Transit Memories

Poor Marcel Proust Only Had a Madeleine

Entrance to the New York Transit Museum.

I remember the Third Avenue El in Manhattan. It stopped running in 1955, when I was seven years old. I lived a block and a half away, between First and Second Avenues. I don't remember it very well - just the steel pillars and the gloom cast by the superstructure. I don't recall riding on it. I have lots of childhood memories of riding the subway - mainly the Lexington Avenue IRT - but no memories of a trip on the El.

These and other transit memories came crowding back to me as I recently spent a very pleasant two hours going through the New York Transit Museum, located in an old subway station at 99 Schermerhorn Street in downtown Brooklyn, a few blocks from the Fulton Mall.

The entrance in the photo above takes you down to a mezzanine level, where you purchase your ticket at an old-time fare booth. The mezzanine is quite long - there's a sizeable lunch room at the west end - and it's loaded with educational panels and display cases that explain the history of New York City's subways, buses, and elevated lines. My favorite artifact sits quietly in a vitrine it shares with other objects, and I almost missed it. It's the New York and Harlem Railroad Ledger Book, 1831-1837. This was New York City's first rail line, incorporated in 1831. (For a short story on this line, click here. For a longer story, click here.)

The heart of the museum is down at the platform level, where a menagerie of antique rail cars welcomes visitors. I was particularly taken with BMT Q Car Number 1612C, which has wooden sides. It was originally built in 1908; in 1938 it was gussied up and repainted orange and blue. Suitably attired, it was one of the cars used to transport visitors to the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens.

From 1950 to 1955 this car ran on the Third Avenue El. I went inside and sat down. Like other subway cars of this vintage, it had the old straps. I remember the straps. Being able to reach them was one of the little ways you knew you were literally growing up. You became a member of a relatively new class of human beings called straphangers. (Merriam-Webster says the first use of straphanger was in 1896.) But I was pretty sure I'd never been in this car before or anything quite like it.

Later on, this and the other World's Fair cars ran on the Myrtle Avenue El until 1969. As the museum's website puts it, "They were the last wooden elevated cars to run in North America."

I found myself engrossed in the early history of the elevated lines - something I had known nothing about before I entered the museum.

The first elevated line opened in 1868. The cars were pulled by cables. It seems this arrangement didn't work very well, and the steam-powered locomotive was introduced in 1871. This was the Ninth Avenue El. The Third Avenue El entered service in 1878. (If you really want to get into the weeds on all this, click here.)

Electrification came around 1900, but with electrification came the subway. Steam locomotives in a tunnel were problematic. As lovers of charcoal barbecue are often reminded, it's best not to barbecue indoors. The same with coal-fired steam engines.

New York's first subway began running in 1904. This was the IRT, and it had a simply magnificent station at City Hall, which is no longer open to the public. (The museum offers tours. It seems to take several months to get in, but the pictures suggest that the station is well worth the visit.)

The subways were faster and could carry more passengers than the elevated lines, and, with continued construction of new subway lines, the handwriting was on the wall for the elevateds. The Ninth Avenue El shut down in 1940, the Sixth Avenue El in 1938, and the Second Avenue El in 1942. (For a relatively short story, click here.)

There are still lots of elevated lines in New York City, of course. Just go to a Mets game or Coney Island, and you can still have that experience. Generally these start off as subways and jump up into the air when they get to less densely populated parts of the city.

And of course there's the famous High Line, which is now a park. The High Line was a freight line, so it falls into a slightly different category from the els we've been talking about.

The museum also takes the occasional detour from transit. For instance, there is the Cyclists' Road Map of New York from 1898. It was produced by the New York Club of the League of American Wheelmen, and free to members.

And in the gift shop, in addition to the hats, t-shirts, bags, and the pen I'm currently writing with, you can buy a mug that says Cawffee - a nod to the museum's location in Brooklyn and part of a useful crockery collection that also serves as an introduction to the famous Brooklyn dialect. I now, for instance, know how to spell Buttah, and I know what it means.

There's an argument that the Third Avenue El should not have stopped running in 1955. It and the Second Avenue El, which gave up the ghost in 1942, were supposed to be replaced by the Second Avenue subway, the first segment of which began to run in 2017. 

My brother, who is a little older than I am, doesn't remember the El very well either, and he has no memory of riding on it. Here is something he does recall: "I do remember returning from school one winter afternoon with snow on the ground and attempting to loft a snowball at a passing south-bound elevated train.  Not a chance of my feeble arm getting the snowball that high but I did receive a reprimand from a nearby policeman." 

Not to neglect the streetcars, here is a 1917 photograph of Broadway near 17th Street. There were lots of streetcars in New York. They even named a baseball team: the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, which became the Brooklyn Dodgers. 

Walking to the Free Library

The Distracting Charm of Logan Square

Entrance to Sister Cities Park.

I love going to Philadelphia's main library, up on Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The gorgeous Beaux Arts building, designed by Horace Trumbauer and Julian Abele, is an experience inside and out. And I always nod hello to Dr. Pepper, founder of the library, whose statue hangs out on the landing in the main staircase.

