A little man ran through first and, running all the way, reached the first ticket booth to be opened and bought a ticket to Elizabeth, N.J. He has the distinction of being the first person to buy a ticket in the new station for a destination not on Long Island. (The Long Island service was inaugurated several weeks ago.)
As the crowd passed through the doors, into the vast concourse were heard exclamations of wonder, for none had any idea of the architectural beauty of the new structure. From end to end the station was ablaze with lights.
Baggage men were standing at attention waiting to check the first pieces of baggage while the station master, tall and military looking, hurried about to see that everything went as it should.
The first train to leave the new station this morning was a local for Perth Amboy, N.J. It was followed 28 minutes later by a through train for Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Jacksonville, Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans and other cities in the southeast and southwest.
The opening of the station marked an end of the Pennsylvania’s 23rd Street Ferry service to Jersey City. The last ferry west to Jersey City left New York soon after midnight.
New Grandeur For Penn Station In Latest Plan
By CHARLES V. BAGLI | July 4, 2007
IT BEGAN AS A PROPOSAL TO RESTORE THE Beaux-Arts grandeur of the old Pennsylvania Station. It grew into a sweeping plan to transform the area around the station into a district of gleaming office towers. Now it is growing again.
In the next three weeks, two of the city’s largest developers will unveil new plans for rebuilding the station, moving Madison Square Garden, replacing the Hotel Pennsylvania, and erecting a pair of skyscrapers, one of which would be taller than the Empire State Building, over the site of the existing station.
Though the new plan is broadly similar to a proposal offered a year ago, it is different in several important ways, starting with the cost: $14 billion, double that of the original plan, a real estate executive who has seen the plan said. It is also bigger than anticipated: the entire plan, involving buildings on six adjacent blocks, would create 10 million square feet of new office space off West 33rd Street, as much as in the old World Trade Center.
The developers, Stephen M. Ross and Steven Roth, have also burnished their vision for the station, which would be renamed after Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who championed the original idea. Civic groups and the head of the City Planning Commission, Amanda M. Burden, had complained that last year’s plan treated the underground station as an afterthought, without a grand public space worthy of the country’s busiest transit hub.
The new plan would try to recapture the imposing aura of the original station inside the James A. Farley Post Office across the street, with a vast, street-level waiting room under a glass canopy that would spill sunlight onto the concourse two levels below. But it is far from a done deal.
Editorial: Farewell to Penn Station
October 30, 1963
UNTIL THE FIRST BLOW FELL NO ONE WAS convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance. Somehow someone would surely find a way to prevent it at the last minute—not-so-little Nell rescued by the hero—even while the promoters displayed the flashy renderings of the new sports arena and somewhat less than imperial commercia1 buildings to take its place.
It’s not easy to knock down nine acres of travertine and granite, 84 Doric columns, a vaulted concourse of extravagant, weighty grandeur, classical splendor modeled after royal Roman baths, rich detail in solid stone, architectural quality in precious materials that set the stamp of excellence on a city. But it can be done. It can be done if the motivation is great enough, and it has been demonstrated that the profit motivation in this instance was great enough.
Monumental problems almost as big as the building itself stood in the way of preservation; but it is the shame of New York, of its financial and cultural communities, its politicians, philanthropists and planners, and of the public as well, that no serious effort was made. A rich and powerful city, noted for its resources of brains, imagination and money, could not rise to the occasion. The final indictment is of the values of our society.
Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tin-horn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.
SUBWAYS AND BUSES
Our Subway Opens; 150,000 Try It Mayor McClellan Runs the First Official Train
October 28, 1904
The New York City Transit Authority was formed in 1953 and, shortly afterwards, subway tokens were introduced. A ride at the time cost 15 cents.
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HIS LIFE, FATHER Knickerbocker went underground yesterday, he and his children, to the number of 150,000, amid the tooting of whistles and the firing of salutes, for the first ride in a subway car which for years had been scoffed at as an impossibility. New York’s dream of rapid transit became a reality at exactly 2:35:30 o’clock yesterday afternoon, when the running of trains with passengers began.
With a silver controller Mayor McClellan started the first train, the official train which bore John B. McDonald, the contractor who dug the subway; William Barclay Parsons, chief engineer of the Rapid Transit Commission; and most of the other men who made the subway a reality.
The mayor liked his job as motorman so well that he stayed at the controller until the train reached Broadway and 103rd Street, when he yielded the place to the company’s motor instructor.
OFFICIAL TRAIN ON TIME
The official train made its run exactly on time, arriving at 145th Street in exactly 25 minutes, and all along the way crowds of excited New Yorkers were collected around the little entrances talking about the unheard trains that they knew were dashing by below. All afternoon the crowds hung around the curious-looking little stations, waiting for heads and shoulders to appear and grow into bodies. Much as the subway has been talked about, New York was not prepared for this scene.
