View of the side platform on the uptown side at 96th Street station. Photo by David Sagarin, Historic American Engineering Record, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, August 1978.

Historic American Engineering Record · Survey Number HAER NY-122, pp. 145-206.

By Clifton Hood

Historic American Engineering Record, National Park Service, Department of the Interior, Washington, DC. 20240. The records in HAER were created for the U.S. Government and are considered to be in the public domain. It is understood that access to this material rests on the condition that should any of it be used in any form or by any means, the author of such material and the Historic American Engineering Record of the Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service at all times be given proper credit. For information on HAER, visit Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record/Historic American Landscapes Survey, Library of Congress.

Part I

The day after the IRT opened on October 27, 1904, the New York Tribune announced the "birth of (the) subway crush."¹ New Yorkers welcomed the subway eagerly at first. Hundreds of thousands waited in lines as long as two city blocks for an opportunity to play with the "new toy." But the enthusiasm quickly ended because of overcrowding. Train after train moved along the line, but the crowds never diminished, The cars were packed to the limit, and station platforms were congested.² "In short," the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide said on November 5, "the Subway should have been designed to handle much larger crowds than existing stations and other approaches can accommodate."³ During the next decade, the overcrowding of the IRT argued strongly for the development of additional transit facilities in New York.

The Rapid Transit Commission and the Belmont interests expected the subway to bear heavy traffic loads. Transit experts knew the introduction of a rapid transit railway into an expanding city often did not free the existing lines of congestion. New lines not only drew passengers from old lines but also created their own traffic. By making travel faster and more convenient than before, new railways generated more passenger traffic then they could comfortably carry.⁴ In 1905, the Street Railway Journal said:

One of the most interesting features of opening new rapid transit lines for service in the densely populated districts of large cities is the effect of these additional facilities upon the volume of traffic within the tributary region. It has long been recognized that a permanent solution of the rapid transit problem in a growing city cannot be secured by the development of a single route of high speed service. New facilities not only open up additional avenues of travel and thereby can -- and often do -- relieve congestion existing upon other lines; they apparently create traffic, which sooner or later grows to a volume that requires additional means of transportation to be furnished.⁵

The Rapid Transit Commission intended to construct more rapid transit lines eventually, but in 1900, the one subway under construction was the most the city could afford. The Board hoped it would suffice to relieve transit congestion temporarily.

The subway traffic was greater than anticipated. Frank Hedley, general manager of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, said in October, 1904 that the subway was designed for a maximum daily capacity of 600,000 passengers. According to Daniel L. Turner, an assistant engineer for the Rapid Transit Commission during the IRT construction, the subway builders originally planned on a maximum capacity of 400,000 riders per day. These estimates notwithstanding, most observers agreed that the patronage in 1904 was too great. In December 1904 the IRT averaged 300,000 passengers each day. There was little margin for growth. On the first anniversary of the completion of the subway, the Interborough announced that the line was nearing its limit. By opening new stations, modifying technical features, and altering existing stations, the Interborough managed to pack more people underground. The daily passenger traffic surpassed the 800,000 mark in 1908 and reached 1.2 million six years later.⁶ "Although the present subway is now carrying more passengers than it was originally designed to carry," Bion J. Arnold, a consulting engineer, reported in 1908, "the number of patrons is increasing yearly and the maximum carrying capacity is therefore taxed to the utmost limit."⁷

The subway failed to provide the expected relief for the congested surface and elevated railways. In Street and Electric Railways, 1902, the Bureau of the Census predicted that once the subway opened, a great relief will be afforded to overcrowded elevated lines and to the thousands of long-distance passengers who now take the surface cars.⁸ In fact, the elevated and surface lines remained crowded after 1904. The patronage of the IRT elevated division declined for several years after 1904, but in 1907 the elevated roads carried only one percent fewer patrons than in 1904. Between 1904 and 1910 the surface railways transported an average of 372.5 million passengers, four percent less than the 1904 total.⁹ In 1907 General Manager Frank Hedley said that,

The traffic situation throughout New York when the New York subway was opened was simply a question of calculation, a matter of opinion, as to how many passengers the elevated roads would carry after the subway opened. The subway was opened, and we carried large numbers of people down there. The business on the elevated has not fallen off to the extent that was expected. . .¹⁰

One reason for the unanticipated IRT traffic was the electrification of the surface railways and elevated roads that took place before and after subway construction had begun. In the United States, the total amount of all street railway trackage that was operated with electric power increased from 15.5 percent in 1890 to 97 percent in 1902.¹¹ Following the successful electrification of the Lenox Avenue line in the mid-1890s; New York traction magnates began to convert their cable and horse lines to electricity. The Metropolitan electrified surface lines such as Second Avenue, Madison Avenue, and Columbus Avenue. By 1902, 134 miles of the 197 single-track miles in the Metropolitan system were electric powered. The heavy overhead costs of cable railways restricted street car operation to crowded urban areas, while the low operational costs of electric railways permitted the expansion of routes. Because electric street cars, when unhampered by street congestion, traveled more than three times faster than horse cars, companies were able to extend their lines into undeveloped areas. The extension of roads stimulated residential development which in turn increased street railway patronage.¹² In addition, the speed of the electric cars enabled companies to gain passengers within established areas. K.H. Vreeland, president of the Metropolitan wrote in 1900 that electrifying the Madison Avenue horse car line reduced traveling time by one-third and nearly tripled patronage. Between 1890 and 1903, the total number of surface railway passengers in Manhattan grew from 215.2 to 382.2 million.¹³

Competition from the electric street railways nearly ruined the Manhattan Elevated Railway Company during the 1890s. Its steam driven elevated cars were not only slower and smaller than the electric cars, but also less comfortable and reliable. The patronage of the Manhattan Railway Company totaled 191.1 million in 1901, a decline of 28 million since 1893.¹⁴

The conversion to electrical power reversed the fortunes of the Manhattan Railway Company. Only three years after the switch to electricity began in 1901, the elevated roads carried 50 percent more riders than before. Because the street congestion that delayed surface cars did not hinder rapid transit lines, electric cars ran more quickly on elevated roads. The Manhattan Railway Company thus gained passengers at the expense of the surface roads. But, even though the patronage of street lines grew at a much slower rate after 1901, it did not decrease. From 1901 to 1903, the surface traffic in Manhattan increased by more than five percent.¹⁵

The electrification of the elevated stimulated a general increase in railway traffic The elevated and surface lines in Manhattan carried one-fifth more people in 1904 than in 1901. This increase was mainly due to the greater frequency with which residents and workers traveled. In Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens, each resident took an average of 274 trips on the elevated and street railways in 1904, compared to 248 rides in 1900.¹⁶ By 1902 the transit lines in Manhattan were crowded to capacity. That year the Street Railway Journal reported that,

. . . in New York it seems impossible to keep up with the growth of the city. The elevated and surface lines are operating as many cars as can be accommodated. Every evening during the rush hour, the cars on the principal surface lines run so closely together than there is reason for complaint on the part of pedestrians who are unable to proceed east or west without experiencing much delay and vexation. On the elevated, it is not unusual to see three five-car north-bound trains on the curve at 110th Street. This is about the limit of the present facilities.¹⁷

The electrification of the elevated lines made obsolete the traffic projections of the subway builders. It was apparent by 1902 that the subway, designed before the advent of electrical power on the elevated, would be incapable of handling the increased traffic. William Barclay Parsons, chief engineer of the Rapid Transit Commission, wrote in February 1903 that "tremendous increase in passenger travel on all lines during the past year clearly indicates that when the present subway system now under construction from Brooklyn to the Bronx is completed, it will almost be immediately congested."¹⁸

In 1902 and 1903 the Rapid Transit Commission prepared its plan for the further development of underground and elevated railways. This plan, known as the comprehensive plan, was both the outgrowth of longstanding Commission policies and also a response to the immediate demand for additional facilities.

From 1895 the Rapid Transit Commission conceived of the original subway as the first in a series of rapid transit lines; the only remedy for traffic congestion, the subway planners believed, was the construction of a well-coordinated railway system. The initial subway proposal in 1895 had envisioned additional subway routes on the east and west sides. The plan was abandoned because of the municipal debt limit and the adverse decision of the New York State Supreme Court.

The consolidation of New York City in 1898 and the successful construction of the IRT made possible the enlargement of the system. Transit expansion became essential once the elevateds' electrification resulted in the rapid growth of passenger traffic.¹⁹ One year after the electrification began in 1901, the Rapid Transit Commission reported that:

In no other city has the burden of intra-urban railway traffic reached the proportions existing in New York The present facilities were designed to carry a much smaller number, and, in consequence, all of the present lines are seriously overtaxed. Great as is the present burden of traffic, the coming years will show larger totals . . . Whatever additions to, or extensions of the present railway system are made, should be made on a comprehensive plan, looking not only to the urgent needs of the present day, but the still more urgent needs that will arise in the future.²⁰

The Commission wanted to build new facilities because the rising traffic levels would prevent the subway from providing even temporary relief for transit congestion. In February 1903, William Barclay Parsons, author of the comprehensive plan said that the IRT was merely a stop-gap solution to the traffic problem, arguing that in order to meet the growing and imperative demands for increased facilities, "arising from the natural growth of our city; it was evident that new lines should be laid down as soon as possible."²¹

The comprehensive plan called for development on a large scale. In Manhattan and the Bronx, Parsons recommended the construction of two subways intended to complete the IRT line by providing connections to the lower west and upper east sides: one from the Forty-Second Street station to South Ferry, and the second north along Lexington Avenue from a junction with the IRT at Fortieth Street and Park Avenue to Mott Haven. Parsons also wanted cross-town subways built on Thirty-Second and One Hundred Tenth Streets. From the terminus of the Brooklyn extension at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, Parsons laid out a four-track route beneath Flatbush Avenue to Prospect Park Plaza. Two branch lines extended beyond the park; a two track line into the Flatbush district and a three-track subway to Brownsville. Another route went south from the Borough Hall station under Fourth Avenue toward Fort Hamilton. Parsons also suggested improvements for the elevate4 systems. In order to increase express service, Parsons recommended the construction of addition tracks on existing lines. The Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, for instance, was only able to operate local trains because of all its routes were double-tracked. He also proposed the extension of the elevated roads. in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. For more than ten years, however, the building of new transit facilities was delayed because of disputes that arose about the original subway.²²

The second cause for the overcrowding of the IRT was its innovative express service. Because the IRT was the first subway with separate double-tracks for local and express trains, there was no reliable means of gauging its impact.²³ At the time the subway was designed, the Rapid Transit Commission and particularly the Belmont interests feared that express service might not be profitable. They thought that local trains would carry the bulk of the passengers, and initially restricted express service to the developed areas of Manhattan. The construction plan laid out two tracks beyond Ninety-Sixth Street for local trains, but express service was to terminate at the junction of the Broadway and Lenox Avenue branches. The decision made to add a third track for express service north of Ninety-Sixth Street was in part a response to the traffic increases caused by the electrification of the elevated.²⁴

Some of the Manhattan elevated lines operated express trains, but their service was not complete enough to provide the subway planners with a basis for accurate forecasts. No elevated ran expresses along its entire route. The Ninth Avenue line, for instance, went from Cortlandt Street to the Harlem River in 1902, but expresses only ran between Fourteenth and One Hundred Sixteenth Streets. Less than one-half of the total length of the Manhattan Railway system was served by express trains in 1900. Because the elevateds employed one track for express service instead of two, moreover, the trains proceeded one way at a time. They headed south toward the business district during the morning rush hour, and north at night.²⁵ The subway express service was a major improvement over the elevated. "The striking feature about the subway, which is about to be completed," William Barclay Parsons said in early October 1904, "is its completeness and the fact that it offers a double service for both express and local travel in which respect it is far in advance of any similar line hitherto undertaken."²⁶

The IRT express service was more popular than expected; contrary to the original estimates, expresses carried more passengers than locals. The express trains, which ran one-third faster than locals when not delayed, broke down transportation barriers, to tie outward expansion of the city. People were able to move further from the city core but remain within the same traveling time from their work places. The vast amount of residential construction the subway stimulated in outlying areas also added to the express traffic.²⁷

The introduction of express service also slowed train operations. Because large numbers of passengers transferred between express and local cars, the trains were kept at the stations over schedule. These delays contributed to the traffic congestion since the running of fewer trains reduced the carrying capacity of the subway.²⁸ In his address to the British Institution of Civil Engineers in 1908, Parsons said:

The transfer from one service to another has been not only to exceed estimates, but to occur to such an extent as to seriously delay express trains... By far the greater burden of traffic falls on express trains, whose cars are often crowded to the limit while the local trains contain empty seats.²⁹

The opening of the IRT altered traffic patterns in New York. In the developed sections of Manhattan, surface railways lost long-distance passengers to the faster elevated and underground trains. Although electric street cars were able to attain speeds above 12 miles per hour for brief periods, the street congestion and the frequency of stops reduced their average rates to about eight miles per hour.³⁰ Even slower speeds were maintained by the horse railways, which remained in operation until World War I. In contrast, the elevated trains ran at an average speed of about 14 miles per hour. The Interborough Company scheduled express trains at 25 miles per hours and local trains at 15 miles per hour. The trains usually operated on time for most of the day, but during the peak periods their speeds were reduced to about 13 miles pen hour for locals and 18 miles per hour for expresses The IRT express trains were the fastest form of urban transportation in New York City.³¹

Following the electrification of the elevated roads and the opening of the IRT, surface railways in Manhattan became principally short-distance carriers. "On some of the surface lines paralleling the subway there is a noticeable falling off in traffic," the Street Railway Journal reported in November 1904, "while even on lines remote from the tunnel the effect is apparent of the better service the tunnel affords."³²

In order to compensate for these traffic losses, the street railway companies curtailed the number of cars in service on some routes running from north to south. The City Club of New York published a report in 1907, entitled New York City Transit, that compared traffic counts made on December 29, 1902 and June 17, 1907 during the evening rush hour on the Lexington and Madison Avenue lines. It revealed a reduction since 1902 of more than 50 percent on each line in the number of northbound cars passing Forty-Fifth Street. This decline was too great to be representative of all routes, but other surface lines also lost traffic. The City Club found, for instance, that in 1907 nine percent fewer cars ran through Herald Square during the rush hour than in 1903. This reduction helped to alleviate vehicular congestion, but the cars were still crowded with riders.³³ In his 1905 pamphlet City Transit Evils: Their Causes and Cure, Charles M. Higgins wrote that surface cars were still "crowded and jammed with passengers, inside and out, not like cattle cars, as this would not be allowed by law in a car of cattle, pigs, or sheep, but more like a basket of fish or other dead freight."³⁴

The subway stimulated the growth of railway traffic in outlying districts. Anticipating the residential development of the Bronx, companies such as Union Railway improved service on existing lines and also built new lines to provide connections with the IRT. From 1900 to 1910 the total length of surface track in the Bronx nearly doubled to about 180 miles.³⁵ "The railway lines in the borough of the Bronx," the Street Railway Journal said in 1906, "were laid out primarily as feeders to the elevated roads and the subway."³⁶ During the decade that followed the completion of the IRT in 1904, the total street railway traffic in the Bronx increased 129 percent from 34.7 million to 79.6 million riders. The railways continued to carry large numbers of passengers to the subway stations, but the local traffic became increasingly significant as the borough grew. The development of residential and business districts multiplied the amount of traffic.³⁷

The subway also affected traffic within Brooklyn. Because the transit system in Brooklyn, like Manhattan, was far more developed than in the Bronx, the redistribution of traffic was of greater consequence than the expansion of transit facilities.³⁸ When the Brooklyn extension opened in January 1908, the elevated and surface railways that terminated at the Brooklyn Bridge and the East River ferry depots sustained traffic losses. Instead of commuting to Manhattan by way of the ferries and the bridge, many Brooklyn residents took the IRT. In anticipation of the demand for transport to the Borough Hall subway stop, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company put 150 more cars into service on routes such as Fulton Street and Flushing Avenue.³⁹ Calderwood, vice-president of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, commented that:

Some surface car lines which, it is believed would be affected, such as Gates Avenue, Fulton Street, and Putnam Avenue, showed increased receipts, while the Graham and Flushing Avenue lines, which do not provide direct service to Borough Hall seem to be otherwise ?? affected. This is possibly a result of people traveling to and from the Eastern District adopting entirely new routes.⁴⁰

By creating a new center of distribution, the IRT changed Brooklyn's traffic flow, and bypassed some distant lines.