I find myself going to the library when a project moves me to. So I will go a bunch of times, and then not go for a while. I still love browsing the bookshelves, and it still amazes me how often I'm interested in the book that's shelved next to the book I was looking for.

Walking to the library, on the other hand, has not until recently been a great experience. There are basically three ways for me to get there - 18th, 19th, or 20th - and they all suffered from visually dead zones roughly between Market and Arch. That has changed.

18th Street, My Favorite
In particular, 18th Street has perked up a lot between JFK Boulevard and Arch, thanks to Comcast, which now has two buildings on this block, one on each side. I sometimes divert eastward and take the midblock crossing of Arch in the 1700 block, so I can walk up through the plaza and fountain by Three Logan Square and then the few feet beyond Cherry Street to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

It's here - at 18th and the Parkway - across from the cathedral, that you encounter the Amor statue, a translation of the Love statue three blocks down the parkway in Love Park. Amor takes after its English cousin, and is very popular with the tourists.

Amor stands at the beginning of Sister Cities Park, which is one of my favorite places in Philadelphia. There are two water features flanking the Sister Cities Cafe, and in the good weather the place is, shall we say, well populated with children, their parents and caregivers, and people like me who come to sit and enjoy a place of happiness.

The library seen from the Sister Cities Cafe.

Logan Square is a very complicated space. Sister Cities Park lies on the east side of the square. Inside the square there is a large traffic circle that is part of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. On the west side of the square is another park called Aviator Park. And on the north side of the square, on either side of 19th Street, are two more patches of land that could be called park, but aren't. So, one square, one circle, how many parks? I don't know. But I do know that the whole place is a sculpture garden.

When I finally finish my cup of coffee at the Sister Cities Cafe, and wander on toward the Free Library, I pass the statue of Galusha Pennypacker, which is one of the quirkier public sculptures in our fair town. (Dubuffet's Milord la Chamarre, on Market Street, gives Galusha a run for his money.)  The Pennypacker memorial statue - he was a Civil War hero - is pretty well documented, so instead of showing you a picture of that, here's the view looking back toward Sister Cities Park.

Galusha Pennypacker's view of Sister Cities Park.

After my old friend Galusha, you can walk up 19th to the library, or you can cross over 19th to the Shakespeare Memorial. I'll get to that in a minute.

19th and the Swann Fountain
So if you're walking up 19th to the library, you can walk directly across Logan Circle. In the middle of the circle, where cars are not allowed, you will find three very large people bathing in a fountain. They're not real people. They're sculptures by Alexander Stirling Calder.

Swann Memorial Fountain, 1924.

And I like to sit on a bench here. The bathers are old friends, and I do love to watch the tourists walk through here. They're probably headed somewhere up the parkway - Franklin Institute, Barnes Foundation, Rodin Museum, even the Philadelphia Museum of Art that hovers in the distance, at the end of the parkway. But they almost invariably stop and spend some time in this space, which among other things is an island. You can see all these destinations around you, and, as I said, you're probably headed to one of them, but just for now you're cut off from the outside world. It's an interesting experience.

When the spirit moves, I walk across the parkway traffic and up 19th Street to the library.

20th: Should Be the Easiest Way in, but It's Not
Just west of 19th Street, on the north side of the circle, is the Shakespeare Memorial. Again, it's pretty well known, so, not to be boring, here's a shot from the Shakespeare Memorial looking back at Aviator Park, with 20th Street and the Franklin Institute in the background.

Aviator Park from the Shakespeare Memorial.

It's a lovely, if underused, park, with the Aero Memorial and the All Wars Memorial to Colored Soldiers and Sailors and a very adequate number of benches, most well shaded by trees. It should be the easiest way to get to the Free Library, but it's not.

Why? Bear with me.

If you do come this way, and cross the zebra stripes in the picture above, and get to the Shakespeare Memorial, you come upon a simply wonderful plaza.

The Shakespeare Memorial is directly behind me.

This plaza sits on top of the Vine Street Expressway, and it provides a truly epic approach to a grand building. There's just one problem. Vine Street (the above-ground, not expressway part of Vine) lies between this space, which would be a suitable parade ground for the French Garde republicaine, and the library, which, come to think of it, is inspired by two buildings on the Place de la Concorde in Paris.

So what's the problem? It's illegal to cross the street. The entire approach from 20th Street, through Aviator Park, across the parkway, and across this fabulous no-name plaza, is designed by the heirs of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, whose specialty was moving people through space and making them feel grand while they were doing it. But when you get to this last piddly street directly in front of the library, you're told no-no, we didn't really mean it.

At least they tell you to go to the corner.

If ever a spot cried out for a mid-block crossing, surely this is it. Of course, intrepid souls (including me) have been known to ignore the sign and stride confidently across the street. But what about the tourists from Sweden? They probably have enough English to know what the sign says. And do you really want to go jay-walking in a foreign country? Maybe we should get the signs to agree with what the built environment is saying to everybody.

Just a matter of some paint, and switching out a few signs.

See also The Last Man Who Knew Everything, Extend the Diagonal, Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets?