One Abandoned, One Being Destroyed

There is a lot going on in this February 1, 1956, photo from Max Hubacher, titled “The Third Avenue Elevated being dismantled:”

First, in the center middle distance is the title event: there’s a crane being used to remove the steel deck of what’s left of the el. We’re looking north on Third from just north of 40th Street, which I know because the building under construction on the left, with the “G”s in the windows, is the Socony-Mobile Building at 42nd Street and Third. That textured sheet-metal facade is unmistakable.

It never occurred to me to wonder how the actual demolition was sequenced. The free-standing columns between the crane and our viewpoint, and the fact that we can clearly see between the deck floor beams, give the answer. The pieces that were not base structure – the rails and ties, for example – were removed, then the deck cut up and take off in pieces, leaving the columns. The big worms on the ground in the foreground are air hoses for pneumatic hammers – jackhammers – to remove the paving around the columns and likely the footings for the columns as well. One last detail: there was a station at 42nd Street, and you can see the upper-level steel for the platform roof on the right.

If you look at the street itself, you can see abandoned and partially blocked tracks for streetcars. The Third Avenue streetcars closed on May 28, 1947, replaced by buses. The last operating part of the el in Manhattan, from Canal Street to 143rd Street, closed on May 12, 1955. Third Avenue was given over to cars, becoming, as it remains today, in Robert Caro’s description of one the highways that Robert Moses built in the city, a great roaring concrete gut.

The midtown office district in 1956 did not extend east of Third Avenue. The avenue itself, partially blighted by the el, consisted mostly of tenements with some office-support service businesses at the ground floor. (I assume the bars and restaurants served both office workers coming from the west and people who lived to the east.)