War of Yesterday

Penhorn Creek Railroad

2012-01-29T21:12:00.000-05:00

The Penhorn Creek Railroad.

The name conjures up thoughts of a doomed short line railway to nowhere projected during one of the railway booms the country experienced one hundred or more years ago. Or maybe it was a logging company's railroad that brought cut trees from the woods down to the sawmill next to a Class I railroad line.

But in fact it ran from Jersey City to Secaucus, and it was built about 1905 to 1910.

And the Penhorn Creek has a web page created by "NE", that shows you where it was and gives some information from the Valuation Reports done for the ICC ninety years ago: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/1384755

Why, after dabbling in New York area rail services for these many years, have I just recently discovered the Penhorn Creek Railroad?

It shows how one or two people can make a difference.

For the Morris and Essex lines, which were the local part of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, we benefit from the work of Thomas Taber senior and junior, who produced the The Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad in the Nineteenth Century and The Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad in the Twentieth Century in a total of three volumes. Thanks to them we can trace railroad openings, station buildings, the laying of additional tracks, route realignments and grade separations, subsidiary companies, and train services.

For the Pennsylvania Railroad, we have the Triumph series by Charles Roberts and David Messer. Their typically thorough volume on the history of the New York Division— from just outside Philadelphia to New York— tells you almost all you need to know about the Northeast Corridor's development.

But the Erie Railroad in New Jersey, in that kind of detail? No one has done it.

So, I find out only now about the Penhorn Creek Railroad.

What was it? As the Board of Public Utility Commissioners (New Jersey) wrote in their 1913 annual report,

the formation of the Penhorn Creek Railroad Company was an expedient adopted by the Erie Railroad Company to enable it to accomplish certain results, highly desirable in themselves, which by direct action it could not accomplish. [...]

From the beginning the main line and branches of the Penhorn Creek Railroad Company have been employed by the Erie Railroad Company as a part of its main line, and the only trains which have been operated thereover have been trains of the Erie Railroad Company "which operate over some one or more lines of railroad operated by the Erie Railroad Company or some parts thereof."

They got a little lost in that second sentence where they seem to be quoting something a company official testified.

In short— the Penhorn Creek Railroad was a new passenger main line that bypassed the freight yards in Secaucus and crossed through Bergen Hill in a new four-track open cut, the cut that became known as Bergen Arches. The old main, including the two-track tunnel opened in 1860, became the freight main. The Arches and the tunnel are parallel, the tunnel along the north side of the Arches and at a lower elevation.

Here's a clip of the 1955 map from my forthcoming New Jersey Terminals project, with a black line added to show the freight main line. The Erie is shown in lime green.

In this area, three Erie lines converged. The Erie-owned New York and Greenwood Lake Railway included trains of its Orange and Caldwell Branches and of the Erie's Newark Branch ; the Erie's Main Line included trains of the Erie-owned New Jersey and New York Railroad (now called the Pascack Valley Line) and the Erie's Bergen County line (mainly for freight) ; and the third line was the combined Northern Branch of the Erie and New York, Susquehanna and Western Railroad.

The Penhorn Creek Railroad had a grade-separated junction between the busy Greenwood Lake and Main lines, with the outbound Greenwood Lake crossing under the Main. The Penhorn Creek ran four tracks wide starting at the junction. The less busy Northern-Susquehanna route, however, as far as I can tell, had an at-grade junction with the four-track Penhorn Creek main line. I imagine inbound trains from those lines just had to wait to join the main. There was no way to build a better junction in the very tight space available.

On the left there's a railroad in my base map with no colored line over it, with the lettering N AND NEWARK R R. Believe it or not it's part of what got me started on the project.

That route, from about the W east, was the Morris and Essex main line from 1863 to 1877. See how it lines up with the dark green Morris and Essex to the left. During this period the M&E ran through the Erie tunnel and then, east of the tunnel, curved north and east to Hoboken. And also during this period, in 1872, the Erie opened its Newark and Hudson Railroad, which completed a branch line from Paterson to Newark to Jersey City. The odd result was the Erie running on the M&E for a short distance. Once the M&E opened its own tunnel in 1877, it followed the routing shown above in dark green, and the Erie acquired the segment used for its own trains.

The Erie had significant investment in the New York and Greenwood Lake Railway from the early 1880s but did not actually acquire control until 1898. Some time around 1890, the Erie had a company called the Arlington Railroad construct a connection in the meadows from the Greenwood Lake south to meet the Newark Branch at a point just off the map above. This consolidated traffic over the lower bridge seen in the base map.

I know that the Greenwood Lake originally ran to the Pennsylvania terminal at Exchange Place. I think the re-routing via the Arlington Railroad marks the date that it started running to the Erie terminal instead. The upper bridge seems to have remained in use— at least maps continued to show it— and possibly it was used to bring freight over the old route to the Pennsylvania Railroad at Marion Junction.

Around 1909, another connection was built across the meadows, running from the Newark Branch northeast to the upper bridge. This seems to have been coordinated with the construction of the Penhorn Creek Railroad, and in fact some part of the line, I would say east of the bridge, is credited to the Penhorn Creek. The point was to get both the busy Greenwood Lake route and the lesser Newark Branch over the upper bridge to that grade-separated junction. A freight connection was also supplied curving north to the Croxton Yard around the old Erie main line. Once this was all in place, about 1911, the lower bridge was removed.

Well, that was a long way to go. I just wanted to point out that the Penhorn Creek Railroad used a little bit of the old M&E curve as it came out of the Arches.

And where is the waterway called Penhorn Creek? You can see it on the base map. It forms the boundary between City of Jersey City and Town of Secaucus.

And how has the Penhorn Creek Railroad fared?

The Erie and the Lackawanna (owner of the M&E) began to consolidate operations into the M&E's Hoboken Terminal in 1956. A connection was built where the Penhorn Creek came alongside the Lackawanna's Boonton Line, north of the Greenwood Lake junction, and the Greenwood Lake itself was also connected to the Boonton Line. This part of the Penhorn Creek remained in use until 2003, when New Jersey Transit opened a new connection near the Hackensack River from the former Erie Main Line to the former Lackawanna Boonton Line, as part of the Secaucus Junction station project. Most of this section of the Penhorn Creek Railroad is now part of a New Jersey Turnpike ramp for Exit 15X.

South of the Turnpike ramp, the former Penhorn Creek Railroad is abandoned, including the Bergen Arches. The Arches closed when the Erie's Jersey City terminal closed in 1958. The parallel tunnel, which was about 50 years older than the Arches, continued in use for freight for decades longer. I am not sure whether it is still in use.

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Mystery Train, Solved

2012-01-22T21:00:00.000-05:00

A month ago I wrote about a mysterious train on the New York and New England Railroad in 1893, a daily limited-stop express between Boston and ... Hopewell Junction, Dutchess County, New York. It seemed to make no sense at all. I observed that its arrival and departure at Hopewell Junction appeared to be coordinated with the Boston and Philadelphia express trains at Poughkeepsie Bridge. A connection would merely require running the 13 miles between Hopewell Junction and Poughkeepsie in a half hour&mash; a leisurely 30 miles per hour would do it. The catch is that the little Dutchess County Railroad showed no such trains in its timetable. Additionally the Dutchess County showed an astoundingly slow time of 65 minutes for its fastest train on the 13 mile route.

I speculated that the New York and New England express could be a mail train, and that the Dutchess County Railroad segment could have been only for mail cars and thus not shown in the public timetable.

And now, while researching for the New Jersey Terminals project, I came across the solution. It was not a mail train, but a train for express, which was the term for shipments of packages, the kind of service provided today by companies like United Parcel or Federal Express. The name of the latter still works if you think "express" means "fast".

One of the most unbelievable trains imaginable operated over the Morris and Essex during the period about 1892-1896. This was the "Boston Flyer", which, with the unusual Train Number 7½ left Hoboken about 8:30 p m and via the Boonton Branch arrived at Waterloo at 10:00 p m, where the engine was turned on the turntable, put on the other end of the train, and proceeded up the Sussex Road to Franklin Junction. There the train was turned over to the Lehigh and Hudson River Railroad for the trip to Maybrook, New York. Here the train was delivered to the Philadelphia, Reading and New England for the run over the Poughkeepsie Bridge to Hopewell Junction. At that point the New York and New England operated the train through Danbury, Waterbury, Hartford, and Willimantic, Conn, and on via Blackstone to Boston, where as Train No 32 it was scheduled to arrive at 8:20 a m.

— Thomas Townsend Taber, The Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad in the Nineteenth Century, Steamtown Volunteer Association, 1977.

Taber includes a sample timetable he dates as 1892, showing the train.

I was going to include here timetable images from Mystery Train and add the Lackawanna table, but I see Blogger has changed the way it shows images in a way that makes them too small to read. Instead of wrestling with that, I'll type it out here. Unknown timings are shown with a question mark.

NEW YORK AND NEW ENGLAND RAILROAD

BOSTON                    1800   0820
Franklin                  1842   0733
Putnam                    1940   0639
Willimantic               2025   0555
Hartford                  2120   0500

Hartford                  2130   0450
New Britain               2145   0435
Plainville                2155   0422
Bristol                   2207   0415
Waterbury                 2245   0345
Danbury                   2340   0235
Hopewell Junction         0030   0130

NEW YORK AND NEW ENGLAND RAILROAD
DUTCHESS COUNTY RAILROAD

Hopewell Junction         ?      ?   
Poughkeepsie              ?      ?   

DUTCHESS COUNTY RAILROAD
PHILADELPHIA, READING AND NEW ENGLAND RAILROAD

Poughkeepsie              0101   0054
Maybrook                  0150   0003

PHILADELPHIA, READING AND NEW ENGLAND RAILROAD
LEHIGH AND NEW ENGLAND RAILROAD

Maybrook                  0200   2353
Greycourt                 0218   2337
Warwick                   0240   2315
Franklin Junction         0310   2240

LEHIGH AND NEW ENGLAND RAILROAD
DELAWARE, LACKAWANNA AND WESTERN RAILROAD

Franklin Junction         0445   ?   
Newton                    ?      ?   
Waterloo                  0515   ?   

Waterloo                  ?      2200
Dover                     ?      2136
Boonton                   ?      2120
Paterson                  ?      2055
Lyndhurst                 ?      2044
HOBOKEN                   0656   2030

DELAWARE, LACKAWANNA AND WESTERN RAILROAD

The above is from the June 1893 Official Guide and from the 1892 eastbound Lackawanna table in Taber's book. There are small differences, but the 0820 arrival in Boston matches Taber's text, and the Poughkeepsie to Franklin times match a February 1893 table in Carlton Mabee's Bridging the Hudson (Purple Mountain Press, 2001). The greatest difference is the southbound timing at Franklin Junction, but Taber has the whole southbound run about an hour later, as follows.

The return trip left Boston at 7:00 p m as Train No 91, reaching Franklin, New Jersey at 4:45 a m, and Waterloo 5:15. After turning the engine, and putting it on the other end, the train proceeded to Hoboken as No 8½, due there at 6:56 a m.

In June 1893, the Lackawanna segment was probably as much as 90 minutes earlier than shown above, but I have entered the times from Taber anyway.

Railfan Dave Rutan, who has researched the Sussex Branch for years, has confirmed that the train ran until 1896, and he explained why the train did not exchange between the Lackawanna and the Lehigh and Hudson River at Andover.

The Boston Flyer was discontinued in 1896. The connection at Andover Junction was not created until 1905. The Boston Flyer ran up the Sussex Branch through Newton to Franklin where it got on the L&HR. The train even made station stops in Newton.

Based on this I added Newton as a stop in the table above. See Rutan's page Remember the Sussex Branch for more, including maps that may clarify point about Andover and Franklin Junction. He also has a plan showing that a cutoff was finally opened in 1901 allowing direct running into the Sussex Branch without the reverse at Waterloo, where the junction faced west. The reason for both the Waterloo and Andover improvements was to facilitate freight trains running to the Poughkeepsie Bridge route. So the "unbelievable" passenger trains were just a short-term addition to a more permanent freight routing connecting the Lackawanna and New Haven systems without carfloat at New York.

Neither of the half-number trains is shown in the June 1893 Official Guide. However, for many years the Lackawanna was cheap about buying pages in the Guide. In the condensed schedules they could cram into two pages, smaller stations are omitted, and some trains shown only as 'additional trains' in footnotes squeezed into margins. Other railroads would have taken at least four pages for the number of trains the Lackawanna operated. It's not clear that all trains were shown even as notes, and perhaps especially not two trains run mainly for express packages.

The peculiar train numbers seem to have been unique on the Lackawanna judging by Taber's comment in his thorough three-volume company history, namely "Why this train was numbered with a ½ has never been explained". Trains 7 and 8 without the ½ were "solid vestibule trains", overnight services with good accommodations between Hoboken and Buffalo. 7½ left 45 minutes after train 7, and 8½ arrived 90 minutes before train 8 (or 3 hours before— see above).

The elder Thomas Taber actually spoke with a Lackawanna engineer who ran the train.

This rather implausible operation was not intended for through passenger service, but was primarily to transport shipments of the United States Express Company (which operated on the D L & W) between New York and Boston, as a rival express company had the franchise on the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. For several years, Morris and Essex locomotive No 87, named "John J Phelps", was assigned to handle the trains between Hoboken and Franklin. The redoubtable John Draney, later to achieve great renown as a teller of tall tales, and star of a radio show "Life Begins at 80", was the engineer, and he told the author that when running at night through the dairy farming area of Sussex County, the greatest hazard was cows on the track. Said John, "I killed eight one night in Drake's Cut, and when I told Superintendent Reasoner about it when I got to Hoboken, he asked if there were any more cows around. I said there was one more, and he said 'Well why didn't you get that one too?'"

An elderly Miss Emma Warbasse told a writer for the Susquehanna Reflector in April 1956 (also from Dave Rutan's site):

Back in the early nineties, the Lackawanna's famous Boston Flyer would roll through Sussex County each evening, its beautiful chime whistle reverberating through the pastoral valleys and wooded hills, its many brightly-lit windows giving forth an enticing glow and the lure of distant horizons.

The word "famous" certainly overstates the case— or maybe not, for longterm Sussex County residents.

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New Jersey Terminals 3

2012-01-15T20:39:00.000-05:00

Nobody noticed that I had the north-south PATH line in Jersey City out of place. I include myself in that statement. Before and after:

I had to fix it in all the maps I've started so far.

I decided also to make the widest line 6 points, not 8, which you can see at Hoboken Terminal. At 8 it was getting in the way of clarity.

The idea of showing light rail lines has snowballed into a Thing, because there are so many of them once I go back past 1945, and I have not already researched them at ten-year increments as I have done the mainline railroads. But I still like the idea and I am plodding along with it. It's taking a lot of time.

This is what part of 1935 looks like with all the street railways in:

Removing the background has its advantages:

That's also 1935. I think I'll leave the background, because it lets you match the lines to streets and landmarks, but the map without it has its minimalist beauty, doesn't it?

I already realize that I will not get the street railways exactly right, because of incomplete source material, but I'm going to get as close as I can.

I had a dream. I went down to the basement for something. Maybe I was doing the wash. When I got there, I found a bear in the basement. It wasn't a full grown bear, but it was pretty big. It didn't look exactly right and I realized it was a CGI bear. I still didn't like being down there with it, so I went back upstairs. I wasn't sure what to do. How did it get down there? I remembered there was a small window with a bad latch. That must be it. He pushed it and got in. I went outside and I found two men in uniform, who were looking around as if they'd lost something. One had a gun with a large barrel. I knew it was a dart gun. "Are you looking for a bear?" I asked them. Yes, they were. I told them it was in my basement. We started up the driveway so I could show them the window, but the bear was already coming out. It was squeezing itself through the little window, and when it got the last of its body out, it made a pop sound like a cartoon bear would do. It saw us and ran up the hill in the back yard, and the two men chased after it.

That was it. I woke up. What does it mean, doctor?

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New Jersey Terminals 2

2012-01-08T21:00:00.000-05:00

I've spent a lot of time on the maps. The only ones I'd call done at this point are 2012, 1975, and 1965. They are now up at a work in progress site, http://www.columbia.edu/~brennan/njterminals/. The page needs some written commentary that I will do later.

Here's a preview of 1955:

For the first time (going back) we have the terminals of the Erie Railroad and the Pennsylvania Railroad.

It's hard to see here, but for the Erie I show the 4-track Bergen Archways open cut line and the older 2-track tunnel just to the north. I think passenger trains used the archways, but if they used the tunnel at all, I wanted to show it.

The Pennsylvania and the Hudson and Manhattan presented an interesting graphic problem. From the portal to west of Journal Square, the H&M used the center pair of tracks and the Pennsylvania passenger trains used the outer tracks. They merged west of Journal Square and used the same Pennsylvania Railroad tracks almost to Harrison station. To show this I have used two thin red lines around the H&M blue line. You could argue that it's all Pennsylvania trackage, but I used blue where the H&M had exclusive use. Journal Square station was H&M only.

Last minute change: I now use the same graphic in 1965, 1975, 2012 to show the stretch near Harrison where PATH is the outer track around the mainlines.

East of the portal the Pennsylvania ran directly over the H&M. I decided to offset the two just enough for you to see the H&M continuing east in tunnel. As the Pennsylvania grows wider nearer the terminal, it covers the H&M. It works for me.

And here is 1945:

Since I showed light rail on the 2012 map, I felt I should be consistent and show it on the older maps too. So there is the Hoboken Elevated. And in very thin purple lines, there are the street railways that ran through from the elevated. There wasn't enough room to name all the elevated stations, but the stops shown are at the correct positions (the pair of one-side stations in Hoboken at Washington St and Bloomfield St are shown as one circle).

The other addition (that you can see here) is the short-lived Lehigh Valley commuter service to the LV's own Jersey City terminal. The terminal, as far as I can tell, consisted of one track alongside Johnston Avenue across the street from the CNJ terminal. Passengers used the CNJ ferry. The 1945 timetable shows one train each way via this route, so I used a thin line.

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New Jersey Terminals

2012-01-01T21:00:00.000-05:00

I've started a new project I'm calling New Jersey Terminals.

I was inspired by getting the latest volume of Richard Carpenter's A Railroad Atlas of the United States in 1946, which is volume 4 covering Illinois, Wisconsin, and upper Michigan. If you are interested in American railroad history you should definitely get these books.

I stumbled across volume 1 in a large bookstore in Toronto a few years ago. I had not heard about it before. I later ordered volumes 2 and 3 from Johns Hopkins University Press, and now I just got volume 4 for Christmas courtesy of my brother in law Rick, who has met the author because of his work with HART in Danbury.

Volume 4 includes the trackage outside both Chicago and St Louis. Both are more fiendishly complicated than the tangle on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, but still, I thought I might be able to provide some clarifications for railfans if I mapped out the passenger services here over time.

This is different from the Atlas. I'm showing only the passenger network, and showing it over time instead of in one year.

I researched the subject some years ago, but I never put it out on the web (or anywhere else), so this is all new stuff. It's mostly just a matter of drawing the maps from the material I have, so I think I can knock it out over some number of weeks starting now.

First I tiled together a base map from four 15-minute series topographics like I did for the Danbury map a few weeks ago. They are from 1898 and 1900. Maybe I should have used the more recently updated 7.5-minute series like I did for the South Orange boundary maps in October, but I didn't. The old maps show some small rail lines that are gone now, and I thought using them would help me draw those lines in the right positions when I did the older years. But it's six of one ; using the old maps I ended up having to work out the location of the high line to Penn Station, which was not there yet in 1900.

Then I drew the present day: the Hoboken lines, the Penn Station lines, the light rail, and PATH. As I worked I decided to vary line width and station circle size, and to show tunnels with dashed lines.

Next I jumped back to 1975. At first I was thinking of just mapping each 25 years, but then I decided it would be more fun to be more granular than that, so the next one I did was 1965. My plan now is to go each ten years on the fives, 1955, 1945, and so on. Maybe I will go back and do 2005, 1995, 1985, but the fact is they didn't change as much as the older dates.

Here is today. I used the New Jersey Transit orange and purple colors for the main lines and the light rail. I'm not sure I like those colors, but they are what they are.

Now, back to 1975. No light rail, and for the Hoboken main lines I'm using the dark green color the Erie Lackawanna used on coaches. We didn't know it then, but this year was pretty much the low point in the modern passenger railroad network. The for-profit railroad companies had abandoned all but the busiest routes, and the state had just started developing rail transportation.

And now, 1965. The Central of New Jersey terminal appears. Its color is royal blue, because the CNJ used a dark blue and yellow scheme, and because the Baltimore and Ohio used the the CNJ as part of its alternative "northeast corridor" between New York and Washington, known as the Royal Blue Line.

I think the map just above poses the question, "why did the PATH tubes run to Hoboken but not CNJ Jersey City?", and the next one, which will show two more terminals at Pavonia and Exchange Place, will ask more loudly, "why just three out of four?". Railroad politics, I think, together with the tubes not generating the income that would attract more capital investment. Not everything can be mapped.

These are just very small sections of the maps in preparation. The full coverage goes out about 15 miles, to show how the various main lines and branches approached the city.

For colors I wanted to follow Richard Carpenter's concept, as he wrote,

Every effort has been made to choose a color for each railroad company that has a historic association with that railroad. ... However, in order to preserve a graphic color contrast between adjacent railroads, the choice of an unrelated color has sometimes been necessary.

I have not used all the same colors he did. But I like the idea. Pennsylvania is dark red, Lehigh Valley is orange, Susquehanna is yellow, New York Central (West Shore) is grey, Erie is light green.

More next week.

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Mystery Train

2011-12-25T21:00:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas to all!

I have a reprint copy of the June 1893 Travelers' Official Guide of the Railway and Steam Navigation Lines in the United States and Canada.

Here is the main page for the New York and New England Railroad, showing trains on the main line from Boston to Hartford to Fishkill, and part of a second page featuring the company's two trains with "Elegant" and "Superb" accommodations.

Running southbound, the 1201 train from Boston gives cars to the New Haven Railroad at Hartford, and the 1500 train from Boston, the famous White Train or New England Limited, gives cars to the New Haven Railroad at Willimantic, using the Air Line route from there to New Haven. The same two services run northbound arriving Boston at 1830 and 2040. The New England Limited also has cars to and from Waterbury on the NY&NE as we can see from the first table.

What catches my eye though is the other express train— the one that runs between Boston and Hopewell Junction, leaving Boston at 1800 and arriving at 0820. It does not have a special table, but it has even fewer stops than the two trains just mentioned. What is this train?

I knew that there was around this time a through train between Boston and New York on the NY&NE and the New York and Northern, later known as the Putnam Division. Here's the NY&N through schedule from the same Official Guide.

While this does show two NY&NE connections, neither is the express train. One is a Brewster-Hartford local and the other is a Fishkill-Boston local.

The other run I know about is the railfan favorite Poughkeepsie Bridge train between Boston and Philadelphia that was run around this time. From Boston, it ran on the Boston and Maine's former Central Massachusetts to Northampton, the New Haven's former New Haven and Northampton to Simsbury, and then the Reading system.

In the early decades of the Official Guide, railroads were remarkably silent about many interline through services. The bridge train is a typical example. Below are tables of the Boston and Maine, New Haven, and Reading system.

Southbound. On the B&M it's the train leaving Boston at 1750, arriving Northampton 2040, with limited stops. On the New Haven, read up, it's the train leaving Northampton at 2045 and arriving Simsbury at 2145. On the Reading system, it originates from Hartford at 2110 and picks up the cars from Boston at Simsbury, leaving there at 2152, reaching Poughkeepsie at 0101 and Philadelphia at 0740.

Northbound. The train leaves Philadelphia on the Reading system at 1900, reaching Poughkeepsie at 0054 and Simsbury at 0400, arriving Hartford at 0435. On the New Haven, the through cars leave Simsbury at 0405— shown only in a note at the bottom of the table! The cars take probably the same one hour to reach Northampton, and at any rate on the B&M they leave there at 0510 and arrive Boston at 0820.

The interesting bit is the Poughkeepsie times. 0101 southbound, 0054 northbound. The NY&NE express train arrives Hopewell Junction at 0030 southbound and departs 0130 northbound. It's interesting because the distance from Hopewell Junction to Poughkeepsie was only 13 miles by rail, on the Dutchess County Railroad. That short line was part of the Reading system, and here is its timetable.

Trains 60 and 61 connect well with NY&NE trains at Hopewell ; trains 63 and 70 connect well with Reading trains at Poughkeepsie. But none connect anywhere near the express NY&NE trains.

I find it very tempting to think that the NY&NE ran through cars to the Poughkeepsie Bridge train. I need only believe that the cars could pass over the 13 miles of the Dutchess County Railroad in under an hour. The limited-stop NY&NE train between Hopewell Junction and Boston just seems pointless otherwise, and its times at Hopewell are wonderfully coordinated with the bridge trains.

But amazingly the two nonstop trains shown on the Dutchess County timetable take 65 minutes to travel 13 miles. That's a blazing 12 miles per hour. Was the track that bad, or the engines that weak? Does this rule out NY&NE trains running at least ten minutes faster?

I'll make the case against.

First, the Reading timetable does list a NY&NE connection for the southbound train, but it's the 1530 train running local from Norwood Central to Hartford. If you could leave Boston on the NY&NE two and a half hours later, why not show it? And no northbound NY&NE connection is shown.

Second, the NY&NE took care to show the two trains with through cars to New York. Wouldn't they also provide notice of through cars to Philadelphia? (Side note: the NY&NE map does not even show a bridge at Poughkeepsie, five years after it opened!)

Third, why wouldn't the little Dutchess County timetable show the two trains?

So, I don't think so. But it's still quite a coincidence.

I observe that the train spends one hour at Hopewell Junction, for a round trip leaving Boston 1800 and returning 0820. That's 14 hours and 20 minutes including a one-hour rest. It exceeds the federal hours of service law, but the law was not enacted until 1907. Did the NY&NE actually have a single crew work that train?

Now, two words: mail train. Back in those days, when people communicated on paper and when all long distance mail went by train, there was so much volume that railroads operated some trains primarily for mail. Since they ran at passenger train speeds and stopped at major cities, mail trains often carried passenger coaches too. You can usually spot the mail trains in timetables because they tended to run overnight. The mystery train has the hallmarks of a mail train.

And let me make one leap of speculation. Is there any chance the Dutchess County Railroad made a midnight run carrying only mail cars, connecting the Reading at Poughkeepsie and the NY&NE at Hopewell Junction, running at a breakneck speed of as much as 25 miles per hour? It would be amazing to think mail made the journey to and from Boston a few hours faster than passengers, but there could be reasons. One would be to keep the passengers on Reading rails as far as possible, to maximize ticket income to the Reading.

Who knows?

Mystery train.

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The Federal Express

2011-12-18T21:00:00.000-05:00

The Danbury research (see the last two weeks) led me to the Wikipedia page for the Federal Express train, which needed some corrections and additions. And who better to do it?

The Federal was the overnight Boston-Washington train that ran around New York, not through it, before the opening of the Hell Gate span in 1917.

I didn't know that the train went all the way back to 1876, but come to think of it, I should have guessed that. The Centennial Fair in Philadelphia inspired numerous special train routings and even new rail lines. The alternate New York-Philadelphia corridor via West Trenton opened that year and vied with the Pennsylvania Railroad route for decades.

The overnight train wasn't actually called the Federal Express for a while. I have a reprint June 1893 Official Guide, and the train still ran then under generic names like Boston-Washington Express. But it had the name by 1903. I couldn't narrow that gap without spending more time researching it. But it was substantially the same train.

Originally the train left Boston on the New York and New England Railroad and came into the New Haven system at Hartford. The New Haven did not control its own line to Boston until 1893. The NY&NE was the shortest route although it had the disadvantage of missing all cities (Willimantic was the largest place on the line!). The Boston and Albany Railroad route via Springfield was the other lead contender. In 1888 the New Haven completed a long high bridge at New London, and for the first time the shore route to the Boston and Providence Railroad, now the Northeast Corridor, became competitive with the other two. Once the New Haven acquired that B&P line in 1893 it became the favored route, and I think it may have been then that the Federal was shifted to what would become its permanent routing.

At New York a trip on the Federal involved a ride past Manhattan on the special steamship Maryland. I do mean that the rail cars themselves rode on the ship. During the hour on board, you could leave the cars and enjoy the breezes, or stay in your Pullman sleeper and... sleep. The north transfer was the New Haven Railroad's Harlem River station, in (what is now) the Bronx near the Third Avenue Bridge, and the south transfer was Harsimus Cove, a few blocks north of the Pennsylvania's Jersey City terminal at Exchange Place.

I could mention that Maryland was so named because its original job was carrying the Pennsylvania's trains across the Susquehanna River at Havre de Grace. Once a bridge was completed there, the unusual ship was out of work for about a decade. It was partly rebuilt in 1876 for the New York service. Here is a photograph of it on April 4, 1876, run aground at Martha's Vineyard, probably on its way to New York.

Maryland could carry six passenger rail cars or twelve (shorter) freight cars. It looks like a ferry, but in a lawsuit in 1877, the railroad succeeded in having it defined as not a ferry, to avoid regulation by the City of New York, whose officials objected to it. Maybe they didn't like seeing passengers go right past New York.

This Maryland burned in 1888, and was replaced by a new Maryland. The name had become so attached to the service that it could hardly be called anything else. I found a report from 1903 that businesses often specified freight routing "via the Maryland" rather than "via Harlem River station". In fact a railroad man admitted many shippers did not even know the name of Harlem River station, and did not know that there was a second boat in service, Exchange, usually used for freight but sometimes for passenger services as a backup for Maryland.

