Tedious and Confusing

From the NYPL, a photo by Max Hubacher from April 9, 1949, titled “Photo made…from the railroad bridge connecting Staten Island with the mainland.” And, if you’re anything like me, you’re already confused.

The only operating passenger rail on Staten Island is the Staten Island Railway, officially part of the NYC subway, even though it’s completely isolated from the rest of the system. The SIR runs between the St. George ferry terminal at the northeast corner of the island’s kite-shape to Tottenville at the southwest corner. In the back of my head, I knew that there was a connection between the SIR as it exists today, the long-gone North Shore branch that ran more or less due west from St. George towards the north end of Arthur Kill (the tidal straight that separates Staten Island’s west shore from New Jersey) and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. That connection implies a bridge, I guess, since you certainly weren’t getting from the B&O’s mainland tracks to the island without one.

At this point, I’m going to cheat and refer you to the Wikipedia article, because frankly there is nothing more tedious than railroad corporate history even when you really care about the trackage at hand, which in this case I don’t. So here: the SIR. The short version: there was a small railroad on the island from 1860 onwards, the B&O bought control by 1885 and built a bridge over Arthur Kill, not far from where the Goethals Bridge was built in 1928. The idea was to build a New York branch for the B&O similar to the Pennsylvania’s New York branch. The idea failed because the B&O lacked the Pennsylvania’s resources to create an entirely new business and because the idea that New Yorkers would travel to Staten Island to catch a long-distance train when Grand Central was in the city and the Pennsylvania was (in 1890) a short ferry ride across the Hudson from lower Manhattan was badly thought out. The B&O long-distance passenger connection was short-lived, ending (I think) in 1903, but freight service and local passenger continued. The old bridge was replaced in 1959.

Anyway, in the picture, we’re looking past marshes on the Staten Island shore, across Arthur Kill, to the industrial waterfront of Elizabeth, New Jersey.