Multimodal

From 1911, a much-worn postcard showing Park Row:

City Hall is off to the left, amongst the trees; the big stone building on the right is the old New York Times headquarters, although the Times had moved uptown to Longacre Square, renamed after them, seven years earlier. The light-colored building on the left with the mansard roof is the Surrogates Court/Hall of Records at Chambers Street, completed only four years earlier.

We’ve got a line of horse-drawn cabs on the right, in front of the old Times Building, and I have to say it never would have occurred to me that they’d be so colorful if not for the artist who hand-tinted this photo for the postcard. There are also streetcar tracks with no streetcars in sight, which is surprising, as this stretch of Park Row was the terminus for several lines, just as it is today for busses.

The center of the photo is, of course, that huge shed on the right and the thing sticking out in front of it. The shed is the Manhattan terminal of the Brooklyn elevated lines that ran over the Brooklyn Bridge, hence the “Entrance to Brooklyn” caption on the lower left. When the bridge first opened, it had a cable-powered shuttle that simply ran from this station to a similar one of the Brooklyn side; eventually the Brooklyn els were re-routed over the bridge tracks. The thing is the end of the City Hall branch of the Second and Third Avenue (Manhattan) els. The southern end of the two el lines intersected at Chatham Square, and from there were two branches heading south: one along Park Row to City Hall, and the other along (mostly) Pearl Street to South Ferry. From 1898 onward, people coming from Brooklyn could transfer from the Brooklyn el to the Manhattan el and head uptown (or downtown, but not very far) without setting foot on the street or transferring more than once. This was a serious improvement in mass transit that promised to hurt the uptown East River ferries the way that the bridge itself had hurt the Fulton Ferry.

Then in 1904, the IRT subway opened. Its southern end was the City Hall station near Broadway and Murray Street, on the other side of City Hall Park. The next station up the line was on Park Row just south of Chambers Street and was logically called the Brooklyn Bridge station not because all that many people were taking the subway to walk over the bridge, but because people were taking the subway to transfer to the els.