The 9th Avenue El--the 19th Century's High Line

By Raanan Geberer--originally published in Chelsea-Clinton News/Our Town/West Side Spirit

Ninth Avenue in Chelsea is a pleasant street, with restaurants, bakeries, several important housing developments, a supermarket, the Church of the Holy Apostles, two diners directly across from each other. Further up the avenue, north of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the avenue is filled with young people going to bars and restaurants.

Now, picture the same avenue with a noisy elevated train line overhead. Hard to do? That was the reality of Ninth Avenue for seven decades, when the Ninth Avenue El was as much a part of people’s day-to-day reality as Penn South, Gristedes and the Rail Line Diner are today.

In the mid-19th century, horse-drawn street traffic in Manhattan was becoming unbearable. Charles T. Harvey, in 1866, formed a “West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway Company” and in 1868 finished construction on an overhead line from Dey Street to 29th Street along Greenwich Street and Ninth Avenue. The line was powered by a cable-car mechanism.

According to “The New York Elevated” by Robert C. Reed (A.S Barnes & Co., 1978), Harvey planned to connect his el to the Hudson River Railroad’s (the ancestor of today’s MetroNorth Hudson Line) old terminal at West 30th Street. But malfunctions of the cable mechanism and lawsuits doomed the scheme. In 1870, the el was bought by new investors, who soon replaced the cable mechanism with steam engines pulling wooden cars.

By 1880, the el stretched from South Ferry to 155th Street. Other els sprung up along Second, Third and Sixth Avenues. Indeed, the Sixth Avenue line eventually swung west on 53rd Street and linked up with the Ninth Avenue El. By 1903, all four Manhattan els were absorbed into the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), which was then building the city’s first subway. In 1918, the Ninth Avenue line was extended into the southwest Bronx, where it joined with the IRT’s Lexington-Jerome Avenue line at 167th Street.

From the very beginning, the els were highly criticized, especially by newspapers. Critics said they blocked sunlight from the street, created noise, frightened horses and made buildings shake. Cinders from their steam engines, they said, fell on pedestrians and blackened the façade of nearby buildings. When the steam engines were replaced by electric power after the turn of the century, things improved — a little.

The worst disaster in the history of the Manhattan els involved the 9th Avenue line on Sept. 11, 1905. According to Wikipedia, a downtown Ninth Avenue train mistakenly switched onto the curve for the Sixth Avenue line. The train was going 30 mph, nearly 20 mph faster than recommended for that portion of the track. The motorman realized his error and slammed on the brakes, throwing the second car down to the street. The third car came to rest against the front of a nearby apartment building, and some of the passengers were able to escape through the windows. Thirteen people were killed, with 48 seriously injured.

What was it like to ride on the Ninth Avenue El? The “classic” el cars were 19th century century wooden “gate cars.” They had open platforms at both ends, protected by gates. At each station, a conductor had to open and close the gates for the passengers. In the early 1920s, some of these cars were retrofitted with enclosed vestibules and sliding doors. The stations were built in Victorian, “gingerbread” style. And in the winter, they were heated by pot-bellied stoves.

For years, civic reformers had sought the removal of the Manhattan els – both to give nearby residents a break and to raise property values along the avenues, according to the “Encyclopedia of New York City.” When the city’s own Eighth Avenue subway opened a block away from the Ninth Avenue El in 1932, the writing was on the wall. The City of New York purchased the IRT in June 1940 and ended service on the el. A small section from 155th Street to the Bronx was preserved as the ‘Polo Grounds Shuttle,” but that, too, was discontinued after the baseball Giants left the Polo Grounds for San Francisco.

A masterful depiction of the Ninth Avenue El can be found in Henry Roth’s novel “A Diving Rock on the Hudson” (St. Martin’s Press, 1996), based on his experiences as a high school student and college freshman in the ‘20s. Taking the el uptown to his friend’s house near Yankee Stadium, Roth and his friend daringly stood on the outside platform at the rear of the last car, which was “windier than windy.” The two chums had “their fedoras jammed down on their heads, topcoats buttoned up to the collar” as they strained to talk to each other above the howling wind and as the train clattered up the West Side. Rest in peace, Ninth Avenue El.

The Other Halves--a Short Story

“Where to?” asked the overweight, T shirt-wearing and balding cab driver, as we prepared to go to the retreat center in the Hudson Valley. I usually rented a car when we went away on weekends in the tri-state area, but my wife insisted that we experiment with taking a Trailways bus this time. So we got off the bus in New Paltz and took a cab.

The cab trip took about 15 minutes. As we proceeded through the mainly rural area, the driver, who introduced himself as Ronnie, turned down his country-music radio station and started talking about himself. “I’ve never had the advantage of an education like you city people,” he said, with a slight Southern accent. “I’ve done everything. I worked in a factory, I drove trucks, I’ve been a salesman – sold stuff out of the trunk of my car – and now, a cab driver. So, we’ll see how this works out.”

“Have you always lived around here?” my wife asked.

