History Of The New York City Subway
The beginnings of the Subway came from various excursion railroads to Coney Island and elevated railroads in Manhattan and Brooklyn. At that time, New York County (Manhattan Island and part of the Bronx), Kings County (including the Cities of Brooklyn and Williamsburg) and Queens County were separate municipal entities.
In New York, competing steam-powered elevated railroads were built over major avenues. The first elevated line was constructed in 1867-70 by Charles Harvey and his West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway company along Greenwich Street and Ninth Avenue (although cable cars were the initial mode of transportation on that railway). Later more lines were built on Second, Third and Sixth Avenues. None of these structures remain today, but these lines later shared trackage with subway trains as part of the IRT system.
In Kings County, elevated railroads were also built by several companies, over Lexington, Myrtle, Third and Fifth Avenues, Fulton Street and Broadway. These also later shared trackage with subway trains, and even operated into the subway, as part of the BRT and BMT. Most of these structures have been dismantled, but some remain in original form, mostly rebuilt and upgraded. These lines were linked to Manhattan by various ferries and later the tracks along the Brooklyn Bridge (which originally had their own line, and were later integrated into the BRT/BMT).
Also in Kings County, six steam excursion railroads were built to various beaches in the southern part of the county; all but one (the Manhattan Beach Line) eventually fell under BMT control.
Read more about History Of The New York City Subway: The First Subways, The Dual Contracts, The Independent System, Unification and Contraction, Reconstruction and Incremental Advance, After September 11, 2001
Famous quotes containing the words history of the, history of, history, york, city and/or subway:
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What it comes down to is this: the grocer, the butcher, the baker, the merchant, the landlord, the druggist, the liquor dealer, the policeman, the doctor, the city father and the politician—these are the people who make money out of prostitution, these are the real reapers of the wages of sin.”
—Polly Adler (1900–1962)
“In New York—whose subway trains in particular have been “tattooed” with a brio and an energy to put our own rude practitioners to shame—not an inch of free space is spared except that of advertisements.... Even the most chronically dispossessed appear prepared to endorse the legitimacy of the “haves.””
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. “Cleaning and Cleansing,” Myths and Memories (1986)