Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies: Forgotten New York- Trains and Subways

R-40 SUBWAY CARS

January 8, 2015

On my last visit to the NYC Transit Museum (where I have been a member for over a decade) I noticed that a pair of R-40 subway cars, #4280 and #4281, had been trotted out. These were very futuristic-looking when they originally hit the tracks on BMT and IND lines in 1968-1969, even more so [...]

Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains

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SOUTH FERRY STATION REPRIEVE

January 3, 2015

The South Ferry station at the tip of Manhattan is a very complex operation that now comprises no less than four separate platforms that serve, or served, the IRT 7th Avenue Line (#1) and the IRT Lexington Avenue line (#4, 5). There are inner and outer loops that direct trains to each line; platforms that [...]

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RIDE THE 11 TRAIN

December 9, 2014

Forgotten Fan Brenna Solop recently found this odd sign combination on the #1 train in Manhattan on one of the 1980s-vintage R-62 trains still in use. She was, of course, perplexed about the #11 sign. Notice that the color of the bullet is purple, the same color as the Flushing Line, or #7 train. At [...]

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238th STREET STATION, Riverdale

December 3, 2014

I was finishing up a Forgotten NY voyage of discovery in the Bronx last week when I again noted with delight the survival of the original railings and signage holders on the platform. They have probably had a number of color scemes in their paint jobs over the years, but the ebony version is a [...]

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195 BROADWAY EXIT, Fulton Street

November 25, 2014

There’s been a lot of “ink” and cyberink spilled lately regarding the new Fulton Transit Center, which is basically a new headhouse with rearranged passageways that links the BMT, IND and IRT in Lower Manhattan. Personally, at first glance, I find the place a bit cold and dystopian, but I realize they weren’t going to [...]

Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Financial District Manhattan

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HIGH STREET STATION ARTIFACTS, Downtown Brooklyn

November 24, 2014

photo: Wayne Whitehorne, courtesy NYC Subways When it was opened on February 11th, 1933 as part of the new Independent Subway System, the High Street station on today’s A and C lines, the first or last station in Brooklyn depending on your direction, was indeed located on High Street. When the east-west street was laid [...]

Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Downtown Brooklyn

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BUSHWICK-ABERDEEN STATION, Bushwick

November 12, 2014

I had never known where the entrance was for the Bushwick Avenue-Aberdeen Street station on the Canarsie Line, popularly known as the L train. I was always looking around for it on Google Street View on Aberdeen Street, where the map says it is, and I had never seen the traditional railed staircase that subway [...]

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LAST OF THE HIGH LINE, Chelsea

October 26, 2014

It’s not politically correct to like the High Line Park on the west side of Manhattan, which now runs from West 34th Street between 11th and 12th Avenues all the way south to Gansevoort and Washington Streets. It’s the high-concept park that has been built on what was previously called the West Side Freight Railway, [...]

Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Chelsea Manhattan

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NYC’S RAILROAD GRADE CROSSINGS, Part 3

September 21, 2014

CONTINUED FROM PART 2 I have an affinity for subways, trains and railroads… not at the “foamer” level, but I have enough knowledge to recognize model numbers on most NYC, Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North (formerly NY Central) cars, or “equipment” as the insiders say. I know where the old els were, and where [...]

Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Bloomfield Chelsea Glendale Howland Hook Little Neck Queens Staten Island

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SHEA STADIUM SIGN, Woodside

September 17, 2014

The MTA hasn’t been completely diligent in erasing all traces of Shea Stadium signage, though I’m likely dooming this remnant by showing it here. It’s on the dead-end portion of 62nd Street that faces the LIRR eastbound platform near Woodside Avenue. Shea Stadium closed on September 28, 2008 and was torn down the following year. [...]

Categorized in: One Shots Signs Subways & Trains Tagged with: Queens Woodside

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NYC’s RAILROAD GRADE CROSSINGS, Part 2

September 14, 2014

CONTINUED FROM PART 1 I have an affinity for subways, trains and railroads… not at the “foamer” level, but I have enough knowledge to recognize model numbers on most NYC, Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North (formerly NY Central) cars, or “equipment” as the insiders say. I know where the old els were, and where [...]

Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn East Williamsburg Maspeth Queens

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NYC’S RAILROAD GRADE CROSSINGS, Part 1

September 7, 2014

I have an affinity for subways, trains and railroads… not at the “foamer” level, but I have enough knowledge to recognize model numbers on most NYC, Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North (formerly NY Central) cars, or “equipment” as the insiders say. I know where the old els were, and where closed sections of various [...]

Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Blissville Hunters Point Queens

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HIDING IN TIMES SQUARE

September 5, 2014

There’s been an added emphasis this summer on one of the very first things I ever examined for Forgotten NY when I began this thing in 1999 — the locked door at the west end of the north Times Square Shuttle platform, with the mysterious word “Knickerbocker” emossed over it. This, of course, was a [...]

Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Manhattan Times Square

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WOODLAWN ROAD, Norwood

September 2, 2014

One of the more curious aspects of the Metropolitan Transit Authority is that it will preserve archaic street names for no apparent reason. There was a rationale for preserving older Queens street names, as the Astoria line, the Liberty Avenue line, the Flushing Line and the Rockaway line do, because when these els were built, [...]

Categorized in: One Shots Signs Subways & Trains Tagged with: Bronx Norwood

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RECTOR STREET, BMT Broadway line

August 8, 2014

Rector Street is the one remaining station in Manhattan on the BMT Broadway line still sporting the 1969 makeover all local stations received on the subway section of the BMT Broadway, which opened in 1915 and runs up 4th Avenue, Montague Street, Trinity Place, and Broadway and has terminated at Ditmars Boulevard or Continental Avenue [...]

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FLASHMOB: 10 years since MTA photo ban protest

June 5, 2014

Ten years ago this week it was Occupy Subways as amateur photographers turned out en masse to protest the MTA/NYPD’s proposed subway photography ban. While the measure was indeed defeated and no photo ban went on the books, some police officers still enforce a photography ban, believing it constitutes suspicious activity. While other mass transit [...]

Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: protest

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TRANSIT MUSEUM COLLECTION, Downtown Brooklyn

May 18, 2014

I have been a member of the NYC Transit Museum for at least the past decade. I don’t visit all that often, admittedly, but I annually contribute $50 (up from $40 in 2013) to make sure it stays in existence and can keep mounting exhibits of the now 110-year old [in 2014] NYC subway. The [...]

Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Downtown Brooklyn

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AVENUE H, Brighton Line

April 30, 2014

I’m perhaps a day late and a dollar short with this one, but word recently trickled back to me that a Forgotten New York favorite, the Avenue H stationhouse, had had a makeover, after it survived a date with the wreckers’ in 2002. It was given landmark status by the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission in [...]

Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn Midwood

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CORONA PLAZA

April 22, 2014

The IRT Flushing Line opened in stages between 1915 and 1928. The stations between Grand Central and Vernon-Jackson opened in 1915. Meanwhile, in Queens, the Hunters Point and Court House Square stations opened in November 1916, and the elevated stations out to 103rd/Corona Plaza in April 1917. There were 3 further extensions: to 111th Street in [...]

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EAST 105th STREET STATION, Canarsie

February 22, 2014

The East 105th Street station on the Canarsie BMT (the L train) is in a somewhat odd place for a subway stop — a dead end street with empty lots on one side and a Verizon administrative office on the other. The Breukelen Houses projects are a block south of it. Until 1973 this was [...]

Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn Canarsie

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BROADWAY STATION, Flushing

February 9, 2014

Though I had been in Flushing repeatedly (for Mets games and to visit my friend Gary) it wasn’t until 1993 that I got more intimately familiar with the neighborhood, as I moved there to get closer to a job in Port Washington, Nassau County. My building was a few blocks away from the Long Island [...]

Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Flushing Queens

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NYC’s MOST OPULENT SUBWAY ENTRANCE

January 19, 2014

The 28th Street station on the Lexington Avenue IRT (e.g., the #6 train) is one of what I call the Original 28 — the original 28 stations built by the Interborough Rapid Transit subway company that opened in 1904, running from City Hall up Elm (since renamed Lafayette), 4th Avenue, Park Avenue, 42nd Street and [...]

Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Kips Bay Manhattan

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THE NEW ELS: a Queens glimpse

January 8, 2014

The first elevated train meant to be used as local transit was built by Charles Harvey on Greenwich Street in lower Manhattan from 1868-1870 as The West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway, later the 9th Avenue Elevated. After a clumsy arrangement in which trains took power from steam engines located in the basements of builsings along [...]

Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Jamaica Queens Richmond Hill

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REMEMBERING OPPY on the NYC holiday train

December 8, 2013

The NYC holiday train, an amalgam of several ancient subway cars that ran on BMT/IND lines yoked together and rin on the F and E lines between 2nd Avenue and Queens Plaza, has been a holiday tradition the last few years, and each event gets increasingly popular — and more crowded. The run attracts two [...]

Categorized in: Subways & Trains

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BOROUGH HALL #2-3 PLATFORM, Downtown

November 13, 2013

I could go on about how the Borough Hall subway complex in Brooklyn is one of the city’s prime architectural achievements, with two different eras of IRT construction, one from 1908 at the height of the Beaux Arts terra cotta era, and another from the Age of Mosaics just a few years later. I [...]

Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Downtown Brooklyn

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PENN RELIC

November 5, 2013

Deep in the bowels of Pennsylvania station, somewhere near the baggage check area near Track 1, there stands one of the last relics of when Penn Station served as a monumental entrance to the city. Each track, from 1-21, had a metal and brass track indicator that also relayed the time when the next train [...]

Categorized in: One Shots Signs Subways & Trains Tagged with: Manhattan Penn Station

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THE ARLINGTON EXPRESS, St. George Terminal

October 30, 2013

Staten Island Railway “customers” (I call them “passengers”) must have been scratching their heads in mystification when this roll sign destination was displayed by mistake at the St. George terminal in the early 2000s. There’s no Arlington stop on the line! Well, there had been. It was the last stop on the North Shore Staten [...]

Categorized in: One Shots Signs Subways & Trains Tagged with: St. George Staten Island Railway

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MANHATTAN EL, Manhattanville

October 15, 2013

You’re looking at part of Manhattan’s only stretch of elevated train track south of Dyckman Street. For approximately 70 years, between the 1870s and 1940s, the island was chockablock with elevated lines, subways and trolley lines (which drew power from underground electric conduits). However, a combination of political decisions and the rise of the automobile [...]

Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Manhattan Manhattanville

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FILIGREE on the IRT

October 10, 2013

What are we looking at here? In 1900, when the IRT subway was designed and began construction, engineers had to make a decision about what to do with Manhattan Valley: run the subway deep beneath it, or keep it level and bridge it over the gap? They chose the latter, and we have a beautiful [...]

Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Manhattan Manhattanville

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QUEENSBORO PLATFORM CLASSICS

September 29, 2013

After a several-decade obsession with bland functionality, the Metropolitan Transit Authority began getting more creative with subway platform lighting in the 1990s. Included in that rubric is the refurbishing, or in some cases redesign and reinstallation, of the classic T-shaped platform lamps that generally were used to light up express platforms. Seen here is one [...]

Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens Queensboro Plaza

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MORRIS PARK to CROTONA EAST

July 7, 2013

I decided to check out the new East 180th Street subway stop on the White Plains/Dyre Avenue Line (#2/#5 lines in the Bronx — after a couple of years’ construction, the station was finally done, on the platforms, in the fare control/waiting area and on the exterior. It’s one of the most sumptuous, voluminous subway [...]

Categorized in: Subways & Trains Walks Tagged with: Bronx Morris Park West Farms

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FROM DYCKMAN TO SHERMAN, Inwood

June 29, 2013

Dyckman is a big name in upper Manhattan — bookkeeper Jan Dyckman arrived on these shores from Westphalia (then under Prussian control) in the late 17th Century, married into the Nagle family and gradually controlled much of upper Manhattan Island. His descendants were prominent US patriots — the British burned down the original Dyckman homestead [...]

Categorized in: Subways & Trains Walks

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TRACKS FOREVER GONE, Rosebank

June 27, 2013

It’s 1936 and the Staten Island Rapid Transit, which was then still run by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, has just been elevated over sleepy St. John’s Avenue in this view looking north. The railroad had been running here since the 1880s, but since the B&O foresaw the relative urbanization of the region, it embarked [...]

Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Rosebank Staten Island

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Sunday, January 11, 2015

Forgotten New York- Trains and Subways

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On my last visit to the NYC Transit Museum (where I have been a member for over a decade) I [...]

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