Iterative Changes In A Map

Same map as yesterday, but different issues…

If you’re in the business of providing urban mass transit, how do you know when your construction is complete? Or if the changes ever could be complete? The 1924 BMT map catches the company in the middle of a number of transitions, as the Dual Contracts were being built out. Note the tense: the 14th Street/Canarsie (L) line was still in construction, as were the Flushing (7) line and the Broad Street/Nassau Street (J) line.

The main Manhattan trunk for the BMT was the Broadway line, which takes a right turn at 59th Street before heading to Queens. There’s a little stub shown at the turn, just north of the 57th Street station. Possible extension up the West Side? Maybe, but any such plans were squashed when the city decided a few years later to build the 8th Avenue (A) line to speed up getting rid of the 9th Avenue el. That goal is a recurring theme in discussing subway planning: building new subways parallel to (or sometimes directly below) els so that the elevated trains could be eliminated. It worked in some places, such as the 8th Avenue subway replacing the 9th Avenue el, and the 6th Avenue subway replacing the 6th Avenue el, but not everywhere.

The BMT built the 4th Avenue subway (Brooklyn’s 4th Avenue, not Manhattan’s) to replace the 3rd and 5th Avenue els. You can see them snaked around each other in the map. The Brooklyn els were built before there were bridges (other than the Brooklyn Bridge) or tunnels across the East River and so didn’t originally connect directly to local transportation in Manhattan: they dumped you at a ferry terminal or took you over the Brooklyn Bridge and dumped you there, just barely into Manhattan. When the BMT built the Broadway subway, it began the process of converting its el network to the new subway reality. Replacing the 3rd and 5th Avenue els was no great loss, but the Lexington Avenue (Brooklyn Lex, not Manhattan Lex) el was not replaced when it was demolished, nor was the portion of the Myrtle Avenue el south of Broadway (Brooklyn Broadway, not Manhattan Broadway). The els that didn’t get hooked up to the subway system were torn down, reducing service.

On the other hand, the Fulton Street el was replaced by the city’s IND Fulton Street subway. Or at least the Brooklyn part of it was: the city gave up on building subway at the east end of the line, and just took over the old el in Queens.

The most bizarre vestige, and one reminiscent of the human appendix in more ways than one, was the Broadway Ferry station that branched off the Broadway el. Originally, the Broadway line ended at the ferry station. When the Willamsburg Bridge was completed, the trains were rerouted to Manhattan. The bridge killed off that ferry, and eventually the one-stop branch was demolished. If you look at the 1979 map, there are dashed lines on the route of the demolished portion of the Myrtle Avenue el and the Broadway Ferry stub. Those lines represented free transfers to buses (back when free transfers were not common) that replicated the demolished els.

I have to wonder exactly how many people got off the J and M trains at Marcy Avenue to take the free bus a quarter of a mile to a ferry terminal that no longer existed.