But none of this relates to Danbury. Here is what does.

The Pennsylvania began service to New York Penn Station in 1911, and all of the long-distance trains were rerouted there instead of Jersey City except the Federal and the Colonial. They continued to ride on Maryland for almost a year more. In October 1912 the Colonial Express was split in two, and passengers were provided a special bus service between Penn Station and Grand Central. The Federal could not be treated that way because it passed through New York in the middle of the night.

Instead the Federal was sent the long way round: via Poughkeepsie.

Running southbound, the Federal left the corridor south of New Haven and ran over the New Haven Railroad's Maybrook Line, the Lehigh and Hudson River Railroad, and the Pennsylvania's Belvidere Delaware Branch, finally returning to the corridor at Trenton. The all-rail route was not faster. It just allowed retiring Maryland and the special equipment and staff involved.

The Maybrook Line is where Danbury comes in. This was the freight route that the New Haven put together from 1908 to 1911, using the former New Haven and Derby, and parts of the former Housatonic, New York and New England, and Central New England. Notice the dates. It looks like the Maybrook Line was just getting into full operation when Penn Station opened in 1911. Maybe there was uncertainty about using it for a passenger train, even an overnight one that could run closer to slow freight speeds than most.

This lasted less than four years. The reason stated was capacity on the Maybrook Line. The freight trains "congested" the line and made the passenger schedule unreliable. I wonder how bad it got before they gave up.

After about a year without overnight service, the Federal came back in April 1917 when the Hell Gate Span opened and through routing via Penn Station became possible. The Federal and Colonial were revived. But for decades the New Haven continued to run almost all of its trains to Grand Central. It was not until the Amtrak era that through service became the standard.

It's too bad there was no daylight service. The view from Poughkeepsie Bridge is said to be spectacular. It has been open as a public walkway since 2009. But the ride along the Delaware River and through the New Jersey Highlands, the Dutchess County farm country, and the Connecticut hills would be very scenic as well. Admittedly there was limited population along the entire diversion, Phillipsburg, Poughkeepsie, Danbury, and Derby being the largest towns en route. I can see why the routing was not viewed as a potential moneymaker. But it would have been fun to ride just once.

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Danbury Railways revised

2011-12-11T21:00:00.000-05:00

Last week we had an historical map of railways around Danbury, Connecticut, and I said, why not?

This week I say: Why not do it better?

Sometimes I can't let go of something when I know I didn't quite finish it. So I blew another 12 hours or so crossing the I's and dotting the T's.

First of all, the jpg map was awful. Here are much better ones, a big PDF with the topo map background and a smaller clean JPG without.

Besides an improved appearance, these maps also have various corrections and additions. Most notably, I added a strip on the west side where I had just barely cut off the interesting area around Brewster, and I added two more partially constructed railways.

Secondly, I rewrote the Historical Sketch section into better English style, and added more details. I can write good. Or write well. Whichever.

The result so far is semi permanently enshrined at http://www.columbia.edu/~brennan/danbury/.

I was especially surprised to learn that there were three partially constructed railways in the area. I had the New York, Housatonic and Northern last week, but now I've added the Ridgefield and New York and the Danbury and Harlem Traction line. These more than pipe dreams. All three companies purchased and graded many miles of property, leaving traces that can still be seen today.

As I mentioned last time, the NYH&N actually opened the small portion from Danbury to Brookfield Junction, which is still in operation today, and the company also graded another 23 miles (!) that was never operated, far into Westchester County. The Ridgefield and New York similarly graded all or most of its route down to East Port Chester (across the boundary river from Port Chester NY). The trolley line D&HT not only graded part of its route but actually laid about five miles of track and made a test run with a trolley borrowed from the Danbury and Bethel Street Railway.

Local railfans and history buffs have discussed the grades— here is a good one about the D&HT grade, although read carefully because it also references the R&NY grade and mentions the NYH&N.

I made two real finds at the U Conn MAGIC web site, the library's wonderful acronym for the Map and Geographical Information Center. They have a 1934 aerial photography set of the entire state that shows the Danbury and Harlem Traction grade very clearly. They also have almost all of the New Haven railroad valuation maps of 1915, providing enormous detail on the railroad's property and structures at that time, which was about its maximum extent.

The valuation maps, amazingly, include the entire Ridgefield and New York line from Danbury to East Port Chester, even though it was never completed. Notations show that the property from Ridgefield south was sold to the New Haven in 1906. The Ridgefield to Danbury section, which was added to the proposed road some time in the 1880s, is carefully detailed, but why is unclear, because the notes emphasize that the New Haven did not own the property.

Last time Charlie Warren commented that the New York, Westchester and Boston project included a proposed line to Danbury. I know that it was to have continued north from White Plains along a route very similar to that of the unbuilt New York, Housatonic and Northern. I haven't shown it since no work was done. However the New Haven's strange acquisition of the Ridgefield and New York property makes me wonder whether there was any idea of extending the NYW&B from its Port Chester terminal by that route to Danbury. It was already graded after all, although it would probably have needed extensive rebuilding to eliminate grade crossings and live up to the NYW&B standard.

I came across this amusing article about a property for sale in northwestern Greenwich, left over from the New York, Housatonic and Northern project. From the street you see a narrow lot (by local standards) 100 feet wide with a modest house on it, but... the property goes back almost half a mile! Type 56 locust road greenwich ct on Google maps.

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Danbury Railways

2011-12-04T21:00:00.000-05:00

This week: an historical map of railways around Danbury, Connecticut. Why not?

Sources

My Topo http://historical.mytopo.com/

Connecticut Railroads by Gregg M Turner and Melancthon W Jacobus. Hartford CT: The Connecticut Historical Society, 1989.

Lost Railroads of New England by Ronald Dake Karr, third edition. Pepperel MA: Branch Line Press, 2010.

Tyler City Station Danbury Page http://www.tylercitystation.info/id10.html

"Motor Trips" New England and Eastern New York for The New England Federation of Automobile Clubs. Hartford CT: The Guyde Publishing Co, 1923.

Atlas of New York and Vicinity by F W Beers. New York: F W Beers et al, 1868. Seen at David Rumsey Map Collection.

History of Public Bus Service in Danbury, http://www.hvceo.org/transport/HART12%20HARTHISTORY.php

Official Guide of the Railways, for June 1893 and January 1910.

Map

The base map is a mosaic of four USGS 15-minute sheets dated from 1892 to 1904, from the My Topo web site. I drew the railroads and stations and notes using the other sources listed. Eight hours.

Historical Sketch

The first railway in the area was the Housatonic Railroad, which eventually ran from Bridgeport to Pittsfield MA on a generally north-south line. The first section completed, from Bridgeport to New Milford opened in 1840, including a rock tunnel in Newtown, usually called the Hawleyville Tunnel. The railroad investors in Bridgeport wanted to connect their town to quarries, iron mines and foundries, potteries, and other industries in northwest Connecticut. Over the next fifty years, connecting and through services were operated by the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad between Bridgeport and New York.

A railway to Danbury, an inland market town with a popular annual fair, had been proposed just as early, but it did not happen until 1852 when the Danbury and Norwalk Railroad opened a line between its namesake cities. Once again the New Haven Railroad provided the important connection to New York and other points, at Norwalk. The D&N ended at Danbury Main Street, with no connection to the Housatonic.

The New York, Housatonic and Northern Railroad was intended to connect the Housatonic Railroad to New York without relying on the New Haven Railroad. The first section built was also the only section opened, namely that from Brookfield Junction to Danbury, 1868. For a few months it ran to the D&N's Main Street station, but in 1869 it opened its own station at White Street and removed the rail connection to the D&N. This segment was operated by the Housatonic from 1872.

The uncompleted route of the NYH&N curved around the west side of Danbury to about the Fair Grounds and then set off as straight as possible toward New York via White Plains, passing through Ridgefield and then on into New York State. The company purchased and graded 23 more miles of route before it failed and sold off all its assets in 1875.

At the same time the Danbury and Norwalk quickly built its own branch line to Ridgefield in 1870. The former Ridgefield Station, where the branch joined the main line, was renamed Branchville, a name it still retains. Passenger service on the Ridgefield Branch ran only until 1925, and it was abandoned in 1964.

A short line called the Shepaug Railroad opened in 1872 from Hawleyville (on the Housatonic) north to Litchfield over a very twisty route. The Danbury and Norwalk again built a branch to take traffic from the Housatonic, from Bethel. It opened the same year and was operated by the Shepaug. The D&N link, which had no stations, was one of the earliest abandonments in Connecticut, 1911. From 1908 the Shepaug's trains ran to Danbury instead via the NY&NE route.

Danbury got its first through trains in 1881 when the New York and New England Railroad opened the last portion of its main line, from Waterbury to Beacon, passing east and west through the area. The NY&NE followed a route something like Interstate 84, from Boston through northeastern Connecticut, Willimantic, Hartford, Waterbury, Danbury, and Brewster.

Entering the area from the east, the NY&NE came alongside the Housatonic near the tunnel in Newtown, where the NY&NE built its own tunnel. South of Brookfield Junction the NY&NE curved over to the Housatonic's Brookfield branch line, and built directly alongside it to Danbury. The NY&NE crossed over to the north side and ran into its own White Street station next to the Housatonic's station. But then west of Danbury the NY&NE route opened new ground, running to Brewster and then north and west.

The age of consolidation began. The Housatonic acquired the Danbury and Norwalk in 1886, renaming it the Danbury Branch. The New Haven acquired the Housatonic and the Shepaug in 1892, and the New York and New England in 1895. This brought all of the Danbury area railways into one system.

The main passenger flow was north and south. The Housatonic built a connection at Danbury in 1889, closing its White Street station and finally bringing the Brookfield trains into the Main Street station for easier connections. Some through trains began to run to New York over the shorter route down the Danbury Branch, but they had to make a reverse move at Danbury because of the stub terminal. A better solution was implemented by the New Haven in 1896, after it acquired the NY&NE, namely a loop track that allowed trains to continue forward, although it meant that looping trains stopped at White Street instead of Main Street. Finally the New Haven built a new station for all Danbury services on the White Street site in 1903.

The New Haven also developed an important east-west freight link. In Orange County, New York, coal from the Lehigh and Hudson River, the Lehigh and New England, the New York, Ontario and Western, and the Erie, and general freight from the Erie, were made up into trains that ran over the Poughkeepsie Bridge (1888). From there the freight main followed the former NY&NE through Brewster and Danbury to Hawleyville, and then onward to Bridgeport or New Haven using the lower Housatonic line.

In 1908 the parallel railroads running east from Danbury were made into a double-track main line as far as Berkshire Junction, where the routes north and east diverged. There had been no junction there before. The parallel lines around Hawleyville were rebuilt in 1911. The new line followed the NY&NE through Hawleyville and then followed a new grade over the site of the old tunnels and down into the lower Housatonic Railroad. The Housatonic tunnel was abandoned, but the NY&NE tunnel was retained with a new west portal for traffic over the old line to Waterbury.

A section of the original Housatonic near Brookfield Junction was abandoned in 1940 after years of very little use. The other two sides of the triangle, Danbury to north and Danbury to east, remain in use. The Shepaug and the ex NY&NE from Hawleyville to Southbury were both abandoned in 1948, years after their last passenger services (1930 and 1932 respectively).

This left just two routes forming a cross at Danbury. The southern leg has Metro North passenger service to Norwalk and New York. Danbury and Bethel stations were re-sited in 1996, and West Redding in 1999. The other three legs have a light amount of freight service.

Danbury was for two brief periods a stop on long-distance passenger trains. The first was an overnight train between Boston and New York from December 1892 to May 1893, that ran on the NY&NE from Boston to Brewster and the New York and Northern (later known as the Putnam Division) down to the NY&N's terminal at 155th St in Manhattan. It took eight hours. The second period saw another overnight train between Boston and Washington, the Federal Express, from 1912 to 1917. The train ran over the freight link previously described, via the New Haven Railroad, the Poughkeepsie Bridge, the Lehigh and Hudson River Railroad, and the Pennsylvania Railroad. It diverted from the modern Northeast Corridor from New Haven to Trenton. Once the Hell Gate Span opened to traffic in 1917, the Federal Express was re-routed via New York Penn Station.

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Boston 1974 - 2

2011-11-27T21:00:00.000-05:00

Last time we looked at a few Boston transit scenes as they were in 1974. You can't get these pictures any more. The vehicles have changed, and in part the city has changed too.

This time though we are going to see almost total change. We're going to North Station.

I walked up that way twice last month. I didn't have a map. I just wandered.

The first time I crossed Boston Common and saw people getting ready for a charity run, and I walked up into Beacon Hill on a street I can't remember, and back down, and then along some other street. Eventually I saw tracks going up onto an elevated structure and realized I was beyond North Station. I could see the elevated structure going out to Science Park. I went back east.

Another day I walked up Tremont Street and then through the modernist ugly City Hall block and came up to North Station from the south.

The Green and Orange lines used to come up out of the subway two blocks south of Causeway Street, six tracks wide, side by side, between Canal Street and Haverhill Street. The east pair, the Orange Line, came up to an elevated structure and turned right at Causeway Street. Of the left four tracks, the outer pair came up to another elevated structure and turned left at Causeway Street, and the middle pair came up to street level and ended at a loop on the south side of Causeway Street. It's all gone.

Here are two details of aerial views from the 1920s, from the Boston Public Library. I have added some labels.

It looked almost the same fifty years later. The same Boston Garden over North Station, and the same elevated structure.

Here's the Orange Line side.

Everything in this photograph is gone.

We're looking from the North Station platform of the Orange Line. That's the canopy at upper left. The two-car train has just left and made its right-angle right turn into Causeway Street, and it's passing under the Fitzgerald Expressway.

My note on the back says: Sign at bottom of picture notes new subway which will replace this elevated line within a few years. Actually it was only one year later. But that's only the elevated line.

The Orange Line went underground in 1975. The John F Fitzgerald Expressway was closed in 2003 and torn down, replaced by the Big Dig. I don't know when the tall building on the left side was demolished, but it's gone now, and so is the other building on the right, behind the expressway.

I am a liar. Causeway Street itself is still there. But everything else is gone.

From the same location, in 1974, if we turn our gaze to the left, we see this.

Again, almost everything in this photograph is gone.

A bit of the canopy of the Orange Line's North Station is at upper right. In the background is Boston Garden, built over the Boston and Maine Railroad's North Station, torn down in 1997. That's gone, replaced by a new TD Garden. The Green Line elevated was torn down in 2005. The buildings on the left might be there: I am not sure.

In 1974 the Green Line had two stations called North Station. The PCC car above is running south on the elevated line from Lechmere. It has already stopped at the elevated North Station, and made a right-angle turn from there to where we see it here. Right below it, not visible, was the other North Station.

My notes on the back say: Trolley car running toward the subway, after leaving North Station stop, which is partly visible in the rear around a right-angle turn. Sign, center, cautions trolley motormen to go slow on curve "to aid in reducing noise". I wonder how much that helped.

Here is the surface-level station below.

This was at street level, in pavement, but separated from street traffic by a fence. The car in view is facing the same direction as the one in the previous photo, but directly below it.

The car shown was a D car, the Riverside Line. It terminated at North Station in the summer of 1974. If you entered here, you walked across the loop track. You could walk over to that car and get on, or you could go up the stairs and follow a passageway over Causeway Street to go west on the other Green Line cars or north to Lechmere.

Everything seen here is gone now, except the taller building in the distance. I'm not sure what it is.

Here's the Green Line elevated station.

We're over Causeway Street, looking west. Boston Garden and North Station (B&M) would be on the right. The car in the first photo is coming from Lechmere.

The buildings on the left are still there. I saw them last month.

I took photos of the old and new City Hall. The old one was purchased by a developer and renovated. In 1974 I was sure I knew which one I liked better. I didn't pass by the old one last month but I did walk through the open plaza around the new one. My opinion has not changed.

I left Boston last month from South Station. I didn't take a picture of it in 1974, but I remember it as cavernous and dark and impossibly decrepit. The unwashed armpit of Boston. No, that was North Station. South Station was something worse.

At any rate, South Station today looks wonderful. It's light and open, and full of people. There are many food and other businesses in it, and they seemed busy, even at midday. I was glad to see it. I'm used to Penn Station, which is garbage. South Station is how it should be.

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Boston 1974 - 1

2011-11-20T21:00:00.000-05:00

I went to Boston for a conference a few weeks ago. I didn't bring the camera, and I'm feeling increasingly old fashioned not carrying a camera phone either. But anyway, no pics for you.

It reminded me that I do have a few photographs of Boston transit, and they're the kind you can't get any more. You'd have to go back to the summer of 1974 to get them. The negatives are missing, so I've had to scan the prints, which have undergone some color shift over the years. The past actually came in the same colors as today, as far as I recall. It just looks like this in old photos.

Last month I stayed in Brookline and commuted a short way to the event on the C car of the Green Line. That was fun. I got off the Acela at Back Bay and walked up to Copley. It's only two blocks. Easy if you have only a small bag.

At Copley I went in on the outbound side of course. It's a conventional stairway in the sidewalk subway entrance. But I took a look across the street to check that the inbound side still has the wonderful kiosk we saw way back when.

That's... just amazing. I imagine the city fathers felt a civic duty not to deface the magnificent public library with a humdrum subway entrance out front. Or an iron works gave political contributions to the right people. Either way: well done. And it's been kept up. Even the modern green sign somehow looks like it belongs there.

That's Helen. Just for scale.

We had some free time in the afternoons. The vendor fair was only so big, and once I'd been through it a couple of times and spoken to people at the few directly relevant booths, I felt like it would be good for me to go outside and walk around.

One day I rode out to Harvard Square. Do you know that if you look up at a certain building in Harvard Square, you can see the offices of Dewey Cheatham and Howe on the third floor? This is not from 1974: it's from Google Street View. I have not altered the image except to add the helpful arrow.

Back in '74, while walking around with Helen at Harvard Square we just happened to find ourselves at the south portal of the trolley bus tunnel at Mount Auburn Street. Don't know how that happened.

Here is a blast from the past.

You don't see that kind of bus any more. That car, maybe.

The portal is still there, approximately, but there's a large building now on top of it, so the scene is almost unrecognizable. At this time you could still see the remains of streetcar track on the right.

Be sure to notice how banged-up the front of that bus looks. These things looked old to me even then. It was as if the MTA could no longer figure out where to buy a trolley bus and didn't know what else to do but just send out the ones they had no matter what shape they were in.

Also notice the left-side door. It's there only for the stop in the bus tunnel.

From this angle you can see that the abandoned track is in the same path taken by one of the bus lines, the 72. It still makes its last stop at Harvard Square in the tunnel, comes out here with no passengers, loops around the block, and goes back in again to start its run.

Here's my favorite of today's batch.

I wrote on the back of this one: A two-car train of trolley cars at Chestnut Hill Avenue on the Boston College line, in Brighton. That's the B car line. This scene looks very much the same today except for the type of trolley.

Another short trip I took last month was to the Mattapan High Speed Line (sic) at the end of the Red Line Ashmont branch. It's a railfan favorite but I'd never found an excuse to go down there. To my surprise, it's still run by PCC trolleys just like the ones above, but painted in the old orange and cream colors. So you don't have to go to a trolley museum or San Francisco to ride them.

I think they looked great in green and white. And I love the T in a white circle: why has the New York system never had a good symbol? Sorry, the dark blue M does not cut it.

That boy is 31 years older now (I hope!).

Here is the railfan geek shot.

The B, C, and D lines are very close to one another at Chestnut Hill Avenue, so it's a choice location
if you want to go out one way and back another. We walked past the end of the C line at Cleveland Circle and found this in the block between there and the D Riverside line.

My note on the back says: Entrance to storage yard and repair shop at Cleveland Circle. The yellow vehicle is a very old boxcar trolley. Besides that, two of the PCC cars are in the colors they still use now on the Mattapan line. There is still a transit yard here but these buildings and cars are gone.

A few paces farther east and we're over the Riverside line, at Reservoir station. The most recent of the Green Line branches, this route opened in 1959, running in a former mainline railroad branch. The splindly concrete stairways still looked a little makeshift fifteen years later.

My note on the back points out: Train of very old red cars in distance on a siding. Yes. It's not clear whether they're in the storage yard or on a siding of the former railroad right of way. The track in the foreground ran from the yard (or even from the B or C lines) around to the right and down to the D line. It's gone now.

Today this scene looks very different. The overpass is much wider, providing a bus loop in the empty space out to about the end of the hind trolley car, and the stairs have been replaced. You can hardly see the D line from the street, and only a large T sign alerts you to the station.

(to be continued)

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A Veteran's Day

2011-11-13T21:00:00.000-05:00

Leather patch of the 561st Bomb Squadron of the 388th Bomb Group.

My father entered the Army Air Force in January 1943. The flight records in his folder show training flights at Gulfport Army Air Field MS from July to October 1944 and Hunter Field GA in October 1944.

The next record is from December 1944 at an unstated location for "8th, 3d Air Div, 388th, 561st". We know from other records now public that he was at RAF Knettishall in Suffolk County, England. Technically a Royal Air Force base, it was used exclusively by the United States Army Air Force's 388th Bombardment Group from June 1943 to August 1945. Its only other use was for a few years more as British army supply base. There is a monument at the site.

Peter Brennan flew 33 missions from Knettishall, from November 16, 1944 to March 29, 1945. His role was togglier in a B-17 "Flying Fortress" aircraft. The togglier sat in the glass nosecone, next to the navigator who was behind and to the left. He released the bombs, and he also had a forward-pointing gun. This late in the war, my father said, the Luftwaffe were almost gone, so almost all the enemy fire was from anti-aircraft guns on the ground.

He is sometimes described on paper as a bombardier, and on a rare occasion that he talked about it, he said that technically the lead plane in the formation had a bombardier who determined when to drop, and that the toggliers in the other planes just dropped when they saw lead plane drop. A few days ago I got a better description from Dick Henggeler, 388th Bomb Group historian:

A bombardier was an officer who was able to use the Noden bombsight. A toggilier was able to arm and release the bombs manually. In the group the bombardier in the lead plane released his bombs using the bombsight. All other planes released their bombs when they saw the lead ship release.

The bombsight was very complicated to use and required a lot of training. It actually took into account air speed, ground speed, altitude, and humidity. The bombardier actually flew the plane on the bomb run remotely. I am sure that it is easier to tell people bombardier (which they could understand) rather than toggelier.

The Good Conduct Medal.

It is awarded for exemplary behavior, efficiency, and fidelity in active Federal military service. It is awarded on a selective basis to each Soldier who distinguishes himself or herself from among his or her fellow Soldiers by their exemplary conduct, efficiency, and fidelity throughout a specified period of continuous enlisted active Federal military service, as outlined in this chapter. There is no right or entitlement to the medal until the immediate commander has approved the award and the award has been announced in permanent orders. — Army Regulation, Military Awards

Peter Brennan's 33 missions are all listed on the 388th web page.

There's always more to the story than a list of data. The longest gap he had was between December 31 and Jan 20, a full 18 days. Any reason? Yes.

The December 31 mission, his tenth, was a bad one. Co-pilot Stevens was killed in action. Ball turret gunner Martin and waist gunner Sevy did not fly again. This must be the mission my father told my brother about once. He said only he and the pilot came back in good shape, and that he helped carry out a dead crew member.

He and engineer Huntzinger reappear in a new crew on January 20, and tail gunner Woods joined them January 29.

The crew they joined, Edelman, hadn't had it easy either. They crashed on January 5, apparently in Germany, attributed to flak. None died. Three men became POWs and did not fly again, but they survived the war. The six others are listed as "evadee" but that word is all we get from the available record. Did they get out together? How? Whatever happened, they were not all back in action until February 15. They were put together into their old crew as they became available for duty. The three men from the SmithO crew, including my father, replaced the POWs.

The plane from the December 31 mission, now flown by another crew, met its end in a crash on January 20, and the men were all taken as POWs.

The Air Medal.

The Air Medal is awarded to any person who, while serving in any capacity in or with the U.S. Army, will have distinguished himself or herself by meritorious achievement while participating in aerial flight. Awards may be made to recognize single acts of merit or heroism, or for meritorious service... — Army Regulation, Military Awards

The exact requirements for this medal varied. To some degree the "meritorious achievement" was measured by ships and aircraft destroyed and by number of missions flown in combat. The relevant example was that the Eighth Air Force Third Bombardment Division defined the criteria in April 1944 as six "Bomber, Bomber-Fighter, Photographic, Air Transport, or Observation sorties with distinction" for the medal, and then an oak leaf cluster for each six additional sorties.

At the completion of his tour my father had the Air Medal with four oak leaf clusters, which makes five awards. As stated on a typed document dated April 4, the dates follow his missions 6, 12, 19, 28, and 32. Characteristically, I feel, he did not bother to attach the oak leaf clusters to the ribbon! Allowing for delays, the six awards correspond to the first 30 missions completed "with distinction".

My father completed 33 missions. The standard by this date was 35, and you better believe the men counted those missions. My sister has the paper where our father wrote out each mission, one per line, make that one per numbered line. There wasn't going to be any mistake!

Of the original Edelman crew, two had reached 35, three 34, and one 33. The three added to replace the original crew POWs, including my father, were at 33, 33, and 30. I suppose the commander could have kept most of them around to see if they could fill in another mission or two with other crews, but there must not have been enough need. And besides the main reason they weren't all at 35 together was that six of them had "evaded" after a crash and the other three had escaped serious injury from flak. They'd done enough.

But my brother recalls our father being astonished. As he told my brother, when they came in after the mission and were told that their tour of duty was complete, he felt the need to point out to the officer that he had only 33. And when told again, he actually repeated that he had only 33, causing the officer to firmly say he was all done. And then he said to my brother, still not believing it some sixty years later, "but I only had 33!".

More information at the 388th BG Association web site.

After the Storm

2011-11-06T21:00:00.000-05:00

We survived Snotober. That was the stupidest name I heard for the Great Snowy Nor'easter of October 29, 2011, so I love it. As I write this a week later, some places in New Jersey still don't have power back. By some miracle our house lost power for only three hours, on Saturday afternoon. But parts of town were out well into Tuesday.

Our neighbor had a tree fall on the electric line to their house, and that one-house restore job was not done until 6:15 Friday night. It's too bad that after six and and a half days without power, the PSEG truck with the flashing light was out front of their house for only ten minutes taking care of it. But then, the crew have had a lot of practice by now.

On Saturday I ran to Millburn and went up the switchback trail on the mountain. Crest Drive— ironically not a drive any more but a paved walk and bike road along the top of the ridge— is full of downed trees. It's just a one-mile dead end into the park, with no power lines and no houses or other buildings, so it's going to be among the last roads cleared.

The tree damage was not so much from wind but from the weight of the wet "white mud" snow on still-leafy branches. It's amazing how far branches can bend without breaking. And then they bend back up when the snow falls off. But there is a limit. Around the neighborhood the damage is mostly tree branches, but up there it was whole trees, and some big ones.

Remember, it's not January, it's this season:

The squirrels tried one of the gourds, but it turned out to be not a pumpkin, so they let it go.

Sign of the times, below. Most houses in town have a pile of branches out front, which, rumor has it, will be picked up some day by the town. This is the neighbors' pile. Most of this is the tree that took out their electric power.

That's our driveway, bottom left. It's a little tricky backing out with this thing piled as high as the car, but we can manage it. Considering this is the worst we have to deal with, we'll call ourselves lucky and shut up.

I walked around the property to see how the outside plants dealt with the snowfall.

I had not noticed these delicate looking flowers before.

Hardy Cyclamen is a bulb plant that blooms in the autumn. Helen told me she planted it a few years ago. I'm not sure I can see any of the cyclamen's own leaves in there. It's got some autumn sun on it. I don't know what insects are active now to visit the flowers. But we had some buzzing around the week before the snow came.

Most of the asters have gone to seed by now, but I found a few still in flower in sheltered areas in back of the house.

You wouldn't look at this and think it snowed seven days earlier.

Globe Amaranth is an annual. We have a group grown Helen grew from seed in a planter. It's said to be tropical but it came through the snow and the recent frosty nights very well. The leaves are still green and it's raising its flowers to the sun.

Well, all right, I tipped the planter a little to get a good shot of the flower. It's actually holding them out sideways. I just wanted to say it was raising its flowers to the sun. It was, for a minute there.

This is either Pale Smartweed or Lady's Thumb, two closely related wildflowers, and probably the former. You can call it a weed, if you object to plants you didn't put there yourself. We find it here and there around the garden. It's small. I don't know why one would object.

Speaking of weeds, here are some more asters in flower, on top of dying hostas. This is in a little corner hemmed on three sides by the house and a fence.

Feverfew continues to stake out its position in a crack of soil between the house and the driveway. This is not the same plant that survived last winter. That one recently went to seed and dried up. This new group is two feet away. It's a medicinal herb introduced from Europe, now growing wild. Supposedly it requires full sun, but the only place it volunteers on our property is here on the northeast side of the house where it gets no more than a few rays of sun early in the morning. It stays green all winter and looks like it's thriving.

Thanks to Helen for naming the plants!

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Seventh Grade

2011-10-30T21:00:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago something made me think of a girl called Nancy that I "liked" in seventh grade.

I don't have the slightest idea what did it.

I know the last time I thought of her before that. It was back in January 2010. That was the first time in ages. It happened because I needed a name for the Summer of 69 story. At least I can explain what made me think of her then. So let's go there first.

