The first stage of the project opened a year later, on November 26, 1832, with trains running along the Bowery from Prince Street to Union Square. The New York and Harlem Railroad was incorporated in 1831 to build street-level tracks from Lower Manhattan to then-remote Harlem. Horse-drawn rail cars were the first viable alternatives to stage travel. The more coaches that plied Broadway, the harder the street became to navigate, and some New Yorkers began plotting alternatives-though they would soon discover that the omnibus companies’ political influence gave them a firm grip on the city’s transportation network. These coaches, run by competing private companies, had haphazard and overlapping routes. Paul’s Church and the Broadway stages, N.Y.,” by Hugh Reinagle, was exhibited at the Bank Coffee House that year, with at least eight different coach and omnibus companies crowded into the frame.īy 1832, the Evening Post was reporting “not much short of a hundred” coaches carrying passengers between Wall Street and other parts of the city. “Everybody in New York wants rapid transit, but, strange to say, the moment that any body sets to work with a definite plan for its realization, they are vigorously opposed and the work prevented.”- Scientific American, 1872įor years, horse-drawn stage coaches had run into the city from Albany, Boston, Philadelphia, and Long Island, and “ by 1816, they were running every two hours to various suburban towns.” Soon, intracity stages were running between Wall Street and various Manhattan destinations, and “y the mid-1820s stagecoaches were clogging Broadway and raising concerns in the Common Council about traffic regulations.”īy 1831, city stages (or omnibuses, as they were also known) had become ubiquitous. Now, having pushed the city limits another mile north, an alternative was needed. When the city had been basically contained within the mile below Chambers Street, there was no distance too great to commute on foot. The first real estate boom centered on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, and it posed a problem for all but the wealthiest: how to get to work. The regular street grid-and lot sizes-of the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan, laid out by surveyor John Randel Jr., sparked real estate speculators and fashionable New Yorkers to push the borders of the city northward. Ferries had plied the waters between Brooklyn and Manhattan since the Dutch era and, starting in 1693, the King’s Bridge spanned Spuyten Duyvil to connect Manhattan to the Bronx, but these forms of transportation were designed for farmers and long-distance travelers, not everyday commuters. But as New York struggles with an antiquated and seemingly unfixable subway system, snarled street traffic, and few viable alternatives, the story of the elevated railway seems a cautionary tale about how politics and greed are too often the motivating forces behind decisions that affect millions of New Yorkers.īefore 1800, New York was so compact that mass transit wasn’t necessary. Today, New Yorkers who remember them are nostalgic for the elevated railways. For the next 80 years, the elevated railway would shape the city, spurring rival transit developments, pushing the city’s population outward, and changing the architectural fabric of the city. The new “el,” as the train soon came to be known, was the city’s first real stab at reclaiming the street. A decade earlier, Harper’s magazine had reported that “in New York, we speak within limits when we say that a lady not unfrequently is compelled to wait half an hour” to cross the street, “and even then she makes the crossing at any point below the Park at her peril.” The Company does not pretend, with its present machinery, to run the cars faster than fifteen miles an hour but during the next two months will make arrangements for much more rapid motion.įor a city gripped by some of the worst traffic in America, even this humble beginning must have seemed miraculous. The car ran evenly from the Battery to Cortlandt-street, starting at a rate of five miles an hour, and increasing to a speed of ten miles. However, an unspecified “ accident to the machinery” pushed the trial run back a day. On July 2, 1868, the West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway-the city’s first elevated train-was to have its maiden journey from the Battery to Cortlandt Street in the Financial District. New York’s transit revolution began, inauspiciously, with a delay.
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