The Routes Not Taken Page 6
The Board of Estimate approved the plan on July 28. “We are all delighted. It is the best thing that ever happened to Brooklyn,” Edward Ward McMahon of the Committee of 100, a Brooklyn civic group, commented. “The new plan meets with the satisfaction of every member of the committee and of the entire borough. All we want is to get the work started immediately, and every man who has been working on this will press this now.”62
After close to half a century of proposals and controversy, work would begin on the Crosstown line. The long sought north–south line would be built, though differently than first envisioned.
The BOT tried to retool the Crosstown line after work started. On October 12, 1930, it announced a plan to connect the route with the South 4th Street / South Queens Trunk Line planned to extend east from Manhattan as part of the second phase of the IND. The connection would run from the Bedford–Nostrand Avenue station and swing north to merge with the trunk line in Williamsburg. It would have created a second route to southern Brooklyn and the Queens Boulevard line. This route went as far as the other second-phase lines, but the Bedford–Nostrand station was built to accommodate a connection with an eastbound line, with an extra track, two platforms, and track ramps leading away from the Crosstown line east of the station.
When service began on the full length of the Crosstown line in 1937 the BOT saw the need to extend it. It was the Queens Boulevard line’s only local and there was more demand for service between Queens and Manhattan than between Queens and Brooklyn. The BOT knew the communities in central Queens would develop and that demand for service to Manhattan would only increase.
Figure 2-10. The Bedford–Nostrand station on the Crosstown line was built to allow for linkage with an unbuilt line. (Photo by the author)
The BOT proposed a new connection between the Queens Boulevard line and the BMT’s 60th Street Tunnel in 1940.63 The Queens Boulevard–60th Street connection became one of the most important links in the subway system after it opened on December 1, 1955, so much so that the Crosstown line was cut back to the Court Square station in 2001 on weekdays and eliminated in 2010. This made room for more service from Manhattan via the connection with the 63rd Street Tunnel, which opened in 2001.
Figure 2-11. The Brooklyn Eagle showed the proposed Crosstown / South 4th Street Trunk Line connection on October 12, 1930.
The BOT also wanted to extend the Crosstown and Smith Street lines southward, proposing extensions to Staten Island and Bay Ridge between 1938 and 1945. Neither connection had the financing to proceed, and it was not until 1954 that a southern connection was established when the original plan for the Smith Street line, the connection with the BMT’s Culver line, began service.
The “Sound to Shore” concept was revived during the 1930s and 1940s. The BOT proposed building a route from the Franklin Avenue line north to connect with the Crosstown line by the Bedford–Nostrand station. Another proposal called for building a line along 21st Street in Long Island City, meeting an extension of the BMT’s Broadway line at 34th Avenue in Astoria, and then running across Queens to Horace Harding Boulevard (now the Long Island Expressway) and Marathon Parkway in Douglaston. Neither proposal had the funding to proceed.
One northern extension was actually put into service and operated for a short time. The BOT ran a spur line from the Queens Boulevard line to serve the 1939–40 World’s Fair. Crosstown line trains ran from the Jamaica Yards and north to a terminal near the intersection of Horace Harding and College Point Boulevards. This was a temporary routing. The BOT asked the Board of Estimate to allow the removal of the tracks and terminal after the Fair closed.
Queens Borough President George U. Harvey objected, wanting to make the line permanent and extend it to Flushing. The borough president saw an extended line as a way to further Flushing’s growth as a residential community.64
The BOT opposed making the World’s Fair spur a permanent route. At a meeting of the Board of Estimate’s World’s Fair Committee at the Summer City Hall in College Point in 1937, Delaney stated, “We recommended a temporary spur from our yards between Kew Gardens and Forest Hills [New York City Transit’s Jamaica Yards] because a permanent line would be useless after two years.”65
Delaney was adamant that the spur wasn’t a feasible route after the World’s Fair closed in 1940:
The only thing planned for there is a stadium, which would seat a maximum of 8,000 persons, where an occasional track meet or concert could be held during the summer months. That would mean maintaining a permanent line all year for traffic, which would be slight. As it is, the Queens Boulevard line’s Woodhaven Boulevard station is only a short distance from the main portal of the World’s Fair.66 If we didn’t have a lead-in from Queens Boulevard to our yards, construction of even a temporary spur would be out of the question.67
Delaney stated that the New York State Rapid Transit Law required that a permanent subway be built as an underground line rather than as a grade-level line. This would drastically increase construction costs.
