The Routes Not Taken Page 9
We understand that Counsel to the Commission and the [New York City] Corporation Counsel agree that the operating companies cannot be forced to operate over the L.I.R.R. tracks as an extension under the operating contracts. If, however, the companies would agree to such operation as an extension and if the City is willing to assume the probable operating deficit of about $200,000 [$4.23 million in 2011, according to MeasuringWorth.com] and particularly in view of the fact that the City has only about $1 million at present time available for rapid transit development in the Third Ward of Queens the Long Island Railroad Company’s proposal to lease its tracks to Whitestone Landing and to Little Neck for rapid transit operation seems desirable and if such arrangement is consummated advantage should be taken of the Degnon proposal for the construction of the connection between the current City line at Alburtis and Roosevelt Avenues and the Long Island Railroad Company’s tracks to insure the cost of this work not exceeding $410,000.95
The Third Ward Rapid Transit Association endorsed a two-fare zone beyond Flushing to induce the IRT and BRT to use the LIRR’s tracks. “We have a good reason to believe that with a ten-cent fare to all stations east of Main and Bridge Streets96 it will be a paying proposition and that the operating companies will consent to run their trains,”97 said Clinton T. Roe of the Third Ward group.
Frustration grew at the lack of progress. The Third Ward Rapid Transit Association prepared a report showing how much work they had done over the past decade with little to show for it on the part of the city, the PSC, and the operating companies.98 James H. Quinlan of the Flushing Business Men’s Association questioned the LIRR’s motives:
It still seems to me as it did long months ago that President Peters simply suggested this leasing so as to divert attentions from the city-built line to Main and Amity Streets, Flushing. He knew that it would hurt his business and he tried procrastination of the fateful day.
Before long we will probably have to drop all of these plans now under way and go back to where we were two years ago. And in the meanwhile, the money that seemed available then for the building of a city-built line will have slipped out of our hands.99
Several hundred Third Ward area residents attended a PSC hearing on August 9, at which Roe presented a petition signed by seven thousand people. However, nothing was being done to lease the LIRR’s tracks or to extend the subway. Representatives of the Queens Borough Chamber of Commerce met with PSC Commissioners Travis H. Whitney and Henry W. Hodge in December, urging them to act. Whitney and Hodge promised to work for the lease agreement and stated that the PSC would try to get it approved.
Subway service to northern Queens began on February 1, 1917, when the Astoria line opened. Built in conjunction with the Flushing line,100 it reminded people east of Corona that nothing had been done to extend that line past Alburtis Avenue. PSC Secretary James Blaine Walker101 said they should ask the LIRR why not much had happened. “The last thing I heard about that matter we were waiting to hear from Mr. Peters, President of the Long Island Railroad, we made him good offers, and he said that he was willing to meet us halfway in the proposition. That was some time ago, and as far as I know, there has been nothing done in the matter since.”102 President Peters met with Commissioners Hodge and Whitney on February 27. There was no report of progress, but discussions continued.
There was news of an agreement in March. Commissioners Hodge and Whitney, PSC Chief of Rapid Transit LeRoy T. Harkness, and Daniel L. Turner came to terms with the LIRR on March 15 and submitted the lease to the full Commission. Rental would be $125,000 for the first year with rent increasing by 6 percent each year. The Commission would consider a second fare to be charged east and north of Flushing until the line was profitable. The Flushing Evening Journal published the full text of the lease.
Clinton T. Roe, speaking for the North Shore Transit League, had another reason for the extra fare: “These terms have been agreed upon and I see nothing in the way now to prevent our section from receiving rapid transit which we have been entitled to for a long time. I don’t believe there will be any objection to the 10-cent fare east of Flushing, because with a 10-cent fare to sections like Whitestone, Upper Flushing, Bayside and Douglaston, the taxpayers there will be able to maintain the high class residential character which these communities have had for so many years.”103
Flushing line service to Corona began on April 21. Full service through Queensboro Plaza started on July 23 when trains began to run over the upper level of the Queensboro Bridge, connecting the 2nd Avenue El with the Queens lines. For the next quarter century, riders on both lines had the option of riding trains that provided direct service over three routes between Queens and Manhattan.