Beginning in the early 1900s, the passenger traffic on the surface and elevated lines grew rapidly in Brooklyn; the subway played a major role in expanding the traffic but the completion of the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges and the construction of the Long Island Railroad Tunnel were also important developments. In order to meet the increased demand for transportation to the subway stations, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company made improvements on the feeder lines. On the Putnam-Halsey routes, for instance, the company instituted short-line service between Borough Hall and Nostrand Avenue in the Bedford section. In addition, more cars were put into operation on routes from the subway stations to Flatbush, South Brooklyn, and Bay Ridge.⁴¹

The subway received passengers entering Manhattan on the ferries and bridges. The Fort Lee ferry, for instance, shuttled across the Hudson River between New Jersey and upper Manhattan. Before the subway was completed, the Amsterdam Avenue surface line took the ferry passengers downtown. After 1904, most passengers used the subway, especially as an electric railway was built from the ferry terminal to the One Hundred Twenty-Fifth Street IRT station on Broadway. In lower Manhattan, the subway carried riders to the boats docked at South Ferry. The Brooklyn Bridge IRT station became the most crowded subway stop upon opening, because in 1904 the bridge was the only direct connection across the East River. Following the, completion of the Brooklyn subway extension as well as the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges and the Long Island Railroad Tunnel, passenger traffic was diverted from the Brooklyn Bridge and the East River ferry boats.⁴²

The introduction of the IRT resulted in the increase of passenger traffic. The principal consequence of the subway was to stimulate the riding habit. In New York City, the number of riders per capita increased from 274 in 1904 to 343 ten years later. With New Yorkers riding the street and rapid transit railways more frequently, patronage greatly expanded. Between 1904 and 1914, the total number of passengers in New York City advanced by more than 60 percent to 1.753 billion.⁴³ Because the growth of traffic took place without a corresponding expansion of transit facilities, travelers became more crowded over the decade. One index of traffic density is the average number of revenue passengers for each mile of single track. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that the number of passengers per track mile in Manhattan and the Bronx increased from 1.229 million in 1902 to 1.565 million one decade later. In both years, the traffic in New York was the densest in the nation. Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago, for instance, reported densities in 1902 and 1912 that were one-half less than in New York.⁴⁴

Traffic was heaviest on the IRT. In 1915 345.5 million people rode the subway, an increase of 150 percent since 1905. The IRT totaled 3,631,296 passengers per single track mile in 1914, nearly twice the number for all New York City elevated lines.⁴⁵ Of all American railways, the Census Bureau reported for 1912, "the densest traffic is found on the subway systems in New York City."⁴⁶ In fact, the IRT bore a denser traffic than foreign subways. The number of passengers for each mile of route, a statistic not comparable with figures based on single track mileage, was about 9.508 million for the New York subway in 1914. At that time, the Paris subway numbered 7.237 million riders, the London underground 4.454 million, and the Berlin subway and elevated system 5.651 million.⁴⁷

The crowded conditions made subway travel unpleasant. Long lines formed during peak periods before the windows of harassed ticket sellers. Through the gates, passengers entered narrow platforms crowded beyond design capacity, littered with refuse, and reeking of stench. Cold in the winters, the poorly ventilated stations boiled in summertime.⁴⁸ In his address to the New York Academy of Medicine in 1906, George A. Soper said that:

No condition, excepting the heat, caused as much personal discomfort as the odors . . . The odors have been most apparent during hot, damp weather, where the greatest crowding has occurred and in those parts of the subway that are most enclosed.⁴⁹

The pressing of the crowds to board the trains reminded some observers of the Darwinian theory of natural selection. "The logical outcome of the present tendency would be a free fight at the entrance to the platform of every car," Outlook commented in January 1907, "and the opportunity of getting aboard to those who survive in the struggle."⁵⁰

Few rode comfortably. Because seats were at a premium in peak periods, passengers were often compelled to hang onto the straps for the duration of their journeys. The character of the crowd raised tensions. In close quarters, class and racial divisions were exacerbated. In addition, groups of youths went from car to car, annoying and also frightening passengers. Of particular concern was the sexual abuse that women endured. In 1912, Outlook noted that:

Many of the daily travelers are young girls. Among them are always some men not too chivalrous, and sometimes coarse grained, vulgar or licentious. When from a skyscraper there issue simultaneously one or two thousand of these workers, to be crowded together in cars packed to suffocation, the result is not only a disregard of all conditions of comfort and health, but often also a violation of the laws of decency. The women are subjected to a crowding which at best is almost intolerable, and at its worst is deliberately insulting.⁵²

In order to survive the subway, passengers became stoical. "It must be admitted, passengers do not look their best on subways. Some read, some stare, some just placidly exist."⁵³

The overcrowding of the New York railways led a new group of reformers, the Progressives, to call for both the improvement of existing lines and also the expansion of the system. The Progressives thought of rapid transit as a panacea for slum clearance. Jacob Riis, the most prominent housing reformer of his day, called rapid transit "the key to the solution of our present perplexities."⁵⁴ In providing rapid transit between the city core and outlying sections, the subway acted to separate the home from the workplace. With rapid transit, the Progressives believed, workers no longer needed to live in the overcrowded districts near their jobs in the city center. "Though population must be concentrated," Adna F. Weber wrote in his 1902 article about "Rapid Transit and the Housing Problem", "it does not follow that population must be congested unless we assume that a man's abode cannot be separated from his workplace."⁵⁵ From the cities that bred physical disease and social pathology, laborers could move to the suburbs.

The Progressives were critical of existing conditions in the American cities, but few advocated a return to rural areas. Many of the reformers who were concerned with rapid transit had departed from the rural areas, of their youth in order to take advantage of the educational and professional opportunities available in cities.

Adna F. Weber, the author of the famous study, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century, was born in Erie County, New York, in 1870, attended public schools in upstate New York and also Cornell University before moving to New York City to study at Columbia University. Milo Roy Maltbie, also a native of upstate New York, received graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and Columbia. Appointed secretary for the New York City Reform Club and editor of the Progressive journal Municipal Affairs in 1897, Maltbie was also an active member of the National Municipal League He was an economist who specialized in street railway transportation and also gas and electric utilities. William R. Willcox, who grew up on a farm in Chenango County, New York, served as the principal of several rural schools from 1882 to 1887. After moving to New York City, Willcox graduated from Columbia Law School and began to practice law. He was involved in settlement house work with reformers such as Jacob Riis and was appointed Commissioner of Parks for Manhattan and Staten Island in 1902.

In promoting the suburbs as the solution to urban problems, these Progressives wanted to retain the benefits of urban life, Their advocacy of suburbs was at once rooted in memories of their rural past and expressive of their commitment to city life. Suburbs offered not only the open air and space of the countryside but also access to the economic centers in cities. The suburbs thus acted "as a halfway house between city, and country and as embodiment of the best of these diverse worlds."⁵⁷

These Progressives looked upon the development of working-class suburbs as the best solution to urban housing problems. To these critics, reform measures aimed at improving the standard of urban housing evaded the central issue of overcrowding. They believed that the ultimate remedy for housing problems was urban dispersal. Adna F. Weber argued that even though building codes and tenement house inspection laws were essential to the provision of decent urban housing, the poor could escape congestion only by abandoning the cities. Weber was especially critical of the model tenement experiment. The speculators who constructed the vast majority of tenements sacrificed even minimal building standards for the sake of higher profits, but the investors who put up the handful of model tenements limited their profits in order to provide better housing for the poor. According to Weber, the low rents of model tenements discouraged residents from relocating to the suburbs.⁵⁸

Suburbs enabled workers to live in private houses. High land costs compelled the poorer residents of most Manhattan neighborhoods to reside in tenement apartments, but land cheap enough for either the rental or purchase of small houses was available in the outlying parts of New York City. Wanting to attract as many slum dwellers as possible, the reformers needed to cut costs to a minimum. They thus envisioned one-floor houses of four to eight rooms crowded onto small building lots. Yet even these private residences were beyond the means of many workers. To encourage home ownership, the reformers favored the construction of two-family houses so that owners might apply rentals to mortgage payments. These suburban houses, though small and crowded together, would nonetheless be distant from the dirt and congestion of the city.⁵⁹

The Progressives put special emphasis on the social benefits of suburban development. Their concern for the poor was, genuine, but they were equally concerned with the pathological consequences of life in the slums -- crime, social deracination, and corruption. By dispersing immigrant and native workers from cities, the reformers sought to reduce social, pathology. This objective entailed the assimilation of working-class groups into middle-class life.

Of particular importance was the role of home ownership. To the reformers, flat dwellers lacked the community attachment that home ownership brought. Apartment residents remained strangers even in times of distress, but householders pulled together in common cause. Home ownership also instilled personal "qualities such as temperance and thrift."⁶⁰ In his 1903 article on "Small Houses for Workingmen," H.L. Cargill said that:

"The tenement also meets the disposition of many to shirk responsibility. Home ownership means, not only some accumulation through thrift, but it involves a constant amount of forethought and great steadfastness of purpose."⁶¹

In addition, home ownership was understood to strengthen family life. Instead of migrating from apartment to apartment, families remained in their own homes long enough to become stable units. According to the Progressives, private houses awoke in women the domestic and homemaking instincts that lay dormant in tenements. City streets tempted the young into lives of corruption, but the wholesome surroundings of suburban homes enabled children to grow into good citizens.⁶² John Ihlder, secretary of the National Housing Association, said in 1911 that:

Flats are not houses. They have no association with home in the family sense, as children understand it in later life. The cottage is a home. The little frame house standing apart is something to which a memory can cling for good. I don't mean this sentimentally, exactly, but as taking cause and effect and the development of the family unit in one suggestion.⁶³

The Progressives associated suburban development with other reform causes. Because the largest employees of children were located in cities, the reformers hoped that the abolition of child labor would encourage families to move to suburbia. Increased wages helped workers to afford the costs of commuting and suburban housing. In addition, the reformers advocated shorter working hours in order to provide laborers with the time needed for commuting.⁶⁴

The plan for urban dispersal was dependent on the provision of adequate transportation facilities. The Progressives believed that high fares prevented workers from using transit lines.⁶⁵ Even to the highly-paid workman, Adna F. Weber wrote in 1902, "the five-cent fare is unduly burdensome, especially if he has a large family; to the lowly-paid laborer or sweat-shop worker the prevailing rates are actually oppressive."⁶⁶ Although European railways operated separate trains for workers at discounted rates, the Progressives rejected workingmen's trains as unsuitable for a "classless" society like America. Instead, the New York reformers advised reducing the standard nickel fare for the benefit of all passengers.

Working longer hours, and settling far from the city core, laborers were expected to need rapid transportation more than well-to-do suburbanites. Both H.L. Cargill and Adna. F. Weber estimated that workers were able to devote no longer than one and a half hours each day to commuting. According to Weber, average train speeds of 30 miles per hour would be required to reach working-class suburbs. In order to expand the area of settlement, moreover, these reformers favored the expansion of the rapid transit network.⁶⁷

Most reformers knew that the opening of new railways increased land values so that multiple-family structures were often built rather than private homes. But they nonetheless thought that the land would remain inexpensive enough to permit the construction of single-family dwellings. H.L. Cargill said that:

Following the development of transportation facilities and the bringing of cheap land within time limits, there will be a gradually increasing dispersal of the smaller wage-earning population into the outlying boroughs. If the tendency to erect tenements in these districts is checked in time, such a development will create a demand for small houses.⁶⁸

Within the decade, as will be shown later, the Progressives were compelled to address the effect of rapid transit lines on stimulating tenement construction in new areas. For the moment, however, the reformers were concerned with improving the transit facilities in New York.

The dispute that arose between the Progressives and the leaders of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company and the Rapid Transit Commission involved different attitudes about public service. The two groups were also distinguished by career patterns.

A number of leading Progressives were professionals with degrees from prominent universities. Milo Roy Maltbie, for instance received doctorates from the economics departments of the University of Chicago and Columbia University. Edward M. Bassett, later president of the Citizens' Union, and William R. Willcox attended Columbia Law School. John DeWitt Warner, a founder of the Reform Club in 1887 and a frequent contributor to journals such as Municipal Affairs, graduated from a less prestigious law school in Albany. Those Progressives who were attorneys generally engaged in general practice as members of small firms. Few were corporate lawyers. Other professionals, engineers for example, usually served as consultants rather than as corporate employees. In the case of businessmen, few were associated with major corporations. President of the Municipal Art Society in 1904-5, chairman of the Citizens' Union franchise committee in 1904-5, and president of the Reform Club from 1909 to 1913, Calvin Tompkins was a leader in the struggle against the Interborough Company. Tompkins, an engineer, was the head of several New Jersey firms that produced building materials.⁶⁹

The professional and small-business orientation of the reformers played a part in their approach to public service. In opposing entrepreneurial activity in government service, the Progressives insisted on the necessity of making sharp distinctions between the public and the private interest. The municipal engineer, for instance, should be "an engineer rather than a self-interested promoter, a public-spirited citizen rather than an overzealous runner in the race for wealth."⁷⁰ When politicians and businessmen abused the public trust, the provision of vital social improvements was neglected.

In the case of the New York subway, Ray Stannard Baker, a noted "muckracking" journalist, writing in the March 1905 issue of McClure's Magazine, found a clear difference between the public and private interests:

Here is the truth: if the history of the subway shows anything at all, it shows that capital all the way through has not only been greedy, not only pursued a dog-in-the-manger policy, but it has been wholly unoriginal, non-progressive. Capital wants no changes; capital "stands pat." Nothing could show more clearly the utter failure of private monopolies in furnishing the public, promptly, with new conveniences.⁷¹

The selfish pursuit of private interest resulted not only in inadequate public service, but also served to heighten existing social tensions. Financiers such as Belmont were indifferent to popular needs, and by displaying contempt for the public trust they invited class conflict. For the Progressives, who sought through reform to avoid overt class struggle, the distinction between public and private interest was, therefore, imperative.⁷²

From the perspective of the Interborough Company and the Rapid Transit Commission, the Progressive distinction between public and private interest was artificial. Unlike the reformers, the transit leaders were prominent businessmen accustomed to operating in the public realm. Their attorneys, Albert B. Boardman and Edward Shepard, were corporate lawyers. August Belmont and Seth Low were patricians from birth, but even self-made men such as Abram Hewitt became part of the elite.

