions in the Bronx, thirteen new lines or extensions in Queens, fifteen new lines or branches in Brooklyn, and five new lines to serve Staten Island over a twenty-five-year period. Over 830 miles of new routes would be built in the city, carrying five billion riders over the course of a year, more than double the number of route miles in today’s subway system. By comparison, the 1929 plan for the second phase of the IND, the most famous of the unrealized plans, would have added just over one hundred miles in new and extended lines, and lines “recaptured” from the IRT and BMT.
Delaney thought Turner’s plan was needed, because “in about another ten years the whole dual system will have been saturated with traffic.”14 Even in 1920 street congestion was a concern: “The growth of traffic per annum has been consistently greater than the per capita growth of the city per annum … the new transit plan takes into consideration the fact that vehicular and pedestrian traffic on the street surface is increasing to such an extent that it will soon be regarded as inadvisable to continue surface passenger traffic, either on the main arteries of travel or on the main cross streets, and that surface passenger transportation must be replaced by elevated or subway, with more cross-town ‘tie-lines’ operated on a platform device or by shuttle car service.”15
Delaney and Turner’s efforts were sidetracked after the 1920 elections, in which Nathan C. Miller defeated Governor Smith. Miller had a different idea for running the transit system. Citing the close links that Delaney and Lewis Nixon, Smith’s appointee as commissioner for utility regulatory issues, had with Tammany Hall, Miller wanted to establish a new state agency to oversee transit issues. He proposed the New York State Transit Commission.
Mayor Hylan led the opposition to the proposal, characterizing Miller’s plan as attacking home rule: “The creation and the power of the proposed new transit board is opposed to the best interests of the city and to sound public policy, in that it would mean the revising and the rewriting of franchises without giving the city any voice in the matter.”16
The State Senate passed legislation creating the Transit Commission on March 16, 1921; the State Assembly approved it on March 22. George A. McAneny, who had played a significant role in drawing up the Dual Systems Contracts as Manhattan borough president and president of the Board of Aldermen, was appointed to serve as chairman.
Mayor Hylan and the city government never fully accepted the Transit Commission’s authority, beginning three controversial years that stopped transit planning and construction cold. John P. O’Brien, the city’s corporation counsel (who would serve as mayor in 1932), wrote to Delaney on April 22, ordering him to stay in office and maintain his papers. The city sought an injunction in court. O’Brien contended that the Transit Commission had no legal standing to take over the city’s franchises.
Justice John W. McAvoy of the State Supreme Court denied O’Brien’s request, stating that there was no legal basis to prevent the Transit Commission from operating. (This was not the last time that McAvoy would be embroiled in the fight between the city government and the Transit Commission. In 1924 and 1925, he led an investigation of that issue that led to the downfall of the Hylan administration.) After managing the mayor’s reelection campaign in 1921, Delaney returned to the city government when Hylan appointed him docks commissioner that December. He also became Hylan’s unofficial transit adviser.
Turner became the Transit Commission’s consulting engineer and prepared several plans for the expansion of the rapid transit and commuter rail system. Not to be outdone, Hylan and the city government issued a plan in 1923 that built on the lines proposed in the Transit Construction Commission plan and began work on a controversial mixed passenger and rail freight tunnel connecting Brooklyn and Staten Island, which was opposed by the Transit Commission and later stopped by state legislative mandate in 1925.
Figure 1-4. The New York Times published this map of the Transit Construction Commission’s plan on October 6, 1920.
In 1922 Alfred E. Smith returned to the governor’s office and the Democrats won control of the State Senate. A day after Smith was sworn in, Mayor Hylan called for the establishment of a city commission to replace the state’s Transit Commission. John Delaney was rumored to be slated to chair the city commission; he was also reported as being the author of the bill calling for it.17 It was sponsored in the State Senate by the majority leader, James J. Walker, who later succeeded Hylan as mayor, and the Assembly’s minority leader, Charles D. Donahue.
