YESTERYEAR’S SECOND AVENUE LINE

When the first portion of the Second Avenue subway opened at the start of the year, it was the beginning step in the culmination of a long-held aspiration. A Second Avenue line was first proposed in 1919 and was a part of the city’s transit plans for many years. Some tunnels were actually finished in the early 1970s, but the city’s fiscal crisis in 1975 put a stop to any further construction until the new century. Yet, there was once another transit line on Second Avenue, a line known as the Second Avenue El. Opened in 1880, it was the last of Manhattan’s four elevated lines — which ran along Ninth, Sixth, Third and Second Avenues — to be completed.

The Third and Second Avenues Els were a block from each other because they were built by rival companies. Before long, though, the lines were consolidated and operated by the Manhattan Elevated Railway Company. And in 1903, the Els were absorbed by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), which built the city’s first subway.

The Second Avenue El didn’t run only on Second Avenue. On 23rd Street, it swung east one block and then ran down First Avenue and Allen Street to Chatham Square. There, it shared the Third Avenue El’s tracks to Chatham Square and South Ferry. Narrow Allen Street was completely covered by the El, making it known as the “street where the sun never shines” and a headquarters for prostitution.

As the Third Avenue El expanded into the Bronx in the 1890s and early 1900s, the Second Avenue El merged with the Third Avenue line above 125th and ran to Tremont Avenue or Fordham Road. When the subway’s elevated extension along Westchester Avenue was built in 1903-4, another connection was made in the lower Bronx, and a spur of the El ran to Freeman Street. My late mother, who grew up in the East Bronx, remembered taking the “Second Avenue Special” in the late 1930s from Freeman Street to Hunter High School.

Finally, another spur of the Second Avenue El went over the Queensboro Bridge, where it merged with the Astoria and Flushing lines. But with all these connections, the Second Avenue El still never had as many riders as the neighboring Third Avenue line. That’s why the Second Avenue line didn’t run between midnight and the early-morning rush hours.

The original cars on the El were wooden “gate” cars, with open platforms on each end and gates that had to be manually opened and closed by the conductor. At first, trains were pulled by steam engines, but later they were electrified. In 1916, the Second and Third avenue Els received several hundred “composite” cars, which were somewhat more modern. The composites had a steel frame, a wooden body and copper sheathing, and they had been the subway’s original fleet in 1904. They were deemed unsafe for underground service because of the possibility of collisions and fires, but they were still considered OK for service on the El.

Also around 1916, the Manhattan Els, including the Second, added a third track for express service. In some places, the street was too narrow for a combined local-express station. “Hump” stations were built in these places, with the express tracks one level higher than the local trains.

Almost from the beginning, the Els proved unpopular with many New Yorkers. They were dirty and noisy, they blocked sunlight, they were much slower than the newer subway trains, and the typical elevated train was only about five cars long. After automobiles became commonplace in the 1920s, motorists complained that the El’s pillars were a safety hazard.

The main group pushing for demolition of the Second Avenue El was the First Avenue Association, an organization mainly made up of businesspeople, property owners and real estate brokers from Midtown and the Upper East Side. As Alexander Nobler Cohen remarked in “Fallen Transit: The Loss of Rapid Transit on New York’s Second Avenue,” the interests of Lower East Side or East Harlem tenement dwellers weren’t represented by the association.

Looking at The New York Times from the 1930s, it seems like every few months, the First Avenue Association made a new push to demolish the El. The April 24, 1936, issue tells us that the association presented a petition with 3,000 signatures in favor of demolition. In February 1938, the association sought funds to build an opera house — but part of the price would be tearing down the El.

In 1940, just before subway unification, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia condemned most of the Ninth Avenue El, the Second Avenue El above the Queensboro Bridge and several of the Brooklyn Els. The lower part of the Second Avenue El and its Queensboro link were preserved because powerful Queens politicians wanted their constituents to have the option of a one-seat ride to East Side and downtown destinations.

Partial demolition didn’t satisfy the opponents of the El, and the entry of the U.S. into World War II gave them the arguments they needed, according to Cohen. They maintained that the steel in the Second Avenue El could be best used as material for the war effort. In June 1942, the rest of the Second Avenue El rumbled into history. Second Avenue was left without a train — until now.