Significant issues needed to be resolved. The most serious required a major capital investment. Large sections of the Port Washington and Whitestone lines operated at grade level, with few trestles or tunnels. Before subway service could begin, grade crossings would have to be eliminated. It would be another two years before that could happen.
The opening of the Flushing line and the possibility of the lease agreement moving ahead affected the entire north shore of Queens. Land in communities from Long Island City to Little Neck and into Nassau County was subdivided, sold, and developed.
Contract negotiations were continuing and a public hearing was held on the grade crossing eliminations. Roe criticized the plan to eliminate all crossings, saying this was immediately required at a few key streets. Commissioner Whitney said more grade crossings needed to be eliminated to ensure public safety. PSC engineers identified fourteen locations and requested more time to complete their plans. Whitney then adjourned the hearing until a later date.
There was little progress though the summer of 1917. By fall, it almost appeared as if matters were going in the opposite direction. The city lacked the funding to extend the subway through Flushing, and the LIRR continued to make demands for additional payments that were disincentives for proceeding with the lease.104
A lease agreement finally was announced on October 16. The IRT would operate the trains that would use the LIRR’s tracks; the BRT would eventually do so as well. A second fare would be charged east of Broadway on the Port Washington line, and east of College Point on the Whitestone line. The PSC would hold a public hearing on the lease agreement on October 31.105
The lease agreement was well received at the hearing. Borough President Connolly sought immediate action: “I wish this matter could be settled here today and that it could be before the Board of Estimate on Friday.”106
But that’s where everything stopped. On November 14, the IRT notified the PSC they wouldn’t use the LIRR’s tracks. “I have submitted the matter to the officers of this company and am instructed to tell you that at this time we cannot undertake the proposed agreement and operation in coordination with the rapid transit line,” IRT Counsel James L. Quackenbush told the PSC. “Conditions, as everybody knows, have changed greatly since this matter was discussed some months ago. It appears to our officers that it would be extremely inadequate to add operating lines to Contract No. 3 [the Dual Systems Contract] under prevailing conditions and therefore we suggest that all negotiations with that end of view be suspended at least for the present.”107
Figure 3-10. A front-page ad from the Flushing Daily Times.
Commissioner Whitney noted the years that had been expended in working on the lease and the support the elected officials and community groups had expressed. He moved that the PSC engineering staff return to planning for the extension of the subway into Flushing.108 The PSC and the Third Ward were back to where they were in 1913.
The Third Ward was enraged. “It is what I suspected and I felt that they had something up their sleeves the whole time,” Charles W. Posthauer stormed. “There was never any sincerity of purpose in the proposition, anyhow, and the people fell for it.”109 “I am not surprised,” commented Rodman Richardson of the Third Ward Transit League. “In fact, I have known for a while that the Inter
borough and the BRT had refused to come in on the plan, notwithstanding statements to the contrary.”110 Ira Terry of the Third Ward Transit League indicated that his area would look to John F. Hylan, who had defeated Mitchel in the mayoral elections the previous week,111 to provide the help needed to bring subway service to the Third Ward.112
About five hundred people attended a meeting at the League Building at Sanford Avenue and Union Street on November 22 to demand subway service. Whitney assured them of PSC support:
The Commission thoroughly believes in an extension into and through Flushing as far as money will allow. If we can build the first section, we will be nearer to the construction of the second structure. The Interborough can refuse to operate an extension leased by the city, but it cannot refuse to operate an extension built by the city.
When the plans are completed and bids secured the contract will be submitted to the Board of Estimate for approval. The Borough President of Queens may be depended on to be vigilant for the necessary money.
