From the NYPL collection of photos of the construction of the original IRT subway, ” Broadway & 62nd Street” from 1901:
The Upper West Side was relatively slow to develop compared to the east side. The Upper East Side had the Harlem Railroad providing local service from the built-up city to then-nearly-rural Harlem by 1837, long before anyone dreamed of underground mass transit here. The Upper West Side had long slow commutes by horse-drawn buses and later streetcars, made worse by some large hills, with the Ninth Avenue el providing better service after 1879. Things changed rapidly when the IRT opened in 1904, providing the best commute in the city from the Upper West Side, through midtown, to downtown. All of this is to say that the patchy development seen in the background in 1901 is not a big surprise.
We’re looking north-northwest up Broadway’s diagonal. The two-story building partially hidden by the trusses was at the northeast corner of Broadway and 63rd Street, so the photographer was standing pretty close to the line of 62nd. The focus of the picture, besides the group of men posing, is that beautifully-built wood truss bridge. Except for the fact that the US had moved away from wood-truss bridges some 50 or 60 years earlier, this is pretty enough to be permanent. (I’m not sure if the gleaming white is paint or not. The other wood construction, as can be seen in the foreground, is unpainted, being temporary. The trusses may just be high-grade lumber.) You can see a series of iron hangers off the bottom chord of the middle truss, holding the beams running side to side that make up the basic structure of the temporary street. And you can clearly see the timber grillage that serves as the foundation of the middle trusses end near us.
Why was this built? There was certainly no tunnel under 62nd Street, even assuming that the truss bridge aligns with the street. There is not, and as far as I can tell, never was a set of crossover tracks connecting the four tracks of the subway at this location. (Crossovers require long-span tunnel roofs, since you can’t have the usual columns between tracks.) Maybe there is or was a large sewer or water main there, although it’s a funny place for anything big enough to need that bridge.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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