The name of the main girl in the story, Terri, came from "one soft infested summer me and Terry became friends". Hiding on the backstreets. We'd swear forever friends. Like that. And then it wouldn't last. Like that too. Because that's how it is.

I decided her real name could be Therese (pronounced te-RAZE), and that made me think of a Therese who "liked" me in eighth grade. This is how the mind jumps from one thing to another.

Oh Therese. I am sorry. She liked me, and I didn't feel it. This is the oldest story in humanity, isn't it? That unequal feeling. It's so awkward. But when you feel it, you should say something, and hope the other person at least is kind.

The rare thing is when two people do both like each other. It didn't happen here. Only the very young are surprised.

Therese made me a cookie or something, like Terri made the cake in the story, only I was young and stupid and I didn't tell her it was great. No matter what I felt, didn't I realize that it was great for anyone to do that for me? I realized that truth eventually, but not in time. It was only eighth grade. Not the last age when I was an idiot, but maybe the first. I suppose she got over it. I still wish I'd said something nice to her.

When I needed another girl for the last chapter, I went back to school again, and I found Nancy. I hope she seemed different in the story.

We were really the same age, in the same grade. But she was much younger than high school when I was paying attention to her, so the memory helped me write her younger than Terri for the story.

"Blond hair, bangs, cute like a kid is cute." I forgot that I actually wrote it out. That is exactly the picture I have in my mind of Nancy. That's how she looked in seventh grade. How old were we? Twelve? She was the first girl who made any impression on me.

I picture her sitting one row behind and one chair over. I think that was right. If I glanced over my shoulder, there she was. We must not have been seated alphabetically that year, because I'm a B and she was an R, and we were that close. It was probably size place. I was short.

The usual Catholic school uniforms. She wore a white blouse of some thin-looking material, with a dark blue wool jumper, with the SCS initials in a shield on it, over her heart. Bare knees, and white socks and the approved kind of shoes. I wore a white shirt, dark blue tie with SCS in a shield, and dark blue pants.

I don't remember how much I actually spoke with Nancy. We did some group work in those older grades, so I think I did manage to do a few projects in the same group with her. I must have said a few words.

I knew where she lived. It was just a few blocks from me.

I don't remember how I knew. Maybe we just mentioned it. Or maybe it was by accident.

I was a big bicycle rider in those days. I went all over town. I went three miles from home. I knew all the streets, and I drew maps of them to see the connections.

I know that I rode past her house and saw her playing or doing something out front. Was that how I knew where she lived? Or did I already know, and was that was the reason I rode by on that short street? I guess I rode down that street whenever I was going in that direction, just in case.

This doesn't mean I stopped and said anything to her. I waved at her. That was pretty far out. What do you expect?

I knew boys who collected comic books. I knew boys who liked to play with model trains and building sets. See, I knew what my friends and I could do together. I had no idea what Nancy and I might both want to do. With that impenetrable obstacle of ignorance, I missed the chance to just simply talk to her for a couple of minutes and find out.

Well, that was January 2010, and that was all. That's almost two years ago now.

Like I said, I don't know what happened a couple of weeks ago. An idle thought that connected to another, and there you go. Something did it.

And then the trouble started.

Why? Why do I do things I do?

Here is what I did. I decided it would be interesting if I could find her online, just to see what became of her. Was she well? Had she done anything interesting with herself? It would be satisfying to see that she had. I wanted that. I wanted her to have had some kind of a nice life.

Obviously her last name could have changed by marriage decades ago, but if she wanted to be found, she would have put her old name on the web, and her schools and her home town. So I tried.

I tried her name and the name of our school. No hits there.

I did find a classmates.com page for our school. There were a few other familiar names. They took attendance at SCS by calling out names every day, so after a few years the names were burned in. Not that I can recite them, but if you said a name now I could probably tell you accurately whether it was a kid in my year. I think one guy I saw on the website was a friend of mine for a while. I haven't thought of him in years either.

Then I was starting to wonder about what high school she might have gone to. Many kids went to the town's public high school, and there were only a couple of Catholic high schools near enough to have bus service. That narrows it down. She must have gone to one of those. I tried her name and the town high school and struck out.

What I tried next was her name and the name of our town.

Hit!

Not on her name, exactly, but on her last name and her address. It was on a page for a real estate agency. They were showing recent sale prices of houses in town.

Her street was only two blocks long, and the house was on the inside of a curve in it. The little Google map on the page showed the house right where I remembered it. This was the house she lived in. I knew where it was.

Luckily, the database's idea of a recent sale went back twenty years. The house was sold in 1992 by a man and woman with Nancy's last name. Her parents sold the house— it had to be.

There was even a link on the sellers' names, to another web site for people searching.

There they were. They live in Toms River now. Of course. I'd keep that nugget of information to myself, except that I am secure in the knowledge that they don't stand out among the hundred thousand other retirees who live in Toms River. My parents lived there for a while too.

Their ages are given. Mid eighties. That's her parents. No doubt about it. The right generation and the right place to move to.

And they list some family and friends, also with ages. (What is this with the ages?)

Anyway. There are two women with different last names. Neither was named Nancy, but they were the right ages to be slightly younger siblings. That's pretty much the only reason they'd be family and friends to eighty year olds, right? Did Nancy have younger sisters? Beats me. I don't remember. My memory of her in the front yard: were there younger blond girls there with her? I think so. Or I am filling it in?

But neither one was named Nancy.

The absence gave me a chill. A bad feeling. My heart sank.

Now, I'd like to think it means she did something cool. Like she's the black sheep. She did something so wonderfully outrageous that her nice parents disowned her. She became a communist, or a performance artist, or she married a divorced man. She joined the circus.

No, I don't believe it.

Let's get real. I know why she's not listed.

I'm sure I wasn't going to contact her anyway. But it looks like that is not a choice I can make.

I wonder how long ago it was. A high school car crash? It would have been in the local paper, but I'd moved to another town in another county. I wouldn't have seen it.

Maybe she had a nice life. Maybe she found somebody she loved who loved her, and it was good. That's what I want.

Maybe she had kids. If she started earlier than I did, there could easily be a granddaughter by now, a granddaughter with blond bangs, sitting in a seventh grade classroom, cute like a kid is cute.

I have to face the fact that I'm never going to know.

But that's the ending I want to write.

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South Orange Borders IV

2011-10-23T21:00:00.000-04:00

Back to the beginning.

Early American Boundaries

The map:

At the establishment of the independent State of New Jersey in 1776, the civil divisions of the former British colony were continued as state divisions. The map area was entirely in Essex County, and contained only two municipalities: the Township of Newark and the Township of Elizabeth. Their names are shown along the boundary line, which was partly the same as the present-day boundary of Essex and Union Counties, but continued west, shown dashed, through what is now Millburn.

Four new townships were established in the area in a twenty-year period.

First, parts of Elizabeth and Newark (about two-thirds from Elizabeth) were taken to form Springfield in 1794. It included all of modern Springfield and Millburn, and parts of modern Livingston, West Orange, Maplewood, Cranford, and Summit. The boundary within Maplewood ran along the East Branch of the Rahway and then along a line from Pierson's Mill over the mountain to Keene's Mill on the West Branch. We considered last time the importance of the long-forgotten Keene's Mill as a boundary landmark. The Springfield boundary in 1794 turned at Keene's Mill and ran another line northeast to Northfield Avenue, which it followed to the Passaic River.

A few years later the remaining area of the map was then divided between Orange, 1806, and Union, 1808, following the colonial Newark and Elizabeth boundary. More than 200 years later that line is still the Maplewood and Union boundary. All of modern South Orange and more than half of Maplewood was within the Township of Orange.

The story would be simpler if the Township of South Orange was then created from parts of Orange and Springfield, but as we saw while working backward, there was an intermediate step. A township called Clinton was formed in 1834 from the southern part of Orange and smaller portions of Union, Newark, and Elizabeth, splitting the settlement of South Orange for 27 years. As a result South Orange was actually formed from the western part of Clinton and smaller parts of Orange and Millburn (ex Springfield). The rest of Clinton would later become Irvington and part of Newark.

Livingston, formed in 1813, is beyond the South Orange story, but it's interesting to see that its southern boundary started at Keene's Mill, which raised the significance of that point from just a bend in the Springfield line to a real landmark. (This is no longer the southeast corner of Livingston, because a strip of Livingston was taken later into Fairmount and then West Orange. The current southeast corner is at Old Short Hills Road, near the left edge of our map.)

Colonial Boundaries

Let's bring this a conclusion. The map:

Newark and Elizabeth were both formed as townships in 1693 by an act of the General Assembly of the Colony of East New Jersey. It was at that time, on one date, that townships were created for the first time within the colony. The boundary between Newark and Elizabeth was "from the mouth of the Bound Creek, and from thence to Bound-Hill, and from thence Northwest to the Partition Line of the Province". The line "Northwest" was not officially surveyed until 1713. Based on that survey and later documented changes, the line was not perfectly straight. It followed the modern county line in the Irvington and Maplewood area (shown in blue on the map), and then ran through Millburn to Chatham Bridge. The Passaic River in that area was the "Partition Line" between the two colonies of East and West New Jersey.

Let's start at the beginning, to see how we got to 1693.

South boundary of Newark

Permission to establish Elizabeth was granted, as Elizabeth-Town, in 1664, the year England acquired the former New Netherlands. Its north boundary was to run from the mouth of the Passaic River "west into the Countery". But the local Lenape tribes had a boundary at Bound Creek, so the subsequent English purchase from the Raritans actually ran only up to Bound Creek, which (hidden under Port Newark and Newark Liberty Airport) is still the north boundary of Elizabeth.

Permission to settle at Newark was granted two years later, and its founders purchased land from the Hackensacks in 1667. The south boundary was correctly set at the Hackensacks' own boundary:

...the great Creke or River in the meadow running to the head of the Cove, and from thence bareing a West Line for the South bounds Wh said Great Creke is Commonly Called and Known by the name Weequachick, on the West Line backwards into the Country to the foot of the great Mountaine called Watchung...

Some historians take the "West Line" as literally running due west. I doubt that that was the intended meaning. The "foot of the great Mountaine called Watchung" sounds to me like the south end of the ridge at Millburn. A line running to that location is closer to west by northwest.

At any rate the leaders of Newark and Elizabeth a year later settled on where their common boundary was.

It is Consented unto that the Centre, or place agreed upon by the said Agents of the Towns for to Begin the Dividing Bounds, is from the Top of a Little round Hill, named Divident Hill ; and from Thence to run up a North West Line, into the Country.

I've shown the "North West Line" on the map with the comment "speculative". This line is shown on some historical maps of New Jersey including one by John Snyder. My opinion, once again, is that the direction stated should not be taken as precise. Rather I think that this is still the west by northwest line to the end of the mountain at Millburn. The significant part of the agreement of 1668 was to place the border at Bound Creek and not any farther north. The line to the mountain sounds to me like the same line as the Newark purchase.

The line was described again as running "Northwest" in 1693 when the townships were created.

The line was finally surveyed and marked in 1713. Again it is described as starting "where a black Cherry tree Markd with ye Letters N on the one side & E on the other Stands under a Steep Hill", evidently Divident Hill, and running along a line of marked trees, about 30 degrees north of west, to "ye South End of ye Mountain call'd Watchung". The marked trees all had N for Newark and E for Elizabeth on the appropriate sides. The surveyed line was not supposed to be a new boundary but just an official marking of the line described in 1693 and 1668.

West boundary of Newark

The western boundary of the Newark purchase from the Hackensacks in 1667 was "the foot of the Great Mountaine", which I show on the map as a line just below the 200 foot contour, where the slope becomes steeper.

Ten years later the settlers purchased an additional strip of land to move the boundary to the top of the ridge. The survey of 1713 also places the boundary of Newark at the top of the ridge.

The description of the Township of Newark in 1693 has it running west the to Passaic River, and the land from the top of the ridge west to the river was purchased from the Hackensacks in 1702, so why was this portion not included in the township as surveyed in 1713? Even John Snyder, in his careful research for The Story of New Jersey's Civil Boundaries, does not have an answer for this one. But it's clear that for most of the eighteenth century, the Township of Newark was approximately the same area as all of modern Essex County.

Recap

This brings us back up to the first map above. The westernmost parts of Newark were separated in in 1794 and 1798 to form Caldwell and Springfield respectively, and then a closer portion was separated to form Orange. Part of Orange was separated to Clinton, and then parts of Clinton and Orange and Millburn (ex Springfield) were taken to form South Orange. Part of the Township of South Orange became the Village of South Orange within the township. Another part of the Township separated to become Vailsburg, which was then annexed to Newark. The village became independent of the township, and the township changed its name to Maplewood. Q E D.

Next time: Something not about South Orange.

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South Orange Borders III

2011-10-16T21:00:00.000-04:00

This time we'll look at borders in the South Orange area before there was a local government called South Orange.

The map shows boundaries of 1834 in a heavy line:

The Orange-Clinton boundary

The strangest feature to modern eyes is the boundary of Orange and Clinton, cutting modern South Orange Village in two. This lasted for 27 years, from the formation of Clinton in 1834 to the formation of South Orange (Township) in 1861.

I cannot identify anything today that corresponds to the Orange-Clinton boundary. The best reference I could find was this 1850 map:

The 1850 map shows a straight line from a point in what is now the South Mountain Reservation to a point on South Orange Avenue that looks to me like the corner of Grove Street. The boundary then follows the middle of South Orange Avenue to a point off this map near what is now another Grove Street in Newark. Most of the settlement called South Orange was just south of the Orange-Clinton line, including the Morris and Essex Railroad station and the houses and businesses downtown. But the line is still awkwardly located. As South Orange grew, spreading north of the line, people must have objected to it. This may have influenced creation of the Township of South Orange and the reunion of the whole settlement of South Orange into one jurisdiction.

The west end of the straight line catches the eye as the end point of six boundary lines, four of them current in 1834 and two more later on. The 1850 map shows a building at that point called Keene's Mill, an establishment for which I could find no further information. As shown in 1850, it is between a road and the West Branch of the Rahway, while modern— presumably more accurate— maps show the point as being on the road. But the road may have been relocated.

One of the other lines from Keene's Mill is the old Orange-Springfield boundary, shown on the 1850 map crossing Ridgewood Road just north of the Crooked Brook and the Timothy Ball house with the label "N Ball" for the current owner in 1850.

Above: the site of Keene's Mill, October 16, 2011. I wondered whether there was any evidence of the mill, so Helen and I walked around there in the reservation. We found a series of small rapids in the stream at this point that was probably enough of a drop to power a mill. We could not find any stone foundation walls, but there was a double line of stones that looked man-made, shown in this photograph. Maybe it had to do with the raceway that carried water to a water wheel.

The Breakup of Orange

The map illustrates the breakup of the large Township of Orange in the 1860s. The first move was the formation of Clinton in 1834 out of the rural parts of four townships, including Orange. But a quarter century later things began to happen fast.

The reorganization of Orange in 1860 from a Township to a Town— yes those are different forms of local government in New Jersey— seems to have set the stage for breakups.

1861: South Orange was formed from parts of Orange and Clinton.

1862: The short-lived Fairmount was formed from parts of Orange and Livingston up on the mountain. The remainder of Orange after this was a more compact and homogeneous area that included all of the center of business and population that ran along Main Street and the Morris and Essex Railroad from Newark to the foot of the mountain.

1863: East Orange was formed, separating the east end of the built-up area.

1863: West Orange was formed, separating the west end of the built-up area, and also including all of Fairmount, which had existed for just 13 months.

The series of changes in just two years left Orange a small fraction of itself, the smallest of the four municipalities with Orange in their name.

I don't know the rest of this story. I imagine it might have to do with early suburban development, and possibly local political gamesmanship. The timing of it, during the Civil War, might be significant.

Millburn

Millburn is slightly off topic, but since part of modern Maplewood was originally within Millburn, it's worth a mention.

Union County, the last county created in New Jersey, was formed in 1857 from the southern half of Essex. There had been a longstanding rivalry between the colonial towns of Newark and Elizabeth, the latter being the older and for a time more important of the two. But to my knowledge the main factor in its creation was some political advantage in the state legislature.

Springfield, one of the earliest townships in Essex, was split by the county division, and since the old settlement of Springfield was within the new county, that part retained the name Springfield. The part remaining in Essex was formed into a new township called Millburn.

Town historian Marian Meisner wrote in 1957 in A History of Millburn Township that the new county line mostly followed the colonial-era boundary between Newark and Elizabeth ...

[...] but in 1857, when the line reached Millburn, it was abruptly changed to include Millburn in Essex County. The story goes that several of the Millburn people responsible for the formation of the new Township, either held political office in Essex County, or had aspirations to do so, and it is evident that a shift of the township into the new County of Union would cause a sudden change in the political fates of some ambitious citizens.

You can see the relatively straight county line on the first map above. The colonial-era boundary continued that line to the end of the First Mountain— about where the South Mountain Reservation entrance now is, opposite the Millburn railroad station— and then on to Chatham Bridge. The county line as established in 1857 still ends at Chatham Bridge, but detours to the south around Millburn.

It's an interesting speculation, even if, as Meisner wrote, it is only as "the story goes". A boundary between Millburn and Maplewood along that line would even today follow more closely the apparent boundary of suburban development, crossing Ridgewood Road near its southern end and Wyoming Avenue at Glen Avenue.

Millburn was a new name in 1857. The settlement and railroad station had been called Millville, but the Post Office would not use that name because there was already another Millville post office in New Jersey, in Cumberland County. Millburn was an alternate name sometimes used by an early Scottish settler, Samuel Campbell, and was the name agreed on in 1857 when the township was created. Even though mills were the basis of the town's economy, Millburn sounds more picturesque and was likely more attractive to the suburban development that was just starting at that date.

Next: The colonial boundaries.

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South Orange Borders II

2011-10-10T21:00:00.000-04:00

Last time we looked at the South Orange borders since the village separated in 1904. Now let's go back about forty years to the beginning of South Orange Township.

The Map

Boundary Changes

Here the Village of South Orange is bounded by dashed lines, to indicate that it was within the township. There were only two boundary events for the village: the formation of the village in 1869 and the addition of an area to the east in 1891, which we mentioned last time.

The Township of South Orange (later Maplewood) was formed in 1861 from parts of three older towns. It brought together under one jurisdiction an area that logically belonged together, namely most of the South Orange Avenue corridor, the South Orange settlement that would become the village, and the country area to the south with mills, farms, and country estates that did business with the South Orange settlement.

This area had been split awkwardly since 1834 by an east-west border almost through the middle of the South Orange settlement, with the old Township of Orange to the north and the newly formed Township of Clinton on the south, which had been part of Orange. (We'll take a look at that border next time.) The new Township of South Orange took enough from Orange to keep the settlement together, and about half of Clinton, down to the Union County line.

To this was added two years later a chunk from the Township of Millburn. The old border, shown on the map, went up the East Branch of the Rahway River as far as Pierson's mill pond (Parker Avenue today), and then went northwest in a straight line. In doing so it crosses Ridgewood Road at the Crooked Brook, noted as "the brook that divided Orange from Springfield" in an early description of the Timothy Ball House (which I wrote about here.)

Orange unfortunately retained a tongue of land that can be seen in the upper right, extending down to South Orange Avenue, because it contained the Orange poor farm, a type of welfare based on the virtues of doing honest labor and breathing fresh air. Because of this, the South Orange Avenue corridor is needlessly split between two municipalities. There is little visible difference today between the Newark and East Orange blocks besides the street signs.

In the far northwest corner of the township, the boundary is shown on some maps as the West Branch of the Rahway River, and on other maps as a straight line, which is what I show. I don't know for certain which is correct, but it is a straight line now, and Snyder does not list any boundary correction there.

Vailsburg

There was another perhaps unexpected portion of the Township of South Orange, the area known as Vailsburg, now part of Newark. Vailsburg was considered part of The Oranges in the nineteenth century.

Here's a modified map from 1889 to give you the geographical picture. My blue lines don't totally correspond to the base map, but they're a little more accurate, based on other sources. I like this map because it shows the full extent of the township as it was from 1863 to 1894, in shades of pink.

Vailsburg separated from the township in 1894 by becoming a borough. The reason was almost certainly the passage that year of a state law requiring all the schools within a township to be in a single school district. That act had the unintended consequence of breaking up townships. Until 1897, all people in an area had to do to establish a borough was pass a local referendum. The leader of the initiative in Vailsburg was Dr Merit H Cash Vail, who owned "a considerable portion" of Vailsburg. He was a Civil War veteran, physician, orator, strawberry farmer, and the first mayor of the borough.

During its brief existence Vailsburg was famous in the sports world for bicycle races. The Vailsburg Velodrome was a one-quarter mile oval with a pine board surface, with a grandstand for 2,000 spectators and open stands for about 6,000 more, and electric lights for night events. It was located on South Orange Avenue at Munn Avenue, in the western half of present-day Vailsburg Park, the rest of which was taken up by Electric Park, an amusement ground. The Vailsburg track was part of a national circuit toured by both amateur and professional cyclists. Notable wheelmen included Frank Kramer "the East Orange Flyer" and a popular African American, Marshall "Major" Taylor.

Racing on Sunday— the only day off most working people had— was started in 1901 in defiance of "blue law" traditions. The borough passed an ordinance specifically against Sunday bicycle racing in 1903, and an arson fire destroyed much of the track in January 1904. But the velodrome was rebuilt in time for the 1904 season, and the owners even announced the resumption of Sunday racing despite the law. The next year, after Newark had annexed Vailsburg, the police came one Sunday and arrested track officials. But the judge hearing the case ruled that racing was "clean outdoor amusement" and asked the chief of police why they never arrested people at the Sunday baseball games.

The track's last season was 1910, but only because the lease on the property expired. The promoters acquired property across the street, where there is now a school parking lot, and opened there the Newark Velodrome in time for the 1911 season. Some modern accounts confuse the two tracks. There was also briefly a Newark Motordrome for motorcycle races in 1912, on approximately the site of the old Vailsburg Velodrome, but soon after it opened, when a horrible crash killed two riders and six spectators, Newark banned motorcycle races.

Above, the Vailsburg Velodrome about 1905, looking north, showing the now unfamiliar sight of a wooden track and large crowds attending a bicycle race. Munn Avenue out of sight to the left, behind the grandstand ; South Orange Avenue in the distance with (I think) the new Engine 21 fire station ; Electric Park out of sight to the right.

But what happened to Vailsburg?

Newark was a prosperous city by 1900, and some civic leaders wanted to expand it into its suburbs, just as New York had done in 1898. They wanted to annex nearly half of Essex County and part of Hudson. Four annexation bills got through the state legislature, subject to local referendum : in 1902 the city annexed what was left of Clinton township ; in 1903 it tried to annex Irvington but failed the local referendum ; in 1905 it annexed the Borough of Vailsburg ; in 1908 it tried again to annex Irvington and failed again.

The end of Vailsburg therefore was part of an expansion campaign by Newark. But the voters of Vailsburg had to approve, which the voters of Irvington refused to do, twice. Some Irvington residents told reporters they felt Irvington would lose its identity as just a small part of a large city. Why the residents of Vailsburg felt differently, I do not know.

Because Irvington was never annexed, Vailsburg became a leftover narrow arm of Newark extending much farther west than any other part of the city. The City Plan Commission wrote in 1912 in City Planning for Newark:

The Vailsburg Section had a very haphazard growth before it was annexed to Newark. As a consequence, its street system cannot be made efficient without much expense. Apparently each property holder divided his plot regardless of his neighbors, with the result that there are no good crosstown [north-south] thoroughfares...

But this merely describes the usual suburban pattern of development, as viewed by planners used to the strict grid of Newark. Vailsburg at this date still consisted of scattered wood frame houses, with much open land. The commercial buildings that line South Orange Avenue did not yet exist, and most lots along the avenue were still vacant. The Commission proposed street openings and widenings that could have been done relatively cheaply at the time, but they did not call for a widening of South Orange Avenue itself or realignment of the intersections for continuous north-south travel.

The Commission's Comprehensive Plan of Newark of 1915 mentioned the key problem:

A poor street plan is largely responsible for lack of growth here and also for [lack of] that prime essential to proper development, transportation.

Nothing was done. The only main street in Vailsburg, South Orange Avenue, is congested with traffic, slowing both automobile and bus transportation, and no off-street rail transport was ever built. The Garden State Parkway provides a way out for automobiles, but its bridge over South Orange Avenue creates a visual gateway separating Vailsburg from the rest of Newark.

Next time, the earliest boundaries at South Orange.

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South Orange Borders

2011-10-02T21:00:00.000-04:00

The other day I was looking through one of my favorite books, The Story of New Jersey's Civil Boundaries 1606-1968. Its author, John P Snyder, modestly states in the Foreword, "This is hardly a book to cuddle up with", a statement I cannot agree with. But he adds, "I hope some history fans will enjoy browsing through the first few maps and pages, or tracing out the boundary changes in their own communities."

That's what I am going to do. Using Snyder's written descriptions of changes to the South Orange and Maplewood town boundaries, his small outline maps, and other maps and sources, I will present a series of larger annotated maps showing the changes.

We'll start with the modern era, which I would say starts in 1904 with the separation of the Village of South Orange from the Township of South Orange. The boundaries of the two towns at that date were similar enough to the present day that the subsequent changes can be shown clearly on one map.

The two towns

The village form is rare in New Jersey, and the village is the only one of the five types in New Jersey that can have incomplete powers, in that a village can be within a township, just as villages are always within towns in New York State. South Orange village as created in 1869 was within South Orange township. The school district was one of the functions still performed by the township, both inside and outside the village. In 1904 the village was "separated" from the township as a stand-alone municipality, but it continued to be called a village.

The result was two municipalities both called South Orange, a situation still found around the state (Chatham for example). In the case of South Orange, local sentiment led to the township being renamed in 1922 as the Township of Maplewood, using the name of the railroad station and post office.

In 1972 the United States began offering assistance to local governments under the newly passed Revenue Sharing Act. The formula, in attempting to deal with differences within the states, tended to give more aid to "townships" (and "towns" in New York and New England). The result of a distinction that meant little in New Jersey was that in the early 1980s fifteen cities, towns, boroughs, and villages in Essex County changed their names to contain the word "township" in order to qualify for more aid. The Village of South Orange renamed itself the Township of South Orange Village in 1981, with no practical change to its form of government. The federal program ended in 1986.

The map

Here's the map. Modern boundaries in a heavy line.

Boundary Changes

There were two large additions to the Village of South Orange, to the east in 1891 (strictly speaking, before the time period shown in this map) and to the west in 1925, both from the township. The 1891 addition brought it out to the township boundary north of South Orange Avenue and brought the entire Seton Hall campus within the village. The 1925 addition extended the village to the edge of South Mountain Reservation.

Otherwise there were an unusually large number of small changes mostly on the east side of both towns. In general they were the result of old town lines not respecting earlier farm property lines, which led eventually to subdivisions of those farms with house lots lying across town boundaries. The adjustments made life simpler by shifting the town lines to run along house lot lines, a good goal that was never fully achieved in either town.

Let's look at the changes, clockwise from the top.

Exchanges in 1906 and 1917 adjusted South Orange's borders with East Orange, and similar adjustments with Orange began in 1920, but were never carried further west.

Once the village separated in 1904, the township was left with a triangular northeast corner extending almost to South Orange Avenue, which was removed in three steps. The point of the northeast triangle was added to the village in 1911, followed within months by boundary adjustments between the village and Newark.

A good-sized section, now known as Ivy Hill, was transferred from the township (now Maplewood) to Newark in 1927. Most of the land here had been owned by the City of Newark for over a decade. Probably at the same time, a small section not noted by Synder was transferred from Newark to Maplewood.

The new boundary with Newark again followed property lines, leaving an irregular strip of Maplewood between Newark and South Orange that was finally transferred to South Orange two years later. The effect of the changes in 1911 and 1929 left South Orange with better boundaries along its whole east side, apparently the result of Newark public policy.

The south border of the village runs across many property lines and has been adjusted in only two places, in 1916 near Ridgewood Road and in 1935 near Clinton School. Here's the region around the Clinton School change. Why was only that one block changed?

The Town of Irvington had boundaries diagonal to city blocks on its northwest and northeast sides. The boundaries with the City of Newark were adjusted in 1926 by a commission appointed by the County Court of Common Pleas, creating the stepped lines seen on the base map, following property lines. Irvington's boundary with Maplewood was adjusted in 1931 in a similar fashion. Snyder notes that further adjustments were made in 1965, but he does not show where the changes were made. All the ones I can identify are from 1931.

No change was ever made to the awkward town line between Maplewood and Millburn that splits many house lots. On the ground, this boundary is invisible and arbitrary, since all the streets were laid out at right angles to Wyoming Avenue and Ridgewood Road. Here's part of the boundary. At least 25 lots are in both towns.

Next time, we'll look at earlier boundaries.

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Hoboken El

2011-09-25T21:00:00.000-04:00

This year I've been asked twice what I know about a very obscure local transit line, the elevated railway that once ran in Hoboken and Jersey City. Both people have created web pages I greatly recommend.

The first one is part of David Pirmann's nycsubway.org site, the Hoboken-Jersey City Elevated page. He has a good historical summary, and then a fine set of photographs he has assembled from contributors. Take a look.

Just recently someone told me to look at the New York Rapid Transit Timeline, a series of maps showing the rapid transit systems every 5 years from 1870 to 2010, and within a day I heard from its creator, Alexander Rapp. You should look at those too. They're really good. He wanted to include the Hoboken El but needed details.

