Friday, January 14

History of New York City transportation

The History of the New York City Transportation System ranges from strong Dutch authority in the 17th century, expansionism during the industrial era in the 19th century and half of the 20th century, to outright cronyism during the failures of the Robert Moses era. The shape of the city's transportation system changed as city did, and the result is an impressive modern-day system of industrial-era infrastructure.

In Dutch Nieuw Amsterdam

Portions of the street that would eventually host eleven subway lines, become slang for the 20th century theater industry, and run through some of the highest priced real estate of the nation, was once a primary route of the Lenape people in Pre-Dutch New York, according to Burrows, et al. This route, part of which is present-day Broadway, ran from the Battery, through the East Side, and exited out of what was the northernmost point of Manhattan, in present-day Marble Hill. Broadway was not the only former Lenape trail route; Jamaica Avenue, which connects the present-day boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, runs along a former trail through Jamaica Pass. According to Homberger, present-day Lafayette Street, Park Row, and St. Nicholas Avenue also follow former Lenape routes. According to Burrow, et al., the Dutch had decided that that Lenape trail which ran the length of Manhattan, or present-day Broadway, would be called the Heere Wegh. The first paved street in New York was authorized by Petrus Stuyvesant (Peter Stuyvesant) in 1658, to be constructed by the inhabitants of Brouwer Street (present-day Stone Street).


The Castello Plan illustrates the extent of Dutch ambition of trade in Nieuw Amsterdam, in the 17th Century.
The early Dutch city of Nieuw Amsterdam (New Amsterdam) took full advantage of the rivers which surrounded the city, in some manner a foreshadowing of the empire that New York's shipping industry would establish two centuries later. According to the Castello Plan, multiple canals and waterways were built, including a very early canal on the present-day Broad Street, which was called the Heere Gracht. According to Burrows, et al., a municipal pier was built on what is now Moore Street, on the East River. The first regional transportation that was built out of Nieuw Amsterdam was a “wagon-road” that linked to Nieuw Haarlem (Harlem). It was built in 1658 to encourage development of that town, by order of Petrus Stuyvesant, who saw, accurately, that Nieuw Haarlem could provide an important measure of defense for Nieuw Amsterdam.

British New York and earlier 19th century

The Province of New-York greatly improved the old Indian trails that had served the colony's earlier masters. Country roads suitable for wagons included the King's Highway in Kings County, two Jamaica Roads through Jamaica Pass, and Boston Post Road.
As new streets were laid out beyond Wall Street, the grid became more regular. The river areas being more useful, their streets were first, with streets parallel and perpendicular to their particular river. Later 18th century streets in the middle of the island were even more regular, with city blocks longer in the approximately north/sout moh direction than east/west. By the early 19th century, urban growth had reached approximately the line of the modern Houston Street, and farther in Greenwich Village. Due to expanding world trade, growth was accelerating, and a commission created a more comprehensive street plan for the remainder of the island.


An 1807 version of grid plan for Manhattan.
New York adopted a visionary proposal to develop Manhattan north of 14th Street with a regular street grid, according to "The Commissioners' Plan of 1811." This would fundamentally alter the city aesthetically, economically, and geographically. The economic logic underlying the plan - which called for twelve numbered avenues running approximately north and south, and 155 orthogonal cross streets - was that the grid's regularity would provide an efficient means to develop new real estate property and would promote commerce.
Into the middle 19th century most streets remained unpaved, but tracks allowed smooth public transport by horse cars which were eventually electrified as trolleys. The 1854 Jennings streetcar case abolished racial discrimination in public transit.