Queens elected officials tried to keep the line operating. City Council Member Hugh Quinn discussed the issue with Delaney at a Council Finance Committee hearing. Quinn wanted to extend it to serve College Point and Whitestone. “To me it seems a waste of money to demolish this line if there is any possibility of converting it and building extensions to carry it through these two committees,” Quinn said.
Delaney retorted, “The spur to the World’s Fair will be utterly useless when the Fair is over next year.” He continued:
It is not suitably located for extension to Whitestone and College Point. It was built very superficially and wouldn’t stand up. It is only a temporary railroad constructed at the lowest possible cost …
… Rapid transit ought to be built out to Bayside and then through to College Point and Whitestone. That’s been our plan for seven or eight years and I am all for it if anyone can get us the money to do it with …
… It would be utterly useless and a waste of money to convert the World [sic] Fair into a rapid transit facility for Whitestone and College Point.68
The BOT, supported by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, didn’t change their opinion. Significant upgrading was needed; Moses wanted the land to build Flushing Meadows Corona Park and the Van Wyck Expressway’s northern extension. The Board didn’t share Harvey’s enthusiasm for the area’s potential. He stated that the construction work needed to make the line permanent would cost $6 million ($78.2 million in 2011 dollars, according to the inflation calculator on MeasuringWorth.com), which they felt was “an improvident waste of public funds.”69
Figure 2-12. Looking north at the tracks of the Franklin Avenue line from Eastern Parkway in 2011. (Photo by the author)
Harvey was correct. The neighborhoods east of the World’s Fair grew. Queens College, near the terminal, opened in 1937 and would have benefited from an extended line. A second station could have been built between the World’s Fair Terminal and the next stop south, Forest Hills–71st Avenue. This would have provided access to the neighborhoods that developed there. Despite the support both of community groups across northern and central Queens and of Queens College President Paul Klapper, the view of the BOT and Commissioner Moses won out, and the Board of Estimate authorized the removal of the line on December 19, 1940.
The plans drawn up in the 1930s and 1940s didn’t deal with the Crosstown line’s biggest problem—the need for a direct connection to Manhattan. The demand for Manhattan-bound trains has exceeded the demand for north–south service between Brooklyn and Queens. The way the line was built after adoption of the compromise plan made it impossible for Manhattan-bound track connections to be built in either borough.
Construction of the Crosstown line was a victory for the community, business groups, and elected officials who had fought for it over the course of a half century. However, what they wanted wasn’t what they necessarily needed.
3
Why the No. 7 Line Stops in Flushing
; The neighborhoods in Queens served by the Flushing line show the impact that rapid transit can have on residential, commercial, and industrial development. Bracketed by Hunters Point and Flushing, two of the oldest neighborhoods in Queens, the Flushing line, known to most riders as the No. 7 line,1 went through largely undeveloped land when its first segment was built to 103rd Street and Roosevelt Avenue in Corona in 1917. When the Public Service Commission planned the route in 1911, they referred to the street that it would run along as “the proposed Roosevelt Avenue.”2
With the Dual Systems Contracts, the PSC followed the thinking of planners like Daniel Lawrence Turner by extending the subways into the outer reaches of the boroughs instead of greater development in the interior sections of the city. William Barclay Parsons and George S. Rice hadn’t seen the need for much service to Queens in the Rapid Transit Commissioners’ plans in 1905. In 1900, 152,999 people lived in Queens, less than 25 percent of Brooklyn’s population and less than 10 percent of Manhattan’s population. They proposed construction of the Brooklyn–Queens Crosstown line into Queens only on the northern side of the borough and the extension of the Jamaica Avenue and Fulton Street lines on the south side.
