Under Park Avenue

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Streetscapes | Under Park Avenue

When Vanderbilt Did Not Get His Way

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/13/realestate/13scapes_span.jpg Left, Office for Metropolitan History; Librado Romero/The New York Times
TRACK CHANGE The construction of a two-mile railroad tunnel along what is now Park Avenue in the 1870s, left, and a recent view from the abandoned station at 86th Street, right.

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=CHRISTOPHER GRAY&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=CHRISTOPHER GRAY&inline=nyt-per)
Published: September 10, 2009

IN his new biography, “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt” (Knopf), T. J. Stiles traces the long career of the ruthless entrepreneur, and notes that few structures remain to mark his influence. But those that stand include one of New York’s grandest public works, a two-mile-long rail tunnel under Park Avenue — which he fought bitterly every step of the way.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/13/realestate/13scapes4_lg.jpg Librado Romero/The New York Times
TUNNEL VISION Cornelius Vanderbilt opposed covering the tracks.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/10/realestate/13scapes3_lg.jpg Librado Romero/The New York Times
The locked access doors to the tunnel are under two large steel plates in the mall on the north side of 86th, where stairs lead down to the old platforms.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/10/realestate/13scapes2lg.jpgOffice for Metropolitan History
The Park Avenue tunnel under construction in the 1870s.

Park Avenue was just Fourth Avenue in 1831, when a group of investors chartered the New York and Harlem Railroad. Much of the land affected by this endeavor was open country, and most of the new double-track line was at grade level. A locomotive hit a cow at East 58th Street in 1839.

According to Mr. Stiles, in the 1860s Vanderbilt gained control of the railroad. He built his Grand Central Depot at 42nd Street in 1871 to accommodate an increase in service, for which he also needed four tracks. By this time, real estate development had filled in most of the blocks north of Grand Central, and the grade-level tracks were now a hazard to humans as well as livestock, Steam, whistles and cinders also made Fourth Avenue undesirable.

Landowners denounced what The New York Times called in 1871 the “frequent slaughter of men, women and children” and there were rumors that the Vanderbilt interests bribed the coroner’s office to conceal the numbers of deaths caused by 80 trains a day.

The Nineteenth Ward Railroad Reform Association held mass protest meetings calling for covering the tracks.

Vanderbilt told The Times in 1872 that he wanted to deal with the public “in the most liberal manner.” But he proposed only fencing off the marshaling yards north of Grand Central, and putting “elegant bridges” across the rail line higher up, leaving the tracks where they were.

The Times described Vanderbilt as “inflexibly opposed” to the more expensive scheme. Railroad executives were of the opinion that their 30,000 daily passengers would refuse to enter the city through “a dark and noisome tunnel,” and that the protesters’ real interest was in having the railroad pay for “pleasant parks” in front of their properties.

The reformers did not get traction until they discovered that the original agreement with the city permitted the closing of the rail line if it interfered with the ordinary use of the streets, which had certainly changed since cows ambled about at 58th Street.

Vanderbilt then saw the matter in a new light, and the railroad’s chief engineer, Isaac C. Buckhout, came up with a plan to leave the yards uncovered, but crossed by high iron bridges. North of 56th Street, the tracks were to be covered, either by medians supported by flat beams with a large opening to the tracks below or, where the natural elevation permitted, arched brick tunnels with circular vents.

The $6 million project was completed in 1875. A comprehensive account of the construction of the line has been posted on the Web by Joseph Brennan at columbiauniversity.org/~brennan/beach/ (http://columbiauniversity.org/~brennan/beach/); it includes drawings of a station at East 86th Street, which got local service.

This stretch of Fourth Avenue — after 1888, Park Avenue — became a real street, with a mall down the middle and reasonable quiet. Edith Wharton (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/edith_wharton/index.html?inline=nyt-per) lived in a town house on Park at 78th Street for several years. Rebecca Mead, who wrote about Wharton’s correspondence in The New Yorker (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/the_new_yorker/index.html?inline=nyt-org) in June, says that it includes an 1896 letter to a friend describing an hour at home with the railroad: “Seven or eight trains passed without affecting our nervous system. What happens is a short roar & rumble, & a puff of white smoke. Some people might mind it very much — to me it would not be in the least disturbing, much less so than the jingle of a cable car, for instance.”

The smoke and cinders disappeared after a 1903 law requiring a conversion to electricity, the marshaling yards were covered over in the 1910s and in the 1920s most of the openings were reduced in size.

But the tunnel is still there, as are traces of the 86th Street station. The locked access doors are under two large steel plates in the mall on the north side of 86th, where stairs lead down to the old platforms. Metro-North recently permitted a reporter to descend.

There, in between the rushing trains, is a holy place of rough, irregular stone and precise brick arches, the sun streaming down from openings in the malls like a ray of light in the Pantheon.

According to Marjorie Anders, a spokeswoman for Metro-North Railroad (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/metronorth_railroad/index.html?inline=nyt-org), the tunnels were comprehensively renovated in the 1980s, when lights were added. These permit a unique view of the tunnels — through the ventilation grates in the malls. At night, the tunnel walls and tracks are revealed to the curiosity seeker, with particularly good visibility in the high 80s.