Isolated from the public, the transit leaders showed little of the social concern characteristic of the Progressives As both patricians and businessmen, the transit leaders thought of themselves as the custodians of the public welfare. Referring to August Belmont as "the community's chief public servant," the New York Times said that:

He will serve his own interests well in proportion as he serves well the interests of the people... his company has a business and a good will that under enlightened administration will yield millions of profit annually; as the higher the enlightenment, the greater the profits.⁷³

The Street Railway Journal, trade paper of the transit industry, spoke of the "partnership in improvements" between management and passengers "however selfish the object of a company may be... the public is the chief beneficiary or the company is heavily 'out.'"⁷⁴

The Progressives saw the Interborough Company as a dangerous monopoly. Ray Stannard Baker pointed out in 1905 that in addition to the subway, August Belmont already controlled the Manhattan Railway Company, street car lines in Queens, and the franchise for the Steinway Tunnel projected to Brooklyn. "The aim of Belmont - and the European Rothschilds behind him," Baker warned, "is complete monopoly."⁷⁵ According to the reformers, Belmont intended to eliminate competition in Manhattan by acquiring the Metropolitan Street Railway Company. The prospect of an IRT monopoly frightened the reformers. Once Belmont established a monopoly, the Progressives expected the IRT to neglect subway operations and to abandon expansion plans.⁷⁶

The reformers also criticized existing subway conditions. Profiting from the overcrowded transit lines, the Interborough was in fact reluctant to make improvements. The Progressives, charged not only that the nickel fare was extortionary, but that subway service was deficient as well. The reformers wanted more subways built, but they were not satisfied with the comprehensive plan of the Rapid Transit Commission.⁷⁷ To these critics, the comprehensive plan was designed so as to promote the creation of an IRT monopoly. In 1903 John Dewitt Warner accused the Commission of "busily laying out new routes to meet the views of the Belmont syndicate."⁷⁸ Indeed, since most of the new lines were extensions of the original subway, only the Interborough could use them. If the Interborough refused to implement the comprehensive plan, the Progressives thought, neither the city nor another company could build the lines. The Progressives also believed that the comprehensive plan did not provide for enough lines to stimulate urban dispersal.⁷⁹

Groups of local businessmen and property owners also called for the construction of additional subways. These local associations were interested in providing their areas with transit facilities rather than, implementing a comprehensive system of railways. Organizations in outlying sections frequently employed the Progressive rhetoric of urban decentralization, but their concern was generally for real estate development instead of slum clearance. In districts along the IRT, the subway overcrowding brought about demands for the building of new subways. Although the opening of the subway stimulated residential development in the Bronx, borough associations such as the North Side Board of Trade protested that the congestion was hampering further growth.⁸⁰ On February 18, 1906, the North Side News reported that:

It has become apparent that real estate operations will have to practically cease in a few years unless the Bronx is given further transit facilities. At the present time the trains and cars of the subway and elevated are jammed night and morning with people who want to get to their homes.⁸¹

The North Side Board of Trade and the Bronx League, the Taxpayers Association and the East Side Rapid Transit Association therefore petitioned the Rapid Transit Commission to begin work on new subway projects.⁸²

The greatest demand for subway construction came from sections inaccessible to the IRT. Local boosters in Manhattan, for instance, feared that real estate development might bypass the upper east and lower west sides in favor of areas along the IRT. Joseph B. Bloomingdale, co-owner of Bloomingdale's department store, was spokesman for a committed of prominent merchants and property owners on the upper east side. "The Belmont interests," Bloomingdale said nine months before the subway opened in October 1904, "must be convinced that the citizens of the east side are profoundly in earnest in their demand for an east side tunnel; that they have been too long put off; and that they are determined to make their demands understood by the authorities."⁸³ The West Side Rapid Transit Association, another committee of businessmen organized before the completion of the IRT, urged the construction of a subway south from the Forty-Second Street IRT station to the Battery. After the subway opened, both the West Side Rapid Transit Association and the Bloomingdale committee continued to press the Interborough and the Rapid Transit Commission. The local associations agreed with the reformers about the basic need for transit expansion, but they opposed the Progressive campaign against the Interborough for fear of delaying construction.⁸⁴

The Progressive campaign was designed to gain greater control over the Interborough Company and transit planning. Some reformers preferred municipal ownership of the subway. New York City held title to the subway in accord with the Rapid Transit Act of 1894, but the reformers understood municipal ownership as meaning government rather than private operation. Only by operating the subway itself, these critics believed, could New York establish sufficient control.

Most Progressives, however, were satisfied with reform measures aimed at restraining the Interborough. R. Fulton Cutting, chairman of the Citizens' Union, said in April 1905 that the uncertainties attending the subway project in the late 1890s justified the provisions of the original contract, but the proven financial success of the IRT warranted the letting of future contracts under more restrictive terms.⁸⁵ The irrevocable contract for fifty years, with a renewal clause for an additional twenty-five years, enabled the Interborough Company to reap exorbitant profits and escape government supervision.⁸⁵ On the 35 million dollar construction project alone, Ray Stannard Baker wrote in 1905, John McDonald and August Belmont made a profit in excess of six million dollars. And by the time the cast-iron contract expired, New Yorkers will have paid "untold millions in profits" to the Interborough in the form of the "unregulatable five cent fare." "The city", Baker concluded, "has actually conveyed its right to govern".⁸⁶

The key to the Progressive plan was competition among transit interests. Because contract number one embodied a property right, the Progressives were unable to alter directly the legal terms under which the Interborough held the original subway. Instead the reformers wanted to amend the Rapid Transit Act of 1894 in order to make bidding more competitive on new subway projects. With a number of companies from which to choose, the city could receive favorable terms and retain control. And since competition would end the Belmont strangle-hold on transit expansion; the Rapid Transit Commission could also use the threat of competition to make the assignment of new contracts to Belmont conditional on the modification of the original subway terms.

In 1903 the Citizens' Union drew up a bill, known as the Elsberg Rapid Transit Bill, based on measures instituted in Boston. Its terms changed over time, but the Elsberg Bill obliged the Rapid Transit Commission to make short-term, revocable contracts for new subways, to separate construction from operational contracts, and either to lease the subways to capitalists or operate them itself.

With short-term, revocable contracts, the Rapid Transit Commission could maintain constant supervision over corporations. By compelling the Commission to let the contracts for operation and construction of the subway to the same bidder, the Rapid Transit Act of 1894 acted to restrict the bidders to major corporations such as the Interborough Company and the Metropolitan Street Railway Company.⁸⁷ The reformers looked upon the Metropolitan as one obstacle to an IRT monopoly, but they also wanted to widen the field of competitors. "This separation of construction from operational contracts would furnish," Ray Stannard Baker wrote, "wholesome competition and enable the public, when a new subway was built, to force really favorable terms with Belmont's monopoly."⁸⁸ In case companies refused to bid on new contracts, the provision for municipal operation was designed to give the Commission "a whip-hand over the monopoly."⁸⁹ The leading reformers preferred to use municipal operation as a device to coerce proper terms from private companies, but they also accepted municipal operation as a last resort.⁹⁰

The Rapid Transit Commission stood in the way of the reform program. Joining with the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, the Commission succeeded in defeating the Elsberg Bill until 1906. Most Commissioners believed that short-term contracts did not offer sufficient inducement to capitalists. All opposed any prospect of municipal operation.⁹¹ Albert B. Boardman, counsel for the Commission, said in March 1904, "this is the most vicious piece of legislation I have ever seen. It is proposed to depart from every principle in the present Rapid Transit Act, and there is no reason for it."⁹²

Indeed, the Elsberg Bill typified Progressive attitudes about public service that were anathema to the Commission as well as the Interborough. The reformers saw the cooperation between the Rapid Transit Commission and the Interborough Company as a betrayal of the public. Ray Stannard Baker wrote that:

The viewpoint of the Commission itself -- a civic body appointed to protect the rights of the public -- is not far different from that of McDonald and Belmont, it is a business engineering view, not a broad, public, civic view. The acts of the commission from the first have been marked not by a bold, free, clear advocacy of what is best for the people, but by the halting, timid, compromising air of men imbued with the old ideals of "business interests" as compared with the "public welfare."⁹³

The resistance of the Rapid Transit Commission hampered the reformers, but it was the merger between the Interborough and the Metropolitan Street Railway, which took place in December 1905. The new enterprise, known as the Interborough-Metropolitan Securities Company, was incorporated in January 1906 with a capital of 155 million dollars. The Metropolitan operated most of the surface lines in Manhattan, and the merger gave Belmont control of nearly all the railways in that borough.

Most observers believed that the consolidation was intended to protect the Interborough investment in the subway; it was the Metropolitan, however, which in fact promoted the merger. By early 1904, the Metropolitan faced financial collapse because of over-capitalization and also the potential competition of the IRT. In an attempt to force a merger with the Interborough, Thomas F. Ryan, president of the Metropolitan, made a proposal to the Rapid Transit Commission in 1904 for the construction of an independent subway system in Manhattan. To forestall ruinous competition with the IRT, Belmont acquired' the Metropolitan. This was the explanation for the merger that Belmont gave in testifying before a state legislature committee, appointed in 1915 to investigate transit regulation.⁹⁴

In her 1974 dissertation The Return on the Investment to the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, Cynthia M. Latta suggests that the threat of competition was only part of the reason for the merger. According to Latta, Belmont apparently needed consolidation to avoid losing control of the Interborough Company. The Hudson and Manhattan Company, which was building two railway tunnels under the Hudson River from lower Manhattan to Hoboken and also Jersey City, encountered financial problems in 1905. One of the major investors in the Hudson and Manhattan Company was Walter Oakman, who was also the third voting trustee for the Interborough stock in addition to Andrew Freedman and August Belmont. Oakman wanted the Interborough to take over the Hudson and Manhattan Company, but Belmont rejected his proposal. At that point, Latta writes,

Oakman then apparently told Belmont that if he did not accede to the demands he, Oakman, would ask Ryan's help and let him into the Interborough. Freedman thereupon urged Belmont to make peace with the Ryan interests and Belmont seemed to fear that if he did not do so Freedman might decide to go with Oakman in a showdown.⁹⁵

This played into the hands of the Metropolitan. As Latta argues, Ryan wanted to merge with the Interborough rather than build another subway. A subway would not provide revenue for several years, but consolidation provided the Ryan interests with immediate income. The financial condition of the Metropolitan was so poor in 1905 that Belmont ended up with a virtually bankrupt company.⁹⁶

The merger gave the Progressives a Pyrrhic victory; they won a battle but came close to losing the war. Owing to the public reaction against the merger, the Elsberg bill was enacted in the spring of 1906 The Elsberg amendments to the Rapid Transit Act included provisions for twenty-five year leases, with twenty-year renewals; the separation of construction from operational contracts; and optional municipal operation. But the Elsberg measure, intended to forestall a monopoly and stimulate competition, was irrelevant once Belmont completed his monopoly; following the merger, the prospects for competition were nil. Ironically, then, the merger compelled the Progressives to change their strategy and propose new reforms.⁹⁷

The consolidation led to demands for the replacement of the Rapid Transit Commission. The reformers believed improved regulation was the only means of establishing control over the Interborough. Because the Rapid Transit Commission seemed neither willing nor able to control the Interborough Company, the reformers decided to oust it. The effort to establish a new public utilities commission allied groups such as the Citizens' Union, the People's Institute, and the Brooklyn Central Committee. Lawrence Veiller, a prominent housing reformer and secretary of the City Club, was a leader in the struggle. Organizations of New York City merchants such as the Board of Trade and Transportation were also active in the legislative campaign. Powerful assistance came from Governor Charles Evans Hughes, a liberal Republican whose investigations of gas and insurance scandals were instrumental in his gubernatorial election in 1906. Hughes signed the Public Service Commissions Act into law in May 1907.⁹⁸

The Act created two five-member commissions. The jurisdiction of the second district was upstate New York, and the first district covered New York City. The law abolished the Rapid Transit Commission, transferring its powers to the Public Service Commission for the First District. Unlike the Rapid Transit Commission, whose authority was limited to the subway, the Public Service Commission supervised all of the railways in New York City, along with the gas and electric suppliers. In part this was due to the fact that the State Board of Railroad Commissioners, which regulated the surface and elevated lines, was dominated by Boss Blatt's Republican machine.

The reformers also wanted to enable the regulatory body to establish control over all of the facilities of the Interborough-Metropolitan. Of the five commissioners, three were active in the struggle against the Interborough: Milo Maltbie, Edward Bassett, and William Willcox. The fourth commissioner, John E. Eustis, was a Bronx lawyer who belonged to the City Club and once served as president of the Citizens' Union. William McCarroll was a Brooklyn manufacturer.⁹⁹

Although the Public Service Commission retained many of the engineers from the Rapid Transit Commission, their status changed, in part this was because once construction ended the need for innovation lessened and the importance of the engineers diminished. The transformation in status also resulted from Progressive attitudes about the proper role of professionals as wall as the suspicions of the Public Service Commission regarding the loyalty of the old engineering staff. The reformers demanded that engineers in public service remain independent of private corporations and they singled out William Barclay Parsons for condemnation as an entrepreneur. The Public Service Commissioners wanted to end the practice of cooperation with the IRT, but the Public Service Commission Act of 1907 required them to retain the old engineering staff in order to prevent the interruption of subway planning. There was, in fact, continuity in the engineering department for the next 17 years, The position of chief engineer for the Public Service Commission and its successor, the Transit Commission, was filled until 1924 by engineers who had worked on the original subway.¹⁰⁰ Yet none was as influential as Parsons, who had prepared most of the major engineering reports for the Rapid Transit Commission. The Public Service Commission also restricted the duties of its chief engineers to narrower technical problems instead of policy matters. And since the chief engineers did not deal intimately with the heads of private companies, they were not as independent as Parsons. Under the Public Service Commission, the chief engineers were subordinates rather than associates.¹⁰¹

Four months after entering office in July, 1907, the Public Service Commissioners ordered a study of subway modifications needed to remedy the unanticipated traffic. Rather than assign its staff engineers to prepare the study, the Commission retained a prominent consulting engineer, Bion J. Arnold.

A native of Michigan, Arnold was educated at Hillsdale College in Michigan, Cornell University, and the University of Nebraska. From 1890 to 1893, Arnold served as consultant for the Intramural Railway Company of Chicago,. which pioneered in building the electrified third rail on the elevated railway at the Columbia Exposition. Arnold was also a forerunner in the development of storage batteries for the generation of electrical current, a system that the Chicago and Milwaukee Railroad and New York Central Railroad adopted under his supervision. Arnold prepared a report on the Chicago traction system in 1902 that formed the basis of the comprehensive network of railways he later implemented as chief engineer. In recognition of his achievements, Bion J. Arnold was elected president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1904 and president of the Western Society of Engineers two years later.¹⁰²

For the Public Service Commission, Arnold wrote six reports upon the Interborough Subway, proposing major changes in subway operations. Praising the IRT "as one of the best railways in existence," Arnold explained that the modifications were needed because the volume of traffic exceeded the estimates incorporated in the subway design.¹⁰³ Because the subway design limited the extent of improvements, Arnold said the carrying capacity could be substantially increased but the subway would nonetheless remain crowded. During the next several years, the Public Service Commission instituted many of his chief recommendations.¹⁰⁴

In 1908, the Interborough began to install a new signal system designed to increase the number of express trains in service. When one train occupied the block of track in a station, the original signal system held an oncoming train in the block of track beyond. the station. This system was established to ensure safe operations; a block of track was the distance required to stop a train running at full speed in addition to a safety margin of 50 percent. But the system seriously delayed trains, especially during rush hours.

The system proposed by Bion Arnold consisted of a number of automatic speed control devices that enabled trains to enter the station block slowly rather than stop completely in the next block. These speed control instruments automatically shut down any train that approached an occupied station above predetermined rates of speed. Because the permitted speed progressively decreased as the station neared, trains safely approached stations in less time than originally allowed. By November 1909, speed control devices were installed on the express tracks at the Ninety-sixth Street, Seventy-second Street, Fourteenth Street, Grand Central and Brooklyn Bridge Stations. By reducing the headway between trains, the new system made possible the operation of two or three more trains per hour.¹⁰⁵

The speed control system helped to relieve the bottleneck at the junction of the Lenox Avenue and Broadway branches. After the opening of the Brooklyn subway station alleviated the overcrowding of the Brooklyn Bridge station, the junction above Ninety-sixth Street became the point of greatest congestion. North of the Ninety-sixth Street stop, each pair of express and local tracks was cross-connected so that trains could pass from one set of tracks to the other. Northbound trains alternated between the Lenox and Broadway divisions, and trains headed downtown changed to either the local or express tracks. Because the crossovers were in constant use, the trains were delayed at the interchange, slowing operations on the entire line.¹⁰⁶ Parsons wrote in 1908 that "this junction is found in practice to be the limiting condition of the whole railway."¹⁰⁷ Following the installation of speed controls, the capacity of the subway track at the junction was increased by one-third and the congestion eliminated.¹⁰⁸

The Public Service Commission also altered the design of the subway car. The original design, with two doors on each side at one end, proved unsatisfactory because of the heavy subway traffic. In his Report Upon the Subway Cars, Bion J. Arnold wrote that single end door cars made the delays at stations.

The present arrangement of loading and unloading passengers through the same end doors of the cars is the chief cause for inefficient operation during the rush-hour period The crowded condition of the car entrances and station platforms results in passengers leaving the cars in single file and with considerable difficulty and discomfort. The unloading under such conditions usually requires about 15 to 30 seconds, and in extreme cases 50 seconds, during the most congestive period at the principal points of transfer.¹⁰⁹

For the new design, Arnold favored the adoption of cars with two pairs of end doors on each side rather than cars with one central door and two end doors. According to Arnold, double end door cars both provided separate entrances and exits for improved circulation and also circumvented the problem of platform gaps. Passengers encountered gaps between the cars and platforms at stations such as Fourteenth Street, but the most dangerous, gaps were at the two stations located on subway loops, City Hall and South Ferry. Because the distance from the curved platform to the center of the cars was about two feet at each station, the operation of center-side door cars was especially difficult.

