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.