The PSC’s Tri-Borough Plan neglected to call for service to Queens, which didn’t sit well with borough officials and business and community groups. They shared Turner’s view that rapid transit should extend into less-developed areas of the city to stimulate their growth.
As the line extended along Queens Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue, the adjoining neighborhoods—Long Island City, Sunnyside, Winfield, Woodside, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Corona, and East Elmhurst—experienced massive growth. What were empty expanses of land—called “cornfields” by Mayor William Jay Gaynor—became major residential communities. When the line reached Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing in 1928, a tree-lined village dating back to the Dutch settlers in the seventeenth century became a major commercial district, the hub of the northeast Queens transit network. The 7 line’s Main Street station is the biggest single interchange between local bus and subway lines in North America. However, Main Street was meant to be another stop on a line running well to the east of Flushing—a very important stop, to be sure—but not the terminal point.
Queens representatives felt they were slighted in the planning process. They wanted subways, seeing the impact that the new subway and elevated lines were having elsewhere. A group of civic leaders from the north shore of Queens met with PSC Chairman Edward M. Bassett on October 2, 1907. They were advocating for the construction of a subway line that would run from the already-constructed Steinway Tunnels3 to Douglaston, in the northeastern part of the borough. They felt that the fare charged by the Long Island Rail Road to travel between Whitestone and the LIRR’s ferries in Hunters Point4—thirty-three cents5—was too high.
One civic leader, Samuel F. Sandborn of Flushing, said the Queens population would increase by tenfold if subways were built. Clarence A. Drew talked about how Queens real estate values would benefit from subway construction. He felt that it would be cheaper to build in Queens, taking advantage of open land, than it would in Manhattan or Brooklyn.
Bassett wasn’t encouraging, saying that the construction costs would be too high. The PSC’s priority was building subways where congestion was greatest. He promised that the Commission would do its upmost to benefit Queens with service from the Steinway Tunnels.6
At a civic conference at Schuetzen Park in Astoria on November 29, 1909, Bassett discussed the borough’s potential:
The reason Queens Borough is so intensely interested in transit problems is because it is so near the City Hall in Manhattan and yet its accommodations are so limited. Within a radius of ten miles of City Hall, Manhattan has a population of 260 to the acre, while Queens has but 11 in the same area. The bridges and tunnels under the rivers at both sides of Manhattan Island tend to distribute Manhattan’s congested population. These people are going into Kings County [Brooklyn] and New Jersey. Few are coming to Queens because of its poor transit facilities. But when Queens gets what it deserves it will surpass all the other boroughs. It is here that people can live in separated units, and the more its population live in units smaller than the tenement houses of Manhattan, the better will be the city.7
Borough President Lawrence Gresser and groups such as the Rapid Transit Committee of Queens, the Real Estate Exchange of Long Island, the Flushing Association, and the Queens Borough Chamber of Commerce campaigned to extend subways into Queens. A group of public officials including Gresser, Bassett, and Bronx Borough President Cyrus C. Miller toured Queens on April 1, 1911. From that came a plan for an elevated line connecting the previously built Steinway Tunnels, which connected between Queens and Manhattan, with Queensboro Plaza, Astoria, and Flushing.8
Complications ensured as planning for the Flushing line and the other Dual Systems Contracts lines continued through 1912. The biggest problem was the PSC’s plan to build an elevated line into Flushing.
Figure 3-1. One of the “cornfields” Mayor Gaynor may have been talking about. This is looking east on what will be Roosevelt Avenue toward Junction Boulevard in 1913. (Photo courtesy of the New York Transit Museum Archives)
Downtown Flushing was a quiet place in 1912. What is now a crowded commercial district was an almost rural village. Only a few buildings from that era remain. The prospect of an elevated line was alarming.