Industrialization in the 19th century

Water transport grew rapidly in the new century, due in part to technical development under Robert Fulton's steamboat monopoly. Steamboats provided rapid, reliable connections from New York Harbor to other Hudson River and coastal ports, and later local steam ferries allowed commuters to live far from their workplaces. The completion in 1825 of the upstate Erie Canal, spanning the Hudson River and Lake Erie, made New York the most important connection between Europe and the American interior. The Gowanus Canal and other works were built to handle the increased traffic, all suitable existing shorelines having already been lined with docks. The Morris Canal and Delaware and Raritan Canal were parts of the extensive system of new infrastructure serving the city with coal and other commodities. The canal age, however, gave way to a railway age.
Steam railroads, started in places less generously endowed with waterways, soon reached New York and became a tool of the rivalry among port cities. New York with its New York Central Railroad came out on top, ensuring the city's continued dominance of the international trade of the interior of the United States. As the West and East sides of Manhattan became more populated, local railroads were elevated or depressed to escape road traffic, and the intercity railroads abandoned their Downtown Manhattan stations on Chambers Street and elsewhere. Soot and an occasional shower of flaming embers from overhead steam locomotives eventually came to be regarded as a nuisance, and the railroads were converted to electric operation. A competitive network of plank roads and surface and elevated railroads sprang up to connect and urbanize Long Island, especially the western parts.
New Yorks' ports continued to grow rapidly during and after the Second Industrial Revolution, making the city America's mouth, sucking in manufactured goods and immigrants and spewing forth grains and other raw materials to the developed countries. By the mid 19th century, thanks in part to the introduction of oceanic steamships, more passengers and products came through the Port of New York than all other harbors in the country combined.
Designed by John Roebling, the Brooklyn Bridge was the first link between Manhattan and the land mass of Long Island. It was notable for size, magnificence and commercial importance. The main span of 1,596' 6" was the longest span of any bridge in the world when it was completed in 1883 – a period of time that firmly established the concept of municipal consolidation among the outlying cities and suburbs into what eventually became the City of Greater New York. The Williamsburg Bridge and Manhattan Bridge completed the trio of architecturally-notable lower East River crossings in the early 20th century. These and other great bridges carried trolley cars, whose tracks and electrical wires had already spread through the metropolitan area, creating sprawling streetcar suburbs miles away from the inner city. Bridges after 1920, being for road vehicles only, had no tracks.


Former streetcar barn
Streetcars found steam power impractical, and more often progressed directly from horse power to electricity. Suburban electrification involved true trolley cars, but the required overhead wires were forbidden in New York (Manhattan). Traffic congestion and the high cost of conduit current collection impeded streetcar development there.
New York's waterways, so useful in establishing its commerce and power, became obstacles to railroads. Freight cars had to be carried across the harbor by car floats, contributing to harbor traffic already made heavy when many of the great new ocean steamships of the day must be served by lightering due to insufficient dock slips large enough to accommodate them. The Harlem River being not so difficult, three railroads with service to the north agreed to build a common Grand Central Terminal, but disagreement among New Jersey railroad companies foiled efforts to organize a great new rail bridge across the Hudson, so the Pennsylvania Railroad, with its newly acquired Long Island Rail Road subsidiary, built the New York Tunnel Extension for its new Pennsylvania Station, New York. Passengers of the other companies changed to the Pennsylvania, or continued to cross the Hudson by ferries and the Hudson Tubes.
The Gowanus Canal being too small to handle late 19th century barges, Newtown Creek was similarly canalized, serving among other customers the newly translocated gas works of the newly amalgamated Brooklyn Union Gas company on the Whale Creek tributary. Refineries and petrochemical factories followed in later decades, greatly intensifying the industrialization of Greenpoint, Bushwick, Maspeth and other outlying former villages in the newly amalgamated City of Greater New York. Greenpoint remained a center of the fuel trade beyond the 20th century.


Hudson River Day Line steamer "New York"
Workaday purposes were not the only ones pursued on the waters. Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad recounts one of the first cruise ship voyages out of Brooklyn in the 1860s for rich people, while the General Slocum disaster points out the late 19th and early 20th century habit of organizing day excursions for humbler folk. Some trips went to amusement parks or other attractions, and some merely to a dock with a footpath to a meadow for dancing, picnicking and other pleasures made more pleasurable by absence from the hectic, noisy city. Day-trippers visited the Great Falls of the Passaic River and other tourist attractions by railroad and sometimes by organized bicycle tours. Hudson River Day Line was the last company doing regularly scheduled day trips from West 42d Street; they went out of business in the 1970s.


Early 20th century elevated rail hub, Downtown Brooklyn
New York was not the first to develop rapid transit in the United States, but soon caught up. Elevated trains, after a modest introduction on 9th Avenue, spread in the 1880s, and late in the century parts of some trolley lines were placed underground. In 1904, the first subway line became operational.