After a double end door car was put on trial service in February 1909, however, the Interborough Company and the Public Service Commission rejected the Arnold design as incapable of improving passenger circulation. Instead, the Interborough adopted the center-side door car and also proceeded with the development of mechanical gap fillers. In addition to converting the original single-end door cars, the Interborough ordered the first lot of 250 new cars in June 1909 from the American Car and Foundry Company, the Pressed Steel Car Company, and the Standard Steel Car Company. All express trains were equipped with the new cars by 1911, and one year later the center side door cars began to operate on the locals.¹¹⁰

The Public Service Commission wanted to add more cars to the local and express trains. At the time, the length of station platforms limited express trains to eight cars and locals to five. By operating ten-car expresses and seven-car locals, Arnold estimated that each train could carry at least 250 more passengers. Even if the number of trains running on one express track remained constant at 30 per hour, the maximum carrying capacity of 10 car trains would be 37,500 passengers per hour, an increase of one quarter over the eight car expresses.¹¹¹

In 1909, the Public Service Commission decided to lengthen platforms to accommodate ten-car expresses and six-car locals. South from Ninety-sixth Street, express platforms were extended to provide access to the center doors of the end cars. The local platforms on the main line were lengthened to reach all doors of six car trains. The Commission directed the Interborough Company to adapt Lenox division stations as far north as Third Avenue for 10 car trains, but only the uptown platforms of the Broadway and other Lenox stations were to be enlarged. The six car locals were inaugurated in October 1910 and the 10 car expresses in January 1911.¹¹² After one year of operation, the Commission credited the long trains for the "perceptibly improved conditions during the rush hours."¹¹³

The technical modifications increased the capacity of the subway, but the rapid traffic growth sustained the overcrowding. The Public Service Commission reported in 1912 that the modifications made since 1907 enhanced train operations. During that period, the average headway decreased from 2 minutes 4 seconds on express tracks an4 2 minutes 5 seconds on local tracks to 1 minute 48 seconds for both services. Consequently, the Interborough operated an average of 33 trains per hour in 1912 compared to 29 trains five years earlier. And since the trains were longer and ran more frequently than before, they provided about 40% more seats per hour. These were major improvements in view of the added traffic, however, the Public Service Commission concluded that the principal effect of the modifications was to prevent the congestion from worsening.¹¹⁴ "Yet this vastly increased traffic is handled with no greater congestion and inconvenience to passengers than obtained in 1907."¹¹⁵ The Commissioners neglected to mention that by 1907 the overcrowding was already far too great.

The Commission recognized that IRT improvements were merely palliative. Some points of delay were incorporated in the subway itself. On the Lenox Avenue branch between Ninety-Sixth and One Hundred Tenth Streets, for instance, curves in the tracks required trains to proceed slowly. Since northbound trains alternated between the Lenox and Broadway divisions, the defective track restricted all operations above the junction. Little did the builders of the subway think, the Electric Railway Journal commented in 1911, "that a long stretch of track on one division beyond the four-track section would ever limit the capacity of the entire section."¹¹⁶ It was difficult to correct problems such as the Lenox track because of the high costs and also the interruption of subway service. But even if further modifications were made, the Commission knew that the great volume of traffic would continue to overwhelm the IRT.

Part II

The introduction of the subway affected land-use patterns in New York City. The IRT was one of several transit improvements that contributed to the northward movement of the commercial districts that were already encroaching on residences in midtown Manhattan. In midtown the subway played the largest role in the emergence of Times Square as a city-wide entertainment center. On the Upper West Side, the subway allowed for both the development of Broadway as a business district and also for the construction of elite apartment buildings on West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. The greatest impact of the IRT was on the undeveloped territories in the Bronx and northern Manhattan. The Progressives wanted private houses to be erected in these new areas, but the actions of land and building speculators brought about the construction of tenements for the poor.

The subway, though increasing the likelihood of development, could not cause it. The subway itself was incapable of making an area successful. The introduction of transit facilities provided access to either new or established areas, but residential and commercial development depended on conditions such as the intensity and character of the demand for the land, the supply of municipal services, and the state of the building market.¹

Nothing came from the projections that the IRT would establish Fourth Avenue from Fourteenth to Twenty-Fifth Street as a major retail center. At the turn of the century, this district was an amalgam of old apartments and houses, churches and charities, hotels and a few modern business buildings.², The New York Times later recalled lower Fourth Avenue as a "street of hotels, antique shops, and undertaking establishments."³ The downtown area was in transition, with the northward movement of commercial districts already advancing on residential area, but Fourth Avenue was stagnant. Although the opening of the subway provided stations at Fourteenth, Eighteenth, Twenty-third, and Twenty-eighth Streets, retail businesses bypassed the avenue. It is true that hitherto the avenue has been "somewhat of a disappointment," the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide said in April 1905. "It has not justified as yet the predictions of these people who believed that the subway would make it much more desirable for retail purposes than it formerly was, and that it would become a second 6th Avenue."⁴

Instead, a boom in the construction of buildings with office and loft space began in 1909. At Fourth Avenue and Eighteenth Street, for instance, office buildings replaced the Belvedere House, the Florence House, and the Clarendon Hotel in 1909. The subway played a part in this transformation, but the entire section grew because wholesalers required locations at an accessible distance from the retail districts uptown.

The IRT contributed to the northward expansion of commercial districts. This movement resulted largely from the encroachment of the garment industries on the old commercial center below Twenty-third Street. In the decade following the completion of the subway in 1904, the Hudson and Manhattan tubes were extended to Thirty-third street and the Pennsylvania Station was opened. The construction of these lines served to reinforce the northward movement.⁵

Few major stores were built on the subway route. Because stores such as Tiffany's and B. Altman's catered to the well-to-do carriage trade, they were located on Fifth Avenue at sites easily accessible to the upper east side rather than along the subway. As Fifth Avenue became a major shopping center, businesses that served a more varied clientele also clustered there, especially on the cheaper land to the south. Middle-class department stores needed to be near transit facilities, but they did not locate on the IRT route. At the turn of the century, these department stores were centered on Fourteenth Street at Sixth Avenue. By moving further uptown on Sixth Avenue, also the route of an elevated line, many department stores remained within the general vicinity of the old retail concentration. In 1901, Macy's began to build at Herald Square, the first major department store beyond Twenty-third Street. This store was situated both at the intersection of Broadway and Sixth Avenue and also near the planned Pennsylvania station. In 1901, Andrew P. Saks leased the block front on the west side of Broadway between Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth Streets for his first New York store.⁶ "The subway has, indeed, altered the line of traffic," the Record and Guide noted in 1906, "but so far this alteration has not affected the retail trade."⁷

Of all mid-town areas, the subway played the greatest role in the growth of Times Square. In the 1890's, Long Acre Square, as Times Square was known before April 1904, was a center of horse stables and carriage stops. To the west of Seventh Avenue, Hell's Kitchen was notorious for its slums and factories. The renovation of the Long Acre Square area began in the early 1890's with the arrival of the Metropolitan Opera House, the Empire Theatre, and the Olympia Theatre, but the announcement of the subway project gave impetus to the development. In part, the importance of the IRT station was derived from its status as an express stop and as the southernmost station on the West Side. The principle reason for the significance of the station was that Long Acre Square seemed destined to become a nexus of midtown. Situated at the confluence of Forty-second Street, Seventh Avenue, and Broadway, the diagonal avenue forming the spine of Manhattan, Long Acre Square was one of the great centers of New York. In providing access to the square, during the time of the expansion of midtown, the IRT stimulated the growth of the area. In 1900, one electric and two cable railways already operated through Long Acre Square, along with a crosstown line, but most observers believed the subway would put the square within reach of nearly all New Yorkers.⁸ The coming of the IRT persuaded the Record and Guide in 1900 that:

...there can be no doubt that the whole neighborhood of Long Acre Square, north, and south, east and west, will be the scene during the next ten years of a very considerable activity. Indeed it is not too much to say that it is rapidly becoming the centre of the Borough of Manhattan -- the centre, that is, not of its business activities but of that aspect of Metropolitan life which is every year becoming more important: its public social and pleasure-seeking activities. There more than any other spot, do people gather from the east and west, the north and south; and this tendency to so gather will be increased by all the forces which make for the growth of New York City. When the tunnel is completed the neighborhood will be more accessible from more points than any other neighborhood in the city.⁹

Brownstones, tenements, and stables gave way before the onslaught of building activity. By 1902 the Astor Hotel and the New York Times Building were already under construction. Times Square was becoming the Piccadilly Circus of New York.¹⁰

The subway also enhanced the development of Times Square as a theatre district. Like many kinds of businesses, theatres settled in clusters that functioned to attract customers. Because playhouses required central locations that offered access to transit facilities, theatre districts had earlier formed at Union, Madison, and finally Herald Square. Some theatres were already present at Times Square by 1900, but the subway brought about an invasion of the area.¹¹ Of the 65 theatres and amusement places that Phillips Business Directory counted in Manhattan and the Bronx in 1900, five were located in the 12-block section bounded by Sixth and Eighth Avenues and by Fortieth and Forty-eighth Streets. Fifteen years later, this Times Square area was the address of 35 in 100 amusement places, a five-fold increase. These lists included establishments such as music halls and skating rinks, in addition to the majority of legitimate theatres concentrated near Times Square by 1915.¹² "The theatre district now extends from West Thirty-fourth Street northward along Broadway," the New York Times reported in 1907. "Playhouses further south, on or near the main thoroughfare, are practically doomed."¹³ In 1906 the Record and Guide found a "concentration of theatrical businesses in that one vicinity (Times Square) the likes of which has never been seen in New York before."¹⁴ The first theatres were constructed on Broadway, but rising real estate costs forced the builders of establishments such as the Lyceum and the New Amsterdam onto side streets. By 1920, movie houses were taking the place of the legitimate theatres that had already begun to leave Broadway for crosstown streets.¹⁵

Unlike previous centers of theatres, hotels, and restaurants, Times Square grew without important retail businesses. This created an imbalance in the use of the land. "Theatres and hotels should be associated with all sorts of general business," the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide said in January 1909, "so that the real estate will be earning an income during the daytime as well as at night."¹⁶ With the theatres busy only after dark, and without the retail shops to create activity in the day, Times Square would later be infiltrated by businesses such as brothels, which profited at all hours.¹⁷

The subway played a major role in the development of the Upper West Side between Seventy-second and Ninety-sixth Streets. After 1904, Broadway replaced Columbus Avenue as the main business thoroughfare in the district. The most intensive development occurred near the IRT stations, where the largest apartment buildings and stores were erected. In addition, streets such as Seventy-second became shopping areas. The coming of the IRT also stimulated residential growth west of Broadway. Ten to fourteen story apartments covering as much as half a block-front went up on Riverside Drive and West End Avenue.

At the turn of the century, Broadway from Seventy-second to Ninety-sixth Street was unevenly developed. Because the major transit line on the West Side, the Ninth Avenue elevated, ran along Columbus, that avenue had become the principal business thoroughfare of the district. Two blocks away from Columbus, Broadway was a more inconvenient location for both businessmen and residents. Thus while commercial and residential buildings were concentrated on Central Park West, Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, the development of Broadway, West End, and Riverside was sporadic.¹⁸

The only local business center of any consequence on Broadway in 1898 was Sherman Square, the intersection of Broadway, Amsterdam, and Seventy-second Street. On the west side of Sherman Square, the Rutgers Riverside Presbyterian Church and the 8-floor Hotel St. Andrew shared the block-front between Seventy-third and Seventy-second Streets. One block south stood the Colonial Club and the Christ Protestant Episcopal Church. At Seventy-first Street, the Sherman Square Hotel occupied the southwest corner and the Roman Catholic Church of the Blessed Sacrament the southeast corner. East of Broadway from Seventy-first to Seventy-second, a l2-story apartment building was located on the southern corner, while the northern corner was taken by brownstones that fronted onto the side street. Opposite these row houses, the northeast corner of Seventy-second and Amsterdam was vacant.¹⁹.

North of Sherman Square, Broadway was sparsely developed. Here and there large apartment houses were scattered, for instance, the Lyonhurst at Seventy-sixth, the Saxony at Eighty-second, the Versailles at Ninety-first, and the Wollaston and Wilmington between Ninety-sixth and Ninety-seventh. But most of the land was held in large plots by owners awaiting an increase in land values. Because these owners were unwilling to sell or make permanent improvements before the demand for their property grew, most of the land was either vacant or the site of small, temporary structures. On the eastern side of Broadway in 1898, the block-fronts between Seventy-sixth and Seventy-seventh, Seventy-ninth and Eightieth, and Eighty-fifth and eighty-sixth were unimproved. The entire block bounded by Eighty-sixth and Eighty-seventh and by Broadway and Amsterdam was vacant. No buildings were contained on the block-fronts west of the boulevard from Ninety-seventh to Ninety-sixth, Ninety-fifth to Ninety-fourth, Ninetieth to Eighty-ninth, and Eighty-seventh to Eighty-fifth. Of the 84 street corners from Seventy-sixth to Ninety-sixth, nearly 30 were vacant in 1898.

On developed land, the most common buildings were the one- or two-story "taxpayers" that housed small businesses. Taxpayers were temporary structures intended to earn an income sufficient to repay the cost of construction and to cover the taxes on the land and the buildings. Because the erection of these inexpensive structures entailed less risk than the erection of more elaborate buildings, taxpayers were constructed in districts undergoing an uncertain change in land use patterns. Taxpayers were built in response to temporary conditions, but they often survived long after the transformation in land use made possible the construction of structures that made more intensive use of the land. In 1898, taxpayers occupied the eastern sides of the blocks north of Eighty-second and Seventy-eighth.

The other structures ranged from frame shacks to 5-story brick tenements with businesses on the ground floors. There were even coal yards at Eighty-eighth and Ninety-fifth Streets. The vacant land and the irregular buildings gave Broadway a coarse appearance at the turn of the century.²⁰ "Probably no leading thoroughfare in the city had so many low buildings and taxpayers as Broadway..." the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide later recalled. "The result was that Broadway presented anything but an attractive view. The vacant property was in most instances surrounded with broad fences, usually covered with unsightly posters and the small buildings were anything but architectural monuments."²¹

The introduction of the subway brought about an increase in land values. In providing access to the territory west of Amsterdam Avenue, the IRT made possible a more intensive use of the land. From 1905 to 1913, the assessed valuation of the taxable land east of Amsterdam between Seventy-second and Ninety-sixth Streets rose only 11 percent, but the land values west of Amsterdam advanced by 34 percent. The greatest increases occurred on the riverfront. Land values between Riverside and West End Avenues increased 38 percent, compared to 34 percent for the blocks on both sides of Broadway. Although the riverfront values registered the largest proportional increase, the absolute value of the Broadway land became the highest on the Upper West Side.²²

The IRT initiated a building boom that transformed Broadway into a retail center. Construction chiefly took the form of elevator apartments over 10 stories high and smaller business structures. Because the Upper West Side lacked the demand for office space that distinguished the central business district, the Broadway apartment houses were at first the only tall structures erected there, with their ground floors intensively used for retail businesses. Following the opening of the subway, the most important mode of mass transit in the district, Broadway supplanted Columbus Avenue as the principal shopping district of the Upper West Side. Retailers were also attracted because Broadway provided the best connections both within the Upper West Side and also with outside areas, especially midtown Manhattan. This avenue ran not only diagonally through the entire borough but also near the center of the West Side above the sixties. Largely because Central Park presented a barrier to east-west communications, the section of Broadway north of Seventy-second Street was basically a local business district. Automobile dealers began to cluster north of Columbus Circle in the sixties, but businesses that wanted to appeal to a city-wide clientele generally did not venture above Sherman Square.²³

The most intensive development took place near the subway stations. Since the volume of pedestrian traffic was greatest on street corners with subway stops, large apartment houses, banks, theatres, and drugstores located there. As both an express stop and the junction of the Lenox and Broadway divisions, the Ninety-sixth Street station was one of the most important on the IRT. Between 1905 and 1915, more people patronized the Ninety-sixth Street stop than any of the other four stations in this section of the Upper West Side (see Table 1). Commercial development was hampered because the nineties were less accessible to midtown than the southern parts of the Upper West Side, but the heavy subway traffic enabled the Ninety-sixth Street area to become an entertainment center by 1921. A 6-story building that housed the Riverside Theatre and a 7-floor structure that contained a theatre and roof garden occupied most of the block-front east of Broadway between Ninety-sixth and Ninety-seventh. On the southwest corner of Ninety-sixth and Broadway, a bowling alley was the tenant of a 2-story building. One block further south stood the Symphony Theatre.²⁴

Table 1. Number of Tickets Sold at Upper West Side Stations, 1905-1915. Sources: Annual Reports of the Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners and the Public Service Commission - First District.