The Hoboken El was operated in the same manner as the Green Line on the Boston T, the subway-surface lines in Philadelphia, and the Muni Metro in San Francisco, namely as a rapid transit line with street trolley lines running into it. Unlike those, and the City Subway in Newark, the Hoboken route was an elevated line, not a subway. If you look at Rapp's maps for 1935 to 1950, you'll notice he shows in pale color the street lines that ran into the Newark City Subway. I've just sent him details of the street routes for the Hoboken El.

There is a little mystery about this elevated line.

We know for sure, from contemporary newspaper and magazine sources, that it opened on January 25, 1886, running from a station adjacent to the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad's Hoboken Terminal to a station on the west side of Palisade Avenue, Jersey City, between Ravine Avenue and Ferry Street. The first part ran along Ferry Street (now Observer Highway) on a structure similar to elevated railways in Manhattan, but then it veered into private right of way up a long incline that rose about a hundred feet on a 5.5% grade to the top of the Palisades cliff. The cliff was the reason for building the line. The el provided the only fast route from the Heights neighborhood to a New York ferry connection, and soon carried 10,000 to 15,000 passengers a day.

The el was operated by cable. Management at the North Hudson County Railway were concerned about a runaway on the long grade. They used the Cable Trust patents developed for the San Francisco street cablecar lines, but with the thickest wire rope ever used, one and a half inches in diameter, and massive thousand-pound grips on both trucks. Company engineer J J Endres developed the patent grip with three-foot jaws controlled by a wheel at the ends of the car.

There were 14 cars similar in style to New York elevated railroad cars. Cable operation lasted seven years, but below is the only known photograph, and it seems to be just before the end, since support poles for trolley wires are already up. From the book Art Work of Jersey City, via George Hilton's book The Cable Car in America.

We also know for sure that the elevated railway was extended in 1892. The extension continued from the Palisade Avenue station over private right of way to a big curve, over Central Avenue from Booraem Avenue to Hoboken Avenue, and two more blocks of private right of way to a terminal at Pavonia Avenue.

Construction was underway by August 1890, when Scientific American described the both the structure and the plans for cable operation on it. Hilton writes that cable was installed by May 1891. But then the company decided not to operate it with cable. Instead the extension was opened on June 6, 1892 as an electric trolley road, connecting at Palisade Avenue with the cable road. Six months later electric service finally began running through to Hoboken.

A trip report published in May 1893 in Transit Journal says that the cable was still being used in rush hours. This was probably done to maintain separation between cars on the incline. It would mean a change of cars at Palisade Avenue was required just when traffic was busiest.

Here is where the mystery begins.

Modern writers assume that with electric operation, through service to street trolleys began. When I started looking into this for David Pirmann I found evidence to the contrary. Instead I am now convinced that for a while, the elevated still operated separately.

The first clue was two maps from a Sanborn real estate atlas of 1896, four years after the extension opened. Here's the smoking gun, a full terminal at Pavonia Avenue:

Later on, there was an incline down from the end of the Newark Avenue station to ground level at Lott Street, and tracks ran out to the street in Pavonia Avenue. But here, there is a real terminal, with two wooden (yellow) platforms and a station house across the end of track, and iron (blue) stairways. Please note that this is not a map of planned structures, but of buildings that actually existed.

Less obvious was the situation at Palisade Avenue:

There is a train yard with four sidings on the Ferry Street side, which was not there later on. That's because later on the equipment was stored and repaired at the same barns as other trolley lines. But at this date, evidently the el needed its own yard.

Here's one of the images from David Pirmann's page, a beautiful view from Pavonia Avenue looking down the right of way. Going back you can see the Lott Street crossing, the incline, and a trolley at Newark Avenue station. But what's that on the right?

Why, it's a column from the original elevated terminal! It's the strongest trolley wire support column in town.

Here's one more item, from "The North Hudson County Railway" by Edward T Francis and George W Walrath, in The Marker, September 1946. I include here their caption.

No steps.

That raises some questions. The original stations at Hoboken and Palisades Avenue would have had floor-height platforms, consistent with the use of structures and cars like those of the New York elevated lines. The car shown above is a hybrid trolley and elevated car. It's small and lightweight like a trolley, but the end platforms have gates. A note in the journal Electricity for December 21, 1892, says "the new cars have the double trolley and are smaller than the cable cars". Francis and George write that these were among the first two-pole trolley cars.

The 1896 atlas shows all of the small way stations. While the Pavonia Avenue terminal is of the same size as the old Hoboken and Palisades Avenue stations, the others are much smaller. They are shown in 1896 as short and wooden. Available photographs, mostly from the 1930s and 1940s, show the same, and the platforms are not much above rail level. Were the platforms really higher once?

The original Hoboken station had only one track while in cable service. As described in an 1886 issue of Scientific American, it was a typical cable terminal operation. The incoming car dropped rope 700 feet before the station (a fairly long distance), and ran by momentum, assisted by a slight downgrade, into the one station track. The cable itself continued without a track and around a sheave at the end and started running outbound under the one track, where the outbound car could grip it to leave. There were platforms on both sides of the track, for exit and entrance, and the article reports that the car or train could unload and load within one minute for fast turnaround.

The original Palisade Avenue station must have been similar in design.

A Sanborn atlas plate of 1891 for Hoboken shows an iron terminal with two tracks drawn in it, but the mechanics of cable operation force me to think it was still really only one track. Notice that the end of the iron structure connects directly into the ferry building. The great majority of riders would have been headed for the ferry. This terminal had high floor-level platforms.

My conclusion then is that the first stage electric operation in 1892 was an isolated trolley line running only on the elevated railway, with floor height platforms. This continued until at least 1896 when the available Sanborn atlas was surveyed.

You won't find this information anywhere else on the web, except in a sentence on David Pirmann's page, because I pointed out to him the Pavonia Avenue terminal map.

But how long did this last? When did through operation to street lines begin? And what about the platform height?

Some years ago, I looked at some Sanborn atlases in the Jersey City Public Library, and took photocopies of a set dated 1908 and 1909. They show the ramps. So it's before 1908.

Here's Hoboken, apparently not long after the railroad terminal burned down on August 7, 1905, showing the site of the elevated terminal. The ruins in the background are the site of the railroad terminal.

The trolley in the foreground is running on the Union Hill Line, and the one behind it is a Summit car. Both of those routes used the elevated line. So by late 1905, street lines ran on the el, and also, by this date, the small Hoboken terminal had been removed, and replaced by a street-level loop. I would guess both things happened around the same time, because more terminal space was needed.

I have narrowed the start of street lines on the el to a date between 1896 and 1905.

Three of the routes that ran on the elevated were North Hudson County Railway lines, namely the previously mentioned Union Hill and Summit lines, and the Oakland line. All of these left the structure at Palisade Avenue.

The fourth and last line however was the Jackson Line, the only one that ran to the end of the structure at Pavonia Avenue. Jackson, known as Court House until 1909, was not a North Hudson County property. Its corporate ownership remained separate until 1903, when its owners and NHC both were acquired by Public Service Railway. Was there through service before that?

Well, that's as far as I could get in one day. One of these days maybe I'll find something that narrows down that 1896-1905 gap. They had "Red Book" street guides to Jersey City and Hudson County later on, listing streetcar routes. I don't have one handy from before 1905. I never knew I needed one.

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Goals

2011-09-18T21:00:00.000-04:00

Last week I didn't mention something great that happened to me. I had put together a nice post about a half-assed 9/11 story, photos taken around the yard, and my experiences in Newark, and I didn't want to throw in something off-topic.

Last Sunday I ran 5 k.

I mean without stopping. I've run 3 miles in as few as two parts, with a walking break. But not without stopping.

I know, I ran the Columbia 5 k Fun Run last year, but I took walking breaks.

I set out early Sunday, and I mean like 4:30, because I am crazy. I was going to run 2 miles, break, and maybe 1 or 2 more. But some days you just feel good. Know how that is? I was running along and thinking about stuff, and didn't pay attention where I was, and then I turned my attention and thought, I must have run a mile by now. And I realized I was at 1.5 miles. Good sign. When I got to 2.0, I wasn't done, so I went for 2.5. By then I was starting to feel a little tired, but I realized I had a shot at 3.0, so I kept going. And at 3.0, I figured, just another 500 feet or so, and I can say I did 5 k. I had not measured off how much more it was to 5 k, but I knew it should be about two blocks and two streets, so I did that. Just now I measured what I ran on gmap-pedometer and it was actually 5.1 k.

Yes!

You know what, if 5 k had been another couple of blocks I think I would have run that too.

Sometimes having a goal and being near it gets you to squeeze out a little extra. That's why I run specific distances I've measured out. Of course it satisfies my weird sense of order, like lining up the windows on my computer screen. I proceed as if units of 5,280 feet meant something. But when I feel a little tired, completing a specific distance gives me something to accomplish. Sometimes I would give up sooner if I were just running as long as I felt like it. Maybe having any goal is the key thing.

I don't expect to run 5 k every time. In fact the next time I ran the same route, a couple of days later, I was pretty tired at 2 miles, so I stopped there and walked a little. After all I am not out to torture myself. But it is very cool to realize that I can do 5 k, under some circumstances.

Then came Thursday morning.

I had gone to sleep Wednesday night without incident. I should mention what I ate for dinner, to show that it wasn't involved. Sauteed kale in olive oil and a little butter, and then penne with marinara and small meatballs. Notice, nothing there very chewy. I had forgotten to buy bread, so I didn't have that to bite off and chew. We're coming to why that matters.

I woke up with something very wrong on the left side of my face. It felt tight and swollen, and I realized moving my jaw hurt. The center of pain was the joint, just forward of my left ear.

It didn't make sense to me. What could have happened during the night? I don't even sleep on that side much.

I was going to be home that day anyway, because a man was coming to check and clean the oil burner that heats the house. As usual my plan was to tough it out and see if the pain went away before considering doing anything drastic, like getting medical attention. Helen said I should take an Aleve, so I did.

It got slightly better through the morning.

The oil company has some long-term veteran employees, and I got one of them. I think it speaks well of a company to have people stay with them for a long time. This guy knew his stuff. He did a real nice thorough job. He showed me how filthy the combustion chamber was, and wondered if other guys had even taken the trouble to clean it the last few years. So I spent some time talking with him. He told me how some people these days don't do honest work and so on. It took my mind off.

Lunch was an ordeal. What I had bought for myself the day before didn't require much chewing, but I still needed to break the meat into little pieces I could sort of inhale.

After that I had nothing to do, so I lay on the couch and thought about my face and jaw hurting.

At such times— when something hurts— I feel that I should curl up into a little ball and await my fate.

But then Helen called to hear about the oil burner. She also suggested that instead of curling into a ball and awaiting my fate, I might call our dentist to have the jaw checked out. Dentist. They do jaws, not just teeth. Of course I said I didn't think so.

Twenty minutes later I decided I was an idiot. Appointment made for first thing the next morning.

I still felt like curling into a little ball and awaiting my fate, but I had a goal to achieve first. I needed to hang on till I saw the dentist. I didn't want to let him down by not showing up. That's a goal. Then I could give up all hope. I would be able to postpone it.

I sent email to work saying I might be out or not depending how it went. A friend replied that I could still drink. It is good to look on the bright side. For dinner I had soup, soft noodles, and a small amount of chicken cut into pill-size pieces. And two glasses of wine.

When I woke up Friday it felt worse again. As if something happened again overnight. What am I doing? Sleepwalking and chewing on furniture?

The dentist agreed it was pretty weird for this to start overnight. He said usually it's a case of biting into something tough, like a good bagel, and you feel something snap. That's why I mentioned to you what a soft dinner I happened to have Wednesday. If it was a delayed reaction it was very delayed.

I want to run this story up to a splashy finish, but what happened is that now two days on, after taking an anti-inflammatory drug a few times and wearing a guard the dentist made to keep my jaw slightly open at night, I am just about normal again.

It would be a better story if I had to go in for emergency jaw surgery, and all my friends and relations came by the hospital to see me one last time in case I didn't make it. I could tell you things they needed to say to me while they had a chance. I would also have to throw in the scene where I ask the doctor, "Will I be able to play the piano?", and, being it's jaw surgery, he would say, "Of course!", and I could say, "That's great! I could never play before!". You put in comic relief in tense parts of a story. Then I'd pull through and people would crowd around and say I am the richest man in town.

I would sell the rights and become famous.

But, taking a few capsules and wearing a thing at night, well, that's all I've got for you really.

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Uprooted

2011-09-11T21:00:00.000-04:00

I had an idea for a story that I was going to call Uprooted. I was going to use the first photograph below for it.

It was going to be a 9/11 story. A man and a woman who worked together would be walking to the Twin Towers, and they'd be pretty close when the first plane hit, and they'd experience some details of the event, and it would shake them out of their ordinary routines. They'd walk away silently, and then they'd start talking about how they felt about work and life and everything. It might turn into a love story. I never worked out exactly where it was going to go. I was starting to throw every stray idea I had into it and losing focus. I was starting to think maybe they should not even be at the event. It was too big to comprehend. They could be stuck somewhere else by the shut-down of transportation on that day. But then it didn't need to be 9/11. It could be a hurricane. Maybe it was Key Largo. I gave up.

So I'm not doing a 9/11 post this year. The media are overselling it enough this time around anyway. Maybe next year.

If you want to read something, let me direct you to a good article that was in the Star Ledger a few days ago, a rare interview with George Tabeek, who designed and implemented the extensive building security measures implemented at the WTC after the 1993 bombing. By 2001 he described the results of his work with satisfaction as "99 percent locked down", and when asked what the one percent was, he said, "a plane". Go read it. Tabeek was on the bridge over West Street when the bridge collapsed as the north tower came down. He was there. And he still feels bad that he couldn't cover that last security hole.

And back to the home front...

You're looking at the nearest tree fall to my house during Hurricane Irene. We're a few steps outside my property, which starts at the power lines (second photo), and my house is off frame to the left. The tree was tall but thin, and the winds were kind enough to make it fall parallel to the power lines where it damaged only some other trees.

These asters were bent down by the hurricane rains, but now they're among the first to flower.

The feverfew in the crack of soil next to the house has expanded.

Look, another red tomato! We haven't had to buy cherry tomatoes in quite a while.

The jungle out front.

I took a day off Friday to recover from the last two weekends. I was going to do one good deed: drive Megan to Newark Penn Station in late morning. She was going to meet some friends so they could all drive to Bethesda for the Small Press Expo. They're sharing a table. Megan has the small first printing of the School of World book (larger printing to follow).

I drove Helen to work in Newark early and came back home. My plan was to drive to Newark a second time with Megan, but then leave the car in the university lot for Helen to drive home later, and I would come back on the train and get in a little walking. That way I'd only have to make one and a half round trips driving instead of three. This would be a treat for me and help me to relax.

It turned into a thing. First Megan heard that there was a delay, so we shouldn't leave when we had planned. Not long after, we heard that they were ready to go, so I drove into Newark, and right about when we got there, came word that there was something wrong with the car they were going to use, and they'd have to get use of another one, so we should probably stay home for a few hours. Back to S O. About an hour after we got home we learned the car was OK after all. The Check Engine light had come on, but the car had been brought to a shop and was quickly taken care of, and now the car was home and all was well, and they could use it. I drove to Newark again and let her off. Now I drove the car to the lot.

So, two and a half round trips. It is still less than three round trips. Now I could relax.

I walked over to the Warren St station of the ~~City Subway~~ Newark Light Rail and took an outbound car. I wanted to get a look at the underside of the Central Avenue bridge to see whether I was right about the structure. The car was too crowded for me to get to a window, but I knew I could take care of that problem by riding out near the end of the line and then staking out a window position on an incoming car. I had to come back anyway.

They did a ticket check at Orange Street station. Everyone had a valid ticket, including the woman who could not remember where her pass was, and took an eternity to check every compartment of her bag and clothing until she found it. I guess they don't check too often.

I rode out to Silver Lake, one of the two new stations on the 2002 extension. I never got off there before. I walked back to the next stop. After all the upgrades of the light rail system, I found a familiar old sight at Branch Brook Park station. The little street they use as a bus loop, Ropes Place, is still paved with cobblestones as I remember it from decades ago. The street that Newark forgot? It's just across the park from the Old Road to Bloomfield, and even that has been paved within my lifetime.

Check. The underside of Central Avenue bridge bears out what I wrote. Good. Notice I did not bring a camera. If you need proof, you'll have to get out there yourself.

When I got to Penn Station, I stayed on the car and rode around the loop for the first time. It is a measure of railfan geekdom to collect rare mileage, or at least new-to-me mileage. I took the other light rail line from there to Broad Street station. The little Broad Street line, a mile long, opened in 2006.

What a boondoggle it is. With its tight curves and street crossings, there are so many speed restrictions that it has no speed advantage over bus routes. And the distance is so short that it does not attract much ridership. It now runs every 30 minutes— 30!— outside of rush hours, further discouraging riders who can find much more frequent service by bus. The car I took around three in the afternoon had four passengers. The stations (except Riverfront Stadium) are elaborate structures that would have helped far more passengers if they'd been placed at downtown bus stops. And they built a ramp for it into the subway! Even granting that the underground junction was already there, all it gets you is one block of subway running and use of the subway terminal loop. How much is that worth?

Total cost for construction: 207 million dollars. I was trying to find ridership figures, but all I can find is combined ridership for the two lines. They're probably embarrassed to publish separate figures. The old former City Subway still looks strong. There were people standing in both directions, with ten-minute headways. My spot observation in midday is that the ratio is 3 full cars with standees on the old line to 4 people on the Broad Street. That's awful. The NJ Transit page even exaggerates the frequency to Broad St as 15 minutes instead of 30, a claim easily disproved by looking at the full timetable (linked from that page).

For some reason it wasn't till I got to Broad Street that I remembered the cutbacks of a couple of years ago on the Morris and Essex mainline. All-day 30-minute frequency? What was I thinking? Well, I was lucky. It could have been worse. I only had to kill 25 minutes looking at the historical images in the station until a train would come. It was more time than I needed really, but it was a nice day and I was being calm.

When I got home I went to sleep. If you've been trying to read this, you've done that already. I'll do better next time.

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Hurricane Special

2011-09-05T18:50:00.000-04:00

While we were waiting to pick up the new TV, the musique system was playing "My Love" by Petula Clark. It sounded worse than I remember, but so it goes. Her voice is pretty nasal. No wonder they loved her in France. She recorded whole albums in French. This is one of the stupid things I happen to know. Other stuff, well, Helen amuses us sometimes by remembering things about my family that never stuck in my brain. Like a steel sieve it is. But I am already off topic.

It was a good thing I had Central Avenue Bridge all set up ahead of time or you wouldn't have had a post last week.

The reason was called Hurricane Irene.

I realize our house got off better than some. I can be a whiner.

Saturday night, back there on August 27, the rains were falling and the winds were blowing. A friend told me she was awake listening to the wind and worrying about the trees on her property, so she couldn't get to sleep until one. Well, lucky her. I slept fitfully all night.

What do people mean by wind howling? In the city we'd hear it making a high pitched noise as it whipped around the corners. That's howling, right?

That's not the sound I heard. It was more like white noise, but much louder. It was the sound of wind going through the trees. It was continuous except that from time to time it would get even louder for a few moments. Now and then I heard the crack of wood breaking. I kept listening for the deep thump of trees or large branches hitting the ground, but I never did. We've got some huge trees that are close enough to hit the house if they went down.

Around 3:30 early Sunday the power went out. This meant the sump pump went dead, and the torrential rain continued until about noon. We ended up with about three inches of water in the basement. We had about six inches from Hurricane Floyd back in 1999, so the pump must have done a good job while it could.

We figured out how to make coffee in a coffee maker by boiling water on the gas stove— lighting it with a match— and pouring it slowly like the pot would have done. Pretty tedious. The juice was still cold and we had... I forget already, look at that... something to eat.

And we managed lunch. By supper we decided not to eat in the dark. We found a restaurant open in a part of Maplewood that had power. And we went home. Helen read her Kindle for a while and Megan read a book with a flashlight. I just whined and fell into despair and lay on a couch in the dark, and soon enough it was sleepy time. And boy was I tired.

Going to work the next day was pretty much out. I couldn't take a shower— a cold shower because the water had risen enough to douse the pilot light in the water heater— until daylight. Funny how that detail seemed a deal breaker. But even more significantly, no trains were running. I'm allowed to work from home when I need to, but that required electricity.

No Internet! Whine whine whine. Ooooh.

The biggest thing I did Monday was re-light the water heater, faithfully following the directions pasted to the outside. We could wash dishes. Sweet.

Four in the afternoon. One second of electric power! A miracle! Or sweet cruelty you might say, to give and then take away so quickly. That evening I drove to the store, and went down a different road than usual, no reason, and there, a few blocks from the house, I found the cause of the problem.

The biggest tree ever had fallen completely across a main road, knocking down power lines along it. The situation as summarized by the local online group was: the town could do nothing because it was a county road ; the county could do nothing because of the live wires ; the power company could do nothing because there was a tree in the way. Or something like that. Someone said they tried re-energizing the wire and the tree started smoking. If that didn't happen, it should have happened.

I don't know how you cut apart a tree of a diameter four times the length of a chain saw. Maybe they brought in military grade lasers, because I didn't hear any explosives used, but they did something overnight, because at five Tuesday morning, BANG there was light. I don't mean the sun. I mean electrical lights.

What a fine invention electricity is.

I went to work exhausted to find some mad scramble about suddenly needing detailed data for the top dogs about something we've been working on since April. Let's say it was not the quiet week I'd been hoping for.

We did have a nice lunch together with people from one of the academic departments we support. It was postponed from Monday. This was where my friend who couldn't get to sleep until one told me she worked from home on Monday. Don't you have trees?, I asked her. I think she said she has fifty trees, but the one that fell didn't hit the house although it just missed a car, and she had power the whole time.

Not fair. Whine whine whine. Look. Trees were down all over town, there was a part of Maplewood that had no water for a while on Sunday, and a part where the power was out until Friday, and parts of other towns in the area that are still flooded as I write this. So I should shut up.

I couldn't find any time to write though.

Saturday and Sunday, we went up to Helen's parents each day to help them out. The grating in their driveway had worked in reverse and drained a creek into the driveway and from there into the basement, a foot deep. Helen's brother and sister and their partners were there too, and we all had a clean out party.

Their basement always was the mother of cluttered basements. Now it was the mother
of wet moldy cluttered basements. Adding to the fun is that half the basement has a low ceiling, only five feet clear under the main beams. I can stand up in places, but mostly, to protect myself, I walked around like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, or as her brother said, we looked like extras trying out for Planet of the Apes. Once in a while one of us would forget and stand up, typically while carrying a delicate work of art, bang our head, stagger trying not to drop the art, and try to come up with an exclamation suitable for the ears of my young niece and nephew.

There were works of art. Helen's mother is a sculptor. The bronzes were OK, and the fired clay seemed to be OK. The unfired soft clay was not always OK. She has made some beautiful stuff. Even Helen thought we had not ever seen some of them. So anyway, imagine having to move an uncountable number of more or less delicate and sometimes heavy things under the conditions I have described.

In the middle of the second day my sister in law declared that she was going to call the job done in a short time. I called her the project manager. She seemed to know the most about how to clean up and organize, and it was good to have someone willing to call it. It wasn't that we had tossed out all the junk, but that we had removed everything wet and either tossed it or else dried it and put it back.

We bought two sections of plastic shelving to replace some makeshift stuff they'd been using. I give you one example. A bust of Beethoven made decades ago by Helen's mother, stored inside the wood cabinet of a 1950s vintage television set. The story is that the plaster bust had exploded when they tried to make a mold from it to cast it in bronze, so she glued it back together, and her father (Helen's grandfather) found someone who could paint it to look like it was bronze. Everything seemed to have a story.

When you are carrying something delicate, being told not to drop it does not help you not drop it. When you are trying to make a polite reply about not dropping it, that seems to take over the part of your brain that remembers why you are bent over. When you hear a quiet "watch your head" as you start to stand normally, it is much appreciated, if said in time. Beethoven is OK, nestled in his new plastic tub. I'm just saying those things because they are true.

There is now a pile of water-damaged junk by the road in front of their house, the size of a small truck. Helen's sister took pictures but I don't have them for you. The story is that the town will come take it away.

Again I was too tired to write.

But the TV died. I don't know whether it was the power going off and on a few times, or if it was just its time. On Sunday morning we found it was shorting out, turning its own power off and on, and displaying interesting line patterns on screen. We yanked the cord and put it away to await its journey to beyond on Electronics Recycling Day. It still looks beautiful.

Today, Monday, we researched what are good TVs, ordered one online and picked it up at the store. It's ten inches bigger than the old one.

Then we turned our attention to cleaning the remains of mud from our own basement. Notice our priority list. Helen didn't like the fuzzy white stuff growing on the stairs down there, or the earthy smell.

And then finally I found an hour to avoid breaking the long string of weekly posts. It was a close one! But I am going for the record books. I thought, well, it's been a hell of a week, I should be able to toss off a few 'graphs. Any kind of garbage will do: the readers can't ask for refunds if I give it out for free. That's the kind of deal we make here at World of... I have forgotten the name of my own blog. Seriously, I wrote "World of" and then it looked wrong. At least it did look wrong. I am still tired. There's a couch in my office, but they keep asking me to do things.

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Central Avenue Bridge

2011-08-28T21:00:00.522-04:00

Scary bridge.

Central Avenue over City Subway
— Status
Open to traffic
— History
Built 1908
— Design
Pony truss
— Dimensions
Length of largest span: 112.9 ft.
Total length: 118.1 ft.
Deck width: 47.2 ft.
— Inspection (as of 09/2008)
Deck condition rating: Fair (5 out of 9)
Superstructure condition rating: Poor (4 out of 9)
Substructure condition rating: Fair (5 out of 9)
Appraisal: Structurally deficient
Sufficiency rating: 49.4 (out of 100)

Structurally deficient.

I've gone under the Central Avenue Bridge a few dozen times on what is now called the Newark Light Rail line, and a couple of weeks ago I went over it.

Some interesting things about this bridge.

First, the angle of crossing is extremely skewed. Going along Central Avenue, you pass one steel truss on the left, then go through an intersection, and then pass the other truss on the right. See the aerial view from Bing below.

Second, the south side is really three trusses in a row, while the north side is just one.

Third, when built in 1908 it crossed over a canal, not a rail line. This is the only bridge over the city subway that was not built new when the subway was constructed.

I wanted to know how such a awkward bridge came to be built and why it's still there.

The Morris Canal was completed from Newark to Phillipsburg in 1831. Crossing New Jersey involves a lot of hill climbing, and the canal used 34 locks and 23 inclined planes. The planes carried the boats on cradles running on rails. The location at Central Avenue was close to the upper side of Lock 16 East (marked today by Lock St, near Warren St), and there was a widened basin in the area for boats waiting to lock through.

Central Avenue came later.

Below is a portion of a street map from 1853, which I annotated to show the future location of Central Avenue. If the drawing is accurate, no streets bridged the canal between New Street (at Lock Street) and Sussex Avenue.

This explains a lot. If Central Avenue had existed when the canal was built, they probably would have tried to avoid such a skewed crossing. Instead, Central Avenue was cut through later. Its width and almost straight path from Broad Street to the city line suggests some degree of dramatic gesture was involved, and therefore its unfortunate angle of crossing the canal simply had to be dealt with.

Central Avenue is not on a map from 1872, but does appear on a map from 1881. Therefore the structurally deficient bridge we have today replaced another one after roughly 30 years.

The first bridge was evidently strong enough to support a street railway. The Central Avenue cars began running in 1890.

Below is part of a plate from an 1892 real estate atlas. The south side of the implied bridge is shown as running from Jay Street to just east of Hudson Street, exactly like the existing bridge. The canal is not shown emerging on the north side of Central Avenue just west of Hudson, but the angles of the buildings imply that it did. The purpose of these maps was to show properties and buildings, so the depictions of other features like canals are not always precise. Most of the buildings shown are wooden, shown yellow, but a few are brick, shown pink.

The only slight detail I could find about the first bridge is in John Harrington Riley's very detailed chronology The Newark City Subway Lines (the author, 1987), where he writes:

On March 1, 1908 the Morris Canal Bridge on Central Avenue in Newark was closed as unsafe. While the new bridge was being built the Central cars were re-routed [...]. At 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, May 28, 1908 the Central cars reverted to their regular route via Central Avenue over the new canal bridge.

Below are parts of two plates from a 1908 real estate atlas that show the new bridge. (The atlas has a page break at Central Avenue, and the two don't quite line up, so I have just copied in the two parts.)

This atlas shows better than anything I've seen how the canal crossed under the street, and it provides a clue to how the bridge works.

On the southern side, there were two support columns shown by squares, with beams running across the canal to the masonry wall on the north side of the canal, under the road. This explains very well why there are three truss structures along the south side.

I made a diagram:

Span A rests on the north side truss (dark blue), the south masonry wall (brown), and a cross beam.

Span B has no truss, resting on the two masonry walls and two cross beams.

Spans C, D, E, rest on the north masonry wall, three trusses, and two cross beams. The cross beams originally extended beyond the trusses to reach masonry columns on the south side of the canal. During construction of the subway, new columns were placed directly under the ends of the trusses and the outer part of the beams cut out.

Here is what it looked like.

The Morris Canal was closed in 1924. The photograph above shows the view from Norfolk Street after it was drained. The occasion might be the date in 1929 when the City of Newark contracted to build a trolley rapid transit line in the canal bed.

You can see the three trusses along the south side of Central Avenue, and one of the cross beams, the other hidden behind it from this angle. You can also see that depositing junk into abandoned property is not a new thing in Newark.

