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Posted by
Dan
on Sun Jun 17 11:20:07 2007
edf40wrjww2msgDetail:detailStr fiogf49gjkf0d So close -- and yet so far
A groundbreaking for a subway to Brooklyn was held in 1923 but the project has been perennially derailed.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
By FABIAN ARZUAGA and MAURA YATES
STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE
http://www.silive.com/news/advance/index.ssf?/base/news/1182073551300270.xml&coll=1
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. --In the July sun of 1923, the ordinary bustle of St. George was transformed for an afternoon. Crowds of Islanders gathered near the water, where the ferry terminal is now located, to witness what was supposed to be a new chapter in Staten Island's history. Years of petitioning had come to fruition: Construction would begin on a subway tunnel to Brooklyn.
The Police Department marching band escorted Mayor John F. Hylan, the city's borough presidents and a cadre of high-ranking city officials off the ferryboat to meet Staten Island Borough President John Lynch. The group spoke from a platform erected before "one of the largest crowds which ever assembled" in the borough, wrote the Staten Island Advance.
Onlookers clustered around the platform at the ferry, crammed into windows and doorways at Borough Hall and the courthouse and stood along vantage points on Richmond Terrace.
Taking "about a dozen healthy swings" with a silver pick ax and wielding an equally sterling shovel, Mayor Hylan ceremoniously broke ground for the Brooklyn-Richmond Freight and Passenger Tunnel, according to a New York Times account.
Three months earlier, there was a similar groundbreaking event at Shore Road in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn -- the other side of the tunnel shaft.
The trans-narrows tube would have shot people and cargo across the Narrows from St. George to Bay Ridge. The proposed two-mile tunnel section, which alone would cost about $27 million, would have been the longest underwater tunnel in the world when completed in 1929.
But years passed and the tunnel project sat on the city planners' shelves neglected. Work would halt a year later and petitioning would begin again. The incomplete construction of 1923 would turn out to be the closest Islanders have ever come to getting a rail connection to the rest of the city.
LASTING LEGACY
Jolting starts and stops from the end of the 19th-century through the 1960s, Staten Island's campaign for a rail tunnel to Brooklyn has been a series of starts and jolting stops.
With the once-grand scheme relegated to the realm of dreams, Staten Island remains the city's most isolated borough, defined by lack of access to public transportation. In fact, Staten Island is the only county in a roughly 50-mile radius of Manhattan without a passenger railway connection to Manhattan.
The decision to rely on cars and buses has led to the borough's car culture mentality and framed its landscape. Multi-lane avenues, highways, strip malls with parking lots and disorganized suburban neighborhoods have largely sprung up because of the reliance on the automobile.
It's unclear whether the development of off-Island mass transit would have changed this dynamic for the better or worse, but it would have certainly made Staten Island a different place today.
A PROMISING START
When New York City incorporated Staten Island in 1898 -- along with the city of Brooklyn, Kings County and Queens County -- city planners and politicians intended to fortify the legal link with rails, bridges and tunnels.
The earliest known plans for a Brooklyn-Staten Island passenger and freight rail connection were studied in 1888 by railroad businesses, but the first serious proposal for a trans-Narrows tunnel was pitched in 1912 by George Cromwell, then-borough president of Staten Island. Cromwell's plan for a subway tunnel linking Tompkinsville and 67th Street took well over a decade to mature and would break ground as something quite different.
MAYOR HYLAN'S TUNNEL
In 1921, Albany legislators ordered the construction of Brooklyn-Richmond Freight and Passenger Tunnel; its total cost was assessed at $60 million.
The ambitious project would include a 10-mile railroad extending from Arlington to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. People could use existing passenger rails to ride to a St. George Terminal and on to the Fourth Avenue subway at the 59th street station.
The freight line would run from the Long Island Railroad in Brooklyn and would extend as far as Broadway in West Brighton on to elevated rails that would go to Arlington, where a rail yard was already in place.
The tube's freight capabilities would have greatly increased the importance and traffic of the piers, making the Island a central component of the city's ports. The groundbreaking for the tube came on the heels of the completion of a $50 million port project in Clifton that added close to 20 percent more capacity to the city's municipal docking facilities for transatlantic shipping.
But by 1932, the only sign of the project were four huge holes cordoned off by rickety wooden barriers. The holes -- two in each borough that contained the headings for the tunnel -- plus the land bought on the Island for the railway cost the city at least $6 million by the time work stopped in 1924.
COMING TO A HALT
The reasons for the sudden stoppage remain murky.
When bids were being advertised for further construction in early 1925, those with railroad interests opposed the freight line and convinced Albany to block the project. Soon after, the bid advertisements ceased and the city engineers for the project were reassigned.
Exactly who were the "interests" that opposed the plan?
One speculation is that Mayor Hylan sabotaged the project because of his quarrels with the owners of Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT), who would probably benefit from the tunnel.
Another theory is that New York Governor Alfred Smith stopped the tube because he had investments in the Pennsylvania Railroad which had monopoly control of rails entering the city from the south.
But engineering historian Joe Cunningham says not so.
"Historians tend to create this great demonic evil, like with Robert Moses," said Cunningham, referring to the claims that the tunnel was killed by power-crazed bureaucrats. "It's more like something out of a James Bond film like 'Gold Finger' or 'Dr. No.' Realistically, individuals only have so much power."
Cunningham, who has studied city transit and engineering history for more than 30 years, speculated that the demise of the tunnel was possibly a factor of economic worries rather than corruption.
A SLOW DEATH
Although the work stoppage on the Narrows Tube was sudden, the project would not have the dignity of a quick death.
The dream of more mass transit options for the Island would stumble onward through the years becoming a sort of joke for cynical Islanders who had been expecting a tunnel for decades.
Throughout the 1930s, the Staten Island subway tunnel was given vocal support but little else by politicians while pro-tunnel Islanders were time and again baffled by the redundancy of failure.
In 1940, when the Board of Transportation announced it planned to build a Staten Island-Brooklyn subway "subsequent to 1946," the Staten Island Advance printed a scathing editorial that encapsulated the bitter cynicism developed by the Islanders who longed for a subway:
"1946 -- that's six years hence. And [Board of Transportation engineer Edward M.] Law...did not give any assurance that a Narrows subway tube would be built in that year. He simply said that it wouldn't be built before then. About the only thing any Islander can conclude from his remarks is that neither Mr. Law nor any of his transportation board associates are running for public office."
Three years later, the Advance ran an article "Surprise: Narrows Tube Still on Planners List" which reported that the Board of Transportation had long-term plans for a subway from New Brighton or Tompkinsville to Fourth Avenue and 61st Street in Brooklyn. The project would begin "some time after 1955."
Islanders didn't hold their breath.
FORGOTTEN HISTORY
The death knell for decades of rapid-transit plans sounded when the Narrows was crossed by the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in 1964. Robert Moses, the chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority had gained enormous power in planning city infrastructure. He ridiculed the idea of a Narrows subway tunnel. He preferred the crossing to be strictly car-friendly, citing the rise of car culture and the impracticality of adding rail service to a suspension bridge. The clamor for mass transit slowly faded into the annals of history on the Island. These days, the most feverish talk about transit wheels incessantly around jammed roads and HOV lanes. Plans for garantuan mass transit projects have been driven into nothing more than hazy dreams and barroom rants of mass-transit advocates. Fabian Arzuaga and Maura Yates are news reporters at the Staten Island Advance.
© 2007 Staten Island Advance
© 2007 SILive.com All Rights Reserved.
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