SEVERAL CASES OF “FIRSTS”
There are a few “firsts” to be noted in writing the history of this great change in New York transportation. The first man to give up his seat to a woman in New York’s subway was F. B. Shipley of Philadelphia. The first man to ask for a transfer refused to give his name. It was on the return trip of the official train. He wanted to get off at Spring Street. It was 41 minutes after the start from 145th Street when, headed by Mr. Orr, the leaders of the subway emerged from the little station at City Hall Park and walked rapidly across the pavement. The mayor was smoking a cigar which looked guiltily short, as if he had lighted it on the train.
In 35 Years, Subways Have Greatly Changed the City, And the Citizens As Well
By ERNEST LA FRANCE | November 26, 1939
Crowds wait for the chance to ride the new subway in 1904.
FROM 8 O’CLOCK TO 9 IN THE MORNING, the briefest of intervals, the expresses thunder into the subway stations at Grand Central, Brooklyn Bridge and 14th Street with their freight shoe salesmen, private secretaries, beautiful shopgirls and plumbers. From 5 o’clock to 6 in the afternoon they collect the identical freight for distribution to remote cots far from the battlefronts of industry and commerce. The process, somewhat akin to the moving belt in mass production, has just passed its 35th birthday.
Today the city has more than a billion dollars invested in three subway systems totaling 273 miles (133 miles of them actually underground), and we take our cellar railroad calmly. The standard reaction to its coming, however, was bitter opposition from politicians, surface and elevated lines, and property owners fearful of the effect it would have on business.
On paper, the first link had existed since 1897, when William Barclay Parsons, chief engineer of the Rapid Transit Commission, submitted plans for a line rushing no
rthward from City Hall to Van Cortlandt Park, with a spur from 96th Street through Harlem to Bronx Park, using part of the Bronx Third Avenue “El.” Actual construction was blocked until March 24, 1900, a month after the city signed a $35 million contract with its builder, John B. McDonald, who had enlisted the financial aid of August Belmont—later the founder of the operating company, the I.R.T. With its extension to Atlantic Avenue, the route totaled 25.26 miles.
One lasting result of the subway was a beneficent decentralization from the crowded area within a four-mile radius of City Hall.
When the subway opened, Manhattan was crowding half the city’s 4 million population into part of its 22.2 square miles and had reached a record density of 400,000 persons per square mile in part of the Lower East Side. The subway first poured new hordes into Manhattan’s West Side. But as the I.R.T. and B.M.T. drove deeper into Brooklyn, Manhattan deflated. By 1930, when the two subway systems had completed their lines, it had only four-fifths of the population it had held in 1901.
Subway Token, Currency of the City, Dies at 50
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA | March 15, 2003
THE NEW YORK CITY SUBWAY TOKEN, TOOL and talisman of city life since Vincent R. Impellitteri was mayor, is dead at age 50.
The causes of death were technology and economics.
Tokens will be sold for the last time on Saturday, April 12. After 12:01 a.m. on Sunday, May 4—the moment at which fares will rise, with the price of a single trip jumping to $2 from $1.50—any token plinked into a turnstile will be spit back out. Bus fareboxes will still accept the token—along with 50 cents cash, thank you—through the end of the year.
The death of the token has been a planned, gradual demise, conceived in the 1980’s and set in motion in 1994, when the first electronic turnstile was installed and the first MetroCard sold. Handling all those tokens—emptying them from turnstiles, delivering bags of them to token booths, counting them out to riders—is cumbersome and expensive, and transit officials have long looked forward to the day when most of their business with riders would involve exchanges of electrons, not metal and paper.
The token can look forward to an afterlife as a nostalgia fetish, a cherished little piece of a bygone New York, like Brooklyn Dodgers gear, Automats and Checker cabs. But for now, there is little lament for the token’s passing.
“We’re not in mourning,” said Gene Russianoff, staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, the riders’ advocacy group. “The MetroCard is a better deal for riders. I have such powerful associations with the token from most of my life, so yeah, there’s some emotional attachment, but it’s no more than nostalgia.”
The token is survived by the turnstile and the farebox, as well as Fun Pass and other members of the MetroCard family. The transit agency will not say what will become of the remains, 60 million of them, except that it has no plans for disposing of them.
With F Trains On the C Line, The G Runs on …
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL | July 18, 2008
HOW MANY ENGLISH MAJORS DOES IT TAKE to figure out the meaning of a subway “Service Changes” poster?
Let’s see, between 12:01 a.m. Saturday, and 5 a.m. Monday, F trains were replacing the C in Brooklyn. G trains were replacing the F between Hoyt and Schermerhorn Streets and Stillwell Avenue. The poster explained that F trains were running between 179th and Jay Streets, then on the C line between Hoyt and Schermerhorn Streets and Euclid Avenue.
Travelers like me going from Manhattan to Brooklyn were to transfer at Hoyt-Schermerhorn for the G, making all F station stops to Stillwell Avenue. (Or was it and transfer at Hoyt-Schermerhorn for the F, making all C station stops to Euclid Avenue?)
I got off my southbound F just as the G rumbled in on the next track. I jumped aboard. But instead of seeing my regular F stops (Bergen Street, Carroll Street, etc.) I was in unfamiliar territory. I finally got off at Classon Avenue, thoroughly disoriented.