The subway opened in 1935. Originally subway services resembled the trolley subways now running in Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco: cars ran out of the subway into street railways. The Central Avenue car line was one of those routed into the subway. Ramps were built that can be seen in the 1955 photo below, taken from under Norfolk Street bridge.

Photo by Frank Pfuhler, as seen on David Pirmann's nycsubway.org site. Inbound Central Avenue cars left the street at Hudson Street and came down ramp seen on the left. Outbound cars went up the ramp on the right and crossed over the subway on a new bridge that rose alongside the Central Avenue Bridge. Central Avenue cars stopped running in December 1947, but as you can see the ramps were still there eight years later (and many years more).

In August 2011 I took the view below from Norfolk Street bridge, from an angle similar to the 1920s photograph. The remains of the ramps are still there, but the track bridge was removed a long time ago now.

I'm sorry there is a chain-link fence everywhere you turn here. This is just about the best view you can get now from street level.

On a much earlier occasion, Sidney Selleck Jr snapped the view from the other direction, looking down the ramps. (Dot screen courtesy of its publication in Traction Extra number 1, The City Subway / Newark's Best Kept Secret, by Joseph Saitta (Merrick NY: Traction Slides International, 1985).)

Those are new cross beams, not the old ones, holding up the track bridge, and I think they were not connected to the Central Avenue Bridge. The date here seems to be in the 1935-1947 era when the ramps were in use.

Below, my very sorry attempt to get a similar point of view in August 2011. Note the very end of the pipe railing that once continued onto the track bridge.

Check the fine rust detailing on the rest of the steel. Note: this is not one of those modern buildings where the rust is intentional and makes it stronger. No.

I have worse photographs. Let me try your patience a little longer.

This happens to show two details well. First, see the support column under the ends of the trusses. On top of it is a support pole for trolley wire that really could have been removed. If you look near the left, another pole marks the location of the other support column. Second, under the bridge you can see a little of the masonry side wall. The white on the stone is some mixture of graffiti and pigeon droppings.

The photo below looks across Central Avenue from the north side. The crack in the sidewalk running out into the street shows the angle of the north side of the masonry wall as it crosses the north side of Central Avenue. The wall curves left as it goes.

I could not get a good photo of the north side truss. It's covered in chain-link fence, and the possible view from the next bridge, corner of Duryea and Dickerson, is totally obscured by a dense growth of ivy on another chain-link fence. But you can guess what it looks like. Rust.

Should this bridge be preserved? No. Let's replace it. If the City of Newark can't afford to replace it, let's at least remove it, while we can choose how to do it, not after it has fallen onto the tracks. We might be able to live without it. I don't know the politics involved, but that's midday weekday traffic you see there in the photo. The bridge is scary.

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Bridge Street Bridge

2011-08-21T21:00:00.052-04:00

Last time I showed you a few old bridges in Hunterdon County. I looked around on the same website to see what we had closer to home.

The oldest bridge in Essex County is the Bridge Street Bridge spanning the Second River between Belleville and Newark. I went there.

The New Jersey Department of Transportation's Historic Bridge Survey, 1994, listed the bridge. This is part of the description:

CONSTRUCTION DATE: 1867
SOURCE: PLAQUE
MATERIAL: Stone
TYPE: STONE ARCH
DESIGN: BARREL

Physical Description: The single-span stone arch bridge is constructed of vermiculated coursed ashlar and finished with ringstones. Spanning 33' and measuring almost 30'-6" wide, the bridge carries a 2-lane road flanked by a concrete sidewalk and ashlar parapets with granite cap stones. A keystone on the east elevation is inscribed with the date, 1867, and the county freeholder minutes confirm the date of construction. The west parapet has missing stones at the north corner. No alterations to the span were noted. Plans were not located.

Historical and Technological Significance: The 1867 stone arch bridge is technologically significant because it is the earliest example of a stone arch bridge in the county, and it is well-preserved. Additionally, it is located in the extension division of Branch Brook Park. The park is listed in the National Register as a historic district, and the span is historically distinguished because it contributes to the historic character of the park.

Here is the west side parapet showing the missing stones at the north corner. In the background is part of Branch Brook Park, which is narrow here, and a few houses in Belleville.

The reddish stone should look familiar to New Yorkers. Local quarries were the source of the brownstone used to face many houses in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Because of the park on the Belleville side of the stream, you can get around to see both sides of the bridge. Trees on the west side obscure the view, but the east side is clear.

I didn't notice any inscription on the keystone in real life, but an enlargement of the east side image confirms something is written on it.

The closeup also shows the vermiculated texture still present on most of the stones. It's not just an artifact of stone cutting, but was deliberately worked into the stones.

Although this is the county's oldest bridge, it is not now located on a main road. It's also not properly lined up with the streets on each side, as you can see below in an image I adapted from Google Maps satellite imagery. Modern maps don't show that the bridge is slightly west of where you'd expect it to be if it was intended to connect Summer Avenue (Newark) to Bridge Street (Belleville). The southwest wing parapet, shown in a thin blue line, seems especially out of position.

The bridge of course pre-dates the local street plan. But on the south side at least, it also seemed to me that old roads leading to the bridge were probably wiped out when the street grid was imposed.

Below is a map of Newark dated 1872, when the bridge was only five years old, showing the old road pattern in the area. My arrow points to the bridge.

As early as this the next road east, Washington Avenue, was becoming the main road. The Newark and Belleville Horse Railroad was laid in it, and the newly opened Montclair Railroad had a North Newark station at the crossing. The Washington Avenue Bridge is the next-oldest in Essex County, built as one arch in 1868 and lengthened to three arches in 1869.

The unnamed road running southwest from the bridge explains the southwest parapet wing.

A second map from 1889 shows the proposed street grid in dotted lines. The doomed road to the southwest is named as Murphy Lane. The road called Woodside Avenue on the 1872 map is now Summer Avenue. The next two parallel streets west are a proposed street called (confusingly) Woodside Avenue, and an extension of Mount Prospect Avenue. The Newark, Bloomfield and Montclair Horse Railroad, which had wandered northwest, crossing Murphy Lane, was removed to Bloomfield Avenue in 1876.

Finally, here's an 1885 map that does not well distinguish proposed and opened streets, but does show the locations of old roads. Here we learn that Summer Avenue overlays a narrower old road called the Upper Road to Belleville (it is uphill from Washington Avenue). Near the bridge the Upper Road is even shown as lying in the western side of Summer Avenue— lining it up with the bridge!

"Montclair Depot" at Washington Avenue means the Montclair Railroad Depot.

Below, I've taken a "modern" map, the Newark Central Planning Board map of 1944, and overlaid two old roads, Murphy Lane and the Old Road to Bloomfield, using the 1885 map as reference. The circle near the top is the Bridge Street Bridge.

The other circle is the location of a curious holdover from the past, older than the Bridge Street Bridge. It's the last piece of the Old Road to Bloomfield. That's actually the name of the street as seen below.

The only address on it is 29 Old Road to Bloomfield, but it's an important one, the John Sydenham House, built in 1711. Photographs and plans made by the Historic American Buildings Survey in the 1930s are here. HABS called the condition poor, but the house was restored in the 1950s and it looks great today.

While I was in the area I was also going to grab a street sign image of an even stranger name, Viviparous Way, shown by the orange thing on the Bing Maps image below. It's just west of Bridge Street Bridge (my added circle).

Sad to say this street exists only on Bing Maps. It's not on any other map I could find on the web or in print, and it's not even found by Bing's search engine. It's also not there on the ground. Well, the street itself exists but it's just part of Manchester Place. I guess someone was having fun with the maps database. Someone, presumably, of a live-bearing species.

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Bridges of Hunterdon County

2011-08-14T21:00:00.095-04:00

There was a book with a title like this. The resemblance ends there.

Looking for an excuse to go to countryside of West Jersey, I thought we could go check whether the Green Sergeant covered bridge is still standing, and then have a lunch and brew at the Ship Inn in Milford, on the Delaware. The best bitter, a batch they made the day we went, proved to be outstanding. But let's talk about bridges.

Hunterdon County turns out to be a mecca for old bridges. You could drive around for days looking at nineteenth century bridges. I decided to start with some of the oldest ones. They're usually one lane wide, and if they haven't been replaced in the name of progress it means they're on minor back roads in the woods and fields. Those are the roads I like.

The oldest bridge reported is a small pony truss bridge dated 1834, rehabilitated 2002, but I couldn't see anything old left. See here.

The next oldest is a stone arch bridge from 1837, rehabilitated 1974. What they did was widen the bridge to accommodate a modern two-lane road. The west side has the 1837 date stone, but otherwise it's all new. The original east side is mostly intact as you can see here:

Driving off along the Dunkard Church Road, we found by chance a very nice bridge that was not listed in my online sources. It's on the Sandbrook - Headquarters Road. It looked to me pretty similar to the bridge from 1837, but its date stone showed a much later date, 1873. I was surprised to find online a news report about major repairs done to the bridge in 2009 after the arch had begun to collapse. You can see that here on the Delaware Township Post's web page. The county road department found out that historically accurate repair came in for less than half the cost of replacing the bridge with a new one.

The road department in fact got so excited about it that they set out to do something similar for another stone arch bridge, without obtaining the proper permissions— which happened to be the next one we visited, although I had no idea about the reconstruction until days afterwards.

The Pine Hill Road bridge was built in 1849. In this case the planned repairs would not have been historically accurate, but fortunately work was halted while the proper permissions were obtained.

The bridge doesn't look like much from road level as you can see below.

This is right around the corner from the Green Sergeant covered bridge, which is obviously more interesting to look at seen from road level. But the opposite is true when you go down to the riverbed. The public are invited into the Wickecheoke Creek Preserve, so feel free. We did.

You didn't expect this, did you?

That is a beautiful bridge.

With advice from local historical experts, the arch was repointed and made strong, and the parapet along the road was rebuilt in the early months of 2010 using local stone. It looks good, and the bridge now will last many years more.

We made our way down the stream bed a very short distance to the Green Sergeant bridge.

This is the last nineteeth-century covered bridge in New Jersey. It's very picturesque.

There are tens of thousands of Green Sergeant bridge photos on the web, so I was reluctant to add to the deluge. I like to write about uncommon things. I like the stream-level views above, which are less common but far from unique. But one thing I've never seen is a view from directly under the bridge.

This is where the magic dies, and why I think the Pine Hill Road bridge is better from the perspective of the stream bed. Take a look.

This is a steel beam deck bridge, spanning the space between concrete abutments built in 1961, the year cast into the concrete. The other bridge to the right looks about the same from below.

Here is the straight dope. The Green Sergeant bridge was built in 1872 to replace an older (non covered) bridge, using the same stone abutments. Records show that the older bridge was repaired in 1787, but I haven't been able to determine when it was first built. It might have been the 1740s, when a mill was built nearby.

In 1960 the bridge was damaged, and the county road department set out in their routine way to replace it with a modern bridge. After considerable public outcry about the historical significance of the last covered bridge in New Jersey, a plan was made to build two one-lane bridges, and reassemble most parts of the covered bridge onto one of them. And that's what we have today, two bridges opened in 1961.

The stone abutments, by far the oldest component, were destroyed at that time. As I understand it, the wooden queenpost through truss which is still visible inside the bridge no longer supports anything but itself. The steel girders that are enough to hold up the other bridge are presumably enough for the covered bridge too. So it's a bit of a fake, although the wooden beams are original.

I like the bridge anyway, and I hope you do too.

The namesake is Richard Green Sergeant, a farmer who operated the Sergeant Mill nearby. He was known as Green Sergeant, and his surname is pronounced surge - ent, not sarge - ent. The locals like to catch visitors on this. I wish I could tell you how the locals pronounce Wickecheoke Creek but I don't know. Wickey - chokey? They probably just call it the creek.

I had a Cornish pasty for lunch. Now I can say I've had one, been there, done that, and I can order something else next time with a clear conscience. But that Imperial pint of best bitter!

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Genius and Stupidity

2011-08-07T21:00:00.469-04:00

Email received:

From: webmail@mnsi.net <webmail@mnsi.net>
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2011 19:59:15 -0400
Subject: ATT: example.edu Account User

ATT: example.edu Account User,

Our data base has full and we want to expand to a better service, also we want to change our log in page for all example.edu User to prevent to receiving of unwanted emails. We requested that all our customers should send us the bellow details:

User Name_______
Pass Word________
Date of Birth___

Failure to send us the above information 48hrs after receiving this email will render your account useless.

Thanks,
example.edu Account Dept.

Shout the "pass word" loudly— they want the bellow details.

I don't like to mix work and blog, but I'm going somewhere with this. There are several attempts a day to send messages like this to our user community at example.edu, and we block almost all of them using custom rules that I created. This past week two of them made it through and I was not feeling too good about it.

The one above was very old fashioned. It wanted the person to send the credentials by reply email. We can block the replies. They took the trouble to insert our edu domain into the text many times, which they don't usually do. That makes it spear phishing, not just phishing.

Next one. I've changed the sender. This was sent from a user account that was probably stolen using a message like this. I could mock the sender by leaving the name. I won't. I've changed the web page it directs to, also.

From: First Last <flast@bpcc.edu>
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2011 08:51:25 -0500
Subject: Important Notice fron the Helpdesk

EMAIL ACCOUNT UPGRADE

Your E-mail box has reached its maximum limit of 20 GB of storage and Your account will be disabled if you do not update now.

example.edu To upgrade your account,please click the link below and follow the instructions to upgrade to more storage space.

http://exemplo.com.br/forms/use/webmail/form1.html

Your account will remain active after you have confirmed your account successfully.

example.edu |Auburn,Alabama 36849

=A9 Copyright 2011 Regulation

This is the modern way. They send you to a web page to give away your identity.

Mail fron our helpdesk does not usually come from another edu domain, nor have we relocated the university to Auburn, Alabama, so this was not totally convincing.

I often check the web page used in these things. This one was a commonly used form made with the phpFormGenerator software. When you have a URL, if you go up the tree by deleting one level at a time off the right side, sometimes you get to other pages that will tell you whose site it is. With these phishing pages, chances are the thieves don't own the web site. More likely they stole a password to get access. It's what they do.

In this case, once I backed up to http://exemplo.com.br/forms, I got to a page that showed me the forms I had created so far, and asked whether I'd like to create another one. And for each one I had created so far, it asked whether I wanted to delete it. So in this case the thieves did not steal a password. You don't need one. D'oh! I told the site owner and the hosting service.

The form was gone the next day.

But let's get on to the good part. Look at the box on the left side under the title "wise words".

What is the difference between genius and stupidity?
Genius has limits.
— Albert Einstein.

Oh, that Einstein. I wondered on what occasion he said this.

Almost at once I also thought of Yogi Berra's wise words, "I really didn't say everything I said". That is the title of a book he wrote, so I think he did say that one.

Famous quotes are always by famous people who are known for famous quotes. Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison. They said a lot of things they didn't really say.

Google says there are 1,710,000 web pages containing that quote and the name Einstein. Could they all be wrong?

Well of course they could all be wrong.

There's an alternate quote:

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
— Albert Einstein

The mention of the universe makes it sound a little more like Einstein. He was always thinking deep thoughts about the universe and infinity.

I tried various searches to get past the nearly two million people quoting other people quoting other people in endless recursion.

The saying with "the difference between genius and stupidity" is common in print only since 1996. It must have appeared in some widely read or heard source that year. And it was not at first attributed to Einstein. It seems to be anonymous until 2000.

The oldest print citation I could find is from 1961. It's in a trade periodical called Grassroots Editor, volume 2 page 34. The page contains humorous quotes collected from local papers.

One man says that the difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.
— Louisville (Ky) Irish-American

Einstein died in 1955. I'd like to have found the quote somewhere during his lifetime, if I'm going to consider that he might have said it. Did the editor of the Louisville Irish-American make it up? I wouldn't rule it out.

I've got to say that a date as old as 1961 surprised me. The sarcastic tone sounds either more modern or else jumps us back a century to the days of Mark Twain.

But the gist of the quote might have been stated earlier in a different form. So I looked a little further.

Back! Back!

In the scientific biography Claude Bernard by Michael Foster, 1899, page 229, we find:

But in the origin of the hypothesis out of the observation, and in the framing of the needed experiment, there is room for all the difference between genius and stupidity.

He goes on to imply that there are more ways to be stupid than genius, but he doesn't make it into a pithy remark. He keeps to a certain elevated tone that you can probably pick up from the one sentence.

Back in 1873, if we had picked up an issue of Every Saturday / A Journal of Choice Reading, we would find on page 530 an article called "The Modesty of Genius" by an author whose name is not supplied. He or she writes as follows (in an essay that runs for twenty-two pages of double columns in small print, to be continued next issue, that makes me wonder how far into the year it took to reach page 530):

The man of genius attributes to obstinacy or idleness what is the result of good, plain, honest stupidity. [...] Perhaps it would be as well if, for a brief period of his life, everybody was condemned to be a schoolmaster or a crammer, in order that he might more or less fathom the stupendous abysses of human stupidity.

There! The stupendous abysses of human stupidity! It's not the quickly tossed-off remark that Einstein made in another universe, but it speaks of the genius's limitations in comprehending stupidity itself. If only there had been a witty bon mot the author could have put in there.

Let's go forty years earlier if we may. In a number of The European Magazine and London Review from 1821, page 301, we come to an article by M M D called "On the Gradations of the Human Intellect". In one of the shorter sentences he or she has this to say:

The most sublime genius has but indistinct views, or confused ideas, of whatever is placed beyond the proper limits of his understanding ; and though he has clear ideas of whatever is placed within these limits, this does not distinguish him from the dunce ; for the stupidest mortal will perceive whatever is placed within the reach of his understanding, as clearly and distinctly as Locke or Newton.

That's 190 years ago. Have we reached the limit? Maybe not. According to some web pages, we can go all the way back to the poet John Dryden (1631-1700), who wrote:

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
— "Cymon and Iphigenia" (l. 107)

This was exciting! It's the alternate version contrasting stupidity not to genius but to the universe, and it's got a specific cite down to the line number in a certain poem. It sounds so modern, and yet, they couldn't put it on the web if it wasn't true.

Sigh. The World Wide Web lets us down again. It lets us down, it lets us down. Here is what you will find at line 107 of "Cymon and Iphigenia":

The fool of nature stood with stupid eyes
And gaping mouth, that testified surprise.

It's somewhat apt, but not what we were looking for.

Inevitably, while I was searching around, I came across this, and said to myself, self, you didn't know it, but this is the quote you were looking for:

There is such a fine line between genius and stupidity.
- David St Hubbins, This Is Spinal Tap

But, despite the solemn word of 6,410 web pages, that's not what St Hubbins said. I don't know what to believe any more. My faith in humanity is shattered.

This is actually how it went:

David St Hubbins: It's such a fine line between stupid, and uh...
Nigel Tufnel: Clever.
David St Hubbins: Yeah, and clever.

And with this week's blog: Q E D.

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Crispy Pig Tails

2011-07-31T21:00:00.314-04:00

Looking for a new Internet time-waster? Go to http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/ and type the name of a person you know in the box "Find someone's list".

Search by name works best with unusual names. My name is hopeless. There's a lot of us. I'll save you some time and tell you that I never made an Amazon wish list. Maybe you think that's just what I'm saying. Then I can't help you.

A few of my namesakes have listed their birthdays, which is nice for gift giving. It's a common security question for resetting passwords, too. I'll take a risk and say that none of the birthdays the few people have listed is mine. That narrows the field by a few dates.

Let's see...

Name 1. Only one hit, and only one book. The book seems... unlikely. Or has he for all these years been hiding his interest in foods like Crispy Pig Tails and Rolled Pig's Spleen and Pig's Trotter Stuffed with Potato? You never know. I had to look up what part of a hog the Trotter is, and though it sounds like a euphemism, it really is just a foot.

Name 2. Only one hit. The two books about her favorite hobby tell me that this is the person I know. But there's also a CD from a 1960s group I am not familiar with, which is saying something. And she'll need the CD because Amazon does not offer mp3 downloads of the songs on it. I checked the samples. It's a thumping garage band with an enthusiastic singer, and it sounds like it was recorded over the telephone. Why does she want this? It came out when we were teens. There is an untold story here. She ran away from home to see them, and was married to the bass player for a week until the drugs ran out and they noticed she was sixteen. I can't confirm any of this.

After a good start it was downhill from there. Most of the names I tried are not found, or they just list boring stuff. If you make one of these wish lists you should list one crazy thing, to entertain people. Get them talking.

Someone I haven't seen since the 1980s wants three of the five volumes of Dante's Divine Comedy. I wonder why she's into that. There's also a small picture of her. Hey you, what's with the white hair? Are we old or something?

I see that back in the year 2000, someone I know at work wished for some technical books about computer system administration. They have got to be a little dated at this point. Do these lists ever expire, Amazon? Eleven years isn't long enough? The revealing thing is that her ex-husband's surname is appended to the name she uses now.

Is this getting creepy? It's the trouble with the Internet. It's too easy.

I had the idea once of forming a club of people who have the same seven-digit phone number in different area codes. To call each other you'd only need to remember three digits because the rest would just be your own phone number. I never followed through.

Now I can just Google my home phone number and find out who some of the club members would be. You can waste time doing this too. You get mostly business web sites but it's a start.

I get a McDonald's in Chicago, a psychologist in St Louis, a printer in the Bronx, a public relations firm in Tennessee. Then there's a mysterious business in Seattle, name redacted to [name], that has this to say:

[name] USA Inc. manages the supply chain of raw materials from North America to [name]'s global production and distribution facilities. [name] USA Inc. is staffed with industrial professionals with profound international marketing background.

I'll just say that [name] are in the export business and let it go. Onward. A marina and conference center (two in one) in Wisconsin, a computer repair guy in Orlando, a hair salon in Greensboro. All connected by the thread of a phone number. Our fates might be tied together. It makes as much sense as astrology.

After those I started hitting sites in Britain. There's another mysterious business in London that offers "access consultancy research and design", and a young people's music venue in Sheffield that says:

Security: Tight but polite, full co-operation with South Yorkshire police
Please Bring Photo ID if you are lucky enough to look under 18
Dress: Sleek and Sexy, No Hats or Hoods, Guys put in an effort for the girls

I've taken a note, in case I ever stay in Sheffield.

The whole concept of the phone number club was based on the need to remember phone numbers. It's becoming weird to think that you'd have to store seven-digit sequences in your brain in order to call somebody.

I still remember my home phone number from when I was a kid. It started with two letters, and we didn't have area codes yet when I memorized it. It was in the SWarthmore-7 exchange. I converted the letters to numbers and prepended the area code for Fair Lawn, and looked it up. It's a cell phone now. I mean the entire exchange is cell phones. I wonder how they managed the cutover. Because I work on things like that sometimes.

Those are my ideas for this week. Come on, it's summer.

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Dietch's Zoo

2011-07-24T21:00:00.242-04:00

Look at the temperature Friday in Newark, New Jersey, five miles from the property. Weather reporters said it was 108, but it felt like 115. As if I would otherwise say to myself, oh it's only 108 outside, I will put on the running shoes. As if I can tell the difference between how 108 feels and 115. As if.

Because of the heat here in War of Yesterday headquarters, I have not taken time to edit this week's installment as much as usual.

Dietch's Kiddie Zoo, Fair Lawn, New Jersey, circa 1960,
from the Zito Photography Collection.

The pop musique in Kings supermarket is not predictable. Somebody at the music service takes time to go beyond the usual stuff. Once in a while I'll stop and examine the breads or spaghetti sauces to listen to a choice selection.

I forget whether I ever mentioned to you that sometimes I'll stay a couple of minutes in the car, in a parking lot or my own driveway, to catch the end of a good song I haven't heard in a while. Only when I'm alone.

Sheryl Crow's "My Favorite Mistake" is such a perfect record. It goes along well for a couple of verses and choruses, and that's enough to make it a good one, but then it spins off into that end section that never repeats, and when she casually hits the lines "Did you see me walking by? Did it ever make you cry?" it's as if she never did that and it's not the heart of the matter.

A few months ago Kings came up with "Walk Away Renee". Who pulled that one out of the vault? I mean, there are songs I haven't heard in years, but this is one I have not even given a thought to. And it sounded great! I don't recall what food aisle I paused in, but it was just before I was leaving, and at the register the very young clerk was singing the tune softly to one of her coworkers and asking if she knew what it was. Go to Youtube and choose any version by the Left Banke. Yes, "Banke". It's like French or something. Let that go. Just play the song.

Left Banke. At one time I though "rive gauche" meant something like "silly laughter". Consider the French cheese from "la vache qui rit". If that can be "the cow who laughs"... French. I never took French. I took German. Consider "die lachende Kuh": that's almost English with a funny accent.

We don't have laughing cows. Borden Dairy had contented cows.

Borden's mascot Elsie the Cow lived in New Jersey. She has a gravestone in central Jersey, giving her real name, You'll Do Lobelia, but the burial site itself is nearby, under houses. No one knows exactly where, but the residents of one house sometimes hear a cowbell at night.

I am not certain whether her husband Elmer should have been contented. It depends on what that glue was made from. If it was casein, not his problem. But it seems to me hooved animals would never be contented when the subject of glue is brought up. Change the subject.

This week at Kings it was Debbie Boone singing "You Light Up My Life". It sounded awful.

Well, duh, you say. But I'm not here to knock that style of music. I can go for a big sappy ballad. I just want the singers to throw themselves into it. "If it's worth doing it's worth overdoing" as Bruce Springsteen said. Remember Whitney Houston's "One Moment in Time"? Well if you didn't like that you just don't like this kind of song. I don't know what to tell you.

The version of "You Light Up My Life" in my head was a lot better than the one they were playing. The version in my head has the same deliberate two-finger piano, dum dum dadum, but it's got a strong female voice going through the steps to get to the big chorus. OK not Whitney Houston in her prime. But a strong voice. What happened?

Were they playing an alternate take from a Debbie Boone box set? I can't prove it didn't happen. But chances are it was the original.

This happens to me sometimes. It will be some song I haven't heard since the Johnson administration, and then I happen to hear the record, and it's too fast, or too slow, or a different singer, or there's a part I forgot was there, or the words changed.

I told you about hearing the Hollies' "Carrie Anne" last year and noticing that the instrumental break is played on steel drums. Steel drums? What the? Was that always in there? And it was funny hearing Graham Nash singing the lead. "Teach Your Children", man.

So here's this iconic "You Light Up My Life", Billboard number 1 for ten weeks in a row, biggest deal single of the 1970s apparently. Let's say it has not aged well. As if it used to sound better.

The next Billboard number 1 was "How Deep Is Your Love". Rival Cashbox
allowed Deb only eight weeks at number 1, giving Crystal Gayle's "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue" a couple of weeks before they too cut over to the Bee Gees. I've heard the Bee Gees song too many times for it to surprise me. But Crystal Gayle. I wonder. Should I seek it out? Sometimes they're better than I remember.

OK, I did. It's not. The singing is corny and the instrumental backing is worse.

I checked Debbie Boone's Wikipedia page. She's a Jersey girl! Born in Hackensack. That's just a few miles from where boy Joe was living at the time. I never knew this.

Before the Garden State Plaza and Bergen Mall opened (both 1957), my parents took me to places like Packard's Department Store in Hackensack. That means I may have been in Hackensack on the fateful Saturday in 1956 when Debbie Boone was born.

What could I have told her? Nothing really. She was a baby.

Packard's. Before Christmas, and it may well be 1956 that I am remembering, they had a train ride in the store. Probably a 18-inch gauge. If I am recalling right, they just laid the track on the floor. Is this even possible? What power did this indoor train run on?

Some other wanderer on the web has written, "At Christmas time they had a great train set up, and Santa would give you a toy and a lollipop!". So it really happened.

And the old Packard's building was a masonry structure with wooden floors, according to another web contributor. My father was a firefighter and he always noticed things like that. He must have checked where the exits as when we went in. Just in case. I don't blame him.

It make me think of Dietch's Kiddie Zoo, which was right in town in Fair Lawn. That had a train too. And I have only mixed-up memories of it, but check this out, from the Bandwagon for September 1961:

Located on several acres of ground, this enterprise is fronted by a park full of kiddie rides and concession stands. To get to the zoo, the customers must pay a small fee but what they get for their money is really something worthwhile. Here is a conglomeration of pens, stalls, barns, cages and ponds filled with just about any type of animal worth seeing. Following the paths toward the back end, you finally emerge in a grove of trees where the Ringling cages are on display. Surrounding the whole area is a train with reproduction of old cars that carry passengers for a small fee.

The Ringling cages. Fifteen circus animal wagons of the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Combined Show. The decorative painted wagons of a bygone age, from the old travelling tent show. They held the Menagerie. The cages and some of the animals were trucked to Manhattan once a year for viewing while the Show was at Madison Square Garden. The article lists the wagons.

The location is not quite right in the article. It was on Saddle River Road, between the road and the river, near the end of Berdan Avenue.

EVERYTHING will be on the Internet soon. There's a home movie of Dietch's Kiddie Zoo on Youtube, and below I'll give you a few screen shots from it.

Was this "The Caterpillar" or something else? It has a little derby hat. Most of the rides were like this. Different shaped things ran in a circle. This one had rubber tires under it that ran on the pathway— you can't see the tires in the movie but I actually remember that.

This ride was different. Handcars. You had to make them move yourself, using your arms to turn the wheel. See the video. Since some kids couldn't keep it going the whole distance, the man there had to encourage them or just plain push them. I might have been one of those kids. This ride was a challenge.