Such an extension to Main Street will bring the Corona line from the further side of a swamp to a community of 30,000 to 40,000 people of great development possibility.113
Connolly thought consideration of the lease agreement was only suspended: “We should all work for this proposition first, because it is the only way, for years to come, at least, whereby all the sections of the Third Ward will be benefitted. Let’s go ahead with this plan until we find it is absolutely impossible to get this company to consent to operate. Then we should go ahead and work for the Main Street extension.”114
The borough president and representatives of Third Ward groups and the Queens Borough Chamber of Commerce met with IRT President Theodore Shonts in December about reviving the lease plan. Shonts said the IRT would meet with the PSC and the LIRR to see if this was possible. According to Shonts, the IRT had disagreements only with some of the agreement’s terms, rather than with the plan itself.115
Any optimism concerning the lease was misplaced; any hope for action was mistaken. The IRT’s decision on November 14 not to operate trains on the Port Washington and Whitestone lines marked the end of that plan. The focus fully and permanently returned to extending the subway to Main Street.
It wasn’t until 1920 that there was any progress. As discussion of the Corona Subway Yard in the Flushing Meadows was underway at the Board of Estimate’s Finance and Budget Committee meeting on June 3, Connolly called for the extension to proceed. Mayor Hylan and the other committee members agreed and passed the recommendations on to Transit Construction Commissioner John H. Delaney.116
Although they both supported extending the subway to Flushing, the contentious relationship between Hylan and the New York State Transit Commission, especially its chairman, George McAneny, slowed transit planning and construction. The mayor took a number of actions to obstruct the Transit Commission, including directing the City Record, which publishes official advertisements for public agencies, not to do so for Transit Commission requests for bids for construction projects, thereby interfering with its ability to award contracts. This hampered the building of the line.117
On May 12, the Board of Estimate met to vote on the construction plan. Aldermanic President Fiorello H. La Guardia moved that it be postponed until concerns over the Transit Commission’s authority were resolved.118 The plans weren’t approved for another month.
The Transit Commission awarded a construction contract in November 1922. The Board of Estimate delayed action because no plans had been made for a vehicular bridge to be built along with the subway crossing over the Flushing River. This bridge would link Roosevelt Avenue and Amity Street, creating one street.
Construction contracts were finally awarded and work on the subway and the Roosevelt Avenue Bridge began on April 21, 1923. Mayor Hylan and Borough President Connolly led the groundbreaking ceremony.119
The line was also extended westward from Grand Central to Times Square, with service to Times Square beginning on February 19, 1927. A short stub of a tunnel was built beyond Times Square in hopes of connecting the Flushing line with the line the Board of Transportation would build along 8th Avenue. That connection was never built; the tunnel stub sat unused for eight decades.
Flushing line service to the Willets Point Boulevard station began on May 7, 1927.120 The Roosevelt Avenue Bridge opened one week later, but the subways’ extension to Flushing was again delayed. The support columns for the elevated structure were sinking into the soft land of the Flushing Meadows. A sinkhole developed. Construction stopped and about 250 feet of the elevated structure had to be demolished and rebuilt.
Piles for the new structure were driven seventy feet into the ground. More piles were driven at least ten feet deeper into the ground to provide extra support.121 At a meeting with Flushing-area representatives, Delaney attributed this problem to the demands of the people of the Third Ward for transit relief: “It probably would have been prudent to have waited a year or so to observe how the soil would react, but speed was urged and we tried to comply with the result that we now have.”122
George U. Harvey, the Republican candidate for Aldermanic president in 1925 (who became borough president in 1929), protested in a letter to Mayor James J. Walker: “It had taken only four years to build the first subway, twenty-five miles long; four years to fight the Civil War and four years to fight the [First] World War. After four and a half years your engineers are alleged to have discovered that there is mud in the Flushing Meadows and this is given as an excuse for further indefinite postponement of completion.”123
The first subway train ran to Main Street on January 21, 1928. The event was marked with three days of celebrations in Flushing. Mayor Walker was supposed to assist in the operation of that first trip but was a no-show. IRT President Frank Hedley ordered Train Operator Herbert L. Parsons (who operated the first train through the Steinway Tunnels with Mayor Mitchel in 1917) to proceed. The official explanation for Walker’s absence was a “previous and unexpected engagement.”124 When Walker spoke at the closing celebration at the Sanford Hotel in Flushing on January 23, he explained his absence by saying that he never expected a train operated by the IRT or BMT to be on time.125
Flushing had its subway, but planning to extend the line continued. The BOT devised a plan for service to Whitestone that didn’t use the LIRR’s tracks. Instead, they proposed a line that came off the Flushing line east of Main Street and then looped back to College Point via 149th Street and 11th Avenue.
