A decade later the city tore down the Third Avenue el, the oldest in New York, a “relic,” wrote the general manager of the New York City Transit Authority, of a “bygone era.” After its demolition, there were no els left in lower and mid Manhattan, only in upper Manhattan and some of the outer boroughs. But the project had gotten bogged down because many New Yorkers felt the el should not be demolished until the Sixth Avenue subway was finished.) Shortly after, the city also tore down the Second and Ninth avenue els in Manhattan and a few lines (or parts thereof) in Brooklyn, the remains of the defunct Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Company. (Sixth Avenue property owners had urged the city to tear down the el and replace it with a subway in 1923. During the late 1930s New York City also demolished the Sixth Avenue el, whose owner, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, had gone into receivership several years earlier. Two other spur lines were torn down later, one in 1924 and the other in 1930. At the behest of the Forty-second Street Property Owners and Merchants Association and other midtown business interests, the New York state legislature approved the demolition of a short elevated line on East Forty-second Street in 1923. The els “are doomed,” wrote architect Ernest Flagg in 1927, “and the sooner they go the better.”Īnd they went, though not as soon as expected. Two years later the Massachusetts Division of Metropolitan Planning reported that popular sentiment would eventually force the demolition of at least some of Boston’s elevated railways. Hylan predicted in 1924 that there would soon be no elevated structures left in Manhattan. Noting that the Sixth Avenue el “ought to have been taken down years ago,” New York mayor John F. By the mid and late 1920s – or even earlier, according to the New York Times – most Americans were convinced that it was only a matter of time before the elevated railways were removed from the city streets. Allied with them were public officials (among them Julius Miller, borough president of Manhattan and chief advocate of the West Side Elevated Highway), who thought the demolition of the els would foster economic development traffic experts (including New York City Police Commissioner Enright, another advocate of elevated highways), who assumed that the removal of the elevated structures would facilitate the flow of vehicular traffic and others who felt that the els were unsightly, unnerving, and anachronistic, a once valuable form of urban transportation that had long outlived its usefulness. In favor of it were abutting businessmen and property owners, who believed that the removal of the els would improve trade and raise values. This idea, which had surfaced in the first two decades of the century, caught on in the 1920s, especially in New York and Boston. The cities should not only stop building elevated railways, many Americans insisted they should start demolishing them. Despite assurances by several leading engineers that it was possible to build els that were quiet, clean, and attractive (and would not reduce property values), they remained convinced that under no circumstances should any more be constructed. This opposition has grown so vociferous that by the 1920s most Americans had come to believe that elevated railways should never have been built in the first place. In view of the longstanding and deep-seated opposition to elevated railways, the construction of elevated highways is more than a little puzzling. I’m posting this more so that I remember it, but the first paragraph offers an interesting rejoinder to those who say that els could never be viable because of the blight factor, and the Second Avenue elevated line makes a cameo towards the end: I started reading Fogelson’s Downtown with the intention of learning more about elevated trains, and though I’ve been slightly disappointed in that regard (more to come on that after I finish and attempt a more comprehensive review), he does include a lot of interesting history.
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