I wonder what the chimp is in for? It looks like he regrets his sorry life. They don't have zoos like this any more. Good.

As you can see in the video, the elephant kept swinging side to side. What I just said about the chimp.

The "No American Buffalo", in the first image on this page, seem more peaceful. I think they take to domestication like cows and are happy to just lump around and eat grass. Maybe I am deluding myself.

For the train geeks, here's the non-operating engine from Maine.

Watch the home movie to the end! There's a bonus. The last several seconds show Kind's Dairy, which was also on the east side of Saddle River Road, down near Route 4. We just called it the Dairy. "Do you want to go to the Dairy?", my father would ask, as if we would ever have replied, "Oh no Dad, we've had too much ice cream this week". That would not have happened. Fans of Moderne lettering, take note.

This is very self indulgent, but these images really tickled the memory cells, and I'm putting them here in case anyone searches Kind's Dairy and Ice Cream Bar, Fair Lawn, New Jersey.

Billboard, the same magazine with the pop music charts, originally covered the entire "variety" industry from circuses to vaudeville. A sideshow like Dietch's Kiddie Zoo was in scope.

From a lengthy article in 1954, we learn that the zoo opened three years earlier. Bob Dietch had a farm and was asked whether he thought he could tame a couple of llamas for a petting zoo, and Bob was the kind of guy who figured why not? This led him into wanting to run a small zoo of his own. He found someone else who wanted to run some carnival rides for kids, and someone else who wanted to run a small railroad. That's how these things go. The Ringling wagons and animals came a few years later.

The railroad equipment came from a Maine two-footer, including two engines from 1893 and 1895, and flatcars that were adapted for people to ride. The train owner had converted the engine that was running to gasoline power.

A webster somewhere asks the dates of the zoo. I'd just gleaned that the opening season was 1951. Another net denizen recalled from memory that it closed when the Saddle River flooded and destroyed much of the property.

So when did it close? Billboard reported on it in 1967. So it closed that year or later. I felt the need to settle the matter.

In the age of the Internet, the answers come almost too fast. Here we go. The New York Times reported on September 14, 1971, "Violent 3-Day Rainstorm Slackens", a stalled front that caused disastrous flooding all over northern New Jersey, only two weeks after the same region had been drenched by tropical storm Doria. The official gauge on the Saddle River at Lodi got stuck at almost 11 feet above normal, but officials said the river had certainly been higher. That would have been enough to flood Dietch's riverside property.

But not so fast! A post on railroad.net in 2005 says that Dietch's closed in 1968. The contributor seems well versed on the topic. He lets us know that the loop was 5/8 of a mile, and that the train had brakes only on the engine, with link and pin couplers to the cars. He says the two engines are now at Boothbay Railway Village, Maine. And they are still there in 2011. The roster online shows two engines originally of S D Warren Co, Maine, sold to Van Walsh of Ridgewood, New Jersey, who I know was the operator at Dietch's, and then sold to the museum in 1969. So I think we have established that the railroad ride ended in 1968.

Elsewhere on the net, I find a discussion of where the RBBB giraffes were housed when not being shown in New York. One commenter says that Dietch told him in May 1967 that he had one of them, and the writer thinks the giraffe may have gone to and from Dietch's until about 1972. But in a reply, a longtime Fair Lawn resident thinks Dietch's closed "around 1967". So there, support for both 1971 and 1968 in the same exchange.

And then, as I realized that not only was I was reading a discussion of where Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey giraffes were kept, but reporting to you on what it said, I realized it is TOO FREAKIN HOT and I am losing my mind.

See you next time.

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South Ferry III

2011-07-17T21:00:00.000-04:00

In South Ferry I, we looked at the first elevated railway station at South Ferry, and in South Ferry II, we considered how New York Elevated managed to operate two lines out of the tiny two-track terminal. Now, we'll see when the better-known four-track terminal was built. This larger terminal lasted until 1950.

The Park Commissioners yesterday granted the privilege to the New-York Elevated Railroad Company to build a "Y" on the Battery, to connect with Pier No. 1, North River.

That's the Tribune reporting inaccurately on a significant event on July 3, 1878. This was the official permission to build a very short branch line not at Battery Place but at Whitehall Street. The Parks Department was not part of the city government, but a fairly independent body similar to the public authorities today. The Parks Department had jurisdiction over parks and also some public streets near parks. It appears from subsequent events that Whitehall Street, alongside Battery Park, was one of those streets.

The permission predates the opening of the Third Avenue El by a month and a half, but the company did not follow up immediately, forcing use of the inadequate old station.

The Third Avenue El was extended to 89th Street on December 9, and the papers described planned rush hour headways of two minutes from South Ferry. This could only have been done by turning some trains at the recently installed third track south of Franklin Square. A company spokesman said now that they would build a terminal at 129th Street and that "a similar station will be erected at South Ferry". Service to the end of the line at 129th Street began on December 30.

Bromley's Atlas of the Entire City of New York, dated 1879, above, shows the location of the buildings at South Ferry. The elevated terminal was sited along the west side of the ferry plaza. This may have been done to keep clear the space in front of the South Ferry ferry terminal, but I think even more likely it was done to make the elevated station as long as possible to accommodate Third Avenue trains of four or five cars. The station house is along the west side of the big ferry terminal, not in front of it, getting another car length or so for the station platforms.

Let's get a good look at the scene. The first three images below, from stereo views, are from unknown dates in the 1870s or even 1860s before the elevated railway was built.

A view from the water shows the South Ferry terminal. The map above and the name on the arch agree that the boat on the left is handling the Hamilton Ferry, and the empty slip on the right is for the South Ferry to Atlantic Avenue.

This view from over the Staten Island ferry building shows where the elevated terminal would be built, along the left side of the South Ferry building and along the edge of Battery Park.

Turning around, we see the front of the South Ferry terminal. Look closely and you can see the names South Ferry and Hamilton Ferry on each side. I wonder what colors this amazing building was painted! The elevated terminal would be built along the edge of the park and extending into the space to the right of the ferry terminal.

A detail of the cabinet card from South Ferry I looks down the edge of the park, where we can see the shacks serving as Staten Island ferry terminals.

Construction for the big terminal must have begun around December 3. That's when the political grandstanding about encroachment on the park started.

The Tribune described the work in an article of December 19:

The plaza near the South and Staten Island Ferries has now a very disorderly appearance, owing to the preparations of the Elevated Railroad Company to extend its tracks over a portion of it. Heaps of earth, stones and logs lie scattered about, while here and there laborers are engaged making excavations for the foundations of pillars. Pumping engines are required to keep several of the holes free from water, which flows in at high tide. In order to secure any foundation, the railroad company's engineers have been compelled to drive long wooden piles into the bottom of the holes. Besides excavating holes in the plaza, the railroad company is digging others in Battery Park. ... When all the tracks are completed the company will be able to dispatch trains with far more frequency than at present. A handsome new depot will also be constructed on the south side of the plaza.

Further progress was reported on January 31:

Work on the station and tracks at South Ferry is advancing, and it is thought that in a month trains will start from that point on a one-minute headway. ... The road is carrying an average of 90,000 passengers a day.

It took more than a month. A report of March 7:

The terminus in Whitehall-st is so far completed that ties are being put in place ; before it can be used and the old structure in Battery Park removed, the new station adjoining Staten Island Ferry will have to be built. With the arrangements completed at this point a train may start out on each side as one arrives.

That means "the old station in Battery Park removed". I'm surprised to read that they were up to laying ties on the new terminal trackways when they had not yet even started building the station house.

The opening of the City Hall branch (joining the main line at Chatham Square) on March 17 provided some relief. Rush hour headways became: South Ferry to Harlem 4 minutes, South Ferry to Grand Central 6 minutes, Franklin Square to Harlem 8 minutes, and City Hall to Harlem 4 minutes. Do the math: that's 47½ trains per hour in one direction on the main trunk between Chatham Square and 42nd Street.

Trains crossed at grade going in and out of the branches at Chatham Square and 42nd Street. New York Elevated's management didn't believe in interlocking systems and ran everything with flagmen. At 42nd Street, trains going uptown to Grand Central every 6 minutes crossed trains going downtown less than 1½ minutes apart. What could happen? A side-swipe collision there on March 25 put an end to this schedule after only eight days. Both branches were immediately closed, and on March 27 the company announced that platforms would be built at the junctions so that the branches would be worked only with shuttle trains.

On this occasion Company President Cyrus Field provided a clue to the opening date of the terminal at South Ferry:

Mr Field thought this determination necessary, as trains will be run from South Ferry in a day or two at one minute intervals, and then the danger at the cross tracks would be very great, as the trains at Chatham-square would not be more than a half-minute apart.

You would expect a news article would follow describing the wonderful new terminal at South Ferry, which may have opened on the weekend of March 29 and 30, or Monday March 31. But I have not been able to find one.

I do have an article in the Tribune for April 11 that mentions that the Third Avenue El was then operating 62 trains an hour in one direction in rush hours. This scarcely seems possible with a two-track terminal at South Ferry, but it is certainly impossible without it. Of the 62, some probably ran from Franklin Square. It's still astounding.

And let's look at the new terminal. The three images below are early, possibly close to opening day.

I think this first one is a great image. You can see the same Staten Island ferry shacks on the right, with a stairway direct from the elevated station. Toward the left, under the el, you can see the South Ferry terminal too. Compare it to the views up above.

This image might show Third Avenue cars and pre-1880 Ninth Avenue cars together. The car farther back is a 1878 Third Avenue car built by Gilbert and Bush, with pointed arches over the window— for transit geeks, it's the same type as Car G, which still exists, and might possibly even be Car G although that's impossible to determine. The closer car, far left, is at the Ninth Avenue line platform, and although the roof silhouette is consistent with the narrow pre-1880 cars, I don't think it's clear enough to say for sure. If it is though, then this image is no later than May 1880.

This stereo view seems to be from around the same time as the cabinet card. The ladder on the elevated station and the materials in the street make me wonder whether the elevated station has just opened, and some work restoring the street plaza is just being finished.

Around the other side, we can see the corner of the South Ferry building on the left.

This is a Third Avenue train, with the other type of 1878 Third Avenue cars, built by Wason, without the pointed arches. Both types had an oval on the side at the center of the car.

You can see steam from the engine that brought this train in, trapped at the end of track. When the train is pulled out by another engine, this one will follow it out to a point past the switches, where it will wait to move in to take another train out.

The site of the original station from 1877 became part of a track not used for passenger service but useful as the only connection between the east side and west side elevated lines. Two images from Charles Warren's pages show the connection.

This scene is looking west toward Battery Park, with the big South Ferry station to the left. An engine is ready to take out a Third Avenue train. The white pole toward the right is at about the location of the stairway up to the original station. The trees inside the triangle are in photographs of the old station.

This is a later view. The departing Third Avenue train is running across the site of the original station. As we saw in South Ferry I, the station stairs were on the sidewalk under the tower seen here, and the platform extended to the left of that point. There is only one connecting track, on the near side of the tower.

Third Avenue engines ran with the engine on the downtown side, while Ninth Avenue engines did the opposite— so an engine running through the connection to the other line was oriented correctly.

The old South Ferry terminal is still standing here, but there is something in front of it that may be an elevated walkway. The building on the right was built by the United States for the Barge Office and the Immigration service.

The Second Avenue and Sixth Avenue Els began running to South Ferry in 1880 and 1881 respectively. Paths for these additional trains were made by routing some East Side trains to City Hall and terminating some West Side trains at Rector Street.

The terminal was expanded by 1910 with longer platforms and side platforms. The Sixth Avenue El closed in 1938, and after the Ninth Avenue El closed in 1940, the west side of the South Ferry terminal was demolished. The Second Avenue El closed in 1942, and in 1950 Third Avenue El service from Chatham Square to South Ferry was eliminated. After that the remainder of the terminal was removed. Nothing of it can be seen today. Even the path of the West Side elevated in Battery Park has been obliterated by redesign, and Front Street, over which the East Side lines approached, has been closed and built over.

The Staten Island boats were shifted to the site of the former Brooklyn ferries early in the 20th century, and new terminals for them were completed in 1909, then 1956, and most recently 2005.

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South Ferry II

2011-07-10T21:00:00.000-04:00

From the time I first learned about the elevated railways, and for many years afterward, I assumed that the large four-track South Ferry terminal was part of the original construction. Although the Greenwich Street and Ninth Avenue line pre-dates the others by eight to ten years, it was not extended to South Ferry until 1877, one year before the Third Avenue line opened, and I could rationalize that the company knew by that time that they would need a double terminal for the two services.

Not even research in New York Times microfilm— the only way you could do it in the 1970s— brought me to the true story.

I did find, back then, a series of articles throughout December 1878 about New York Elevated Railroad's "encroachment" on Battery Park. An additional track or tracks were being installed. Members of the city's Common Council gave speeches calling the Battery "the most beautiful park in all creation" and the like. They passed a resolution directing the Corporation Counsel to take action directing the Park Commissioners to revoke the privilege. By the end of the month the Mayor had to inform them that the Parks Department had sole power over parks and that they could do nothing about it. None of the Times stories describes the purpose of the encroachment. I concluded that the viaduct through Battery Park was being widened in some way. What else could it mean? Right?

I'm pretty sure that I only finally got it around about 2004 after staring at photographs like the two I put up last time. Where is this? And my wondering eyes finally realized that it was another, smaller, different South Ferry station that pre-dated the more familiar one.

So now I needed to find out how long the old terminal lasted and when the larger one was constructed.

Above: Aerial photography from 1924. Observe how the 1877 station blocks the Third Avenue El at Whitehall Street. Also, (looking ahead in our story) you can see that the curve from the West Side into the new station necessarily begins over the park, causing the encroachment complaints in 1878. (The ferry terminals were being reconstructed in 1924, creating temporarily the white open space to the right of the elevated terminal.)

The Third Avenue El opened on August 26, 1878, from South Ferry to Grand Central. Trains ran every 15 minutes, and 10 minutes in rush hours, and there were no Sunday trains.

Where did they end at South Ferry? One of the photographs I put up last time shows that the 1877 station spanned the width of Whitehall Street, to the end of Front Street. It was still there in June 1878, judging by the two Scientific American illustrations I posted last time. The Third Avenue El came down Front Street, so there was nowhere else it could have gone.

But the East Side trains were a foot and a half wider than those on the West Side. Did they really run trains of both lines from this one small station, with its single stairway to the street? Yes, it looks to me like they did.

The company must have cut back one side of the island platform by about nine inches for East Side trains. The images from 1877 show that the iron structure provided a level open deck on top. The station was probably all woodwork resting on the iron deck.

The first evening of Third Avenue service, there was a collision in which a West Side train, going around the curve in Battery Park, rear-ended another West Side train waiting to enter the station at South Ferry. This may have had something to do with new arrangements at the terminal, but the company as usual made no comment to the press.

The tremendous disadvantage to sharing South Ferry was that each line had only a one-track terminal. That limited the frequency of trains to how quickly they could get in and out of one track. It wasn't so bad on the West Side line, but business on the East Side grew fast.

The Tribune reported on September 3 that some of the East Side stations were too small to accommodate the crowds— and this was just one week after the opening. The following sentences are all I have found to explain the arrangement at South Ferry at the time the Third Avenue El opened.

The company intends building a triangular switch extension to the South Ferry to accommodate the trains from the East and West Sides. This will be built at an early date, and when completed the Board of Directors will take into consideration the question of running trains continuously from one side of the city to the other on one fare, or perhaps issue a coupon ticket. Under the present arrangement, if a passenger desires to go from one side of the city to the other, double fare has to be paid.

At this time, New York Elevated still collected tickets on the trains.

By the time the Third Avenue El opened to 67th Street on September 16, the company had taken delivery of more engines and cars, and began to run trains every five minutes to each branch, Grand Central and 67th Street. This was the practical limit with a single-track terminal at South Ferry, as stated by a member of the board:

It is physically impossible to make up trains there faster than one in two and a half minutes. We are now sending trains out of the South Ferry Depot at that rate, but it doesn't meet the exigencies of travel during the evening hours ; nothing less than double this service will. Trains must be dispatched on a minute headway, and to do this we are preparing to build a spur at Franklin-square, from which point trains will be dispatched just as rapidly as those from South Ferry.

The spur was a third track between the two main tracks, with a stub at the north end to hold an escaped locomotive. A southbound trainset would run into the third track, the locomotive in the stub would move down and couple to the north end while the incoming locomotive was detached, and the the trainset could move back out northbound as its former locomotive escaped up into the stub, where it would wait to take the next northbound train.

The Franklin Square track effectively provided a second terminal track to reverse some trains in rush hours. The rationalization was that trains were "well filled" in rush hours by the time they got to Franklin Square, the third stop from South Ferry. Nothing was said, or at least nothing was quoted at this time, about a new South Ferry terminal. But plans were already being made.

Above: Conjectural track plan for the transitional period, adapted from a track map showing tracks of the 1893-1903 period. This is the first mile of the Third Avenue El.

I'd love to drop in a photograph here of a Third Avenue train at old South Ferry, but as far as I know, no such image exists. That would be a find!

Next time, the new terminal is built, the one that lasted until 1950.

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South Ferry

2011-07-03T21:00:00.419-04:00

A couple of weeks back I wrote about the southern terminal of the first elevated railway in New York at Number 7 Broadway. As I mentioned there, that terminal was in use for about four years ending in April 1877.

The next terminal was at South Ferry, one stop farther south. New York Elevated Railroad was permitted by law to build extensions to connect with railroad terminals and ferries, and in February 1876 the company obtained permission from the Parks Department to build an extension through Battery Park near its edge along State Street to connect to the ferries at the foot of Whitehall Street. Construction was halted by a lawsuit after a few foundations had been dug, and did not resume until February 1877. City officials and property owners on State Street were against the extension, fearing a loss of property values. In the suit, lawyers argued that when the city was granted the land in 1790 by the United States, the city was required to use it only for "public purposes". In this case and in others, the appeals court eventually ruled that railways are a public purpose, since the public are accommodated on them.

The deal with the Parks Department called for ornamental iron columns, with plantings of ivy that would grow on them. Calvert Vaux, who designed Central Park along with Frederick Law Olmsted, created the design below (as printed in the Daily Graphic newspaper in May 1876):

Is it any surprise that the structure as built had just the structural parts of those columns, without the planned embellishments?

The point of interest here is that the original terminal was not the four-track terminal that old New Yorkers remember. It was a much more modest station, in keeping with the minimalist nature of the old New York Elevated Railroad. This was the company that took seven years to complete a second track ; the company that had people walk across one track to avoid building stairs from the street on both sides of the structure ; the company that ran trains with the engine pushing in one direction rather than construct a second track at terminals.

By New York Elevated standards, South Ferry was a pretty big station. It was an island platform between two tracks. Two! Not only that, the new structure through the park was built for three tracks, as you can see in the Vaux cross section above. What extravagance! As I mentioned last time, this and the second track running almost to the other terminal at 59th St meant that finally the engines could escape and run at the front of trains in both directions, a distinct improvement in safety.

The original terminal is very little known today, so I want to present the details I've been able to find. First, here's a diagram I made based on several illustrations. I've drawn in green the tracks and the station platform over Whitehall Street as they were in 1877. The base map is from 1880 and therefore shows (roughly) the location of the later station too.

The best reference image I have found for the track arrangement is the drawing below, published in Harper's Weekly on February 9, 1878. We are on the roof of a building on Whitehall Street, looking west toward the park.

This image shows a single crossover track, instead of the double crossover I would expect to see. A center track seems to be drawn, but there are obstacles on each side of the switch that I cannot identify. They seem to consist of two posts with a little peaked roof between them. I drew this part of the middle track space as a dashed line.

Both trains shown have the engine at the uptown end.

Another drawing (like the one above, it is based on photography) appeared in Scientific American for June 15, 1878, showing the same section of line seen from street level.

In this image, there is a little signal box in the distance up on the structure. I think the necessary other crossover track is out there, so I drew it there in the map above. The middle track probably began at that point.

We can see here from underneath that the stringers (lengthwise girders) for a middle track continue all the way to the station, and we'll see in a photograph below that they continue all the way to the end of the structure. The station platform was built over the stringers for the middle track.

The train in the distance has its engine at the downtown end.

Now let's consider the station.

There was just one narrow stairway to the platform, which splits into two for the lowest flight. It was of wooden construction. You can see the homely wooden posts in the second image above. The Harper's image shows a small octagonal booth near the head of the stairs, which I suppose is the ticket office. The width of that platform is less than eight feet, and yet the stairway comes up between sections of platform where people are standing. The booth might be four feet across. The minimalism of New York Elevated!

Let's make this more real. I have a couple of photographs from 1877.

We're looking down Whitehall Street to the ferries. A steam dummy and two shadbelly cars are in the station. Ahead of the engine, a well-dressed signalman is reading a newspaper (?). At the extreme right is the beginning of the crossover track, and, as in the Harper's drawing, there is no sign of a crossover on the other track. There is possibly one rail where the center track would be.

In the background are entrances to two Staten Island ferries. The one on the left is the ferry to points on the north shore of the island, and on the right the Staten Island Railway ferry to points on the east shore. The Brooklyn services that were actually called South Ferry, as you can see from the map up above, are off frame to the left. Out in the harbor is Governor's Island with the stone fort.

Now we're looking across Whitehall Street, the ferries off frame to the right. A different train has come in, with the type of cars acquired after the shadbelly cars, all one level and with a center door that opens with a knob.

Were these photographs taken the same day? The horse cart with barrels is the same place, and so is the ladder leaning against the staircase. But the tree on the right is not there in the first image.

I think everyone enjoys the women and children posing for the photographer. Two men pose behind them too, and so do most of the people in the train. Ghosts on the left and on the stairs were not patient enough. They all probably checked the photography stores weeks later to see whether their photo was published. The prints above were on cabinet cards. Stereo views of the same two scenes were also sold.

The woodwork of the stairs is decorative although simple for the day. You can see why the stairway to the platform was so narrow: it had to fit between the stringers for a possible center track, which are spaced to support rails 4 feet 8½ inches apart.

There is no engine trapped at the end of the train, where it would be if the train had come in engine first. So I was wrong in the Number 7 Broadway piece: they did not immediately change the practice of running downtown with the engine pushing. But they did change by June 1878— more than a year after opening— the date of the Scientific American illustrations.

On the left, you can see the end of the structure. It runs to the east side of Whitehall Street and stops, pointing itself to continue in Front Street. The very last pair of columns support a cross girder, a different type of construction that would be used for the continuation as the Third Avenue El, which was not yet built when this image was taken. The continuation was built for two tracks spaced farther apart, because the newer lines had coaches about a foot and a half wider than the old west side road.

Here's an enlarged detail of another image from the same issue of Scientific American as the previous one, June 1878.

We're looking out the arched entrance of the South Ferry terminal toward the elevated station. Up on the el, on the right, are a couple of sheds, one of which is apparent also in the first photograph above. The train has the engine at the downtown end, and there is another engine, partly obscured, on the far track at the extreme right. That engine is past the station platform, at the end of track.

This drawing is as usual based on photography, but it is looser in detail than some, to some extent an artist's impression. It captures the busy scene in a way that slow-shutter photographs could not. Horse cars and horse omnibus lines started here, and cabs waited for passengers. The buildings in the background are on State Street. On the right Whitehall Street runs back into the distance.

This little station did not last. It was probably inadequate the day it opened, and once the Third Avenue El opened it was hopeless. Within two years a much larger terminal went up. We'll get to that next time.

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Manhattan of Dreams

2011-06-26T21:00:00.182-04:00

I was in Manhattan. Not the real one. I was in the Manhattan of Dreams.

I've been here before. Remembering one dream was the key. Let me describe a few places I have been.

There's a department store there. It's multiple stories and yet each floor is not large. The corners are not right angles. It has escalators.

Up one or two levels is a book department that has the kind of books I like. Sleepy brain might not fill in for me the specific titles or authors, but they're the ones I like. This place has books I don't find in other stores, so I like to go there. I think I've usually gone there with Helen.

One time I was in the store with Helen and we were looking for something else on one of the upper floors. It was a Christmas present for somebody. We found part of one floor emptied out, with marks on the floor where the shelves and counters used to be. There was a story to this that eludes me now. Then we found the department we wanted. I don't remember what we bought there.

I haven't been to that store in years. Maybe.

There's another store that sells records. It's on some side street in Midtown that Sleepy brain knows. It has imported records and out of print records. I mean vinyl. I would find records there that I'd only heard about. Sometimes I'd even find records I had not heard about. There were stores like this in Real Manhattan, but in some way this one was better. I haven't been to it in a very long time now. It's probably closed.

There are overgrown parts of Manhattan of Dreams. When you go between Downtown and Midtown and the Village by road— I would usually take the subway— by road you pass through blocks without buildings, blocks with trees and weeds and dirt fields. The avenues curve a little as they go through those areas.

When I take the subway, there's a place where the train enters a very large tunnel for a short distance. You can see it out the train windows. It has strange tiles on the wall and arched passages off to the sides. It's the remains of something unfinished and I don't know what. I feel I should know what it is. That book department probably has a book that describes it, that I should get.

Way downtown there are stone-cobbled streets and stone block buildings. They're all old, as if people are not allowed to build down there any more. I've been through there on my way to the Bridge. There's something about the Bridge that is still hidden from Waking Brain. I know I've been there a few times trying to solve something about it. That's all I can tell you.

I've been in the Manhattan of Dreams many times.

And now I was there again. It was good to be back. I never felt totally at ease there, and yet I was sure I'd found my way around before, and I was ready to take it on once again.

This time, for the first time, I was there to be in a 5 K run. I had running clothes and shoes on. I was explaining this to somebody. I looked at the time on a clock and knew that the run was going to begin in a half hour, about 20 blocks away. I considered running there. But I didn't know whether it was a good idea to get there by running, right before I was going to run the 3.1 miles of a 5 K. Maybe I should take a bus or a subway.

The person I was talking with asked me when I had registered for the run. Well, I hadn't. I was going to do that when I got there. The person thought I couldn't.

The start place was somewhere on the far west side of Midtown. It isn't one of the overgrown places, but when you get that far west, it doesn't seem like Real Manhattan either. The avenues are paved with concrete, and they have two-way traffic with a lot of trucks passing through, like you see on main roads well outside the city. Yet there are also traffic lights at every corner, and the usual New York flow of pedestrians.

On the far west side there is a huge shopping mall with curving streets inside it, and maybe a railroad station. I didn't go there this day, but I've been in it.

I found the start of the run, in a vacant parking lot on one of the avenues, and it was just as the person had told me. The organizers had enough runners and no more were being accepted. I didn't feel very bad about it though. It had just been an idea. I wasn't dead set on it.

Somebody I knew was there. Sleepy brain didn't tell me who it was. This person might have been thinking of running too. I don't know why else he was there. (Why am I trying to apply logic?)

He said I should see what was down the street. OK.

Down the end of the block was the Hudson River. I mean the street just ran right to the edge of the water and ended. There were boats on the water, and across the river in New Jersey I saw buildings and the Palisades. I hadn't seen this street before.

I wondered where West Street was. I tried to remember whether they had put some portion of it underground when they rebuilt it. I couldn't remember that. But it wasn't here, and there was the river.

The buildings lining the street had given out in mid block, leaving empty lots. I could see across to the next street, which also ran to the water's edge.

Between the streets was a large empty field. The ground was partly covered with grass and weeds, and the rest was just dirt and rocks and broken bricks. There are lots like this where a buildings have been torn down and they've backfilled the former basements up to street level.

The object of attention was in the center of the field. There was a large square hole in the ground about twenty feet on a side. A stream of water from the river was flowing into it.

Sleepy brain tried to make sense of this. The Hudson was at sea level, it knew, so how could water be flowing to some lower level? No matter how deep a hole this was, wouldn't it fill pretty quickly and then just look like a pool of water? But the water was pouring in.

My friend was smiling. He knew I'd like this.

The square hole was obviously man-made. I could see a little of the far side and it seemed to be lined with cut stone, and there was even an alcove just below ground level topped with a pointed arch. It was old.

I started walking across the field. The ground became wet as I approached. There was a little spring on the side of the field away from the Hudson, and a little stream flowed from it toward the hole. Near the hole, someone had made a little footbridge over this little stream. I saw that it was actually two wooden window shutters resting across a pair of two by fours parallel to the stream. Someone had just used what was lying around to make the bridge.

I didn't want to get much closer to the square hole. The ground was level, but I still felt as if a slip might take me over the brink, and there was nothing to hang onto. I could hear the roar of the water flowing in, but no splash from where it was going.

I stared at the water flowing in, fascinated. It was like looking into a fire, and just as mysterious. Where did the water go?

And I woke up.

I'm sorry. But that's the only reason I remember any of this. Something woke me up.

Maybe I will go back there, and I'll remember it. I'll let you know if it happens.

The map is from The Official Maps of New York, published by The National Survey Co, Chester, Vermont, no date. Needless to say the maps were not deemed official by any authority other than the small publisher. I'd say the date is about 1920.

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Number 7 Broadway

2011-06-19T21:00:00.531-04:00

Not long ago I wrote a little about the first elevated railroad in New York, the Greenwich St and Ninth Ave line. The first segment, Dey St to 29th St, was originally operated by cable in 1870, but when that proved hopelessly unreliable, a new company began operating in 1871 with one a train pulled by a very small steam engine.

If we jump ahead just two years, we find the New York Elevated Railroad operating a profitable small transit line. As of February 1873 there were intermediate stations at Franklin St, Watts St for Canal St, Little West 12th St, and 21st St. Four engines were available to pull eight passenger cars. A second track had been added, running for three blocks near the midpoint of the line, from Perry St to Bethune St.