Post-Industrialization

Early in the 20th Century the Department of Dock and Ferries built a series of piers south of 23rd Street to handle the ever-growing traffic of oceanic passenger steamships, which was later called Chelsea Piers.
John D. Hertz started the Yellow Cab Company in 1915, which operated hireable vehicles in a number of cities including New York. Hertz painted his cabs yellow after he had read a study that identified yellow as being the most visible color from a long distance. In 1967, New York City ordered all "medallion taxis" be painted yellow.
From the late 1910s to the early 1930s, Mayor John Francis Hylan authorized a system of "emergency bus lines" managed by the Department of Plant and Structures. These were eventually ruled illegal by the courts, and those that continued to operate obtained franchises from the city.
The increased use of private automobiles greatly affected all transportation projects built more or less after 1930. In 1927, the Holland Tunnel, built under the Hudson River, was the first mechanically ventilated vehicular tunnel in the world. The Lincoln and Holland tunnels were built instead of bridges to allow free passage of large passenger and cargo ships in the port, which were still critical for New York City's industry through the early- to mid-20th century. Other 20th century bridges and tunnels crossed the East River, and the George Washington Bridge was higher up the Hudson.
Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia presided over the construction of the Independent Subway System started by his predecessors, and promoted an airport in Brooklyn and two larger ones in Queens. The Queens airports grew and prospered in later decades, but construction of new subways came to a virtual standstill after the 1950s, proposed expansions being first deferred and then scaled back.
Mayor La Guardia appointed a dynamic young Robert Moses as Commissioner of Parks who, in the West Side Improvement, separated the freight service of the West Side Line (NYCRR) from street life, to the benefit of both and of parks. Later, Moses extended parkways beyond previous limits. After 1950 the federal government's priority shifted to freeways, and Moses applied his usual vigor to that kind of construction.


Port Authority grain storage facility


Inland Freight Terminal Number One
Hudson River crossings were in the charge of the Port of New York Authority, which also took control of freight piers and built a grain elevator in Red Hook, Brooklyn and built an Inland Freight Terminal in Lower Manhattan. The Port Authority oversaw the transition of the ocean cargo industry from North River break bulk operations to containerization ports, mostly on Newark Bay, built a Downtown truck terminal on Greenwich Street and Midtown bus terminal, and took over the financially ailing Hudson Tubes that carried commuters from Hudson and Essex Counties in New Jersey to Manhattan. Plans for a Cross-Harbor Rail Tunnel to replace the declining car float operations of the railroads did not come to fruition; instead most land freight traffic converted to trucks. The Port Authority also took over and expanded the major airports owned by the Cities of New York and Newark, New Jersey.
In 1944, at the height of World War II, the port became the busiest port in world history.
A catalyst for expressways and suburbs, but a nemesis for environmentalists and politicians alike, Robert Moses was a critical figure in reshaping the very surface of New York, adapting it to the changed methods of transportation after 1930. Beyond designing a series of limited-access parkways in four boroughs, which were originally designed to connect New York City to its more rural suburbs, Moses also conceived and established numerous public institutions, large-scale parks, and more. With one exception, Moses had conceptualized and planned every single highway, parkway, expressway, tunnel or other major road in and around New York City; that exception being the East River Drive. All 416 miles of parkway were also designed by Moses. Between 1931 and 1968, seven bridges were built between Manhattan and the surrounding land, including the Triborough Bridge, and the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge. The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge connecting Brooklyn and Staten Island, was the longest suspension bridge in the world when it was completed in 1964. In addition, Moses was critical in designing several tunnels around the city; these included the Queens Midtown Tunnel, which was the largest non-Federal project in 1940, and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel in 1950.
In the 1950s, New York's passenger ship docks in the West 20s were replaced by a modern New York Passenger Ship Terminal in the West 50s, in time for a great increase of ocean passenger service. The Terminal was extensively renovated in the 1970s, in time for the virtual disappearance of the transatlantic steamship trade. In the 1960s the State took over two financially ailing suburban commuter railroads and merged them, along with the subways and various Moses-era agencies, into what was later named the MTA.


(source:wikipedia)
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