Figure 3-2. The same view today. (Photo by the author)
Amity Street,9 along which the elevated line would run, needed to be widened to accommodate the structure. The cost concerned home and property owners alike. They wanted to wait until the entire length of Roosevelt Avenue was laid out so as to share the cost of the work with the communities to the west.10 The Flushing Business Men’s Association suggested that the line swing north to Broadway (now Northern Boulevard) and Main Street. They thought the Flushing line could go farther east. Using Broadway, even then a wide street, would lower the project’s cost as it wouldn’t require widening Amity Street.11
Figure 3-3. New York City’s five borough presidents in 1910. Bottom row (left to right): Alfred E. Steers of Brooklyn, Cyrus C. Miller of the Bronx, and Lawrence Gresser of Queens. Top row (left to right): George A. McAneny of Manhattan and George Cromwell of Staten Island. (Wikimedia Commons)
The PSC approved the route of the Flushing line as far to the east as Wateredge Avenue12 on December 17, 1912. It would be one of the IRT’s lines under the Dual Systems Contracts. The plan was supported by the Flushing Association, a civic group. John W. Paris, chairman of its Transportation Committee (and president of the Real Estate Exchange of Long Island), said Flushing couldn’t expect rapid transit service to Main Street unless the people in that community supported one specific plan. Building along Amity Street to Main Street created the most convenient route to downtown Flushing and the communities to the east of Flushing. He also foresaw that area trolley lines could be extended to Amity Street, creating a transit hub.13 Hearings would be held in early 1913.
It seemed as if the groups in Flushing had put their qualms aside about an elevated line on Amity Street. The Flushing Business Men’s Association and the Flushing Association met on December 27 about the route. George W. Pople, the president of the Business Men’s Association, noted the efforts to obtain rapid transit service going on elsewhere in the city. Given the city’s resources, Pople felt that if the people of Flushing didn’t articulate their needs it would take at least a decade for a line to be built.14
Both groups preferred a subway through their area but would accept an el. The route they wanted ran along Amity Street to Boerum Avenue (now 150th Street), south to Madison Avenue (now 41st Avenue), east to 16th Street (now 156th Street), and north to either Mathews Place (now Depot Road) or Lucerne Place (now Station Road) to 22nd Street (now 162nd Street).15
The two groups knew that Amity Street, fifty feet wide to the west of Main Street, needed to be widened to allow either an elevated line or s
ubway to be built through. Borough President Maurice E. Connolly was asked to meet with Amity Street property owners to gain permission for this work. Since the project needed to be funded through assessment, they asked that the assessment area be expanded over the entire Third Ward of Queens16 to lessen the financial burden.17
Representatives of the Flushing groups met with PSC Commissioner William R. Willcox on January 6 to discuss their recommendations. They claimed the Third Ward had been discriminated against. Willcox took exception, saying that some lines could be added on at one point, and others later on. He went on to say, “The Sycamore Avenue [now 104th Street] terminal is within two miles of Flushing and it should be a very easy matter later on in bringing it to your village. In fact, I intend introducing a resolution before my commission at an early date which will legalize this extension to Flushing.”18
Pople asked Willcox if the line could be built as a subway. He said that if the people of that area wanted rapid transit in the near future they should ask for an el. While acknowledging the advantages of an underground line, Willcox acknowledged that such a line required more time and money to build.19
Not everyone shared that attitude. One person who disagreed was a major Amity Street property holder, Magistrate Joseph Fitch:
Amity Street is a residential thoroughfare and will remain so for at least twenty-five years to come. Look at Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn, now that the elevated line is running there. This line has changed this street from one of the best residential sections in Brooklyn to one of the poorest tenement sections in Brooklyn. Do we want Amity Street like that thoroughfare in a few years? Thirty years from now if a man suggests an elevated line he will be laughed at.
In my opinion this line is being advocated by real estate developers who don’t care what happens to Queens after they sell their land. They act like the steamship companies who bring immigrants over to America. They get their little $30 per passenger and what do they care if the men and women they bring to America fill our prisons? I am progressive in a reasonable way and I am not standing in the way of healthy progress, but I can’t understand why our civic workers are advocating an elevated line through Amity Street.20