My parents' transit dilemna

[daveklepper]

Dad was an Eye-Ear-Nose-and-Throat doctor and my Mom was the office nurse and business manager (with a pharmacy degree).  They had an uptown Manhattan office on West 85th Street, our home, and a downtown office on West 29th Street.  Before 1932, the year I was born and the year the IND subway's first line was built, known for a long time as "The 8th Avenue Subway," their mode of transportation was the Ninth Avenue Elevated.  Going uptown was simple, any train boarded at 29th Street and Ninth Avenue would take them directly up to 86th Street and Columbus Avenue (Columbus an extension of 9th).  But southbound they would ofter be so concerned with their patients' affaires that they would not notice the sign and end up getting off at 34th Street and Sixth Avenue and having to walk about a third of mile to the downtown office.  The opening of the 8th Avenue Subway changed that.   Downtown they used the subway, where all trains would get them to the 32nd Street and 8th Avenue exit of the 34th Street station, and northbound they would use the elevated.  They used the subway north for a short time also, since it was faster, but the opening of the branch to Queens, with the E train running on the same tracks as the CC at 34th Street, changed that in 1933.   Yep, once coming home they ended up in Queens and has to retrace back to 42nd Strret Manhattan.  The pattern of south on the subway and north on the el was not changed when the 6th Avenue el was abandoned in 1938, leaving all southbound el trains running via 9th Avenue.  The pattern was only broken in 1940, when the 9th Avenue elevated, south of 155th Street, followed the 6th Avenue to scrap merchants.  This meant they had to watch the signs carefully northbound on the subway.   Life got complicated even more duriung the middle of WWII when the Sixth Avenue subway was opened, and southbound trains from 86th and Central Park West could go either to 6th or 8th Avenues, with northbounds from 34th and 8th going up Central Park West or over to Queens.   If I came home from highschool on time for supper and had to wait a long time, I generally did not need to ask why.

[Tom Curtin]

Interesting story.  As a current resident of upper west side Manhattan, I often, when I am on Columbus Ave. try to picture what this must have looked like when it was all under the 9th Ave. El.  Must have been grungy, to say the least.  Today it is a beautiful "historic district" --- with the same old buildings remaining from el days, now all restored.  It's almost the closest thing you can find in Manhattan to a neighborhood like Paris, lots of cafes and boutiques, etc.

My only contact with the "old" Manhattan els was one ride on the 3rd Ave. that my dad took me on when I was about 9, a year or so before its abandonment.  Then when I was a student at Fordham in The Bronx in the 60s I of course had many rides on the remaining Bronx portion of that line.

BTW I live literally on the site of NYC 60th St. yard, and our building is literally on the "West side freight line" tracks, which is of course Amtrak's Empire corridor now.  Gives me the opportunity to tell people (truthfully) I have 12 inch scale trains in the basement!

BTW Dave if you were a little kid on the UWS in the 30s you must have some slight memories of the "burying" of the NYC underneath Riverside Park which occurred about 1937

[daveklepper]

I sure do!   I had my first train ride when I was about 2-1/2.   Parents and I visited a sick relative at a hospital somewhat south of Hartford on the Connecticut River.   We went there by a friend's auto, and my memory sticks seeing the streetcars emerging from the end of elevated subway at 24st and White Plains Avenue as we used the "Post Road' north.   And then seeing the tracks in New Rochelle, where they left the pavement and went to the side of the road, but without wire, because the NY & Stamford had been abandoned and the Third Avenue Railway's local operation to Rye? Beach followed afterward.   But coming back we waited for the southbound New Haven train at Hartford, and I was scared by the steam locomotive's noise but resolved to get over my fright.   Then that fall, my nurse (with Mom busy as nurse in Dad's medical office) would take me in a stroller to Riverside Park, and I would watch the construction train with its derrick and the steel beams (painted orange in my memory?) being used to construct the tunnel.  Nurse couldn't exlain what was going on.   But then Mom took me and she exlained it in a going-on three-year-old's terms.   So when on a subsequent visit to the park, I was lost, and when a freindly woman helped me find Mom, I described her as "The Lady Engineer."   Actually, Mom was a pharmacist, and the story was told by family members for years afterward.   So I did watch the whole process of the line being covered.

Much later, in grade school, my class had a field trip to the Bordon milk processing plant which had a freight siding.   Possibly this was off the "High Line".

I did get to ride Amtrak out of Penn before moving to Israel.   A number of times.   Always tried to sit on the west side of the coach to enjoy the view of the Hudson.   But the move made train watching and photography at 125th and Park Avenue slightlly less interesting.  Still a good spot though.   I had one photo published in TRAINS in my lifetime (so far):   "P-motor coupling up"  At Harmon with some kids framed by the coach diaphragm.

You can get a feel as what life was like under the Ninth Avenue el.   Just visit Jerome Avenue or Broadway between 225th and 242nd Streets.  And we did have a friend, an elderly woman, who lived in an apartment on Columbus Avenue south of 84th Street with her window level with the tracks.   Enjoyed the visits but in retrospect don't understand how she slept nights.   While the el was running, I could hear it in the distance in my own bedroom, located on 85th Street about 3/4 a long block away.   But also could hear the noise of the 40-passenger gas buses on Central Park West.