A young woman saw my confusion and offered a quick diagnosis. “F train problem, huh?” she said, calling the train by an unprintable nickname. She explained that at Hoyt-Schermerhorn I should have crossed over instead of staying on the same platform, and taken the train in the opposite direction. But the M.T.A. poster made no clear mention of crossing over.
That night, returning to Manhattan, I took the G (replacing the F) to Hoyt-Schermerhorn. As I arrived, the A was pulling in across the platform, so I jumped on. Wrong move. I soon found myself hurtling through Brooklyn in the wrong direction.
On Sunday, I foolishly tried my luck on the West Side. Posters at the 81st Street station said the express A train was running on the local C track, so I waited. Nothing came. A musician on the platform told me the way to go downtown was to take an uptown A train to 125th Street and cross over. I got out and took the M11 bus.
Surviving in the Land Down Under
By RANDY KENNEDY | August 29, 2004
THE INTREPID TRAVEL WRITER AND NOVELIST Paul Theroux once spent a week in 1981 riding the New York City subway and conveyed the advice of a friend about how to ride more safely: “You have to look as if you’re the one with the meat cleaver.”
Fortunately, that advice can be ignored these days. The graffiti is gone, crime is down, service is (mostly) reliable and almost no one carries a cleaver anymore, except maybe a sous-chef on his way to work at a restaurant where you will not be able to get a reservation. The guidelines for a better subway experience no longer speak to the fear of being mugged; they speak to the much more pervasive fear of being annoyed (and they also try to help you avoid annoying others).
Here are some things to remember:
AVOID EYE CONTACT AT ALL COSTS—This does not mean you or your fellow riders are unfriendly. When you are locked underground in a lurching metal room with a crowd of strangers in a big city, it is simply much easier if everyone pretends that everyone else is not there. You will be amazed at how assured you will feel.
“You have to look as if you’re the one with the meat cleaver.”
SEAT YOURSELF STRATEGICALLY—All seats are not created equal. If you see one at the end of the row, near a door, take it immediately. It means that only one person can sit next to you. And this means that you will never be sandwiched between the woman eating kung pao chicken with her fingers, and the snoring guy with the blaring headphones who is trying to bed down on your shoulder.
KNOW WHERE YOU ARE GOING—Despite all the improvements in the subway, many on-board announcements are still unintelligible and a map is hard to read on a moving train, especially with someone’s head blocking it. Do not be afraid if you hear the conductor announce something that sounds like “Tetanus. This is canned duck. We make all loco. Reefer. Loco! Loco!” Veteran riders might act as if they understand, but they don’t, either. If you are unsure, stick with the loco (translation: local) train, which makes all stops.
POSITIONING—Figure out the quintessential New Yorker trick: prewalking. While you are waiting for your train, walk to the place on the platform that gets you into the car that lets you out at the best place at your destination to make a quick exit (that is, right in front of the best staircase up to a Madison Square Garden entrance).
Subway Graffiti Called Epidemic
By FRANK J. PRIAL | February 11, 1972
Most subway cars in the 1970’s and 1980’s were covered in graffiti.
SUBWAY GRAFFITI ARE FAST REACHING WHAT an IRT conductor has called “the epidemic stage” here. In fact, Frank T. Berry, general superintendent of rapid transit for the Transit Authority, says that it costs the authority more than $500,000 a year to remove the scrawls made by vandals and that “every station porter so spends an hour a day on it.”
Once confined principally to car and station advertising placards—because they were most easily marked by ballpoint pens—the onslaught of ink and paint has spread to steel and tile walls, to route maps in cars, to station ceilings and to trackside walls reachable only through subway car windows or by standing between the cars of a stopped tr
ain.
Transit officials link the current wave of graffiti to the felt-tipped pen, often called the Magic Marker, although that is merely one of many brands in the field. And officials at the Magic Marker Corporation note that cans that spray paint may be replacing felt-tipped pens for graffiti writers.
The police are hampered, officials say, by a lack of laws governing this kind of vandalism. At present, youthful offenders—and almost every graffiti offender is a teenager—are given youth referral cards. This means that the police send someone around to talk to the young scrawler’s parents.
Under existing law an adult convicted of defacing Transit Authority property is subject to a $25 fine or 10 days in jail or both.
Philadelphia, which some of its officials call the graffiti capital of the nation, and which spends $200,000 a year trying to curb it, is trying several different approaches.
One is the Graffiti Alternative Workshop, where known graffiti offenders are allowed to vent their creative urges by painting fences around construction projects. At present, a number of young markers and sprayers are participating in a contest to create a design for city bases.
The winning design will be painted on a bus.
Graffiti Wars in the Subway: It’s Round 2
By CLYDE HABERMAN | December 19, 1995
MARILYN SULLIVAN DOESN’T LIKE THE layers of scratched gibberish that make it difficult for her to see out the windows of the No. 6 subway train. No, that’s putting it too mildly. She really hates the scrawlings, etched into the glass by vandals who, when you can read the junk at all, assign themselves names like ICE and DIMS and SHAWTS.
The New York Times Book of New York Page 9