	1905	1906	1909	1911	1913	1915
96th Street	2,657,887	3,119,254	4,493,427	4,777,460	5,464,885	5,669,595
91st Street	979,789	1,107,070	1,436,685	1,497,891	1,609,518	1,790,513
86th Street	1,792,043	1,998,850	2,916,879	2,935,126	3,079,906	3,321,533
79th Street	1,596,388	1,874,677	2,622,810	2,578,925	2,753,851	2,987,047
72nd Street	2,447,122	2,918,757	4,018,694	4,171,246	4,484,207	4,657,515
Total	9,473,229	11,018,608	15,488,694	15,960,648	17,392,367	18,426,203

The Ninety-first Street IRT station served the fewest passengers of any Upper West Side subway stop. Neighborhood residents preferred to patronize the express station located only five blocks to the north. And since Ninety-first was not a major crosstown street like Ninety-sixth, Eighty-sixth, Seventy-ninth, and Seventy-second, the Ninety-first Street station received less pedestrian traffic than the others. The result was that the Ninety-first Street stop exerted little influence on its surroundings. The 6-story Versailles apartment house at Ninety-first and the 7-floor St. James Court at Ninety-second both predated the announcement of the IRT project. On the block front between Ninety-first and Ninetieth, east of Broadway, the only improvements made by 1921 were a group of small single-floor buildings, most of them constructed away from the streets. The 12-story Tintern and a 13-floor apartment stood on the northern corners of Ninety-first, but this type of building was common to all parts of Broadway.²⁵ [The 91st Street station was in fact closed, due to low ridership and platform extensions at 96th Street, on February 2, 1959.]

Large apartment buildings went up near the Eighty-sixth and Seventy-ninth Street IRT stations. The Belnord Apartments, largest in the world upon completion in 1908, was built on the entire block bounded by Eighty-sixth and Eighty-seventh Streets and by Broadway and Amsterdam. Opposite the Belnord was a small retail building. Two apartment hotels, the Euclid Hall and the Bretton Hall, were located on the block-fronts from Eighty-sixth to Eighty-fifth. At the northeast corner of Eighty-sixth Street, adjacent to the IRT station, the New York Produce Exchange Bank rented office space in the Bretton Hall in 1921. The neighborhood around the Seventy-ninth Street stop was dominated since 1908 by the Apthorpe apartment building, which covered the block between Seventy-ninth and Seventy-eighth and between Broadway and West End Avenue. The Apthorpe, like the larger Belnord, was a 12-floor building designed in Renaissance style and constructed around a large central court. The Apthorpe was owned by the Astor estate, which retained much of the Upper West Side property acquired decades earlier by John Jacob Astor. The family also erected the Astor Apartments between Seventy-fourth and Seventy-fifth Streets, and the Astor Court Apartments between Eighty-ninth and Ninetieth. Across Seventy-ninth Street from the Apthorpe, the First Baptist Church was finished 13 years before the IRT opened. A department store was housed in the 2-story building at the north-east corner of the intersection, while a 12-floor apartment was located at the southeast corner.²⁶

The IRT allowed for the growth of Sherman Square as the major business center on the Upper West Side. The passenger traffic through the Ninety-sixth Street station was slightly heavier than through Seventy-second Street but Sherman Square offered merchants a location both at the junction of the two avenues and also accessible to midtown. The opening of the Seventy-second Street express station stimulated the further development of Sherman Square. In December 1905 the New York Times reported that:

The present strong position held by Sherman Square property may, of course, be traced directly to the operation of the subway. Before the opening of the underground road the availability of this neighborhood for hotels and apartment houses had been thoroughly demonstrated, but it needed the subway crowds to give it prominence as a business centre and to bring about that increase in values which comes with large ground floor rentals. Broadway and Seventy-second Street has to a very large degree supplanted Columbus Avenue and Seventy-second Street as the great distributing points for traffic to and from a considerable area on the West Side... It is probably a conservative estimate that Sherman Square values have increased at least 20 or 25 percent since the opening of the subway.²⁷

In discussing the outlook for Sherman Square, the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide in 1905 also put special emphasis on the subway:

The square at 72nd St and Broadway is becoming one of the most important in the city, and is likely to become still more important. It has the advantage of a subway express station, of the location in the vicinity of many huge apartment hotels, and consequently of a great and growing density of population.²⁸

Following the completion of the IRT, Sherman Square was reconstructed. Built on the block front from Seventy-fifth to Seventy-fourth and developed by W.E.D. Stokes, the Ansonia was finished in 1904. This 17-story apartment hotel was a prestigious New York address. Two blocks further south, the Colonial Club was converted into an office building known as the Lincoln Trust Building, between l905 and 1907. The Christ Church occupied the entire corner at Seventy-first Street before 1925, but the Broadway end of the church was demolished at that time and replaced by a 8-story office building. The Sherman Square Hotel at the southeast corner of Seventy-first and Broadway was sold in 1904 to new owners who made extensive alterations on the old building. In 1921, the Church of the Blessed Sacrament completed work on new buildings located east of Broadway between Seventieth and Seventy-first which was intended to replace the old church at the southeast corner of Broadway and Seventy-first. This church was demolished in order to make way for an 18-story apartment hotel, the St. Gerard Apartments. Opposite the site of the old church, the Dorilton Apartment House was completed in 1900. Because many people passed the southeast corner of Seventy-second Street and Broadway on their way to the subway station in the center of the square, the Import Cigar Company leased the site of a former school house several years after the IRT opened. The northeast corner was vacant before 1904, but two 12-story apartments that covered the entire block-front were put under construction in 1905. The ground floors of the Sherman Square apartment buildings were rented to businesses such as restaurants and clothing shops that profited from the pedestrian traffic. The reconstruction transformed Sherman Square into a prominent business center.²⁹

The land near IRT stations was put to the most intensive use, but the other sections of Broadway were also developed. Only one street corner between Seventy-sixth and Ninety-sixth was vacant in 1921. No coal yards remained, and a number of old buildings were demolished. Yet many of the earlier structures survived, such as the taxpayers lining the eastern block front north of Eighty-seventh Street. The subway made possible higher levels of land use, but previous uses often did not become obsolete since parts of Broadway were already improved with apartments and retail buildings. There was frequently little profit in replacing structures able to function adequately under changed conditions. This was especially true of the areas away from the IRT stations that showed smaller increases in land values. And because much of the improved property was held in small parcels, a number of different decisions entered into the process of development resulting in a mix of old and new buildings.

The most common type of new building was the 12-story apartment erected on half a block-front. The Wellsmore was built at Seventy-seventh Street, the Admaston at Eighty-ninth, the Cornwall at Ninetieth, and the Roxborough at Ninety-second. The other apartment houses covered smaller lot areas and rose fewer stories. Retail stores rented the ground floors of these buildings. In general the construction of the largest and most luxurious apartment houses was confined to the valuable sites adjacent to IRT stations. In addition to apartments, 2- and 3-floor business buildings also went up on Broadway.³⁰

Following the completion of the IRT, some of the major crosstown streets on the Upper West Side emerged as shopping districts. The subway stimulated their growth, but these streets were already important by 1904. In 1807 the New York State Legislature authorized the appointment of a commission to lay out a street plan for New York City north of Houston Street. All the side streets plotted by the Commission of 1807 were 60 feet wide, except for 15 that were 100 feet in width. These were the streets numbered: 14, 23, 34, 42, 57, 72, 79, 85, 96, 106, 116, 125, 135, 145, and 155. As New York grew northward, these side streets became the principal thoroughfares for crosstown traffic. Indeed, the Interborough Company and the Rapid Transit Commission built most stations on the main crosstown streets in order to attract the largest volume of traffic to the subway. The IRT served to enhance the development of these streets. On the Upper West Side, the Seventy-second Street block between Broadway an Columbus Avenue became the crosstown street of greatest consequence after 1904. The 4-story and basement brownstones that lined the street were constructed as elite private residences during the 1880s, but the block lost favor shortly before the turn of the century and some buildings were altered to boarding houses. The location of the block between two centers of commerce and transit offered an ideal site for businesses. To the west, Sherman Square was not only a growing business area but also the junction of two surface railways. Owing to the elevated station at Columbus and Seventy-second, that neighborhood was also an important retail district. After the opening of the IRT greatly increased the number of pedestrians on Seventy-second Street, retailers began to move onto the block. The brownstones were converted into shops at first, but the row houses were later demolished to make way for large apartment buildings that also provided more space for businesses.³¹

Above the Upper West Side, the IRT stimulated the development of businesses on streets such as One-hundred-sixteenth. By 1915 a retail district extended several blocks to the east and west of the IRT stop at One-hundred-sixteenth and Lenox Avenue, an area that was also served by an elevated and several surface railways. Two theatres built in 1913, the 116th Street Theatre and the Regent, were located between Seventh and Lenox Avenues. One block east, at 60 West One-hundred-sixteenth, was the Regun Theatre. At least six movie houses were situated from Eighth to Third Avenue, including the Empress, the Mecca, the Princess, and the Crown. William Waldorf Astor owned the Graham Court, a luxurious 8-story apartment building constructed in 1901 on the east side of Seventh Avenue from One-hundred-sixteenth to One-hundred-seventeenth. A 4-story office building was at the southeast corner of Eighth Avenue, and another office building, the Bernheimer Building, was at the northeast corner of Lenox. A 3-floor building on the block between Fifth and Lenox housed the Columbia Typewriter Company. Most of the six banks located west of Morningside Avenue were concentrated in the area between Fifth to Eighth Avenues. Retail shops included clothing, drugstores, liquor, and furniture dealers. In addition to private enterprises, political clubs, churches and temples, schools, and a post office were among the tenants of One-hundred-sixteenth Street.³²

The completion of the IRT also stimulated the construction of large apartment houses on Riverside Drive and West End Avenue. During the 1880's private residences were built on parts of both roads, but the boom soon ended. In part this owed to the fact that the East Side remained the fashionable; residential district for the elite. Charles Schwab, president of U.S. Steel, erected his mansion on Riverside Drive, from Seventy-third to Seventy-fourth Streets shortly after the turn of the century; but most prominent New Yorkers built their houses on the East Side. The two avenues also languished because of the inadequacy of transit facilities. Since the Columbus Avenue elevated railway was distant and the Broadway surface railway slow, house-seekers avoided the area as inconvenient. More houses were built on West End than Riverside during the late nineteenth century because the cheaper land attracted middle-class residents and the avenue was one block nearer the elevated line.³³

The IRT initiated the construction of large apartments on both avenues. By providing access to the riverfront land, the subway made possible the building of luxurious apartment houses on Riverside Drive. The New York Times reported in 1904 that:

The subway changed the conditions that retarded the residential development of Riverside, however, and with adequate transportation facilities at hand, the natural attractions of the Drive have again caused it to assume a prominent position in the city's building operations. This new construction, by reason of the value of the land, has been of the highest type, and it is evident that the Drive's popularity with apartment dwellers is to be fully as great and certainly more permanent than was its popularity with the builders of fine residences. The unobstructed outlook up and down the river gives an added attraction to its corners, and in this respect the Drive is unique among Manhattan's north and south avenues.³⁴

Modern apartments lined Riverside Drive by 1916. Apartment buildings over five stories high were located between Seventy-ninth and Ninety-sixth Streets, including 12-floor houses. These apartments typically consisted of suites of five to ten rooms that included quarters for servants. Although Riverside Drive became an elite residential area, the New York Central Railroad tracks that ran like a scar through Riverside Park diminished the appeal of the waterfront. The City of New York prepared plans in 1911 for covering the tracks, building a depressed highway for trucks, and landscaping the park, but improvements were not made until the 1930s. Because the highway designed for passenger cars was built above ground at that time, the defacement of the riverfront continued.³⁵

Apartments also went up on West End Avenue after 1904. Since builders were first attracted to the less developed and more valuable riverfront land, West End Avenue was neglected until about 1907. According to the estimates of the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide in 1912, the construction of apartments resulted in the destruction of about one-half of the private dwellings existing in 1907. By 1916, 32 apartments over six stories high were located on West End from Seventy-second to Ninety-sixth Street, including seventeen 12-story and eight 7-story structures. For the most part, the West End flats were less luxurious than the apartments built on the costlier riverside property.³⁶

The Progressives and other groups expected private homes to be built in the new areas of Manhattan and th Bronx that the subway opened up for development. To these New Yorkers, the IRT was important as a means of removing slum dwellers from overcrowded urban districts to the suburbs. "The greatest benefit of the underground railway will come from the fact that it increases the habitable area of the city tenfold, and leaves no possible excuse for slums and overcrowded flat dwellings except the more than suspected preference of the people who now inhabit them," the New York Public Opinion commented on November 3, 1904. "The subway has at least made it possible for a New Yorker, even if he is not a millionaire, to live in a private dwelling within reach of his business."³⁷ The Real Estate Record and Builders Guide opposed most Progressive measures aimed at regulating tenement houses as economically unsound and as infringements on property rights, but the journal strongly advocated suburban development. In September 1904 the Record and Guide stated:

What is much more serious is the fact that the millions of people who elect to live in Manhattan are, for the most part obliged to inhabit small, cramped and uncomfortable tenements and flats, which exercise a bad influence both upon the physique of their tenants and upon the character of their domestic lives. New Yorkers lack good air, good sunlight, and enough space for comfort, and the great want of the subway is that it will begin the process of restoring to the inhabitants of the city sufficient allowance of habitable room, air and sunlight... It will begin the process of restoring cheap residential land to Manhattanites...³⁸

Because of real estate speculation, however, tenements were constructed in the new areas rather than private homes. Speculators profited from the increase in land values that accompanied changes in land use patterns. Much of the land in northern Manhattan and the Bronx was fully improved for uses such as farming before 1904, but the coming of the IRT made possible more intensive use of the property accessible to the subway.³⁹ Edwin H. Spengler wrote that:

The conversion of farm land into land which is suitable for residential or business use has the effect of multiplying its value many times. The subway appears to serve the purpose of increasing the possibility of such conversion or of causing it to take place sooner than it would ordinarily require. To this extent it is instrumental in facilitating a rise in land values.⁴⁰

This transformation to higher levels of usage was the source of speculative earnings. After acquiring tracts in anticipation of increased values; the New York speculators retained the property until the subway was nearing completion. At that time, they began to either sell the land in small parcels to other speculators for the construction of residences or else develop some of it themselves.⁴¹

For the most part, land speculation was the province of professional realtors connected with leading politicians, traction magnates, and capitalists. These entrepreneurs were able to reduce the risks inherent in speculation. By receiving inside information about the subway route, the speculators bought the land with the potential for the greatest increase in value before the prices rose. In order to fund large operations, professionals needed entry into the circles of financiers. Professional and amateur speculators alike lacked reliable standards with which to project increases in values, determine appropriate uses of the land, and set retail prices, but past experience permitted professionals to make better judgment than amateurs. Because these speculators belonged to networks of realtors, they also obtained access to buyers.⁴²