The LIRR offered the Whitestone line to the BOT in 1928, but they declined, citing the costs involved with eliminating grade crossings, widening the line’s right-of-way (it was mostly a single-track route), and the need for more stations along the line.126 The LIRR ended the Whitestone line on February 16, 1932.
The BOT continued to include Flushing line extensions in its capital priority lists through 1945. Postwar budgets and other priorities affected the planning process and ended any further efforts to take the line beyond Flushing. Several proposals by the New York City Transit Authority would include the takeover of the Port Washington line but never made it through the discussion process.
By that time, Flushing line service had been cut back, not expanded. Service over the Queensboro Bridge on the 2nd Avenue Elevated ended on June 14, 1942. Borough President James A. Burke and other borough representatives fought this, but the city and the BOT proceeded anyway.127 The links between the Flushing and Astoria lines at Queensboro Plaza were taken out of service in 1949 and the other platforms and track structures were demolished; parts of the structures still stand to the east and west of the station. Flushing line riders had the ability to take one train all of the way to Lower Manhattan; since 1949, they have had to make transfers in Queens or Manhattan that added significant time and effort to their trips.
The eleven-year delay in extending the Flushing line from Corona, and the failure to widen Amity Street, still has effects. Before work on the extension had begun, its effect was fel
t on Flushing’s real estate. Many of the buildings that are still standing in the area were either built or planned within the building lines established in Flushing’s village days. Amity Street wasn’t widened; the Main Street station was built within a confined area with narrow platforms and stairways. Few in the 1920s imagined how many people and vehicles would enter the area to reach the subway. Few anticipated that the Third Ward area or the rest of northern Queens would grow as it did following the opening of the Flushing line and in anticipation of the system expansion that never came.
The station entrances at Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue couldn’t handle the crowds of riders who wanted to ride the No. 7 line. A new entrance was built toward the east end of the station after World War II. This entrance was also overwhelmed and was replaced by a larger entrance area in 1999.
The intersection of Roosevelt Avenue and Main Street is heavily congested due to narrow roadways and sidewalks. Many of the bus lines that enter downtown Flushing come from communities across northern, central, eastern, and southwest Queens, Nassau County, and the Bronx to link with the subway. Add to it the cars and other vehicles that enter this area and the quiet, unclogged streets of the early part of the twentieth century are choked with traffic and pedestrians. The New York City Department of Transportation and MTA New York City Transit are still working toward a solution.
Figure 3-11. Looking north on Main Street toward Amity Street (Roosevelt Avenue) in 1923. (Photo courtesy of the New York Transit Museum Archives)
Figure 3-12. The same view in 2011. (Photo by the author)
All talk of extending the Flushing line is in a westward direction these days. After eight decades, work on an extension to 11th Avenue and West 34th Street in Manhattan is underway. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and others have discussed a further extension under the Hudson River to New Jersey to connect with commuter rail lines there. This is nothing new—in 1926, Daniel L. Turner proposed such an extension while serving as consulting engineer to the North Jersey Transit Commission. It just continues to show the Flushing line’s ongoing and growing value to transit riders in the New York metropolitan area.