The Easy Route

On Sunday, I mentioned in passing that Ridgewood and Glendale, which are in southwest Queens as much as there is a southwest Queens (that corner isn’t very big because most of where it might have been is Brooklyn) used to have service on the Long Island Railroad and now don’t. I want to take a look at that using three maps of the LIRR: 1901, 1925, and today. The first is just after Brooklyn and Queens were absorbed into “Greater New York”, the second is when the LIRR was in the middle of a big electrification project, and the third is…today.

One all three maps, the purple line is the boundary between Queens county (i.e., NYC) and Nassau county (i.e., suburbs). It’s irregular because individual towns voted in 1898 whether to join NYC or not, so it’s tracing the boundaries between a bunch of 17^th and 18^th century towns. It looks different form one map to the because the 1925 map is not very accurate and the current map is wildly inaccurate.

1901:

1925:

2024:

At a glance we’ve lost NYC stations at Elmhurst on the Port Washington line (the furthest north), Winfield on the main line (the next one south), eight stops (two in Brooklyn) on the Brooklyn branch between Flatbush Avenue and Jamaica, five stops (including Glendale) on the Long Island City leg of the Montauk line (in black), the entire Bushwick branch, the entire Whitestone branch and the entire Bay Ridge branch south of Fresh Pond junction. None of those lines have completely disappeared – they still carry some freight – but more than 25 passenger stations were removed from service. (Note that the Rockaway branch across Jamaica Bay still exists – it was transferred from the LIRR to the subway.) The reasons were the same reasons that rail all over the US was decimated in the twentieth century: more people driving, buses were cheaper to operate, the generally bad reputation of rail.

For the most part, those lines still exist, as freight lines, as abandoned track, or as abandoned rights of way. The Interborough Express plan on the books is mostly the Bay Ridge branch and a piece of the New York Connecting Railroad (the dashed black line on the 1925 map) being put back into passenger service. Great idea; now what about the rest of it? Queens is the largest borough in area and its population in my lifetime has increased from roughly 1.9 million to roughly 2.3 million. Getting people around faster and cleaner should be a priority, and we simply need to look at the past to see how to do it.

You can do the same thing with maps of the rail lines north and north east of the city (the old New York Central and New Haven commuter lines) and the rail lines west of the city (numerous road, but primarily the Erie, the Lackawanna, and the central of New Jersey).