Another Moment Of Transition

From Max Hubacher, March 1950, “Brooklyn Bridge”:

We’re looking west from the Manhattan approach, a bit west of the Manhattan anchorage. The Woolworth and Transportation Buildings on the left, and the Municipal Building on the right are still there; many of the foreground buildings, including the World Building with its four-story dome, were demolished not long after.

The most interesting thing is the streetcar. Not its presence, but where it is: those are the elevated-train tracks, immediately adjacent to each side of the center pedestrian walkway. The two roadways (westbound north of the walkway, eastbound south of it) are three lanes wide. The original configuration had one train lane, one shared streetcar and vehicle lane, and one vehicle lane in each direction. The trains were originally shuttles that only ran between the terminals at each of the bridge, but were replaced by extensions of Brooklyn elevated lines after 1898. The els were mostly removed in 1940 and the last of them was removed in 1944, so obviously someone had the clever idea to move the streetcars to the old elevated tracks to free up more space for cars.

A lot of work was just about to start: the last streetcars ran on March 5, 1950, and that event was followed by a phased reconstruction of the deck to eliminate the train tracks (make the roadways each three lanes for cars) and strengthening the bridge by increasing the height of the outer stiffening trusses to match in the inner trusses. In other words, Hubacher took this picture just about as late as you could and see mass transit on the bridge.

I’ve pointed out multiple transitions in this blog, with the links in this sentence being just a fraction. Along the lines of the old joke that Shakespeare’s plays are nothing but strings of quotations, history is a series of transitions without end and often without demarkation between one and the next.