The Routes Not Taken Page 32
The Concourse Extension returned in a shorter form. The MTA proposed building it across Bronx Park to meet the White Plains Road line at the Burke Avenue station and provide more service to the northeastern Bronx by extending the Pelham line to Co-op City.
Due to the 1970s financial crisis, work stopped on the 2nd Avenue, southeastern Queens, and 63rd Street lines. The other “New Routes” lines, which hadn’t gone beyond the planning phase, faded away. When funding became available, the Queens lines were truncated. Service on both levels of the Archer Avenue line terminated at the Jamaica Center–Parsons / Archer Station; it began service on December 11, 1988. The 63rd Street line terminated at the 21st Street–Queensbridge Station in Long Island City, with service beginning on October 26, 1989.
The MTA examined the next steps for the 63rd Street line with the Queens Subway Option Study (QSOS). QSOS considered reviving the “super express” line to Forest Hills and two plans to use the LIRR’s Montauk line to reach Jamaica. One option would turn the Montauk line into a subway line, connecting with the Jamaica Avenue line in Richmond Hill, with the existing Jamaica Avenue line terminating in Cypress Hills. The other Montauk line option kept it as a LIRR line, with subway riders transferring to the railroad at a new station in Long Island City. This was in tune with what the CPC proposed in Queens–Long Island Rail Transit. The Montauk and the “super express” options elicited heavy opposition from the communities the lines would run through. A fourth option, connecting the 63rd Street with the Queens Boulevard line north of the Queens Plaza station, received little opposition.
After the QSOS public hearing, the MTA Board voted for the Queens Boulevard Line Connection on December 14, 1984. Service on that connection began on January 11, 2002.
These were incremental extensions. All the maintenance programs, all the purchases of new subway cars and buses, and all the station improvements that had been postponed for years now had to be addressed. The capital improvement programs pushed during the tenures of Chairmen Richard Ravitch and Robert Kiley that the MTA implemented beginning in the 1980s started to deal with those issues; in fact, the MTA is still playing catch-up. In addition, there are new needs to address. The MTA is faced with the need to make the subway, commuter rail, and surface system accessible to disabled riders, a need no one in government or any transit agency gave any thought to until the 1980s. One hundred subway stations will be retrofit with elevators by 2020.
The concepts that planners like Daniel L. Turner and William Barclay Parsons proposed for the expansion of the transit system have remained a possibility in the minds of transit planners. On March 3, 2008, then-MTA Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer Elliot G. Sander gave the State of the MTA report, a series of actions expanding the regional transit system very much in keeping with Turner’s Transit Construction Commission and Metropolitan Transit System plans and the CPC’s Queens–Long Island Rail Transit.
The State of the MTA called for the development of a regional rail network, including the Long Island Rail Road, the Metro-North Railroad, New Jersey Transit, and Amtrak. It also discussed studying the feasibility of reviving the dormant parts of the “New Routes” plan and making use of the parts of the Rockaway Beach line that were not incorporated into the subway system in 1956, and using the old New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad tracks to provide passenger service to Hunts Point, Parkchester, and Co-op City.
This was before the MTA sustained major financial blows that severely affected its operations. This plan, as have earlier plans for the extension of the subway system, collided headlong with economic realities. The additional tracks across Queens are still waiting to be built, as are the Burke Avenue line, the Utica Avenue line, the Nostrand Avenue line extension, and the Narrows Tunnel. Beyond the current projects that are underway, however, little can be done beyond planning for the day when times are better.
11
What Happened to the Rest of the System?
One of my colleagues once pondered the question of what happened to all the ambitious plans to expand the subway system. She explained it this way: “Bad transit karma.”
Terrible events always seemed to coincide with announcements of expansion plans—the Great Depression and other economic crises, both world wars, and terrorist attacks. Funds or resources that could have been used for capital programs were used to fill other needs or weren’t available.
But that only starts to tell the story. The reasons why the New York City subway system hasn’t grown beyond its current limits can be found in the policies and decisions of city and state administrations over the last century.
Maintaining the fare was overemphasized, and less priority was given to system maintenance and capital projects. The subway fare remained at five cents from 1904 to 1948. Opposing a fare increase played well with the electorate in campaign after campaign, but it ultimately helped to deny necessary funding to the transit system. Debts were not paid down; projects that would have maintained or expanded the system were put on hold. It had a huge impact on the Transit Authority’s ability to undertake new endeavors in the 1950s and continued on from there. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority and MTA New York City Transit are still playing catch-up on capital work as a result of decisions made to defer maintenance decades ago.
After the 1970s, this was called the “Beame Shuffle,” named for the budgetary maneuverings that transpired during Mayor Abraham D. Beame’s administration. This might have been unfair, since there was little difference between what was being done then and in most mayoral administrations from the time the first subway line was built. More priority was always given to maintaining the fare structure than to expanding or even maintaining the system.