The Republicans in the Assembly resisted, opposing municipal ownership of the subway and surface lines. Hylan was often quoted as saying that he would not build any new lines for the IRT or the BRT.18 This deadlocked consideration of the Walker–Donahue bill and prevented completion of the Flushing, Nassau Street, and 14th Street–Canarsie lines and the planning of new subway lines. Assembly Republicans drafted their own legislation, sponsored by George N. Jesse of Manhattan, giving the Board of Estimate authority over subway construction, but not regulatory control over the system.19
Debate over the two bills continued through 1923 and into 1924. Assembly Republicans offered a compromise bill on February 6, 1924. It offered the city the control Hylan wanted, with the condition that the city-owned lines eventually become self-sustaining.
At a Senate–Assembly conference attended by Governor Smith and John Delaney, ostensibly representing Mayor Hylan, an agreement was reached on legislation that greatly resembled the Assembly’s bill. Asked if Hylan would support this agreement, Delaney replied:
I do not know. I will have not been in conference with the Mayor since the compromise was reached. If the Mayor takes my advice, he will accept the bill.
His approval is not necessary. It becomes binding on the city the moment it is signed by the Governor. In passing upon this agreement I was acting not for the Mayor, but as a technical umpire at the request of Senator Walker and Assemblyman Bloch, Democratic leader of the Assembly.20
Hylan accepted the agreed-on legislation, which made the city responsible for completing the remainder of the Dual Systems Contracts lines, but not without objections. He complained that while it gave the city the right to build new subways it didn’t allow city voters to authorize raising $275 million above the city’s debt limit to do so (an issue that would repeatedly affect later mayors). Hylan was asked if he had authorized Delaney to accept the deal, and he replied, “I didn’t authorize anyone to accept anything. But no doubt he accepted he best possible deal they could get, which means practically nothing.”21
The Assembly passed the bill on April 11. Assembly Member Victor R. Kaufman took the occasion to fire back at Hylan: “It will be a great pleasure to bring Mayor Hylan out from his cover of darkness and make him do something for the people of New York City instead of continuing to make a political issue out of it. The people of New York are wise to everything the Mayor has done over the last five years.”22
After the State Senate approved the legislation Governor Smith signed it into law on May 2. Mayor Hylan announced that John Delaney would be chairman of the Board of Transportation on May 6. He served in that role for the next twenty-one years, overseeing the completion of the Dual Contracts, the construction of most of the IND, and the unification of the subway system.
Although Delaney had close ties to the Democratic Party’s power structure in Tammany Hall, he worked closely with Fiorello H. La Guardia. Delaney served in five consecutive mayoral administrations. He survived changes in four separate Democratic administrations co
ntrolled by Tammany Hall and the scandals that engulfed the New York City government in the early 1930s, and served through La Guardia’s three terms.
The Board of Transportation officially began operations on June 1. Hylan warned them to be cautious of the civic and business groups and newspapers that were increasingly critical of him. They began from scratch with planning new subway lines, ignoring the Transit Commission’s proposals, and released the initial plans for the first phase of the Independent Subway System on December 9, 1924.
The IND’s first phase was the start of a long series of plans released by the New York Board of Transportation (BOT) over twenty-eight years to expand the rapid transit system. The IND’s second-phase plan, issued in 1929, was the first to include the 2nd Avenue Trunk Line. Other lines reflected Daniel L. Turner’s view that rapid transit should expand ahead of population growth.
One route proposed in 1929 was the South 4th Street / South Queens Trunk Line. It was clearly intended to have the same impact in Brooklyn and Queens that the 2nd Avenue Trunk Line would have had in Manhattan and the Bronx. In fact, it may have been more ambitious than the 2nd Avenue plan.
The trunk line began in Manhattan as an extension of the 6th Avenue–Houston Street line, using its two middle tracks east of the 2nd Avenue station and a spur of the 8th Avenue line, running from the Canal Street station and across Worth Street and East Broadway. These routes formed the trunk line in Williamsburg at a station connected with the Brooklyn–Queens Crosstown line’s Broadway station. Running eastward across Brooklyn and Queens, three spur lines would branch off: the Utica Avenue–Crosstown line to Sheepshead Bay; the Fresh Pond Road / Winfield line, running north to connect with the Queens Boulevard line at the Roosevelt Avenue–Jackson Heights station; and the Rockaway line, creating new lines running to Far Rockaway and Riis Park. The BOT proposed a fourth branch in October 1930, connecting with the Crosstown line at the Bedford–Nostrand station.23