The second track was a breakthrough. Now trains could leave each terminal every half hour and pass at that point. The passing siding, complete probably in October 1872, led to many more improvements. The one we're going to look at now is the downtown terminal at Number 7 Broadway, which was used for four years, January 3, 1873 to April 4, 1877.

The location is amazing in today's terms. It was an old house and a former railroad freight yard on property facing Bowling Green and running through to Greenwich St. Today this is some of the most valuable land in the city, but in 1872 it had declined over the years into a neighborhood of warehouses and hotels supporting the docks along the river. A railroad terminal and maintenance shop was not out of place.

Here is the location.

The base map above is from 1880, so it shows some later elevated construction. The elevated track that existed in 1873-1875 is shown by red lines. It runs over the east curb of Greenwich St and into the property we're discussing. The house at number 7 Broadway is shown in brown.

The New York Daily Tribune for November 23, 1872, gives the best description of it that I have found:

At Nos 5 and 7 Broadway, near Battery-place, a depot is rapidly building. This will be of iron, and will be completed by December 1. The first floor will be about four feet above the sidewalk and five feet below the level of the track, and will be devoted entirely to waiting-rooms for passengers ; indeed the entire building is to be used for this purpose at present, though the company's offices will by-and-by occupy a part of it. From the waiting-room stairs ascend to the railroad.

The tracks will extend to the lower side of the building, and at this point will be nine feet above the sidewalk. The space between will be used as a storehouse. The curve necessary to bring the road, which now ends in Greenwich-st, into Broadway, will be at a point just below Morris-st. From Greenwich-st to the depot there will be four tracks side by side, in order to accommodate the travel which is now rapidly increasing, especially large numbers taking the train connecting with the 5 p m Hudson River Railroad train. By this arrangement four trains can be started at the advertised time, and the others taking passengers who have reached the depot earlier.

This is not completely right in detail, but it's pretty good.

The article also mentions the third and fourth engines on order, and the planned service of trains every 30 minutes, but the reporter does not mention the second track that would make that frequency possible. In the last sentence he assumes an expansion of one-way service on single track, all four trains running uptown together. I don't think they were really operated that way, although possibly they were in rush hours.

A remarkable stereo view provides the only known image of the station from the Bowling Green side. I've enlarged the available digital image here, so pardon the pixellation.

The New York Elevated Railroad owned the lot with the trains, 5 Broadway, and the old house beyond it, 7 Broadway. There's a ghost of a house on the side of 7 Broadway, but it was gone for at least 20 years at the time of this photograph. To the left of the trains is 1 Broadway.

The ground floor under the trains looks like it might be concession stands. There seems to be a stairway to the trains on the far side, but there also seems to be an open door into 7 Broadway at track level, converted from a window. Three trains are in the station.

Below is an image from the early 1890s, with some house numbers. This gives a better idea of the setting on Bowling Green.

The former station at 3 and 5 Broadway has stores at ground level and a second floor. Number 7 looks relatively unchanged and was probably rented as offices. A one-story building at number 9 houses "Our Club" and another at number 11 has a "Ticket Office" for a railroad or ship line. The signs on the side of number 13 are for Die Deutsche Gesellschaft der Stadt New York and Braguglia and Coreno's Cafe and Restaurant. The motley collection of buildings beyond made up the Stevens Hotel. Numbers 3 to 11 would be removed in 1895 for construction of the Bowling Green Building.

If we go around to the Greenwich St side, we can see the tracks. This is from a stereo view photographed in the autumn of 1876.

I drew the tracks on the map based on this view. It's too bad engine Yonkers blocks the part of the view, because it looks like there is a three-way switch there. Railroads avoid those, but space was tight here. Notice that there are five tracks, not four described in the Tribune article. The trees in the background are in Bowling Green.

From the left, the back of number 7 Broadway, and in the foreground, the brick wall of the former railroad freight yard has been cut back crudely to allow the elevated tracks in. Left middle is an interesting collection of items including the outer shell of a steam dummy and a handcar. Top middle, the back of number 1 Broadway, and to its right the Washington Hotel, which faced Battery Place. Lower right, Yonkers is coupled to a few cars on the old track down to Battery Place, used at this time as another siding.

Something else to notice is that there is essentially no space between the trains. This agrees with the scale on the map, which shows the station to occupy only about 40 linear feet along Broadway, or roughly 8 feet wide per track. How did passengers get into the trains?

Keep in mind that the second track I mentioned was the only second track on the railroad. How did the trains reverse at the end of the line? In the days of steam, railroad terminals routinely had an escape track to let the engine run around the train. Even if the engine did not actually turn around, it would move to the front of its train.

The answer is that New York Elevated used what is now called push-pull operation. Every photograph and drawing I have seen before 1877 shows the engine at the uptown end of the train. I am convinced that the engine stayed there at all times, and that when running downtown it pushed the train ahead of it. The engineer and fireman stayed with the engine, and relied on the rear brakeman to convey information about what lay ahead.

Newspaper reports of an accident in December 1876 make this quite clear. At the start of a two-track section at Vandam St, an uptown train was erroneously switched across the street to the downtown track, where its engine collided with the lead car of a downtown train that was waiting to enter the single track section.

The switchman gave the signal indicating everything was right, but through forgetfulness on his part he had left the switch open. The engineer of the up train when within a few yards of the switch saw that it was misplaced, and immediately applied the air-brake and gave the signal to the brake-men to apply the hand-brakes.

The cab of the engine was almost completely demolished, and the platform of the car on the down town train was destroyed. The passengers on both trains were thrown from their seats by the shock of the collision, and some three or four were slightly injured on the hands and legs.

The significance of this to 7 Broadway? Every train came in with the engine trailing. Every train had passenger cars at the end of track. In the photograph from the Broadway side, you see three trains with cars at the end of track. In the photograph from the Greenwich St side, you see four trains with engines visible, and one that I think has its engine detached.

So my conclusion is that at 7 Broadway they only needed access to the last platform of the last car, and people walked through the train to and from that point. Platforms between the tracks were not needed.

But this meant that the company could not convert to engine-first operation as long as they used the 7 Broadway terminal. The terminal was closed when the extension to South Ferry was opened. Some of the earliest depictions of trains at South Ferry in 1877 show engines running at the downtown end of trains for the first time. So as soon as it became possible, the company converted to a safer mode of operation where the engineer himself could always see the track ahead.

This shows how you can get an engine to the head of a train at a terminal, as long as there are at least two tracks outside the terminal. Start with engine 1 waiting on one track. Engine 2 pulls a train in. Engine 1 follows it in and couples to the other end, as engine 2 uncouples. Engine 1 takes the train out, and engine 2 follows it out and waits. Repeat.

At South Ferry, the extra tracks were available immediately outside the station. At the north end, which was 59th St station by 1877, the line was single track for the last eight blocks from 51st St, but still the same escape could be operated. The time it took to turn at 59th St was then the limiting factor on train frequency. This method of escaping engines to the front of every train became possible only when the second track opened to 51st St, about November 1876, and more importantly when the 7 Broadway terminal was closed in April 1877.

__________

Bonus feature.

The map up there at the top also shows the complete length of the first section of the el built in 1867, from Battery Place to a point just north of Morris St. The famous photograph below shows Charles T Harvey in front of 37 and 39 Greenwich St.

At that date, Trinity Place was a narrow lane that ran from Liberty St to a dead end behind the buildings on the north side of Morris St. Its southernmost outlet was Edgar St, a bit north of the dead end. That's the reason Edgar St existed. In 1869 the city bought out properties in order to continue Church St south. A totally new street was created through three blocks from Fulton St to Liberty St, and from there Trinity Place was widened and opened through to Morris St and Greenwich St. The new street was completed late in 1870. The photo of Harvey shows on the left a building on the north side of Morris St that was removed in the Church St project.

I've noticed also that the house numbers on Greenwich St shifted sometime in the 1880s. The old number 23 became 13 (but the next building remained number 25), and numbers 11 down to 1 were spread over the remaining lots, so that a few properties running through the block now had the same house number on Broadway and Greenwich St. The building with the "13 STORAGE" sign seen in two images in Greenwich St El Cars was the original 13 Greenwich St shown on the map here.

The base map (first image) is from the David Rumsey Map Collection, a terrific site for map fans. The image of the station from the Bowling Green side (second image) was rescued from Ebay by Charles Warren and can be seen on his Ninth Ave El page. The others are from my collection.

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Subway Station Counts

2011-06-12T21:00:00.622-04:00

On Thursday someone posted on nyc.transit a link to New York subway station counts.

The counts are annual fares paid per station. Stations connected by free transfer are shown as one station, since you can't tell which line riders are going to. Although the stations are ranked from 1 to 420, the chart is arranged alphabetically by borough, so it takes a little looking around to find the top and bottom performers.

One thing is missing: transfers. That's because there are no turnstiles to provide counts. Some stations may have only a moderate number of riders entering but quite a few changing trains. Transfer makes a station important in the system and adds to the number of passengers boarding trains at the station.

But granting the limitation of counting only passengers entering the system, I thought it might be interesting to check to top and bottom 15.

Good locations: Times Square and Grand Central.

1 : TIMES SQUARE and 42ND ST (Eighth Ave). 58,422,000. That's about 160,000 a day. This group of interconnected stations might also be the busiest transfer location in the system, but we don't have counts to show that. Why do 58 million passengers enter here? The Port Authority Bus Terminal brings in 58 million riders a year, and the 42nd St (Eighth Ave) station is the only one nearby. But there are also a lot of riders coming back from movies and shows and shopping around Times Square.

2 : GRAND CENTRAL. 41,903,000. 16 million fewer than Times Square! The entering riders include some per cent of Metro North's 44 million railroad passengers. This is an office district too, more so than Times Square.

3 : 34TH ST (Sixth Ave and Broadway). 37,769,000. This is the major shopping center of Manhattan, anchored by Macy's. I wonder how many riders are coming from Penn Station, one long block away, and how many from PATH.

4 : UNION SQUARE and 14TH ST. 34,730,000. Interesting. Where are all these people coming from? It's the closest express stop to New York University, and there are plenty of small stores, and some offices. I've been in this area in the evening recently, and it is a happening place full of life. I am still surprised to see it at number 4.

5 : PENN STATION (Seventh Ave). 26,892,000. The first one that is on only one subway line. This is only one block from number 3, and has some of the same traffic from Macy's and other stores. But then there's Penn Station. I've had trouble finding an annual count for Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey Transit, and Amtrak railroad passengers using Penn, but 200 million is in the ballpark. Way more than Grand Central or the bus terminal. But for continuing the journey by subway, they've got two separate adjacent stations at Seventh Ave and Eighth Ave and a third nearby at Sixth Ave. Combined those three have 88 million, which blows away Times Square, fed by the combined railroad and shopping traffic.

6 : PENN STATION (Eighth Ave). 24,265,000. Look how evenly Penn Station splits to the two stations. The Seventh Ave side is close to more stores and that's probably the difference. If these two were connected within the subway system they'd take the number 2 spot.

7 : 59TH ST and COLUMBUS CIRCLE. 20,711,000. It's not the prime stop for theaters or Lincoln Center or Central Park or midtown offices, but maybe it's just close enough to each of them.

8 : 59TH ST and LEXINGTON AVE. 19,554,000. Look at that. It's almost the other Central Park corner, and it's got almost the same numbers. A big thing here is Bloomingdale's and other stores, and it's at the north edge of the office district.

9 : 86TH ST (Lexington Ave). 19,147,000. The first one in a primarily residential area. It's the only express stop for a mile around, and the residential towers are in this area are tall.

10 : MAIN ST. 18,630,000. The first one outside Manhattan, and it's way the hell out there in Flushing. The meaning is clear: the subway stops short of where a lot of riders want to go. They transfer here from many local bus lines.

11 : FULTON ST. 18,303,000. The first one that is mainly based on journey to work, I'd say. This is four interconnected stations from which office workers can go home to all points in the city. Even so it competes with other stations very close by. It's also the closest station to South St Seaport.

12 : LEXINGTON AVE 53RD ST and 51ST ST. 18,025,000. Another journey to work station, in the heart of the Midtown office district.

13 : 47TH-50TH ST (Sixth Ave). 16,518,000. Again, plus the tourist stuff around Rockefeller Center.

14 : ROOSEVELT AVE and 74TH ST. 16,280,000. Queens isn't the biggest outer borough for subway ridership, but it sure is concentrated. The only really big passenger magnet here is that Roosevelt Ave has very good express service to Manhattan, so people must be staying on the local bus to get here.

15 : CANAL ST (Broadway, Lafayette St, Centre St). 16,007,000. Chinatown, what's left of Little Italy, cheap stores, and the north edge of the courthouse district.

Brooklyn's top stations are downtown: Borough Hall and Court St (24 with 11,135,000), Jay St Metro Tech (28), and Atlantic Ave and Pacific St (29), the last raised somewhat by the adjacent Long Island Rail Road terminal. The next ones are Utica Ave (Eastern Parkway) (36), an impressive showing by Bedford Ave (North 7th St) (46), and Flatbush Ave (Nostrand Ave) (62).

The Bronx's best are 161st St Yankee Stadium (37) and 149th St (Third Ave) (50), the only two that crack the top 100.

Now for the bottom of the list.

Bad locations: Cemeteries. Bay Parkway, Cypress Hills, Bushwick-Aberdeen.

405 : BAY PARKWAY (McDonald Ave). 427,000. F train. Consider a circle around this station, and you find that three-quarters of the area is a cemetery. As you'd expect, the "residents" don't ride trains much. Close it.

406 : ATLANTIC AVE (Snediker Ave). 424,000. L train. It's right above the Long Island Rail Road's East New York station, but a, who cares, and b, walking two blocks gets you to Broadway Junction station (number 169) with much better train service. Close it.

407 : CYPRESS HILLS. 419,000. There's not much here besides the eponymous cemetery. Close it.

408 : BUSHWICK AVE - ABERDEEN ST. 399,000. L train. Hidden away on a dead end street next to a cemetery, and it's just like number 406, too close to Broadway Junction. Close it.

409 : BEACH 25TH ST. 388,000. Rockaway. Not bad for a suburban railroad station, but this is the subway.

410 : BEACH 90TH ST. 339,000. Ditto, and see number 420.

411 : BEACH 36TH ST. 327,000. Ditto 409.

412 : 21ST ST (Jackson Ave). 320,000. Long Island City. G train. Close it. There are other stations nearby.

413 : ROCKAWAY PARK. 269,000. See number 420.

414 : 143RD ST (Southern Blvd). 256,000. 6 train. Close it. A lot of riders want to get past here to where they're going.

415 : AQUEDUCT. 238,000. I'm impressed it has even this much traffic, for a location at the edge of nowhere. Feel free to add 30,000 who use the part-time Aqueduct Racetrack station, because it doesn't make much difference. But before closing it, let's hang on and see whether the track's foray into slot machines generates traffic.

416 : BEACH 98TH ST. 215,000. See number 420.

[ 417 : WHITLOCK AVE. Foul. It was completely closed for 8 months in 2010, so no wonder the counts are a little low. In 2009 it did 480,000, which isn't great, but it's enough to keep it out of the bottom 15. I'm not considering it. ]

418 : BEACH 44TH ST. 144,000. Rockaways.

419 : BROAD CHANNEL. 93,000. On one side, a small town in the middle of Jamaica Bay. On the other side, nothing.

420 : BEACH 105TH ST. 65,800. Oh come on. That's an average of 180 a day, or with 4 trains per hour, 2 passengers per train. It's easy to understand. On one side is an empty lot and a parking lot, and on the other is an industrial property full of tanks. Great. Why is this station open? All four stations on the Rockaway Park branch are in the bottom 15— numbers 420, 416, 410, and 413. Why is the line open?

Really bad locations: Broad Channel and Beach 105th St.

What should we do with the whole Rockaway line south of Howard Beach? The only two stations not in the bottom 15 are Beach 60th St (378 with 789,000) and Far Rockaway (302 with a respectable 1,375,000). I want to allow that during the past year many of the stations have been closed part of the time in one direction for construction, but the passengers must have just gone on to the next station, and they are still all low counts.

The numbers really are well within the range of Long Island Rail Road station counts, even Far Rockaway (subway) which has fewer riders than about a dozen suburban stations. Far Rockaway (LIRR) has one train an hour, or two in rush hours, and a ride from New York will cost you $7.25 off peak. Should we really be running four trains an hour for $2.50 on the subway side?

I know. No one wants to open the can of worms about the gap in fares and frequencies between subway and mainline rail lines. It's the "third rail" of transit policy... or maybe some other metaphor! We can save that for another time.

The images are from Google Maps.

Water in the Air

2011-06-05T21:00:00.182-04:00

Hot humid summer weather came to New Jersey for a while last week.

Monday, Memorial Day, I went out to run at 05:00. It would be too hot later in the day. I wake up then anyhow.

At that hour, this time of year, there's light in the sky. The local bird population perform a rousing morning chorus, as if spring will never end. At that hour, that day, it was reasonably cool, but only a few blocks of running told me how much humidity was in the air. Ugh.

My usual plan lately is:— Walk a half mile to warm up. Run one. Walk two blocks. Run another. Walk up a steep hill (it stretches the legs) and three blocks more. Run a half. Home. I walk a block past home and back to cool down.

The first mile run was tough. I know enough to go slower, but it was a struggle. In the second mile, halfway through, I took a walking break for a block. But then in the second half I did manage a small uphill. I was damn tired but I was not feeling dizzy or faint.

I always think about things while I'm out.

This day I wanted to know what on earth humidity was doing to me.

I tried to be in touch with my body. I wanted to feel what it was telling me. Then I would gain insight. I would be at one with myself. I sensed that my body was telling me, You idiot, why are you running? But I don't listen to that stuff.

Mock strawberry.

Here is the first Google hit I got later, and it's a good one. See the sections 'Account for Heat' and 'Heat Alert!'. He blames it on poor evaporation, which causes heat buildup in the body. That was one of the things I was thinking of.

I was also thinking about how the air feels heavy when it's humid. It's like pushing through it, isn't it? And I was wondering to what extent water vapor replaces oxygen, and whether I was tired because I was actually getting less oxygen per breath.

A little research told me that water vapor does displace oxygen, but weirdly enough it makes the air lighter per cubic unit. Helen told me the same thing later. I guess what we feel, when we think it's heavier, is really the fatigue of not cooling down normally as we move. We'd get the same feeling if the air was heavier.

Should I be amused or sad about seeing so many web forums where runners wonder why humidity is higher in the cool of the morning? Why? Oh, maybe it's because that's why they call it relative humidity? I am not a scientist and I know that.

But it raises a puzzling question. I like running at dawn because the temperature is at its lowest point of the day (usually), but by doing that I'm also putting myself in the highest relative humidity (usually). What's the tradeoff? Later in the day, I'd be able to cool off better from evaporation, but I'd also need to cool off better, since it's warmer out. Which way should I go, if I could run at either time?

It's moot, since I can only run at one time, but inquirin' minds want to know. They want to know a lot of things. But, back to our story.

View from the house. Compare to this.

When I got home I sat down on the front steps. It was a little cooler outside than in. (We turn off the living room air conditioner overnight.)

I took off my shoes and sat there and considered the world. The front garden looks great this time of year. Helen has put out all the potted plants, and we've got flowers on them and on the ground plants too. It's pretty lush.

Fact is I was too worn out to feel like moving.

My head was empty of words. I was just gazing at the riot of leaves and flowers. Nature's beauty.

There was a little flash of light just at the edge of my vision. Then I saw another in focus. A lightning bug! And it wasn't even June yet. Cool.

After some minutes a very welcome cool breeze stirred and stopped. Another breeze came. The plants moved here and there as the little breezes touched them.

Up in the trees the leaves showed their darker and lighter sides as they fluttered.

And I noticed the colors of the garden were becoming less bright.

In the sky to the south there was now forming a great grey mass of cloud. The breeze became more insistent, and cooler.

I noticed mosquitos pecking at my legs. Stupid nature. Just when I was feeling it. Just when I was communing with the world. Inside I went.

About five minutes inside, when— lightning flashed!— thunder shook the house! And rain started pounding on the house, a booming noise from all the open windows.

I had dodged that bullet by fifteen minutes.

The cold rain would have felt good, of course, but I don't want to be running in a lightning storm. I got caught in one once, when I was a mile and a half from home. It's an uncomfortable feeling whether you pass under open sky or under trees, wondering which is worse.

I cleaned up and put on regular clothes and flopped on the couch for an hour.

South side front garden. All three photos were taken at 06:00 Thursday.

When I went out later to get bagels, I could see twigs and tree seeds all over the street. The usual detritus. It had been a fine demonstration of the inevitable result of water vapor and cooling air.

Was the humidity any less then, an hour or so later? It didn't seem to be. It felt as if all the moisture released in the rain had been absorbed back into the warmer air of day, resetting the trigger for another round.

When Helen got up she looked out and asked, Did it rain this morning?

Greenwich St El - Cable Operations

2011-05-30T18:49:00.000-04:00

I'm going to throw you part of something I've been working on, about the very early days of the Greenwich St El.

What interested me about this subject is that so little is documented on the state of the first elevated line in Greenwich St and Ninth Ave before its reconstruction in 1879 and 1880. I felt like I could add something. Some dedicated amateur historians, like George Horn of the Electric Railroaders' Association, pulled together information from company documents that were still available in the 1930s and onward. But not much had been kept about the old road, since there was no practical value to it after 1880. The increasing availability of full-text searching of newspapers and journals has now made it possible to gather bits and pieces of evidence that would have been nearly impossible to find previously.

I've written about this before. My excuse is that some of this is new.

When it first opened, the Greenwich St El was operated by cable power. The man behind the project, Charles T Harvey, wanted to avoid using steam locomotives, because of the soot and smoke, the noise, and the danger from boilers exploding. His contemporary, Alfred E Beach, proposed using pneumatic pressure in tubes, and built a demonstration one-block subway in 1870. Harvey proposed a system with moving cable that the cars could grab to carry them down an elevated track. Both systems still involved stationary steam engines located in buildings along the way to supply the pneumatic or cable power. The ultimate solution to the problem, electric motors, were not practical until about 1885.

Harvey built a first segment one block long in October and November 1867. The track was supported by a line of columns along the east curb line of Greenwich St from Battery Place to Morris St. He was able to run a handcar by cable power on December 7, gaining approval to build a further segment up to Cortlandt St.

The second segment was built in March and April 1868. What newspapers called a "trial car" was placed on the structure about May 1, and Harvey gave it a test run for the state-appointed commissioners on June 6.

Here is Harvey demonstrating cable power on December 7, 1867. He is riding a handcar, which would normally be moved by trackworkers turning the handles of the flywheel behind him. But instead Harvey is sitting holding a rope like the reins of a horsewagon, which is evidently attached to the cable. The cross street there is Morris St, so the structure ended just off frame on the left. One of the men in the crowd would continue working on the elevated lines into the 20th century.

Here is the "trial car" at the Cortlandt St end of the second segment, some time between May 1868 and the start of further construction in 1869. The beams are very thin, with a slightly heavier one across Liberty St. The "track" consisted of flat iron strips laid over a cushioning material laid directly on the beams.

The main line up to 30th St was built during 1869 and 1870. The columns, made by the company at its factory in Harrison St, were placed at the east curb line of Greenwich St and the west curb line of Ninth Ave, crossing over at Gansevoort St. By November 1869 the structure was up to Canal St, and it was complete to 30th St by March 1870.

Cable cars are familiar today because of the surviving routes on the streets of San Francisco. An endless loop of cable runs from the powerhouse down to one end of the line, back up to the other end, and back into the powerhouse. The engine in the powerhouse moves the cable continuously throughout the service day. The cars have no power, but can grip the cable to move, or release it and brake to a stop.

The grips used in San Francisco were not yet invented in Harvey's day. His concept was instead to have little wheeled units he called travelers permanently affixed to the cable every 150 feet, with a "horn" projecting up. When the car was to move, the operator turned an iron wheel on the end platform, and a hook under the car would snag the next horn to come along. Turning the wheel back the other way would disconnect the hook.

Streetcar cables run at about 7 miles an hour, and the grip can be closed gradually so as to slip for a moment, bringing the car into motion and then to full speed as the grip is made tight. Harvey wanted to run the cable 10 to 15 miles an hour, and it would suddenly jump forward when the horn was snagged. Arrangements of springs were used on the hook and in the car body, but riders still reported a tremendous jolt when the car started.

This is a traveler.

The problems of the Harvey system, when it operated properly, were the least of it. There was a collision at 29th St terminal on June 14, when an arriving car would not detach from the cable, and it rammed another car, snapping the cable. Since the car overshot the platform and could not be moved, passengers had to go down to street level by ladder. On June 22, the machinery was smashed as a car crossed over the cable break at Houston Street, and a wheel (from a traveler?) fell in fragments to the street. Again the passengers had to escape by ladders. On some other occasions, when the cable failed, a rope was then attached to the front of the stalled car and the other end was thrown to the street where a truck with four horses, if they could make it, pulled the car.

The trade publication Iron Age ripped it apart:

... it is constructed with but little apparent regard for scientific or mechanical principles ... the motion is uneven and disagreeable, and the gradual loss of impetus in passing over the bridges between the sections [the cable gaps], necessitates a succession of sudden and unexpected jerks as the tracks attached to the cables come in contact with the spring affixed to the under part of the car. The worst feature of the road, however, is the weakness of the structure, sustained by single posts, and possessing no side braces or supports to overcome the lateral motion of the heavy cars balanced on the spreading arms that hold the tracks. These defects should have been discovered before a hundred feet of the road had been built, if not sooner ...

The cables were short compared to later street railways. There were four engine houses and nine cables, in a distance of only 3.3 miles.

CORTLANDT ST cable. This house was opened in 1868 and powered the demonstration sections south to Battery Place. (The temporary powerhouse for the first block in 1867 is unknown but was probably at Morris St.) This cable was built differently from the others because it returned in a vault under the sidewalk. It was noticed in early 1868 that water got into the vault, and freezing would interfere with cable operation. The main line was built with the cable returning directly under itself up on the structure. The Cortlandt St cable was not used in regular passenger service.

Cable gap at or near Cortlandt St, location not documented.
FRANKLIN ST south cable to Cortlandt St.
FRANKLIN ST north cable to Houston St.
Cable gap across Houston St.
BETHUNE ST south cable to Houston St.
BETHUNE ST north cable to Gansevoort St.
Cable gap across Gansevoort and Little W 12th Sts.
22ND ST south cable to Little W 12th St.
22ND ST north cable to 30th St.

Below is a typical section of the main line, at Fulton St. You can see the cable returning, below the beams and passing through a redesigned column. Again the beam across the street is a little heavier than the others, and it has truss rods too, possibly added as a result of the May 1870 load test.

This is the cable gap between the end of the 22nd St south cable at Little W 12th St, foreground, and the Bethune St north cable at Gansevoort St, background. Cars had to coast across, losing speed as they went, until they were jolted back to cable speed at the other side. The big drums are where the cable loops back under itself to return to the powerhouse. This is also where the el crossed from the west curb of Ninth Ave to the east curb of Greenwich St.

This wonderful illustration shows that the 22nd St powerhouse was below street level at the northwest corner. On the left, a typical elevated column has been adapted to support the smokestack from the unseen stationary steam engine. There is only a small cable gap here between the south and north cables, so maybe less of a jolt.

Passenger service was operated from Dey St to 29th St. Dey St station was located at the southeast corner partially in the Exchange Bank building. 29th St station was located across 29th St with a stairway at the southwest corner. At both ends there was one block of cable past the stations, to Cortlandt St and 30th St respectively, which was used to set cars that were not in service. There were no sidings.

Dey St station, still under construction in 1869. The ticket office is built into the Exchange Bank building on the left. It's hard to be sure, but under the word "boots" on the sign may be the big drum at the end of this cable.

29th St station, 1870. The stationhouse is barely large enough for one person, and the platform is clearly no longer than one car.

Regular service started on June 11, 1870 (many sources give earlier dates), and ran intermittently because on many days the line was closed for repairs. By mid August the line was reported as no longer running. A "pneumatic engine", which was shaped like a small steam locomotive but ran on a tank of compressed air, was tried in September. The line reopened with cable power on November 14 but was closed for mechanical failure by the end of the day. And that was all.

The property was foreclosed and sold, and the new owners tried operating with a small steam engine in April 1871. But that's another story.

Lantern Slides : Upper West Side El

2011-05-22T21:00:00.293-04:00

While rummaging around in my picture collection recently, I found four lantern slides of the Upper West Side elevated railway showing it under construction in 1879. They're pretty dirty, and I am sure they were not made from original negatives but rather by photographing other photographs. The sharpest exposure is usually in a circular area near the center.

The two elevated companies— New York Elevated Railroad and Metropolitan Elevated Railway— had both been awarded franchises for Ninth Ave (Columbus Ave). The Metropolitan company could not continue their Sixth Ave El directly north because of Central Park, and Seventh Ave was likewise unusable, and Eighth Ave was not allowed because of popular sentiment against an elevated railway running right next to the park, thus pushing any possible Sixth Ave extension all the way west to Ninth Ave. Under an agreement New York Elevated built up to 83rd St, and briefly considered some alternate routing north from there. Metropolitan Elevated constructed the rest up to 155th St. The main service in the nineteenth century was by Sixth Ave trains. Older New Yorkers who remember the line, which closed in 1940, invariably consider it part of the Ninth Ave El, which was the main service in its last years.