Much care is required because the grates run east-west, and the view is available only to those willing to risk standing on the edge of the mall right next to traffic. But the reward is a nearly straight-down view of the tracks, ballast, rubble walls and brick arches, with a giant silvery bullet zooming past every few minutes. The regular spacing of the bars on the gratings give it a shimmery, elusive quality, a vision straight into the 19th century.

E-mail:streetscapes@nytimes.com

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Copyright 2009 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[Merry]

Putting the Park in Park Avenue

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/07/24/realestate/24STREETS1/streets-1-popup.jpg
The Park Avenue tunnel appeared on the July 1936 cover of
The American City after its conversion from train to automobile traffic

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/07/24/realestate/24STREETS2/streets-2-popup.jpg

THE Park Avenue automobile tunnel under Murray Hill used to be pretty hairy, a 1,500-foot-long, two-lane, two-way road with solid walls on each side, not much clearance and cars barreling along at highway speeds.

Three years ago, the Department of Transportation narrowed it to a single lane, and it is now easier — in a car — to make a closer inspection of the passageway that put the “park” in Park Avenue.

New York and Harlem Railroad completed a horsecar line along Fourth Avenue between Prince and 86th Streets in 1834. At Murray Hill, the horses pulled you along through an open cut. This was long before Grand Central went up at 42nd Street.

The relationship between railroads and the cities they serve often turns adversarial, and in 1846 the Common Council decided that the cut, running from 32nd to 40th, created too great a crosstown detour and ordered the railroad to build cross-bridges at 34th and 38th Streets. By that time the railroad was running steam engines.

The city revisited the issue in 1850, specifying that parapets be added to the bridges as a safety measure, and that the tunnel be roofed over to cover the “great chasm” of the open cut.

Parklike malls were then ordered for the area over the cut, and they in turn brought town house and even mansion construction to what was renamed Park Avenue no later than 1860.

The smoke and steam of locomotives are never pleasant, and in 1854 the Common Council forbade the use of steam below 42nd, a measure the railroad resisted. A long legal tussle ensued, and the railroad switched over from wood-burning engines to coal, which reduced smoke and steam. The abutting well-to-do owners on Park Avenue were not mollified.

The railroad also promised to remove what The New York Times described as “unsightly wooden funnels” in the malls, used to ventilate the tunnel. But the railroad held its ground on steam, maintaining that a ban at 42nd would require a cumbersome switch to horsepower for the 25 million quarts of milk that came into the city every year, as well as for 1,500 commuters each day.

In 1870 The Times described the tunnel as “dark as Egypt,” and “abounding with vile pestilential odors.” The railroad whitewashed and drained the passage, and created a stairway midway through for a passenger stop. By the following year, the first Grand Central was completed, and steam service south of 42nd Street ended, leaving only a horse-drawn trolley line to ply the tunnel. The manure produced some pretty ripe days.

In 1887 Jackson Schultz, an engineer, observed “What passenger is not glad when he gets out of the tunnel?”

But despite the odors below, the malls above were prospering. In his 1889 guidebook “An Eastern Tour at Home,” Joel Cook described the Park Avenue mall as creating “one of the pleasant places of New York.”

The manure problem was cleaned up in 1898, when electricity became the motive power; the streetcar line went into the tunnel at 34th Street, turned left on 42nd and continued up Madison.

Railroad structures occupied the east side of Park from 33rd to 34th, and for a time only the west roadway of Park was open to traffic, creating a quiet enclave on Park below Grand Central.

The plug was pulled on this bottleneck in the 1910s, although a coalition of Murray Hill groups fought for what The Real Estate Record and Guide called “the tranquillity and seclusion which this neighborhood has hitherto enjoyed.” By 1935, when the streetcar was discontinued and the tunnel repaved for automobile traffic, only a few holdout householders would have cared.

According to a 2008 study by the Department of Transportation, southbound drivers exiting the tunnel were sometimes blinded by sunlight, and pedestrians were regularly injured. So that year, the department cut the tunnel back to one northbound lane, and it says that injuries have dropped to 2 or 3 per year from 6 to 10.

Before the change, it was impossible to pause or even slow in the tunnel, and the wall was at best a blur. But the advent of one-way traffic means that a trip through the tunnel is no longer like being flung by a giant slingshot. Walking through is prohibited, but it is now possible to drive slowly up the tunnel pulled over to the right, while traffic moves past on the left at normal speed.

As it turns out, there is not all that much to see: no old signs or station platforms, no ladders or lights, nothing from the age of horse, steam or trolley. The rubble stone walls could be from the 1830s — or from the 1930s. Vestigial stairs appear midway through, but they are obviously of 20th-century construction. You might be deafened by the traffic noise, but it’s not vile or pestilential.

What has proved enduring are the little parks above. Unlike the malls farther up the avenue, these are densely grown with ivy and low shrubs. They are little green refuges, harking back to a time when that lonesome whistle blew up and down Park Avenue.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/realestate/putting-the-park-in-park-avenue-streetscapesmidtown.html