Henry Morgenthau was a leading speculator in the Bronx and Manhattan. He emigrated from Germany at the age of nine in 1865. After attending public schools and the City College of New York, Morgenthau graduated from the Columbia University Law School and began to practice real estate law in 1877. Morgenthau continued to practice law for the next two decades, but he became increasingly involved in real estate promotions. By selling 44 Washington Heights lots in 1891 to buyers who mistakenly anticipated the prompt construction of a subway through the area, Morgenthau received an advance of 170 percent on an equity of $300,000. After acquiring 41 lots located between Avenue A and First Avenue and between Fifth and Seventh Streets for $850,000 in 1898, Morgenthau built tenements on the properties. In 1899 Morgenthau discontinued his law practice and founded the Central Realty Bond and Trust Company. He served as president of the Company until its merger with the Lawyers' Title and Insurance Company six years later. In 1903 Morgenthau helped organize the United States Realty Company, the directors of which included financiers such as Cornelius Vanderbilt and Charles Schwab and politicians such as Hugh J. Grant and Charles H. Tweed. The following decade, Morgenthau was selected as chairman of the finance committee of the Democratic Party and also as ambassador to Turkey. His son, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., served as Secretary of the Treasury for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Owing to his associations with politicians and capitalists during the early 1900s, Morgenthau was able to receive the information and financial backing needed to buy large amounts of property in advance of transit improvements. Before the IRT route was known to the public, a syndicate headed by Morgenthau acquired tracts in the Washington Heights and Fort Dyckman sections of northern Manhattan and also in the south Bronx. In Washington Heights, for instance, Morgenthau bought some 140 lots around the IRT express station projected at One-hundred-eighty-first Street and Broadway.⁴³

Charles T. Barney was probably the largest speculator in land along the IRT. He was born in Cleveland in 1851, the son of A.H. Barney, president of the U.S. Express Company and himself a real estate speculator. Charles T. Barney entered the circle of New York City entrepreneurs through his marriage in 1875 to a sister of William C. Whitney, one of the most powerful traction magnates in New York and also an influential figure in the Democratic Party. Barney was associated with the Knickerbocker Trust for most of his career, serving as vice-president from 1884 to 1898 and as president until shortly before his death in 1907. He was also a special partner in the firm of Rogers and Gould, members of the New York Stock Exchange. By 1900, Barney was an experienced real estate operator. Ten years earlier, Barney, Whitney, W.E.D. Stokes, Francis M. Jencks, and other financiers formed a syndicate, known as the New York Loan and Improvement Company, to develop land on the Upper West Side and Washington Heights. During the next decade, Barney also took an active part in real estate transactions in downtown areas, but he returned to northern Manhattan after 1900. At that time, Barney was appointed as one of the original directors of both the Rapid Transit Subway Construction Company and the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. When August Belmont refused to detour the subway route from Barney's home at Park Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street, Barney sold his interest in both companies. This was perhaps the only time that he ever objected to the effect of rapid transit improvements on his properties.⁴⁴

Barney's early involvement in the IRT project was the key to his success as a speculator. It provided him with advance knowledge of the subway route and the assurance the subway would be completed on time. This assurance was important because experienced speculators were often reluctant to risk the acquisition of land alongside projected transit lines for fear that the lines might be either seriously delayed in opening or never finished. "Mr. Barney was one of the men most intimately concerned with the initiation of the subway project in New York," the Times noted in 1907, and with his real estate operator's instinct he went again largely into realty investment on the Upper West Side along the route that was then known to only a few of the inner circle of subway financiers.⁴⁵ Barney acquired Upper West Side parcels such as the four vacant Broadway corners at the Eighty-sixth Street IRT station, but most of his transactions were made in northern Manhattan and the Bronx.

In order to raise capital for the venture, Charles T, Barney formed a syndicate that included: George Rumsey Sheldon, a New York banker who was a specialist in street railway finance, the treasurer of the New York County Republican Committee from 1899 to 1903, and National Republican Committeeman in 1903-1904; Francis M. Jencks, who was president of the Safe Deposit Company of New York and formerly a partner in the New York Loan and Improvement Company; and William F. Havemeyer, Jr., named after his father, a three-term mayor of New York City and ally of William C. Whitney and Abram Hewitt in the struggle of reform Democrats against Boss Tweed during the early 1870s.

According to the New York Times, the Barney syndicate invested about $6.9 million in vacant property north of One-hundred-twenty-fifth Street. The syndicate began operations in Washington Heights and Fort George, but by 1901 the buying was extended to the Inwood area and the Bronx. At that time, the syndicate acquired 109 lots in the vicinity of the Broadway division stations at Two-hundred-twenty-fifth Street and Two-hundred-thirty-fifth Street in the Bronx. No inventory of syndicate property seems to exist, but Charles T. Barney held title to about 360 parcels of varying size in his own name.⁴⁶

The speculators subdivided their parcels into lots intended mostly for sale to small-scale builders. Since the southernmost tracts provided the best access to downtown Manhattan, they were the first to be sold. In February 1904 the Barney syndicate began to dispose of 150 lots located between Broadway and Riverside Drive from One-hundred-thirty-fifth to One-hundred-thirty-seventh Streets. The syndicate auctioned off most of its holdings during the next 18 months and all of them by 1907. Most land was sold to builders, but some speculators retained parcels to develop themselves. The American Real Estate Company acquired in 1899 an 86-acre tract in the Bronx that extended from Westchester Avenue and Southern Boulevard toward the Harlem River. Although much of the property was sold to developers, the American Real Estate Company built stores, apartments, and duplexes near the Simpson Street IRT stop.⁴⁷

Tenements were built in the new areas. The construction of private homes was uneconomical because of the high land costs. All types of apartments made more intensive use of the land, but building speculation brought about the erection of low-grade multiple-unit dwellings. The building speculators were generally small operators who lacked the capital to make more substantial improvements. Tenements not only provided a sufficient income relative to land costs but also were cheap enough for speculators to erect. These speculators abandoned construction standards in favor of high profits. Since most tenements were built for sale rather than for investment purposes, the speculators were not induced to maintain standards, especially as the structures were often sold before completion. In order to increase their profits and also to put their capital back into operation before the boom ended, the builders hurried construction and cut costs.⁴⁸ The New York Times reported in 1908 that:

... the speculative spurt was so rampant and so many tenement houses were being sold from the plans - many, indeed, before the cellars had been dug - that there was an ever present temptation to 'skin' the buildings. Material prices were at top notch, and with all responsibility for a building's future value and attractiveness off his hands, the builder's interest in many cases naturally ended with putting up a structure as cheaply and rapidly as possible.⁴⁹

Because tenements diminished the appeal of neighborhoods, builders who commanded greater resources than most speculators were reluctant to erect more elaborate structures in the area. The result was that tenements predominated in much of northern Manhattan and the Bronx. The Times concluded that "there were launched in various sections a vast number of ill-advised and ill-considered operations. Structures were put up without regard to renting prospects and without regard to the requirements of a neighborhood."⁵⁰

In upper Manhattan, the boom in tenement house construction began in 1904. This building activity continued at a high level until about 1907. At the height of the boom in 1905, the New York City Tenement House Department recorded 560 building plans for the district west of Lenox Avenue between One-hundred-tenth and One-hundred-fifty-fifth Streets, a fourteen-fold increase since 1902. The 1,396 plans that were filed for this district from 1902 to 1908 amounted to nearly one-third of the total for the entire borough. (See Table 2.) During this period, preparations were made for 472 tenements located north of One-hundred-fifty-fifth Street, ten percent of the number for all of Manhattan. Of the 3,174 tenements houses that were counted north of One-hundred-thirtieth Street in 1909, two-fifths were built since 1902. (See Table 3.) Northern Manhattan contained more than thirty percent of the 3,932 new tenements constructed throughout the borough since 1902, but only 7.4 percent of the total number of tenements in Manhattan. At that time, the buildings were concentrated on the Lower East Side.⁵¹

In the Bronx, the tenement house was the predominant form of construction in the boom that began after 1904. The number of structures for which plans were filed nearly tripled from 882 in 1902 to 2,278 three years later. (See Table 4.) In 1910 the estimated cost of the proposed buildings was seven times greater than in 1902. Of the 16,192 construction plans submitted to the Bronx Bureau of Buildings during the eight-year period, 28 percent were for tenements. In that time, the estimated cost of the tenements amounted to about 60% of the total $229.2 million. More than 20 percent of the 7,256 tenements that the Tenements House Department enumerated in the borough in 1909 were built after 1902.⁵²

Table 2. Location of Tenements in Manhattan for which plans were filed, 1902-1908. Source: New York Tenement House Department, Fourth Report, 1907-1908.

Street	1902		1903		1904		1905		1906		1907		1908		Total
	#	%	#	%	#	%	#	%	#	%	#	%	#	%	#	%
Below 14, east	99	38.2	207	45.1	136	16.3	82	5.6	99	10.6	76	23.2	18	7.2	719	15.9
Below 14, west	35	13.5	44	9.5	46	5.5	9	3.6	11	1.1	24	7.1	17	6.8	186	4.1
14-59, east	25	9.6	27	5.8	36	4.3	4fl	2.8	55	5.9	35	10.4	9	3.6	228	5.0
14-59, west	8	3.0	5	1.0	11	1.3	8	0.5	17	1.8	14	4.1	5	2.0	68	1.5
59-110, east	17	6.5	45	9.8.	151	18.3	300	20.7	152	16.4	19	5.6	13	5.2	697	15.4
59-110, west	21	8.1	24	5.2	63	7.5	85	5.8	62	6.6	16	4.7	12	4.0	283	6.2
110-155, east	12	4.6	14	3.0	93	11.1	187	12.9	132	14.2	13	3.8	6	2.4	457	10.1
110-155, west	38	14.6	75	16.3	260	31.1	560	38.7	271	29.2	108	32.2	84	33.7	1396	30.3
North of 155	4	1.5	18	3.9	38	4.5	172	11.9	127	13.7	28	8.3	85	34.1	472	10.4
Manhattan total	259	100.0	459	100	834	109	1444	100	926	100	335	100	249	100	4506	100

Table 3. Distribution of Tenements in Manhattan By Date of Construction, February 1909.

Street	All Tenements		Built before 1902		Built after 1902
	#	%	#	%	#	%
South of 14th St., east of Broadway	8,896	20.9	8,242	21.3	654	16.6
South of 14th St., west of Broadway	3,181	7.4	3,017	7.8	164	4.1
14th-40th Sts., east of 6th Ave.	2,674	6.2	2,536	6.5	138	3.5
14th-40th Sts., west of 6th Ave.	3,466	8.1	3,440	8.9	26	0.6
40th-86th Sts., east of 6th Ave.	5,939	13.9	5,627	14.5	312	7.9
40th-86th Sts., west of 6th Ave.	4,311	10.0	4,234	10.9	77	1.9
86th-130th Sts., east of Lenox Ave.	7,157	16.8	6,318	16.3	839	21.2
86th-130th Sts., west of Lenox Ave.	3,757	8.8	3,291	8.5	466	11.8
North of 130th St.	3,174	7.4	1,918	4.9	1,256	31.9
Total, Manhattan	42,555	100.00	38,623	100.0	3,932	100.00

Number and Estimated Cost of Tenements and all Structures for which plans were filed, The Bronx, 1902-1910. Source: New York City, Borough of the Bronx, President, Annual Report, 1910 and 1911.

Year	All Structures	Tenements	Percent	All Structures	Tenements	Percent
1902	882	72	8,1	$6,503,900	$1,789,500	27.5
1903	795	88	11.0	6,792,800	2,001,500	29.4
1904	1,684	489	29.0	23,068,100	14,960,700	64.8
1905	2,278	762	33.4	38,313,400	20,142,600	73.4
1906	2,246	464	20.6	27,622,700	16,140,100	58.4
1907	1,967	373	18.9	20,784,600	8,664,300	41.6
1908	1,912	437	22.8	21,415,100	10,642,700	49.6
1909	2,402	870	36.2	40,748,600	29,252,500	71.8
1910	2,026	971	47.9	44,034,400	34,920,000	79.3
Total	16,192	4,526	27.9	229,283,500	146,513,900	63.9

The building of tenements was centered along the IRT in both areas. Most tenements in Manhattan were constructed within one block of either the Lenox or Broadway divisions, and nearly all were located no further than two blocks from the subway. The tenements were concentrated north of One-hundred-thirty-ninth Street to the Harlem River on the Lenox line and from One-hundred-thirtieth to One-hundred-sixtieth on the Broadway branch. Because the higher riverfront values attracted more expensive structures, tenements were not prevalent in the block between Broadway and Riverside Drive.⁵³ The New York World noted in September 1905 that in the Bronx "there is now a distinctive subway zone of flat houses extending almost solidly from Third Avenue north-easterly to Simpson Street... The zone extends on both sides of Westchester Avenue and the Boston Road, and on the west side of Southern Boulevard."⁵⁴ The Bronx Bureau of Buildings reported in 1911 that:

The line of the subway and the adjacent streets and avenues aggregate about 20 linear miles. This represents but 2 3/5 percent of the mileage of all the streets and avenues already laid out in the Bronx, excluding all undeveloped acreage. Yet 23 percent, or nearly one-quarter of all new buildings erected in the Bronx during the past seven years have been erected within that small proportion of developed territory.⁵⁵

The opening of the IRT brought about population increases in northern Manhattan and the Bronx. In New York City, the population was concentrated near rapid transit facilities. Nine of ten New Yorkers lived within one-half mile of rapid transit lines in 1925. Between 1905 and 1920, the number of Manhattanites residing north of One-hundred-fifty-fifth Street grew more than 70 percent, or from 123,000 to 216,000. In 1905, nearly 240,000 people lived along the Lenox Avenue division in northern Manhattan, an area bounded by the Harlem and East Rivers, Eighth Avenue, and One-hundred-ninth Street. The population of this district, parts of which were already developed before the subway opened, advanced 40 percent by 1920. The combined population for these two districts increased by one-half during the fifteen year period, one-tenth greater than the total for all of Manhattan. From 1900 to 1920 the number of people who resided in the Bronx grew by 265 percent to 732,016, compared to 65 percent for the entire city.⁵⁶

The IRT played a limited role in relieving the overcrowded slum districts. For the most part, unskilled workers remained behind in the residential areas that provided easy access to their jobs in the central cities. These lowly paid laborers were unable to afford the nickel subway fare. Since wives and children often worked in addition to adult males, the cost of commuting would have been higher for poor families than for families of better means in which adult males were more likely to be the sole wage earners. Because the only free transfer point on the IRT was at Third Avenue and One-hundred-thirty-ninth Street in the Bronx, many laborers would have had to pay an extra fare in order to reach their places of work. For laborers who spent 10 or 14 hours a day at work, the traveling time of one to one and a half hours between job and home was prohibitive. Since many unskilled workers lacked secure employment and were compelled to move from job to job, they were unable to count on regular journeys to work. These workers required residences in central areas that offered a network of information about job opportunities and a nexus of transportation facilities.

However, the subway did allow families of improving means to escape the slums more easily than before. By opening vast new areas for development, the subway served to lower the threshold required for relocation. The housing in the new districts was affordable, and the time and cost of commuting were manageable. To these New Yorkers, the tenements of northern Manhattan and the Bronx were a considerable step up from the tenements of the Lower East Side.⁵⁷

After the construction of tenements ended their dream of suburbs for workingmen, the Progressives began to promulgate zoning codes partly in an attempt to curtail the impact of transit lines. Their efforts culminated with the enactment of the 1916 resolution, the first comprehensive zoning law in the United States. This code established building zones intended to segregate land uses. By regulating the height, area, and use of buildings, the planners hoped to prevent the encroachment of commercial on residential areas and of densely populated residential on suburban districts. To the New Yorkers who took part in the zoning campaign, the development that followed the opening of the IRT was a prime instance of the need for regulation. Among the members of the Commissions that prepared the zoning code were former public Service Commissioners Milo R. Maltbie, William Willcox, and Edward H. Bassett.⁵⁸ According to Bassett, who served as chairman of the New York City Heights of Buildings Commission from 1913 to 1915 and later became a nationally recognized authority on zoning, the code was essential because "new subways that produced only increased congestion of living and business conditions... would be of doubtful benefit to the city."⁵⁹ In his testimony before the New York City Commission on Building Districts and Restrictions in 1916, Nelson P. Lewis, Chief Engineer of the New York City Board of Estimate and Apportionment, said that:

I remember the sensational development of the Washington Heights districts on the completion of the present subway... Unless there is some restriction on kind of development which can occur, I think we will have a serious problem for the city to deal with.⁶⁰

During the decade that followed the opening of the IRT and that witnessed the construction of tenements throughout the new areas, the reformers went from promoting new subways to seeking means of limiting their impact. No longer was the subway a panacea.