110th St, looking from Eighth Ave west toward Ninth Ave.

Other photos from this general location were in Riding the El part 13. There were few buildings in this area in 1879, so we can see clearly up to the higher ground at Ninth Ave (Columbus Ave). The downgrade at track level was made less steep by erecting a very high structure here and letting it slope gradually down to a normal height at about 125th St.

A detail shows the foundations of the columns. These look the same as those in a diagram published in 1878, for an article explaining that they have a concrete footing, over which is a cut stone core that the column rests on, surrounded by brick. I wonder how many of these foundations remain out of sight under the streets. They are so solid, probably only those in the way of other work would have been removed.

You can also see the trees on the rocky hillside leading up to Ninth Ave. All this is covered now by apartment blocks. This photograph appears in The First Elevated Railroads in Manhattan and the Bronx by William Fullerton Reeves (New-York Historical Society, 1936), and in his caption he writes, "In the distance, at the left, Lion Park is shown, located at 109th Street, east side of Ninth Avenue."

Lion Park and the Lion Brewery was actually between 107th St and 108th St, as shown in this excerpt below from G W Bromley's Atlas of the Entire City of New York published the same year as the photograph, 1879.

Neighborhood trivia. Look at that "Cemetery" at the corner of 109th St. This was too late a date for a planned new cemetery in Manhattan, so I don't know what to think. What did they do with the bodies? At the upper left, Leake and Watt's Orphan Asylum would become the grounds for the Cathedral of St John the Divine, and part of the orphanage's main building is still standing, attached to the cathedral.

Construction workers look down at the photographer. The tubular Phoenix column was favored by the Metropolitan Elevated company. It is made of four parts bolted together.

Eighth Ave, looking north from 110th St.

This perspective, blocked later by buildings, shows very nicely how the track grade slopes gradually down to a normal height.

Up on the structure is the beginnings of 116th St station, but the long stairway that led to the street is not visible and may not have been built yet.

The shanty at ground level may have nothing to do with the construction. Such primitive houses can be seen in many photographs of upper Manhattan in the nineteenth century.

This thing amazed people in 1879, and it still amazes me now.

The cross-beams have hangers for possible center track, which was added within fifteen years.

Ninth Ave (Columbus Ave).

A short section at this location was originally built for three tracks.

But what is this location? This photograph is also in Reeves, who writes, "Looking northwest from 96th St. Remains of the old Croton Aqueduct (built 1842) are visible at the extreme left." However the lantern slide itself has a handwritten note, "100th St & 9th Av before woodwork".

Referring again to Bromley's 1879 atlas, 100th St wins. There was a cluster of buildings at 100th St, but none at 96th St.

Apparently the aqueduct originally ran above ground level in this area. The right of way can be seen as a pair of wider lots through each block (where I have inserted the letters ST for each street name). I'll come back to this in a few moments.

Houses at 100th St. On the left is a pile of wooden cross-ties waiting to be hoisted up to the structure.

Details of the ironwork.

Back to the aqueduct. Now here is something I never heard of before. The Clendinning Valley.

This valley is 1900 feet across, and the Aqueduct is supported upon a foundation wall of dry stone work having the face laid in mortar, except over three streets where bridges are built, having an arch of 30 feet span for the carriage-way and one on each side of 10½ feet span for the sidewalks. These bridges are over 98th, 99th, and 100th streets. [...] These bridges are beautiful specimens of mechanical work ; indeed the whole structure across this valley has a degree of neatness, finish, and taste, not surpassed by any on the line of Aqueduct.

The book quoted here, Illustrations of the Croton Aqueduct by Fayette Bartholomew Tower, 1842, contains not one but two images of this wonder, by the author.

That is Manhattan around 100th St in 1842! The viaduct extended from 95th St to 102nd St. Originally there was to be an arch at every street ; but then to save money it was proposed to build a solid wall seven blocks long ; and then to compromise with irate city officials, in the final plan three streets were allowed through. 96th St was not one of them. The whole thing was torn down in the 1870s, replaced by a siphon running under Ninth Ave.

As little as it shows, the photograph above may be the only photograph of any part of the Clendinning aqueduct. There, now I've said that, someone will want to prove me wrong.

The handwritten note on this slide says "8th Av from 116th St looking North". The point of view is probably 115th St looking north, with 116th St the first cross street we see there. From that point back, for a distance, are cross beams to support the station platform, which was not yet built.

You can imagine why real estate speculators were enthusiastically behind construction of elevated railways. These nearly empty properties suddenly became useful places for commuters once there was a reasonably fast way to get downtown. The cluster of buildings in the distance were around 125th St, which had a crosstown streetcar connecting to the Harlem Railroad at Park Ave for trains to Grand Central. But this elevated railway would take you directly to lower Manhattan for one fare (originally ten cents). Progress. No more cows at 100th St.

Greenwich St El Cars

2011-05-15T21:00:00.106-04:00

If you have any special interest or hobby, you probably know how you can get drawn into a discussion of some little detail, especially when you can't find any specific documentation and all you can do is argue your case.

This one is about early days on the Greenwich St and Ninth Ave elevated railway.

There's a lot of back story. Briefly, a very lightweight structure went up in 1869 along the east curb line of Greenwich St and west curb line of Ninth Ave, to be operated by cable power. The system, which pre-dated the grip system used on the San Francisco cable cars, had repeated mechanical failures when the company attempted to operate it for a few months in 1870. The property was foreclosed, and a new company was formed to operate the same line with steam engines. The catch was that the structure was so weak that the engine and cars would have to weigh as little as possible.

Many New York transit buffs know about the elevated railways, but this first one in its early state was different from the others. The old road in Greenwich St and Ninth Ave (south of 53rd St) had to be rebuilt in 1880 to bring it up to the same standard as the other three elevated railways that had opened from 1878 to 1880. Only after the rebuild was it possible to operate standard elevated engines and cars over the old road. At that time too all of the lightweight engines and cars were sold or scrapped, even though some were only a few years old. It's quite clear that the old road was incompatible with the others, so much so that its lightweight equipment could not even be run on heavyweight structures.

The little question I got into recently is how wide the car bodies were.

From 1878, elevated cars were about 8 feet 9 inches wide, and that width survives today on the former IRT subway lines (numbered routes) and the PATH trains. The width gets set in stone because the car bodies have to meet the station platforms with about an inch to spare.

The Greenwich St el equipment looks a lot narrower than that in photographs. Gene Sansone, in his book Evolution of New York City Subways, writes that the car bodies were about 6 feet wide. That would make them much too narrow to board passengers safely at platforms built for standard equipment, and therefore would explain why the cars could not be used after the rebuild of 1880.

But I haven't found a contemporary source that simply states the width, and since the cars were gone by the end of 1880, the more voluminous later data sources are silent on the subject.

Here's the first elevated engine, Pioneer, designed by New York Elevated Railroad's engineer David Wyman and constructed by the Albany Street Iron Works in lower Manhattan.

The metal shell somehow contained an upright boiler, rods, a coal bunker, and room for an engineer and fireman to work it! This very small engine weighed less than 4 tons, and on opening day, Thursday, April 6, 1871, it managed to pull two passenger cars that weighed only 3500 pounds each. And it ran successfully day after day. By July this engine pulled three cars.

I want to stress that 3500 pounds is an extremely lightweight car. Horsecars on the busier street railways in the city, pulled by two horses, weighed 5000 to 6000 pounds. Only a small one-horse car was as light as 3000 pounds. What on earth did they have on the el in 1871?

Some people say they were using the former cable cars. You'll see this stated in some histories. I have been unable to find a source that specifically states whether the cars were or were not the former cable cars. For several reasons I don't think they were.

I think the closest car in the photo below is what Pioneer pulled.

It looks like a horsecar body, and it might even be a used horsecar. The track is the original cable track, strips of metal laid directly on the beams of the structure at an odd gauge of 4 feet 10 inches, so the photo pre-dates the standard gauge track laid in April 1875. The car trucks were custom-made for that gauge. Access to the car is from a platform at only one end, with no steps.

Beyond it, and of exactly the same body width, are two of the "shadbelly" cars acquired starting in 1872. They were much heavier cars, described as under 5 tons. New York Elevated Railroad management evidently had decided to chance larger engines and cars, although over the next few years they would keep adding braces to the old structure just to make sure. The shadbelly cars were numbered starting at 1, as if they were the permanent equipment and whatever had been used earlier was just a temporary expedient.

The location is Greenwich St just north of Battery Place, the end of track past the last stop where cars could be stored out of the way. This section was built in 1867 and as shown it has been just slightly strengthened with thin braces outside the original gracefully curved column tops. It's scary.

Now if the track is no more than 5 feet wide, how wide are those cars?

Here's another photo of two shadbelly cars at the same location. Battery Place crosses in the foreground. Compare the height of the end door to the width of the car.

The next one shows the engine Yonkers, built in 1876, coupled to a shadbelly car, and in the background is another shadbelly car in the trainyard in mid block between Battery Place and Morris St. The standard gauge track (4 foot 8½ inches) rested on wooden cross ties. Some of the posters on the wall below are for candidates in the November 1876 local election.

Again, compare the height of the end door compared to the width. The shell around the engine seems just large enough to clear the side rods, and the dropped center of the car seems no wider than the cross ties.

One more. A photograph taken from the West 11th St station in Greenwich Village, opened in 1875, shows the engine Kingsbridge pulling an uptown train. The truss rods were added in 1875 to the 1869 structure keep the beams from bowing down between columns. The track uses a very thin rail, but with very tall wooden guides inside the rails to keep a derailed train on the structure.

In this case, we have a man standing on the end platform to help establish the width.

It's hard to find truly equivalent photographs, but here's a wider view of the Yonkers photo together with part of an image from my Riding the El series part 7. The car at upper left in the old photo is at about the same three-quarter angle as the car in 1940.

What do you think? Shall we say the bodies were about six feet wide?

Or shall we have another round?

Alien Raids part deux

2011-05-08T21:00:00.112-04:00

Go here to see the previous chapter. It's better than this one.

Page 28:

Supermouse: Morse Code! An S.O.S.!
Sounds: Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap!

Supermouse: I have something!

Supermouse: This little thing! I worked out a force-screen anti-ray while examining that alien city!

Supermouse: Now let's hope it's the same kind of screen!

Page 29:

Supermouse: It is!

Supermouse: Well, in that case ——

Sounds: Crash!
Wonder Dog: That's music to my ears!

Supercat: What was that?

Supercat: Supermouse!

Supermouse: You? Oh, I'm prepared!

Page 30:

Supermouse: OW.
Supercat: So've I!
[Supermouse is knocked out. He has X eyes.]

Narration: And Supercat leaves.
Wonder Dog: He'd come prepared. Hmm.

Wonder Dog: I bet I know what's in here!
Wonder Pup: Ohhh!

Supermouse: Hey, wait!
Wonder Dog: Supermouse!

Supermouse: Hey! Stupidcat!
Supercat: You again?!

Supermouse: You'd better come quietly!

Page 31:

Supermouse: It tickled!
Sounds: Tap!
Supercat: It hurt me!

Supercat: Is— Is that—
Supermouse: Sure! Molybdenum!

Supermouse: Here! Take him to jail!!
Wonder Dog: O.K.!
Supercat: You!

Superkitten: I'm here!
Supermouse: So?

Page 32:

Supermouse: You always were weaker than me! You're only a kitten!
Sounds: Pow!
Superkitten: OW.

Supermouse: And you aliens— I'll repair the hole and you'll take off to space, you hear?

Alien: We were forced to commit crime. We have an Antaran system of government!
Supermouse: Antaren?

Supermouse: Is your heat giver (sun) Antares?
Alien: Yes.

Page 33:

Supermouse: They said they'd be back on a visit sometime!
Wonder Dog: I can't wait!

Narration: The End!! (of this)

Page 28: We established last time that Supermouse can't see through the walls or windows of the plane, but was there any reason he can't break through lead? It's softer than most metals. Panel 2, the closeup of his shapeless body, should show us a pocket or bag or something where he has "this little thing", but shows us nothing.

Page 30: "I'm prepared" (page 29) does not match the comeback here, "So've I!". Again, I stress, honestly, English is my native language. Because you might not believe it.

Page 31: Molybdenum? We might grant that the unknown "proconite" (see Chapter 4) is Supermouse's kryptonite, but really, Supercats lose their powers when they are near an ordinary element found on earth? No wonder Supermouse calls him Stupidcat.

Page 32: That poor kitten. Did I have something against cats when I was a kid? I don't remember any traumatic episodes. I like cats now.

Also page 32: No, Supermouse, he said Antaran, not Antaren. And why, Supermouse, do you think that somehow "heat giver" would be more understandable than "sun"? And for that matter how does their home planet's sun or their system of government force them to commit crimes? Maybe this was covered in Chapter 1 or 2 or 3.

Page 33: What a lame ending. And what else would it be the end of, younger self? One thing: the effect of the purple ray under the saucer is nice. It's not outlined in pencil.

I wonder what was on the next page before I tore it out.

I apologize for this comic. Chapter 4 was pretty good. But then this. I have worse childhood comic books. If I get desperate for material you will see them.

To make up for this I will give you another brief slice of life like I did in Comic with No Pictures. "Lindsay" will get this.

On Friday I got home first, because Helen goes to the gym after work. She's still half asleep when I leave in the morning, so when she came home, this was the first conversation we'd had all day.

Joe B: Hey! What's the name of Zorro's horse?

Helen (without hesitation): Toronado. Why?

I bet you want to know the rest of that story. But I understand the ideal in show biz is to leave them wanting more.

Alien Raids

2011-05-01T21:00:00.209-04:00

What's that? You couldn't get enough of Supermouse and Wonder Dog, the heroes of Invasion from Beyond!!? I understand. They're back.

Remember the setup: dorky kid around age twelve drawing comics. Nuff said.

_______

Splash page: cover of Wonder Comics. It's Volume II of "The Alien Raids".

Yes. Volume II. And I don't have Volume I. So we'll be coming in at Chapter 4.

Outer space adventure, and coming in at Chapter 4. You're thinking Star Wars, aren't you? Well, this comic dates from about 1963, so that's not the inspiration. It's more like, George Lucas and me, great minds think alike.

Then I noticed that the page numbering starts with 20, so I guess there really was a lost Volume I.

Page 20: half blank, but with a summary of Volume I. If you need to imagine this crawling up against a background of stars, go ahead, but as you can see it's written in pencil on a field of yellow crayon.

Narration: What has gone before: Flying saucers and rays steal various objects. SM [Supermouse] goes inside flying saucer and escapes ; one alien asks the other if they should let him go, and the reply is yes. Wonder Dog and Wonder Pup have been helping all along. Now a strange light was reported, and SM finds a vacant alien city there ; it's in the Himalayas. He is stopped by a force barrier.

Narration: Now turn for Chapter Four.

Page 21: blank except for the words: Volume II.

Page 22:

Narration: In the Himalayas.
Supermouse: It's that same .. force barrier.

Supermouse: Let's examine.

Narration: Meanwhile.
Wonder Dog: I think that maybe Supermouse, with his X-ray vision, could look at me while I'm in a flying saucer!
Wonder Pup: Not a bad idea! But what will I do?

Wonder Dog: Want to come with me?

Wonder Pup: Sure!

Page 23:

Narration: After informing Supermouse.
Wonder Dog: Another saucer at the Dogville Planetarium!
Wonder Pup: Let's go!

Wonder Dog: We know this won't hurt it— but after SM attacked, they let him in.
Wonder Pup: Check.

Sounds: BAM. POW.
Voice in saucer: Looks like more visitors....
Another voice in saucer: But this time permanent!

Page 24:

Voice in saucer: Attention, Earth-being! Enter through the hatch! You will be anti-gravitized to let you float in air!
Wonder Dog: (chuckle)

Voice in saucer: Come.
Wonder Pup: This is something new!

Voice in saucer: Welcome, Wonder Dog!
Wonder Dog: How do you know us?
Voice in saucer: I know you personally.

Wonder Dog: Supercat!
Supercat: Yes, and Superkitten is still at the controls!

Page 25:

Supercat: Superkitten?! Who's at the controls?
Superkitten: Zorg!
Narration: So they're with aliens!

Supercat: And by the way, if you're counting on Supermouse, this thing is lead-lined!!
Wonder Dog: Really?

Narration: And true to SC...
Supermouse: I can't see through this!

Supermouse: The windows are coated with blue proconite! Anyone but me, a Proconian, can see thru it!

Supermouse: That's funny! Only a few people know of blue proconite!

Supermouse: Wait! What's that?
Sounds: Tap tap tap tap.

Page 26:

Narration: And inside Wonder Dog has done a plan!

Wonder Dog: Now that we're alone I'll do this!
Sounds: Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap!

Narration: It's Morse Code for an S.O.S.! Will SM get the message? See Chapter 5!!

Don't worry. I have Chapter 5.

Page 20: I used a semicolon, twice. Whoa.

Page 23: I am happy with the perspective of panel 1, with the Wonder Plane and the landscape below. I must have copied that from somewhere. On the other hand, the bat-like wings of the Wonder Plane are less of a mystery.

Page 25: "Zorg", of course, has to be the name of an alien. Many aliens are named Zorg. And yet the narrator wanted to make sure we got that bit.

Also page 25: It looks like Supermouse used an interrobang in panel 6, but I think it's just a question mark changed to an exclamation point. This was drawn in pencil. Did I not have an eraser?

Page 26: "Done a plan"? Or "gone a plan"? Not "got a plan"? Yes, English is my native language. I cannot explain some things in this comic. I am also puzzled why the narration box seems to be a speech balloon pointing to three speakers, one of which is not even drawn in the panel. But there was no time to fix such petty details. There's Chapter 5 to draw.

Last House

2011-04-24T21:00:00.036-04:00

I remember being in a large room.

It didn't seem spacious though, because the ceiling was low and the lighting was indifferent. The walls had fields of red, and wood panels. It had a closed-in feeling.

It was both an event and a dinner. Someone I knew was getting honored. Was that it? Or was it some kind of show?

On one side of the room, on the tables, cases were on display. You could look through the glass tops at something. Whatever it was, it was not the center of attention. The people were mostly standing and talking to one another.

Lots of people. I felt I knew some of them, but I cannot identify any one of them.

Then we all sat at tables on the other side and were served food. It was not a fancy place. It was a little shabby but comfortable. I remember it as chicken with green vegetables. Probably off a steam table. The food was not the reason we came.

Someone stood and spoke for a few minutes and we listened.

I was standing after dinner among all the people and a woman came over to me and started talking. I felt like she was someone I knew but I don't know who she was.

I could tell she really liked talking to me and standing close to me. It was awkward. She knew I am in a long term relationship. What was she doing?

This happens to me all the time. No. No it doesn't. But there we were.

When it was time to go, she said she was taking the same bus as me, so we rode together.

The bus was really moving. I remembered the Fordham Road bus as poking along. Something had changed. I leaned over to see out the front. They had built bus lanes down the center of the road, with dividers separating them from the rest of the traffic. We could race from one bus stop to the next.

It then entered my mind that this bus didn't go all the way to the terminal where I needed to change. I got off. She did too.

Evening by now. Night in fact. We walked down busy sidewalks past the bright light of stores. We crossed many streets.

Presently there were fewer stores, and less light. The street got narrower and less busy.

Then it was only a narrow sidewalk, just enough for two to walk side by side. The concrete walk hugged the line of brick buildings on the right.

On the left there was a black empty space. I didn't look there.

We came to a place where the walk went up a half flight of steps. They were brick, with a waist-high brick barrier against the open space on the left.

At the top we found the barrier wrapped around a corner to the building wall, so our path went no farther. There was just a heavy closed door with no handle into the building on the right. We turned around and found a young couple coming up the steps.

"Dead end", we told them.

"There's no way down to the basement level?", they asked.

We all realized we should have taken the other steps that went down a half flight. Why hadn't the couple gone that way? Maybe we had all instinctively chosen the steps closer to the building.

The four of us went down those steps. On this level there was another door on the right. Through a window we could see young people gathered in an apartment, and the couple behind us went in there to see their friends.

But she and I continued on. The walk had changed to weathered wood planks but it was still attached to the building on the right. Now on the left we could see and hear, not three feet below, dark waters lapping on a pebbly shore. A damp breeze went through us.

And then we reached the end of the buildings on the right, and as we faced forward the dark open water was all around us. We had come to the Last House.

No sound of traffic, no voices. Out across the water were the lights of ships passing in the night. We could taste the salt in the air. We could hear the movement of waves, and once a faint and distant ship's bell. I thought there was a flapping of canvas.

We stood there in silence. There was something about her. I wanted so much to tell her something that would make her smile. But the only thing I had to say would not make her smile.

I put my arm around her waist for a moment and gave a her a hug. For another traveller on the road.

I told her. She nodded. And she was gone.

I mean, she was completely gone, just like that.

I faced the dark water a few minutes more and then turned back.

I found my way to the bus terminal. I could not think of what time my bus was scheduled to leave. I used to know that. But I have not taken a bus from that place in twenty-five years.

A clock hanging from the ceiling showed me the time. It was too late.

And I woke up.

Comic with No Pictures (Tree with No Leaves)

2011-04-17T21:00:00.173-04:00

I stopped in at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MOCCA) festival last weekend. Megan B was there, so were the creators of a few web other comics I read. I saw Jeph Jacques (Questionable Content), Dorothy Gambrell (Cat and Girl), Yuko and Ananth (Johnny Wander), and Klio (SPQR Blues). I got books from three of them and a CMY Cat tote from Yuko and Ananth. That's a web design joke: they had a black cat with yellow eyes and a magenta mouth, so they added a cyan collar and that made the cat CMYK. Never mind.

I purchased the three available Cat and Girl books, and Dorothy painstakingly drew a character on each title page for me. Here's the Cat she drew on volume 1. I thought she was going to stop after completing Cat, but she kept going, adding the big ice cream cone and the mice, and the wording.

The mice look like descendants of Ignatz, a bonus for this Krazy Kat fan.

I've just completed reading the Questionable Content book, and I am inspired to create a Slice of Life comic with many characters. My disadvantage is that I can't draw even as well as Jeph Jacques did seven years ago (he mocks his early art himself in the comments). If you've seen Invasion from Beyond!!, which I created when I was twelve, well, that was probably my peak.

So I will just present the script, and you can draw it yourself.

JOE B
a comic

[1]

Street corner. Joe B, Gianni, Bill, Isaac, Lesley, Mindy have gathered.

Gianni: Lunch! Where do we go today?
Bill: Let's go to that Irish pub I mentioned to you.
others: Yes! Let's go!

[2]

Gianni: We can take two taxis.
Lesley: OK, but I think I'll take the subway back.

[3]

Isaac: I'm thinking about shepherd's pie.
Joe B: That's just what I was thinking of.

[4]

Joe B to Isaac: Wait, do you mean it? I really am thinking of shepherd's pie.

[5]

Joe B, Lesley, Mindy riding in the back seat of a taxi.

Joe B: Look, there's a little map on the screen showing where we are.
Mindy: Yeah, and they have a credit card swipe on the side too.
Joe B: I don't take a taxi very often. I never saw this before.
Lesley: I want Irish coffee.
Joe B: Is it the conversation?

[6]

Sidewalk outside the pub.

Joe B to Karen: Oh, hi!
Karen: I almost missed the second taxi but I made it.
Joe B: I forgot about you.
Karen: That's nice.

[7]

Inside the pub. The seven, a barmaid behind the bar, and empty tables.

Isaac: Seven for lunch?
Barmaid: We open at 4.
Gianni: Oh, we thought you served lunch.
Barmaid: Not on weekdays. Well, we do when there's a game.

[8]

Sidewalk outside the pub.

Bill: Sorry everybody.
Joe B: But now this is an adventure!
Gianni: There's an Italian place I've been to, a block from here.
others: Yes! Let's go!

[9]

Walking.

Joe B: I haven't walked around here in a long time.
Mindy: We come down here sometimes after school. There's that big bookstore.

[10]

Gianni: I wonder if the Italian place serves lunch.

[11]

Inside the Italian place. Show that they are in a big room with a high ceiling and nicely decorated walls. Joe B is between Mindy and Karen, not with his back to the door. Lesley across next to Karen, Bill and Isaac and Gianni down the other side.

Gianni: Doesn't this look great? I wonder what this big room used to be.
Isaac: It looks so elaborate, I can't believe they did all this just for a restaurant.

Karen to Joe B: I said to Gianni, Bill has been talking about an Irish pub, but I don't know whether it's open for lunch, so you should check. He said it doesn't matter.

[12]

Gianni to waitress: Do you know the history of this place? What this room was?
Waitress: It was a hotel ballroom.

[13]

Gianni, pointing at menu: What's the difference between the Old School Round pizza and the Old Fashioned Square pizza?
Waitress: The first one is round...

[14]

Leslie to Bill: ... so anyway I told them to forget it.
Joe B: Absolutely.

[15]

Lesley: Right. Joe.

[16]

Joe B to Karen: I think she just told me to shut up.
Karen: I think so too.

[17]

Food has been served and they are all eating.

Gianni: The square pizza is actually rectangular.
Isaac: We shouldn't have to pay.

Mindy: The salad was so big we hardly have room for the pizza. That is a strategy for not eating too much.

Lesley: I like crumbled sausage on pizza better than sliced.
Joe B: They're both good.

[18]

Lesley, gesturing at remaining pizza: Would someone take half of this slice?
Isaac: I will.
Joe B: I will too.

[19]

Outside on the sidewalk.

Isaac: I should walk back to work this off.
Joe B: Me too.

[20]

They are all riding in a subway car.

MTA Map

2011-04-10T21:00:00.033-04:00

I ride the subway ten times a week. I stare at the MTA subway map when it's there in front of me. I can't help it. Some things bother me.

Not really the design itself. Obviously they had different goals than I had when I created my own diagram. That's OK. Seeking the balance of information and clutter is a difficult thing. I won't even get into it. I think they did pretty well with what they wanted to do. But on its own terms, there are some odd points.

Here's the worst one:—

They've taken the trouble to use the full name of the Whitestone Bridge, but they don't know where it is! It's been like this for years. It's like this on the cluttered version shown here, and on the cleaner version that is used in subway cars. They recently fixed it for the online map:—

The bridge was about a mile and a half out of place. And it's an MTA property!

I know that second map looks really blurry. That's how they have it on the web page.

You might well say that the bridge has nothing to do with the subway, so the error does not affect subway riders. This is true although it leads one to ask why the bridge is shown. But I said I wasn't going there. My point is that if you're going to show something, show it where it is.

The next one is about rail lines:—

They want to give us an idea where the Metro North Harlem Line stations are in relation to subway stations. That's worthwhile (and I do it on my diagram too).

The map really emphasizes how close Woodlawn is to 233rd St. In fact it looks like they are adjacent. If you go there you'll discover that from Metro North to the subway is a third of a mile up a steep grade. I wonder whether the map exaggerates the closeness because once in a very great while a service disruption leads them to ask Harlem Line passengers to change there.

I re-drew the position of the Harlem Line:—

This is still a bit wrong because the distance from Woodlawn station to the subway is about the same as the distance from Fordham station to the Fordham Road subway station (orange), and the latter is farther apart on the diagram. But that's because of the convention that the scale gets larger as you approach the central area, so it's acceptable. I think the map reader senses that because of the station spacing on the subway lines. It's something like perspective. Or is it just me? On the plus side, I got the Harlem Line out of Bronx Park (it really does run along the edge) and I have the stations on the correct side of the cross streets.

More misplaced railroads:—

This is right at the top edge. The New Haven Line does branch off north of Woodlawn, but it does not cross under the elevated subway. It's still very close to the Harlem Line at the Harlem Line's Wakefield station. Does this matter? Maybe to a stranger walking around up there.

The Hell Gate Route is horribly misplaced. Admittedly it's an Amtrak route of minor interest to subway riders, and there are no stations on it in this area. So maybe you don't need to know exactly where it is. But to a stranger walking around, the presence of its massive fills and bridges is overwhelming, so it is a landmark. The arch bridge looming over the elevated Ditmars Blvd station is certainly noticeable, and a user of the Northern Blvd station would observe the heavy overpass at street level.

Here's another one that might be political:—

The Nassau St line from Chambers St to Broad St is the only part of the subway system that is just plain closed evenings, nights, and weekends. No service at all. Shouldn't this section be shown with some kind of dashed line? The only clue on the map is that marker letters J and Z are shown in a light typeface at the two affected stations. I doubt many people catch that. I think someone didn't want to draw much attention to the situation.

There's a design problem around here:—

The station spacing on the red and green line is weird. In real life the stations are evenly spaced. I can see that they wanted to line up the two Church Ave stations to the grid, and the Flatbush Ave and Avenue H stations. This little area is jammed together compared to the areas on both sides. Compare to real life:—

(from Google maps)

As you can see, the yellow-orange line stations on the left are not evenly spaced, and Beverley and Cortelyou are notoriously close. But the red-green line is has only a slightly longer spacing before Flatbush Ave, not enough I would say to bother with on a diagram. I would simplify the grid to say that the first two stations are even with each other on lines at right angles to subway, that Newkirk (red-green) is at a line between Cortelyou and Newkirk (yellow-orange), and that Flatbush is at a line between Newkirk (yellow-orange) and Avenue H.

By the way the variant spelling of Beverly and Beverley on the diagrams is not an error, or rather it shows accurately the names that have been on the station signs since the stations were opened. Street signs disagree too.

And now I feel very picky, but:—

Isn't there a transfer there? The minuscule line that should be between the circles is missing.