John F. Hylan was one such mayor. Over the years, Hylan became known as the mayor who built the IND. He certainly wanted a municipally owned transit system and advocated for the creation of the agency that supervised its construction, the Board of Transportation. Yet the six and a half years of the Hylan administration prior to the creation of the BOT were marked by a slowdown of the subway system’s expansion.
Both before and during his tenure as mayor, Hylan threw up roadblocks to expansion of the system. In his history of the Dual Systems Contract, Tunneling to the Future, Peter Derrick pointed out that Hylan wanted to see the subway lines built in thickly populated areas, rather than in “developing farm lands.”1 Those were what William Jay Gaynor referred to as “cornfield lines” while mayor, serving what were then the outer reaches of Queens and Brooklyn, but Gaynor had the vision to understand that the city needed to expand and that the subways would facilitate that.
Mayor Hylan didn’t have that foresight. While his 1922 plan to expand the subway system was more ambitious than what was issued by the Transit Commission, it was still aimed at serving the more developed parts of the city. Dr. Derrick noted that neither Hylan nor his successor, James J. Walker, had an organized city planning structure in place;2 neither apparently wanted one. Hylan actually supported the elimination of the Standing Committee for the City Plan upon taking office. City development was carried out in a haphazard fashion. The City Planning Commission wasn’t created until the administration of Fiorello H. La Guardia.
The lack of structure surely affected how planning for the subway system’s expansion was conducted during the Hylan and Walker administrations. The first phase of the IND, prepared by the Board of Transportation during the Hylan administration, mostly consisted of lines built adjacent to IRT and BMT lines in areas that were already developed or developing. The one line built to serve a relatively undeveloped area, the Queens Boulevard line, triggered significant residential and commercial development in the communities that adjoined it. The areas that are least developed along Queens Boulevard are those not adjoining a subway line. Construction of what was meant to be the first phase of the Concourse line sparked significant development along the Grand Concourse, but that line closely paralleled the IRT’s Jerome Avenue line. The only Concour
se line station not near Jerome Avenue is 205th Street.
The IND’s second phase, drawn up during the Walker administration, was reactive to political pressure. The proposal for the Lafayette Avenue branch of the 2nd Avenue Trunk Line was a response to election-year demands made of Mayor Walker. It paralleled the Pelham line to such an extent that it was later found to be easier just to consider connecting the 2nd Avenue and Pelham lines. As we saw in the land that changed hands near Burke Avenue and Boston Road in the time leading up to and following the announcement of the plans for the Concourse line extension in 1928, it’s possible that insider information was being circulated about where the new subway lines would be built.
The opposition to new elevated lines led Walker to commit to building only underground lines. This promise may have helped him to defeat Fiorello La Guardia in 1929 (it may have affected La Guardia’s thinking about elevated lines when he was mayor), but it would have added huge amounts of money to the cost of building subways if the city had the resources to move ahead with the BOT’s plans.
It took the length of the Hylan administration and the first three years of James J. Walker’s mayoralty to extend the Flushing line thirty-five blocks from 103rd Street to Main Street. Knowledge of Hylan’s attitude toward rapid transit companies may have influenced the IRT and the Long Island Rail Road to back out of an agreement that would allow the connection of the subways with the LIRR’s Port Washington line, thereby extending subway service into northeastern Queens, a decision that has had huge consequences. It took even longer for the Nassau Street line to be extended from the Chambers Street station to its connection with the Montague Street Tunnel and for the 14th Street–Canarsie line to be completed.
The 14th Street line was delayed because the Public Service Commission had proposed to build it through the Ridgewood and Bushwick communities as an elevated line, which was opposed by the residents of those areas. Hylan supported this view. The type of construction had to be changed. The route was adjusted, but Hylan still resisted proceeding with construction. This was due to the hostility between the mayor and the BRT / BMT (and its supporters), and between Hylan and the Transit Commission.
This wasn’t a one-way grudge; the BRT / BMT and its allies gave back as good as they got. They took out advertising criticizing Hylan. BMT President Gerhard Dahl wrote a book, Transit Truths, that fired back at the mayor and talked about his company’s desire to build more subway lines. Mayor Hylan was also continuously slammed in many of the city’s newspapers. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle ran a series of “man on the street” interviews conducted in Bushwick, the mayor’s home neighborhood, in which in which the interviewees complained about the lack of progress in subway construction.
All of this was because Mayor Hylan did not want the privately operated subway companies to control more than what they already did. When the Board of Estimate finally acted to approve the contract to complete the 14th Street–Canarsie line on October 10, 1924, Hylan commented, “It’s the last thing that the B.M.T. will ever get.”3
Hylan’s goal was a single, municipally operated transit system. In his history of the subway system, 722 Miles, Clifton Hood wrote that Hylan believed that a system operated by the city could be profitable, producing enough revenue to expand the schools, parks, hospitals, and highways. Hood noted, though, that the mayor never seemed to be able to identify the funding sources that would be needed to purchase the existing lines from the IRT and BRT or the logistics of accomplishing the purchase.4 James J. Walker was equally steadfast in opposing a fare increase.