Notes

Part I 1. New York Tribune, October 28, 1904. 2. New York Mail & Express, October 28, 1904; New York Commercial, October 31, 1904; New York Sun, November 1, 1904. 3. Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, November 5, 1904, p. 949. 4. "The Rapid Transit Problem," Street Railway Journal, March 18, 1905, p. 501; William Barclay Parsons to Alexander E. Orr, February 19, 1903, pp 207-208, in Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, Report 1903 (New York: n.p., 1904). 5. "The Rapid Transit Problem," Street Railway Journal, p. 501. 6. New York Tribune, October 28, 1904; October 7, 1905; Daniel L. Turner, "Is there a Vicious Circle of Transit Development and City Congestion?", National Municipal Review, June 1926, p. 322; Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, Report 1904 (New York: n.p., 1905), p. 261; Abraham Lincoln Merritt, "Merritt Journal," May 2, 1908, February 16, 1914, Electric Railroaders Association, New York. 7. Bion J. Arnold, Reports Upon the Interborough Subway. Report No. 4, The Capacity of the Subway, (New York: Public Service Commission, First District, 1907/1908), p. 7. The reports were No. 1, The Equipment and Operation of the Subway, No. 2, The Subway Signal System, No. 3, Report Upon the Subway Car, No. 4, The Capacity of the Subway, No. 5, The Cooling and Ventilation of the Subway, and No. 6, The Traffic of the Subway. 8. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Street and Electric Railways, 1902 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1905), p. 38. 9. New York State Department of Public Service, Metropolitan Division, Transit Commission, Ninth Annual Report: 1929 (Albany; J.B. Lyon Company, 1930), pp. 85-86; New York Times, October 29, 1904. 10. New York State Public Service Commission, First District, Investigation of Interborough-Metropolitan Company and Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, v. 1 (New York Law Reporting Company, 1907), pp 3-254. 11. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Street and Electric Railways, 1907 (Washington, D;C,: Government Printing Office, 1910), p. 29. 12. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Street and Electric Railways, 1902, p. 290; "Electricity Supplants Cable," Street Railway Journal, June 1, 1901, p. 671; "Hearing on Traffic Conditions of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company of New York," Street Railway Journal, January 31, 1903, pp. 176-178; Street Railway Journal, April 4, 1908, p. 581. 13. H.H. Vreeland, "Cars and Car Service in Metropolitan New York," Street Railway Journal October 13, 1900, p. 959; Street Railway Journal, April 4, 1908, p. 581; New York State Department of Public Service, Metropolitan Division, Transit Commission, Ninth Annual Report: 1929, p. 85. 14. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Street and Electric Railways, 1902, p. 36. The 1901 statistic is for the year ending September 30; Street Railway Journal, June 16, 1900, p. 516; Chicago Public Library, Municipal Reference Library, A Study of Rapid Transit in Seven Cities, Municipal Reference Bulletin No. 3 (Chicago: Municipal Reference Library, 1914), p. 16, New York State Public Service Commission First District, Report 1910, v. III (Albany: J.B. Lyon Company, 1911), pp. 26-27. 15. New York Times, July 1, 1901, November 1, 1901, March 19, 25, 1902; William Fullerton Reeves, The First Elevated Railroads in Manhattan and the Bronx of the City of New York, The John Divine Jones Fund Series of Histories and Memoirs, IX (New York: The New York Historical Society, 1936), p. 43; "The Electrical Equipment of the Manhattan Elevated Railway," Street Railway Journal, January 5, 1901, p. 10; "The Opening of the Manhattan Elevated Railway," Street Railway Journal, January 18, 1902, p. 82; New York State Department of Public Service, Metropolitan Division, Transit Commission, Ninth Annual Report: 1929, pp. 85-86; Glen E. Holt, "The Changing Perception of Urban Pathology," pp. 331. In Kenneth T. Jackson and Stanley K. Schultz, eds. Cities in American History, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972). 16. New York State Department of Public Service, Metropolitan Division, Transit Commission, Ninth Annual Report: 1929, pp. 85-86; Street Railway Journal, April 4, 1908, p. 581. 17. "Crowded Cars", Street Railway Journal, May 17, 1902, p. 605. 18. William Barclay Parsons to Alexander E. Orr, February 19, 1903. In Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, Report 1903, p. 208. 19. Ibid.; Alexander E. Orr to William Barclay Parsons, May 29, 1902. In Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, Report 1902, (New York: n.p., 1903), pp. 65-68; Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, Report 1906 (New York: n.p., 1907), p. 18; New York Evening World, October 28, 1904; Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, September 19, 1904, p. 526., July 23, 1904, p. 177. 20. Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, Report 1902, p. 310. 21. William Barclay Parsons to Alexander E. Orr, February 19, 1903. In Board of Rapid Transit Commissioners, Report 1903, p. 208. 22. William Barclay Parsons to Alexander E. Orr, February 19, 1903. In Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, Report 1903, pp. 209-214; William Barclay Parsons to Alexander E. Orr, March 12, 1903. In Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, Report 1903, p. 215; New York Sun, October 23, 1904; James Blaine Walker, Fifty Years of Rapid Transit, 1864-1917, (New York: n.p., 1918), p. 149. 23. "Rapid Transit Subways in Metropolitan Cities," Municipal Affairs, September 1900, pp. 478-479; Robert H. Whitten, "Comparison of Operation of the New York and Paris Subway Systems," Electric Railway Journal, December 11, 1909, pp. 1178-1184; New York World, October 2, 1904. 24. William Barclay Parsons, The New York Rapid Transit Subway (London: Institution of Civil Engineers, 1908), pp. 86-89. 25. William Barclay Parsons to Alexander E. Orr, February 19, 1903. In Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, Report 1903, pp. 210-212; Chicago Public Library, Municipal Reference Library, A Study of Rapid Transit in Seven Cities, pp. 7-8; Reeves, Reeves, The First Elevated Railroads, 43; New York State Board of Railroad Commissioners, Eighteenth Annual Report, v. II (Albany: J.B. Lyon Company, 1901), p. 839. 26. New York World, October 2, 1904. 27. London County Council, The Rapid Transit Subways of New York, (London: Southwood, Smith, 1904), p. 32; Arnold, Reports Upon the Interborough Subway, Report No. 7. The Traffic of the Subway, pp. 15-17. 28. William Barclay Parsons to Alexander E. Orr, February 19, 1903 in Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, Report 1903, p. 249; Arnold, Reports Upon the Interborough Subway, Report No. 3, Report Upon the Subway Car, pp. 3-8. 29. Parsons, The New York Rapid Transit Subway, p. 49. 30. The Merchant's Association of New York, Passenger Transportation Service in New York, (New York: n.p., 1903), pp. 13-19, pp. 97-105; New York State Board of Railroad Commissioners, Twenty-Third Annual Report, Vol. II (Albany: Brandow Printing Company, 1906), p. 1181; New York State Public Service Commission First District, Report 1907, Vol. II (New York: Public Service Commission First District, 1908), p. 29; New York Commercial, August 2, 1907. 31. New York State Department of Public Service, Metropolitan Division, Transit Commission, Ninth Annual Report: 1929, p. 95; New York State Public Service Commission First District, Report 1907, Vol. II, p. 29; Arnold, Reports Upon the Interborough Subway, Report No. 6. The Traffic of the Subway, 17; New York State Public Service Commission First District, Investigation of Interborough-Metropolitan Company and Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, v. I, pp. 130-131; New York Times, August 29, 1907; New York Evening Mail, August 3, 1907. 32. "Subway Conditions About Normal," Street Railway Journal, November 2, 1904, p. 893. 33. City Club of New York, New York City Transit (New York: M.B. Brown, 1901), pp. 24-27; Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, Report 1903, p. 256; New York State Department of Public Service, Metropolitan Division, Transit Commission, Ninth Annual Report: 1929, p. 88; New York Evening Post, August 7, 1907; Charles M. Higgins, City Transit Evils: Their Causes and Cure, (Brooklyn: n.p., 1905), p. 7. 34. Higgins, City Transit Evils. Their Causes and Cure, p. 7. 35. New York State Department of Public Service, Metropolitan Division, Transit Commission, Ninth Annual Report: 1929, pp. 90, 97. The Mileage Statistics include an unspecified amount of track owned by the Westchester Electric Railroad Company and located in Westchester County. Ibid. 36. Street Railway Journal, February 10, 1906, p. 252. 37. Ibid.; New York State Department of Public Service, Metropolitan Division, Transit Commission, Ninth Annual Report: 1929, p. 85; Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, Report 1906, p. 254. 38. From 1908 to 1914, the total length of all railway track in Brooklyn increased 4 percent to 608 miles. Statistics before 1908 classify track in Queens with that in Brooklyn, and statistics before 1919 make an arbitrary division between Brooklyn elevated and surface track "owing to the existence of a considerable mileage having mixed characteristics." New York State Department of Public Service, Metropolitan Division, Transit Commission, Ninth Annual Report: 1929, pp. 90-91, 95-97; Manhattan surface track increased from 281 miles in 1900 to 295 miles in 1914. The miles of track operated by the Manhattan Railway Company; later the elevated division of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, in Manhattan and the Bronx numbered 109 in 1900 and 117 in 1914. Ibid., pp. 90-91, 96-97. 39. Abraham Lincoln Merritt, "Merritt Journal," January 9, 1908; "Effect of New Tunnel on Brooklyn Traffic," Street Railway Journal, January 25, 1908, p. 153; Street Railway Journal, January 18, 1908; New York State Public Service Commission First District, Report 1912, v. I (Albany: J.B. Lyon Company, 1913), p. 189. 40. "Effect of New Tunnel on Brooklyn Traffic," Street Railway Journal, p. 153. 41. Electric Railway Journal, January 2, 1909, p. 46; New York State Department of Public Service, Metropolitan Division, Transit Commission, Ninth Annual Report: 1929, p. 85. 42. Alan Paul Kahn, The Tracks of New York, No. 1: Metropolitan Street Railway, 1907, (New York: Electric Railroaders Association, 1973), Figure 1; Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, Report 1903, p. 226; Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners Report 1905 (New York: n.p., 1906), p. 63; New York City Department of Docks and Ferries, Thirty-Ninth Annual Report (New York: n.p., 1911), p. 21; New York State Public Service Commission First District, Report 1912, v. I, p. 189; Street Railway Journal, January 18, 1908, pp. 88-89. 43. New York State Department of Public Service, Metropolitan Division, Transit Commission, Ninth Annual Report: 1929, pp. 86-87; New York State Public Service Commission First District, Report 1910, v. III (Albany: J.B. Lyon Company, 1911), pp. 25-31. 44. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Central Electric and Power Stations and Street and Electric Railways, 1912. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1915), pp. 2l4-2l5. 45. New York State Department of Public Service, Metropolitan Division, Transit Commission, Ninth Annual Report: 1929, p. 86; Chicago Public Library, Municipal Reference Library, A Study of Rapid Transit in Seven Cities, p. 16. 46. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Central Light and Power Stations and Street and Electric Railways, 1912, pp. 214-215. 47. Chicago Public Library, Municipal Reference Library, A Study of Rapid Transit in Seven Cities, p. 16. The only foreign line for which the number of riders per single track miles was reported was London, which averaged 1.070 million in 1914. In 1914 the lengths of the subway routes were: New York, 29.1 miles; London, 40.2 miles; Berlin, 5.5 miles; and Paris, 48.5 miles. Ibid.; Traffic on the Paris and Berlin subways was dense because neither extended far beyond the city core. For the Paris subway, see Robert H. Whitten, "Comparison of Operation of New York and Paris Subway Systems," Electric Railway Journal, December 11, 1909, pp. 1178-1184. 48. New York State Public Service Commission First District, Report 1910, v. I (Albany: J.B. Lyon Company, 1911), pp. 441-443. 49. George A. Soper, "The Condition of Air of the Rapid Transit Subway," Street Railway Journal, March 31, 1906, p. 496. 50. "The Discomforts of New York," Outlook, January 5, 1907, p. 15. 51. Ibid., "The Strong-Arm Brigades," Electric Railway Journal, August 26, 1911, p. 340; Holt, "The Changing Perception of Urban Pathology," pp. 327-333. 52. "New York's Subway Problem: A Review," Outlook, June 22, 1912, p. 386. 53. James Joseph McGinley, S.J., Labor Relations in the New York Rapid Transit System, (New York: King's Crown Press, 1949), p. 18. 54. Quoted in Roy Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York, 1890-1917, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962), p. 111. 55. Adna F. Weber, "Rapid Transit and the Housing Problem," Municipal Affairs, Fall 1902, p. 411. 56. Municipal Affairs, Fall 1902, p. 506; National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, v. A (New York: James T. White and Company, 1930), p. 445; National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, v. 14 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1967), p. 382; Joel A. Tarr "From City to Suburb: The Moral Influence of Transportation Technology," pp. 202-212. In Alexander B. Callow, Jr., ed., American Urban History, 2nd. ed., (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 57. Tarr, "From City to Suburb: The Moral Influence of Transportation Technology," p. 203. 58. Ibid.; Adna F. Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 469-475; Weber "Rapid Transit and the Housing Problem," Municipal Affairs, p. 415; Lubove, The Progressives and The Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890-1917, pp. 6-11. 59. Weber, "Rapid Transit and the Housing Problem," Municipal Affairs, pp. 412-424; New York Times, September 17, October 10, 1910; Robert Coit Chapin, The Standard of Living Among Workingmen's Families in New York City, (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1909), pp. 75-84; H.L. Cargill, "Small Houses for Workingmen," pp. 331-335, 346-353. In Robert W. DeForest and Lawrence Veiller, eds., The Tenement House Problem, v. 1 (New York: MacMillan, 1903). 60. New York Times, September 17, 1911; Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890-1917, pp. 131-132; Lawrence Veiller, "Housing Conditions and Tenement Laws in Leading American Cities," pp. 131-136. In DeForest and Veiller, eds., The Tenement House Problem, v.1. 61. Cargill, "Small Houses for Workingmen," p. 352. 62. Ibid., pp. 351-353. 63. New York Times, September 10, 1911. 64. Weber, "Rapid Transit and the Housing Problem," Municipal Affairs, pp. 412-417; H.L. Cargill, "Small Houses for Workingmen," pp. 331-132. 65. H.L. Cargill, "Small Houses for Workingmen," pp. 33l-332; Chapin, The Standard of Living Among Workingmen's Families in New York City, pp. 111-114. 66. Weber, "Rapid Transit and the Housing Problem," Municipal Affairs, pp. 414. 67. Ibid., pp. 412-414; Cargill, "Small Houses for Workingmen," pp. 331-332; New York City Commission on Congestion of Population, Report, (New York: Lecouver Press, 1911), p. 25. 68. Cargill, "Small Houses for Workingmen," p. 353. 69. National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, v. 44, (New York: James T. White and Company, 1962), p. 548; Who's Who in New York, 7th ed., (New York: Who's Who Publications, 1917), p. 1063. 70. Robert A. Bruere, "George Staples Rice," Outlook, May 25, 1907, p. 191. 71. Ray Stannard Baker, "The Subway 'Deal'", McClure's Magazine, March 1905, p. 469; See also R. Fulton Cutting, "Public Ownership and the Social Conscience," Municipal Affairs, March 1900, pp. 3-7; West Side Citizen's Transit Reform Committee of One Hundred, Report of Executive Committee (New York: n.p., 1903), pp. 5-7; and Higgins, City Transit Evils: Their Causes and Cure, pp. 6-15. 72. Cutting, "Public Ownership and the Social Conscience," Municipal Affairs, pp. 3-7; Baker, "The Subway 'Deal,'" pp. 458-471; Bruere, "George Staples Rice," Outlook, pp. 191-194. 73. New York Times, December 24, 1905. 74. Street Railway Journal, January 4, 1902, p. 31. 75. Baker, "The Subway 'Deal,'" McClure's Magazine, p. 468. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid, pp. 461-469; Outlook, June 24, 1911, p. 369, 78. John Dewitt Warner, "Municipal Ownership Needed to Correlate Local Franchises," Municipal Affairs, Winter 1902-1903, p. 516. 79. Baker, "The Subway 'Deal,'" McClure's Magazine, pp. 467-469; Outlook, June 24, 1911, p. 369; Higgins, City Transit Evils: Their Causes and Cure, p. 6; Brooklyn Eagle, February 22, 1906; New York Evening Post, August 7, 1907; New York Press, February 20, 1906. 80. New York Telegram, December 29, 1906; New York World, July 24, 1905. 81. North Side News, February 18, 1906. 82. Ibid. 83. New York Times, January 26, 1904. 84. New York World, October 2, 1904, July 24, 1905; New York Times, December 10, 1908. 85. R. Fulton Cutting, "Shall New York Own Its Subway?" Outlook, April 15, 1905, pp. 931-933; "New York's Subway Problem: A Review," Outlook, pp. 384-388; Outlook, December 29, 1906; William J. Gaynor, "New York's Subway Policy," Municipal Affairs, June 1901, p. 434; Baker, "The Subway 'Deal,'" McClure's Magazine, pp. 463-469; Warner, "Municipal Ownership Needed to Correlate Local Franchises," Municipal Affairs, pp. 515-524.

