Documenting the End of Tribeca's 'El'
A crowd gathers to watch as a crane removes the last section of the Chambers Street station. The view looks east along Chambers. Photograph by H.F. Dutcher, courtesy of Jack Banning
In 1939 sunlight brightened the Lower Manhattan thoroughfare of West Broadway for the first time in 60 years as the steel girders of what was called the Sixth Avenue Elevated Railway were picked apart and carried away.
Although Tribeca has witnessed much teardown and rebuilding over the past century, few events changed the neighborhood so dramatically as the demolition in 1939 and 1940 of the elevated railroad lines that for decades had run along West Broadway and Greenwich Street. Suddenly, streets that had been dark and noisy from the rumbling and screeching of trains overhead were sunlit and quiet.
As it happened, the removal of the West Broadway line was thoroughly documented by a commercial photographer named H. F. Dutcher.
The els that traversed Tribeca were the first in the city. The original line, which came up Greenwich Street, dated from the late 1860s and by the mid-1870s stretched all the way to northern Manhattan via Ninth Avenue. Its companion line, which ran up West Broadway was built in the late 1870s and was referred to by New Yorkers as the Sixth Avenue line.
Originating at the Battery, it came up Trinity Place and Church Street as far as Murray Street, turned west to West Broadway and then followed West Broadway through Tribeca all the way through today’s Soho. (It continued up to Third Street, where it jogged left to Sixth Avenue and ran uptown, proceeding past Macy’s and Rockefeller Center all the way to 53rd Street, where it once again turned left, as the D train does today, to join the Ninth Avenue El.
The Sixth Avenue line was noted for its stations, which were designed by the landscape artist Jasper Cropsey (who dabbled in architecture) and which sported gingerbread decorations and romantic peaked gables. Below Canal Street there were stations at Chambers, Franklin, Park Place and Cortlandt streets.
When the Sixth and Ninth Avenue lines proved popular, the companies operating them were given permission to add two East Side lines. The Ninth Avenue company built the Third Avenue El and the Sixth Avenue company built the Second Avenue El.
Riding the elevated could be fun: even when the trains were crowded or the weather was bad, you were aloft and the view constantly changed. Wrote one chronicler, “New Yorkers could fly through the air from end to end of their teeming island… borne swiftly high above the crowded streets in the fresh, open air while watching the wonderful changing panorama of the Empire City through their windows.”
But the effect on the streets below was less than favorable. Aside from the noise, the els tended to inhibit development and their support columns obstructed the flow of traffic. Finally in the 1930s the city decided to remove most of the elevated railways in Manhattan, and the first to be torn down was the Sixth Avenue line.
Most New Yorkers probably applauded the move, but many railroad buffs were dismayed. One enthusiast who decided to do something about it was a well-to-do businessman named Norvin H. Green, who hired Dutcher to immortalize the entire process. The photographer did not disappoint. Girder by girder, block by block, his Tribeca images—all taken in 1939—capture the disorderly drama of a neighborhood in the remaking.
This article was first published in the Trib in April 1999.