For Hylan, the fare was one more weapon to use against the IRT and BRT / BMT. He responded to an IRT request to raise the fare to seven cents in 1925 by saying, “They are all at the same old game of trying to increase the fare and exploit the people to the tune of sixty millions a year. If the Interborough cannot run their subways for a five-cent fare, let the Interborough turn them over to the city and we will run them for a five-cent fare. The people’s money was used to build the subways and they were turned over to the Interborough and B.M.T. They take all the profit and don’t even pay interest on the bonds and still they keep demanding an increased fare.”5
One mayor who should have grasped the need to take the steps to expand the system but didn’t was Fiorello H. La Guardia. His place in New York City’s history is deservedly secure. But if he had an Achilles’ heel, it was rapid transit. “La Guardia viewed the subways as old and thus uninteresting,” Hood noted. “He did not seem to put value on the role that the Els and subways played in stimulating New York’s tremendous physical expansion since the 1870s or their potential as a spearhead for further urban development.”6
La Guardia attended groundbreaking ceremonies for subway line segments and was in the train operator’s cab whenever a line opened. But he participated in the start of the demolition of an elevated line with seemingly equal, if not greater, relish. He supported the groups that wanted the immediate razing of the els rather than waiting for the construction of subway lines to replace them, without understanding the consequences of that demolition.
The service provided by the 2nd Avenue and 3rd Avenue elevated lines in Manhattan and the Bronx and the Myrtle Avenue, Lexington Avenue, and 5th Avenue elevated lines in Brooklyn, the connection of the 6th and 9th Avenue elevated lines with the Jerome Avenue line (which could have been kept in service with the construction of a ten-block connection with the Lenox Avenue line, providing service options that subway riders today don’t have), and the connection of the 2nd Avenue elevated with the Flushing and Astoria lines were never replaced, at great inconvenience to their riders. If only some of the money and effort that have been put into the maintenance of the surviving elevated lines in modern times had been put into some of the lines that were demolished, some of them could have survived. Those who ride the Lexington Avenue subway can attest to the impact of the loss of the 2nd and 3rd Avenue lines.
Hood made note of Mayor La Guardia’s fascination with new technology, represented by airplanes and airports. It was why the mayor was such a strong advocate for the construction of North Beach and Idlewild Airports and why North Beach Airport was renamed in his honor. By extension, it’s also easy to see why Robert Moses’s projects—highways, parks, swimming pools, and housing developments—fascinated him. These were new things, not extensions of old work.
No matter how closely linked John H. Delaney was to La Guardia, the Board of Transportation’s capital project lists were not as attractive to the mayor. He didn’t grasp the impact that new or extended subway lines would have had on parts of the city that didn’t have subway service. Like Hylan, La Guardia may well have been shocked to see how the construction of the Queens Boulevard line affected the communities it served.
Subways were also old technology to Robert Moses. Many people blame him for the subway system not expanding. He certainly was no friend of public transit, except in the case of the acquisition of the Rockaway Beach line, but his impact on the subway system was more indirect.
Moses had other priorities and goals, and the ability to achieve them. He wanted something to call his own. This is not to give Moses a pass; the money spent on his projects would have been very useful in constructing new lines or better maintain existing ones. But there was never a time when he was directly responsible for taking funding away from a transit project to fund one of his own projects. Highways, parks, airports, and housing developments represented new technology to Moses. He was able to advocate for them and win support in a way that Delaney and his successors at the BOT and TA could not.
Delaney submitted ambitious capital priority lists to the City Planning Commission each year with a caveat that he was aware funding was limited. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. In effect, the BOT submitted a wish list but did nothing to see that list become reality. Edward Vogel would complain about the ranking of the 10th Avenue line, but he was complaining about a list that was part of a letter to the CPC chairman calling for projects that wou
ld not achieve reality—in effect, a wish list. For all of Delaney’s knowledge of the political system, for all of the support that he had from Mayor La Guardia, he seemed unwilling to fight to expand the system. Moses knew how to make his programs a reality and he pursued those aims.
That was the difference as the BOT planned for the postwar years. For the most part, the Board’s chairmen and the early leaders of the New York City Transit Authority would not fight for their programs. William Reid was willing to speak up but he did not serve long enough to make a difference.
In writing about La Guardia’s era, Charles Garrett traced the beginning of the difficulty the IRT and BRT faced with operating profitably with the five-cent fare to the World War I years, when material and labor costs rose. Costs did not decrease after the war ended. The BRT went into bankruptcy in 1918, re-forming as the BMT five years later. The IRT held on for a longer time, but was bankrupt by 1932.
Those companies were locked into the fare structure. Under the terms of the Dual Contracts, they couldn’t raise fares without the city government’s consent for the length of their lease with the city, which would have expired in 1966, had the system unification not taken place in 1940. But that wouldn’t have happened anyway; it was too big an issue for any mayor, alderman, or City Council member.