86. Baker, "The Subway 'Deal,'" McClure's Magazine, p. 494. 87. Cutting, "Shall New York Own Its Subway?" Outlook, pp. 931-933; "New York's Subway Problem: A Review," Outlook, pp. 384-388; B.L. Beal, "Boston Municipal Subway," Municipal Affairs, June 1900, pp. 219-220; Charles A. Beard, The Traction Crisis in New York, Municipal Research Pamphlet No. 94 (New York: Bureau of Municipal Research and Training School for Public Service, 1919), pp. 10-16; Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 25, 1903, pp. 88l-882. 88. Baker, "The Subway 'Deal,'" McClure's Magazine, p. 467 89. Ibid. 90. Cutting, "Shall New York Own Its Subway?" Outlook, pp. 931-933. 91. Ibid., p. 934; New York American, April 5, 1905; Brooklyn Eagle, February 22, 1906; New York Press, April 14, 1906. 92. New York Times, March 11, 1905. 93. Baker, "The Subway 'Deal,'" McClure's Magazine, pp. 462-463. 94. Mark D. Hirsch, William C. Whitney: Modern Warwick, (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1948), pp. 522-528; William Russell Hochman, "William J. Gaynor: The Years of Fruition," (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1955), pp. 360-364; New York Sun, December 23, 1905; Brooklyn Eagle, December 22, 1905; Brooklyn Citizen, February 22, 1906. 95. Cynthia M. Latta, "The Return on the Investment in the Interborough Rapid Transit Company," (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1974), p. 71. 96. Ibid., pp. 67-76. 97. New York Evening World, December 23, 1905; Outlook, April 21, December 29, 1906. 98. Brooklyn Eagle, March 10, 1907; New York Herald, December 27, 1907; Wall Street Journal, February 26, 1907; Robert F. Wesser, Charles Evans Hughes: Politics and Reform in New York, 1905-1910, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 21-33, p. 154, pp. 160-169. 99. Wesser, Charles Evans Hughes: Politics and Reform in New York, 1905-1910, pp. 153-155; Herb J. Pusey, Charles Evans Hughes, v. I, (New York: MacMillan, 1951), pp. 200-207; Street Railway Journal, July 6, 1907, p. 45; James Blaine Walker, Fifty Years of Rapid Transit, 1864-1917, (New York: n.p., 1918), p. 209; National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, v. 25 (New York: James T. White and Company, 1936), p. 327. 100. George S. Rice, who succeeded William Barclay Parsons as chief engineer of the Rapid Transit Commission, continued in that capacity for the Public Service Commission until late 1907. Henry B. Seaman, the division engineer in charge of the first IRT section until 1902, was chief engineer from 1907 to 1909. Alfred Craven, second division engineer and also deputy chief engineer during the IRT construction, served as chief engineer between 1910 and 1916. Daniel L. Turner, an assistant engineer who worked on subway drainage and surveys for the Brooklyn extension, was chief engineer of the Public Service Commission, and then the Transit Commission from 1916 to 1921. Formerly an assistant and division engineer for the Rapid Transit Commission, Robert Ridgway was employed by the Transit Commission as chief engineer between 1921 and 1924. National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, v. 12, (New York: James T. White and Company, 1904), pp. 82-83; Who's Who in New York, 9th ed., (New York: Who's Who Publications, 1929), pp. 15-17, p. 393; National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, v. E (New York: James T. White and Company, 1936), pp. 77-78, pp. 91-92; Walker, Fifty Years of Rapid Transit, 1864-l9l7, p. 183, pp. 189-191. 101. Electric Railway Journal, October 1, 1910, p. 527; New York Times, October 27, 1907; Walker, Fifty Years of Rapid Transit, 1864-1917, pp. 209-210; Bruere, "George Staples Rice," Outlook, pp. 191-194. 102. National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, v. 14, pp. 62-64; New York State Public Service Commission First District, Report 1908, v. I, p. 9. 103. Arnold, Reports Upon the Interborough Subway, Report No. 1. The Equipment and Operation of the Subway, p. 4. 104. Arnold, Reports Upon the Interborough Subway, Report No. 4, The Capacity of the Subway, pp. 3-7, p. 9. 105. Arnold, Reports Upon the Interborough Subway, Report No. 2, The Subway Signal System, pp. 8-24; New York Public Service Commission First District, Report 1908, v. I, pp. 9-20; New York State Public Service Commission First District, Report 1909, v. I (Albany: J.B. Lyon Company, 1919), pp. 85-87; Merritt, "Merritt Journal," November 1, 5, 25, 1908, May 9, August 22, 1909. 106. "The Neck of the Bottle," Electric Railway Journal, February 11, 1911, p. 248; New York State Public Service Commission First District, Report 1910, v. I, p. 85; Street Railway Journal, February 29, 1908, p. 343; Parsons, The New York Rapid Transit Subway, pp. 31-32. 107. Parsons, The New York Rapid Transit Subway, p. 32. 108. "The Neck of the Bottle," Electric Railway Journal, p. 248; Electric Railway Journal, February 19, 1910, p. 315. 109. Arnold, Reports Upon the Interborough Subway, Report No. 3, Reports Upon the Subway Car, p. 7. 110. Ibid.; "History of Center-Door Cars for the New York Subway," Electric Railway Journal, February 10, 1912, pp. 246-247; Electric Railway Journal, August 19, 1911, p. 320; "Extensible Platform in New York Subway," Electric Railway Journal, February 21, 1914, pp. 421-422; Merritt, "Merritt Journal," March 1, 1909, October 27, 1910, November 11, 1912. 111. Arnold, Reports Upon the Subway, Report No. 4, The Capacity of Subway, pp. 8-9. 112. Ibid., 11-12; New York State Public Service Commission First District, Report 1909, v. I, pp. 91-92; Merritt, "Merritt Journal," October 24, 27, 1910; January 23, 1911. 113. New York State Public Service Commission First District, Report 1911, v. I (Albany: The Argus Company, 1912), p. 107. 114. New York State Public Service Commission First District, Report 1912, v. I, (Albany: J.B. Lyon Company, 1913), pp. 51-52, pp. 190-191. 115. Ibid., 53. 116. "The Neck of the Bottle," Electric Railway Journal, p. 248. Part II 1. New York Times, January 4, 1910; Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, December 18, 1909, p. 1088; Edwin H. Spengler, "Land Values in New York in Relation To Transit Facilities: Studies in History," Public Law, No. 333 (New York: Columbia University), 47-50. 2. New York Times, September 4, 1904; Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, October 20, 1900, 486. 3. New York Times, January 4, 1910. 4. Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 29, 1905, 929. 5. Spengler, "Land Values in New York in Relation To Transit Facilities: Studies in History," 50-70. 6. New York Times, April 20, ??? May 17, 1901, April 9, 1904; Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, May 18, 1901, 886, June 11, 1904, 1439-1445, October 20, 1906, 635-636, December 8, 1909, 1086-1087. 7. Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, July 7, 1996, 2. 8. Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, May 10, 1900, 864, November 3, 1900, 571, July 12, 1902, 37, New York Times, April 9, 1906; Mary C. Henderson, The City and the Theatre (Clifton, N.J., James T. White and Company, 1973), 186-196. 9. Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, December 22, 1900, 866. 10. New York Times, May 14, November 13, 1904; Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, June 29, 1901, 1133, August 5, 1905, 245. 11. Charles C. Colby, "Centrifugal and Centripetal Forces in Urban Geography," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, March 1933, 14-15; Henderson, The City and the Theatre, 186-192, 203; New York Times, January 1, 1905. 12. Phillips' Business Directory of New York City, 1900-1901 (New York: W. Phillips, 1900); 1161-1162; Phillips' Business Directory of New York City, 1915 (New York: W. Phillips, 1915); 1150-1151. 13. New York Times, October 15, 1907. 14. Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, June 16, 1906, 1137. 15. New York Times, January 1, 1905, October 15, 1907; Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, June 16, 1906, 1137, February 3, 1917, 75; Henderson, The City and the Theatre, 207-209. 16. Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, January 9, 1909, 45. 17. On this point, see the forthcoming book about Forty-second Street by Professor Stanley Buder of Baruch College. 18. G.W. Bromley and Company, Atlas of the City of New York: Metropolitan, 1898, (Philadelphia: G.W. Bromley and Company, 1898), plates 5,6,7,10,1,14. 19. Bromley, Atlas of the City of New York: Manhattan, 1898, V. 3, plates 5,6; New York Times, December 17, 1905. 20. Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 4, 1911, 200-201, June 10, 1911, 1091-1092, May 18, 1912, 1055; Bromley, Atlas of the City of New York: Manhattan, 1898, v.3, plates 6,7,10,11,14. 21. Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, June 10, 19l1, 1091. 22. For the assessed valuation of taxable land in each block of Manhattan in the years 1905, 1913, 1921, and 1929, see Spengler, Land Values in New York in Relation to Transit Facilities, 145-162; the starting point for the Spengler study was 1905, the first year the value of the land was computed separately from the value of improvements. Ibid., 27; Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, Regional Survey of New York and Its Environs, v.2, Population, Land Values, and Government (New York: Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, 1929), 142-151. 23. Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 9, 1907, 306, January 20, 1909, p. 848, June 10, 1911, p. 1091; New York Times, October 15, 1905. 24. Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, June 10, 1911, p. 1091; G.W. Bromley and Company, Atlas of the City of New York: Borough of Manhattan, 1920-1921, v. 3 (Philadelphia: G.W. Bromley and Company, 1921), plates 11, 14. 25. Bromley, Atlas of the City of New York: Manhattan, 1898, v. 3, plate 11; Bromley, Atlas of the City of New York: Borough of Manhattan, 1920-1921, v. 3, plate 11. 26. Bromley, Atlas of the City of New York: Borough of Manhattan, 1920-1921, v. 3, plates 9, 10; Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, November 7, 1908, p. 873, June 10, 1911, p. 1091. 27. New York Times, December 17, 1905. 28. Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, July 8, 1905, 61. 29. Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, September 23, 1905, 459, January 26, 1907, 157, June 10, 1911, 1091, October 23, 1915, 685, September 18, 1917, 311, June 3, 1922, 681; New York Times, July 9, December 17, 1905; Bromley, Atlas of the City of New York: Manhattan, 1898, v. 3, plate 6; Bromley, Atlas of the City of New York: Borough of Manhattan, 1920-1921, v. 3, plate 6; Norval White and Elliot Willensky, AIA Guide to New York City, revised edition (New York: Collier Books, 1978), 189. 30. Bromley, Atlas of the City of New York: Manhattan, 1898, v. 3, plates 6,7,10,11,14; Bromley, Atlas of the City of New York: Borough of Manhattan, 1920-1921, v. 3, plates 6,7,9,10,11; Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 4, 1911, 201, July 22, 1911, 8. 31. Herbert S. Swain, "Hundred Years of City Planning in New York," Part II, Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 31, 1917, 431; Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, July 8, 1905, 6l, January 26, 1907, 157, October 23, 1915, 685; New York Times, July 9, 1905, February 11, 1906. 32. Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 6, 1915, 369; Phillips' Business Directory of New York City, 1915, 1151. 33. New York Times, September 19, 1909; Real Estate Record and Builders Guide October 11, 1902, 518-519, August 26, 1911, 257-276, June 29, 1912, 1393-1394. 34. New York Times, September 19, 1909. 35. New York Times, August 7, 1938; Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 25, 1908, 754, January 14, 1911, 48, September 23, 1911, 415-416, April 26, 1916, 650; Robert A. Caro, Robert A. Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage, 1975), 525-534. 36. Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, October 31, 1908, 843, June 22, 1912, 1359, March 27, 1915, 525. 37. New York Public Opinion, November 3, 1904. 38. Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, September 10, 1904, 525. 39. Homer Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933), 163-165, 192; Richard M. Hurd, Principles of City Land Values, 3rd Ed. (New York: The Record and Guide, 1911), 2-13. 40. Spengler, Land Values in New York in Relation to Transit Facilities, 76. 41. Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago, 163; Hurd, Principles of City Land Values, 11. 42. Hoyt, , 163-165. 43. National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, v. 15 (New York: James T. White and Company, 1916), 363-364; Henry Morgenthau, All In a Life-Time, (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1927), New York Times, December 6, 1900, November 21, 1903, November 15, 1904; Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, January 20, 1900, 94, October 22, l904, 835. 44. National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, v. 34 (New York: James T. White and Company, 1948), 395-396; Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, May 4, 1901, 789, November 16, 1907, 799; New York Times, November 15, 16, 1907; "Passenger Statistics and Engineering Details of the New York Subway," Street Railway Journal, October 1, 1904, 464; Mark D. Hirsch, William C. Whitney: Modern Warwick, (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1948), 1-2, 34-35, 56-58, 62-66, 625-626. 45. New York Times, November 15, 1907. 46. National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, v. 14 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, Inc., 1967), 489; National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, v. 18 (New York: James T. White and Company, 1922), 115-116; Who's Who In New York, 1914, (New York: Who's Who Publications, 1914), 650; Hirsch, Whitney, 35, 62-66; New York Times, November 15, 1907; Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 27, 1904, 434, October 22, 1904, 835, November 16, 1907, 799. 47. New York Times, January 5, 1900, March, 25, 1906, November 3, 15, 1907; Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 27, 1904, 434, March 30, 1907, 639. 48. Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago, 136, 163-166; Hurd, Principles of City Land Values, 77-78; H.J. Dyos, Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell, (Leicester University Press, 1961), 80-86; Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, July 22, 1905, 153; New York World, September 24, 1905. 49. New York Times, August 30, 1908. 50. Ibid. 51. New York City Tenement House Department, Fifth Report, 1909 (New York: Little and Ives, 1910), 102-103. 52. Ibid. 53. New York City Tenement House Department, Ninth Report, 1913 (New York: np., 1914), map showing New Law Tenement Houses Erected Since the Organization of the Tenement House Department, 1902-1913. 54. New York World, September 24, 1905. 55. New York City, Borough of the Bronx, President, Annual Report, 1911 (New York: M.B. Brown, 1912), 136. 56. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census of of the United States: 1900. Bulletin 11, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900), 15; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920. vol. III Population, (Washington,. D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922), 710; Cities Census Committee, Inc., Population of the City of New York, 1890-1930, (New York: Cities Census Committee, Inc., 1932), 83-84; Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, Regional Survey of New York and Its Environs, vol. II Population, Land Values, and Government, 76-79. 57. Robert Coit Chapin, The Standard of Living among Workingmen's Families in New York City (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1909), 75-84. 58. Lawrence Veiller, "The Safe Load of Population on Land," Proceedings of the Second National Conference on City Planning and the Problems Congestion, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 72-79; Lawrence Veiller, "Protecting Residential Districts," Proceedings of the Sixtieth National Conference on City Planning, (Boston: Boston University Press, 1914), 98-110; Edward M. Law, "The Preparation of the Building District Map of the City of New York," Municipal Engineers Journal November 16, 1916, 107.1-107.15; Edward H. Bassett, Zoning (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1940), 7-12, 45-63; New York City Heights of Buildings Commission, Report (New York: np., 1913), I; New York Commission on Building Districts and Restrictions, Final Report (New York: Board of Estimate and Apportionment, 1916), 2-5; Seymour Toll, Zoned American (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1969), 3, 144-147, 172-181. 59. Bassett, Zoning, 7. 60. New York City Commission on Building Districts and Restrictions, Final Report, 147.

The Interborough Subway (Historic American Engineering Record) The New York Rapid Transit Decision of 1900: Economy, Society, Politics The Impact of the IRT on New York City Design and Construction of the IRT: Civil Engineering Design and Construction of the IRT: Electrical Engineering Architectural Designs for New York's First Subway Interborough Rapid Transit-Historic American Engineering Record Images