Five Borough Ferries Speeding to 1st Avenue

Mayor de Blasio announced that he'd like to expand ferry service throughout the five boroughs.


But one long forgotten plan could have made this ferry plan really work.

A Tale Worthy of Kafka: New York City's Affordable Housing Lottery

This is a different Tale of Two Cities. Not the metaphorical one used by Mario Cuomo and Bill de Blasio to describe the gap between the rich and the poor. This is a story about how New York City's poor can be divided into two groups: Winners and Losers.

WNYC Keeping the Dream of Subway Expansion Alive

WNYC has put up a great piece on some of the unfinished portions of the New York City subway. The map above gives approximations of where some line expansions would have gone. 

The Google Map below gives a better scale of where the lines would have run.

"Third Avenue Subway" (Route #3 from 1905)

Supplementing the First Avenue Subway (Route #1) and—one would assume—eliminating the need for a 3rd Avenue Elevated, William Barclay Parsons designed a four-track subway to run under 3rd Avenue and Bowery. It's complicated set of tracks in the Bronx belie an ambition of the original transit planners; to have the city's subways operated by private railroad companies such as the New York Central Railroad and the Pennsylvania Railroad. In Midtown, there's also an interesting crosstown connection along 35th and 36th Streets.

"Ninth Avenue Subway" (Route #2 from 1905)

The next route William Barclay Parsons, Chief Engineer of the Rapid Transit Commission laid out while the IRT was being constructed was one that would weave through northern Manhattan, run down 9th Avenue, then veer west right up against the waterfront along West Street. Like the First Avenue Subway (Route #1), the Rapid Transit Commission and Public Service Commission did not consider it a priority (most likely because of the existing 9th Avenue elevated) and kept the plans on the back burner. The IND however would give life to certain stretches of it. Read more after the jump.

"First Avenue Subway" (Route #1 from 1905)

The first route William Barclay Parsons (Chief Engineer of the Rapid Transit Commission) laid out while the IRT was under construction would have stretched from Claremont Park in the Bronx, run southwards to 1st Avenue, make a straight shot to the Lower East Side, and then weave it's way to the Financial District. His bosses at the Rapid Transit Commission (and it's successor, the Public Service Commission) considered the route worthwhile, but not crucial in the near term. The plan was put on the back burner with some southern stretches being adopted into the Board of Transportation's IND system in the 1930's. To this day there is no other subway line to supplement the IRT East Side (the Lex) as it runs through the dense east side of Manhattan north of Houston Street. Read more after the jump.

The 1905 vision of Manhattan and the Bronx

Long before the IND or BMT came into the picture—indeed literally at the dawn of subway building in New York—William Barclay Parsons was already engineering the encore to his "Rapid Transit Railroad" aka the Interborough Rapid Transit system, the first leg of our Subway system. Read more after the jump.

This map is from the "Railroad Gazette, 1907" posted online courtesy of Google Books.

"1905 Route #9: Brooklyn & Manhattan Loop Line - Trackage" on the mend

It's a complicated setup that the esteemed Mr. Parsons and company had drawn up in 1905. While initially I had just laid out the route after eye-balling the line drawing map that came with it, I had always intended to assign the text of each description to it's appropriate section. Which given Google Maps' constraints would involve recreating each line. Promise to have the route up and ready as soon as possible. And later on, an amalgam of all of the planned routes of 1905 into one map.

The Dual Contracts' "Second System" from 1920

And you thought the IND's Second System was huge. This, my friends is thus far the trippiest of the ego trips I've come across. It covers the ENTIRE city, ALL five boroughs including the waterfront of Hudson County, NJ (to be discussed in a future post). This map was included in the second of two New York Times' articles on the plan. What I love is that this wasn't submitted by some advisory panel or consulting engineer, but by the subway builders' themselves. It was completed by "Daniel L. Turner, chief engineer in the office of John H. Delaney, Transit Construction Commissioner":

Click on the "View Full Article" link below each to see a scanned pdf of each. Courtesy of the New York Times.

September 26, 1920: "$350,000,000 PLAN FOR SUBWAY ROUTES HAS BEEN COMPLETED; 830 Miles of New Track to Carry Five Billion Passengers a Year Contemplated."

October 3, 1920: "CITY'S GROWTH DISCOUNTED IN PLANS FOR ADDING 830 MILES OF TRACK TO RAPID TRANSIT SYSTEMS; Work to Cover Period of Twenty-five Years and Cost $350,000,000--New Lines and Extensions Would Provide for a Population of Nine Millions and Carry Five Billion Passengers"


I really like the way Daniel L. Turner thinks. He espouses the famous maxim attributed to Chicago city planner Daniel Burnham, "Make no small plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood". (I wonder if the two Daniels ever knew each other.) The goal of the plan was to ultimately eliminate all surface transit with elevateds, open-cuts, or subways as well as underground moving sidewalks (which had lately received much notoriety in the blogosphere). Many of the routes or their corridors in Manhattan, southern/western Bronx, and Brooklyn where already planned for rapid transit back in 1905 by William Barclay Parsons. The lines going to northeastern Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island were laid out first by Alfred Craven and then Mr. Turner. Later the Board of Transportation's IND would seemingly grandfather-in many of their plans from Turner's. (Notice what would be today's Culver IND and Fulton IND, but with notable exception is Queens Boulevard.)

My only criticism of Turner's plans is the insistence on parallel routes. It would have been better to mimic the pattern of railroad building and create multiple hub and spoke routes. The hubs around NYC include the downtowns of Flushing, Jamaica and Brooklyn plus Long Island City, Broadway Junction (BK), South Bronx, and St. George (SI).

If, nowadays, the city, state, and the MTA can get past their endless series crisis management, then a "100 Year Blueprint" on this scale should be produced and adhered to like a city charter.

Oh, you know I'm gonna create a Google Map of this. If anyone has more detailed information on the plans, please post them and give me a heads up.

G Train as it could have been

In honor of the permanent change in the routing of the G train, I present to you the B'klyn–Queens Crosstown as it could have been:

IND Second System Map 1929 plan

So this will be my first post for Ego Trip Express. I'll begin this blog as a means to display the Google Maps I've made that lay out the bygone plans in New York City.

I'll start with the most famous of them, the "IND Second System". A very comprehensive entry in Wikipedia goes into detail about it.

The map below is interactive, if you click on a line it'll describe the details of it. You can also click on the link just below it to open it in Google Maps itself and turn on "Transit" to compare it to the existing system. Unfortunately Google Maps has yet to allow embedding of it's Transit overlay into sites outside of Google Maps.



I'll be going into detail on the features of the plan and post other maps and links to Google Books as time goes by. Thank you and enjoy.