“No, I’m from Florida, originally,” he answered, lighting up a cigarette, “but I moved around a lot.” He briefly looked back at us and smiled, then turned his attention back to the road. “I was married twice, but that didn’t last. When I get to a new place, I find a few rooms above a store, buy a few broken-down pieces of furniture, fix ‘em up, and it’s home!” After we passed a large mock-log cabin bar-roadhouse with lots of pickup trucks and SUVs parked outside, he made a turn and went up a hill.

A question kept popping up in my mind, and I finally couldn’t help but ask it. “If almost everybody has cars around here,” he said, “how does the cab company stay in business?”

He turned back for a second, put out his cigarette, then kept driving. “Well,” he said, “You see that bar we passed? Lots of people go there on at night, but they’re in no condition to drive home because they had a few drinks. So we take them home.” We passed a fishing bait-and-tackle shop.

“Then, the next morning,” he continued, “they call us again, and we drive them to their cars. Some of these old boys, they call us two, three times week. This Saturday, there’s going to be a band playing, so there’s gonna be a lot of action!” He turned up the radio again.

Somehow, I knew the band had to be country and western. I decided to change the subject and bring up something I’d heard from a friend who’d grown up around here. “I heard the police chief in Accord races cars himself in the stock-car races there.”

“Yep,” Ronnie said, smiling. “He’s always there with his car, just like everybody else. I really enjoy goin’ to the raceway—when I can afford it! Oh, here we are. Hey, let me help you take your bags out of the trunk. And when you decide to leave, here’s my card. Just call this number.” He turned around and waved goodbye.

·        * *

After the retreat weekend was over and Ronnie drove us back to the bus stop, we found ourselves on a spacious, new bus headed back to the city. My wife and I marveled about how comfortable it was --- not like the cramped buses I used to take back and forth to the State University at Binghamton way back when.

Apparently the people in back of us had similar thoughts. “That was a wonderful idea for an experiment, to take the bus,” I heard a man with a British accent say. “It’s very clean, very spacious, very punctual, very convenient.” I sneaked a look back. The man was gray-haired, in his fifties or sixties. He was with a dark-haired heavy-set woman who was slightly younger, maybe in her late 40s or early 50s. She was wearing a silk blouse and a pearl necklace; he was wearing a white shirt with a light-blue tie and an expensive watch.

“I’m definitely finding it quite satisfactory,” the woman answered. She was definitely American, but she had an upper-crust, private-school accent, a little like Margaret Dumont in the old Marx Brothers movies. “And I engaged that cab driver, Ronnie, to do some work in my house.” Hey—that was the same cab driver we had, I realized with a smile.

“So,” the man asked, “do you want to talk about the weekend?”

“Well, unfortunately, the deal fell through. A pity—it was such a lovely house, right on the edge of the woods and near a lake. And, I was telling you before, it was a million-dollar deal.”

“You know, that reminds me about my son. He built a vacation rental property in the south of Spain, then, with the proceeds from that property, he built six condos. You’ve got to have that stream of income coming in!”

Wow, I thought. These guys are the antithesis of Ronnie!

“Now, for pleasanter things,” the woman continued. “I took along something for us to eat during the trip. It’s a salad of root vegetables with fresh Swiss chard and goat cheese in a balsamic vinegar and truffle-oil dressing. It’s in this plastic container. I brought these two forks.”

There was a brief silence, and then the man said, “Delicious!” The bus rolled through Newburgh.

“I’m glad you liked it! I’ll put it away so we can have the rest later,” the woman replied.

“I think I’ll do some reading. I’ll take a look at the Wall Street Journal.”

“And I’ll have a copy of Distaff.” I reflected, how, years ago, I worked for an energy technology magazine published by the same magazine group that put out “Distaff.” My editor at the tech publication had told me that “Distaff” was a high fashion and lifestyle magazine geared to wealthy, middle-aged women. Sounds about right, I thought.

The bus proceeded through one New Jersey town after another. My wife took out her copy of  the New York Times Book Review, while I looked out the window, observing the red, yellow and brown leaves on the trees. I used to get a kick out of going through Paramus because it was home to the Paramus Roller Staking Rink—something I remembered passing numerous times during my college bus trips to Binghamton. But this time, I didn’t see it. Must have gone out of business, I thought. I dozed off to sleep.

I was awoken by the bright lights of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Behind me, the older couple began to speak again. “Where would you like to eat tonight? Something Italian?”

“Sounds marvelous!”

“I know a wonderful Italian restaurant, the Tuscan Villa, on the Upper East Side. It’s highly rated by Zagat -- It’s worth going to just for the wine list!” They both laughed. I wasn’t looking forward to going back to work at the newspaper the next day, but I put that out of my mind. I dozed off to sleep.

The driver opened the doors, and people started grabbing their bags and moving up to the front, trying to get to the head of the line. Outside the bus, many people waited for friends or loved ones. My wife and I went to the baggage compartment on the side and waited for the driver to open the door. Suddenly, we heard a loud crash.

“How terrible!” I recognized the voice of the Englishman who had been sitting in back of us.

“A catastrophe! Oh, I’m terribly sorry!”

And there, with passengers carefully avoiding it, were the remains of a salad of root vegetables with fresh Swiss chard and goat cheese, splattered on the bus terminal’s concrete floor.