Postcard Thursday: The Third Avenue El

James is finishing up a piece right now on the history of St. Mark's Place in the East Village (we'll let you know when it's published), and as part of that research he's been reading about how the Second Avenue and Third Avenue Elevated trains were an integral part of the neighborhood for years.

This postcard, showing the Third Avenue El running along the Bowery, is ubiquitous in postcard shops (often the sort of card that can be picked up for under a dollar), which means they must have printed thousands of them at the turn of the twentieth century as a typical New York City view.

The Third Avenue El first opened in 1878, running from South Ferry to Grand Central. Two years later, a Second Avenue El began operating from a split at Chatham Square. The Third Avenue line eventually ran all the way into the Bronx (parts of its infrastructure are still used today by the 2 and the 5 trains), and was the last of the lines to come down in Manhattan, ceasing operation in 1955.

Do you have recollections of riding the Third Avenue El? If so, please let us know in the comments.

A crowd on St. Mark's Place watches the demolition of the Third Avenue El.
Photo by Calvin S. Hathaway, Dec. 16, 1955 (courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York)

Why Not Use the "L"?

Reginald Marsh, Why Not Use the “L”?, 1930. Egg tempera on canvas, 36 × 48 in. (91.4 x 121.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase  31.293  © 2010 Estate of Reginald Marsh / Art Students League, New York / Artists Rights Society, New York

A few nights ago, we were walking through the Whitney Museum's recently re-installed top floor, "American Legends: From Calder to O'Keeffe," when Reginald Marsh's 1930 painting "Why Not Use the 'L'?" caught our eye. If you've read Inside the Apple, you know that we're fans of Marsh's work in the US Custom House on Bowling Green.

In this work, Marsh captures a slice of the city that's now gone: riders on the elevated train. The train depicted appears to be the Third Avenue "L" (or, sometimes, "El"), but transportation aficionados should chime in if we are wrong about that. As in many of Marsh's paintings, there is a gauzy quality to the canvas, though a few things are in sharp focus. Above the sleeping man's head is a sign that gives the painting its title: "The subway is fast, certainly. But the open-air elevated gets you there quickly, too! And with more comfort. Why not use the 'L'?" Below the man's feet is a newspaper, the headline of which trumpets, "Did Sex Urge Explain Judge Crater's Disappearance?"

Judge Joseph Force Crater disappeared on August 6, 1930. Having had dinner with his mistress and a friend on Forty-fifth Street, he hailed a taxi, never to be seen again. At first, he wasn't even reported missing--the courts were in recess and he had been frequently commuting back and forth to his summer house in Maine. But when he didn't show up for work on August 25, the police were called in; the disappearance went public in early September and consumed the New York headlines for weeks. Had he been murdered? Kidnapped? Run off to a tropical island with a woman? It remains one of the great unsolved cases in New York history and anchors Marsh's painting in a very specific moment in time.

A few years after this canvas was painted, the Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts hired Marsh to complete sixteen murals in the rotunda of the Custom House. As we write in Inside the Apple:

"[His] murals depict the dominance of American shipping; the eight larger panels show the stages of a steamship's entrance into New York harbor, from its approach to the Narrows to its discharge of passengers and cargo. In one panel, the ship pauses to take on the press so that they can interview an arriving celebrity--Greta Garbo.... Just before work was to begin in September 1937, Marsh received world that Joseph P. Kennedy, U.S. maritime commissioner, objected to the fact two prominent ships in the panorama were foreign vessels--the Queen Mary and the Normandie. Kennedy wrote that Marsh should instead depict 'the new passenger liner that we will probably commence building.'"

Marsh ignored Kennedy. Supposedly the word "Normandie" is smudged on the bow of that vessel, but it is still perfectly legible. The old Custom House is now the Museum of the American Indian and is open to the public free of charge so that you can check out Marsh's work yourself. The Whitney Museum is pay-what-you-wish on Friday nights. There are other Marsh works in the "American Legends" installation, as well as, of course, some of the finest works of American art in any New York collection.

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Find out more about Reginald Marsh in
our book:

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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What's in a Name?: The Bowery

Last week, Curbed and Racked pointed out that at least one new boutique on the ever-gentrifying Bowery would like to rename the entire neighborhood the “Bowery District.” This is just the most recent in a long line of attempts to change or repurpose the Bowery name over the years.

The original lane that now bears the name Bowery—the English corruption of the Dutch bouwerij or “farm”—led from the city of New Amsterdam into the countryside. The original lane now goes by three different names in its different sections: Park Row, the Bowery, and Fourth Avenue.

The most famous Dutch bouwerij was owned by Peter Stuyvesant, who lies buried in the churchyard of St. Mark’s in the Bowery on 10th Street and Second Avenue. For years, this church was known as St. 

Mark’s in the Bouwerie; its archaic spelling not only hearkened back to the days of the Dutch, but also helped distinguished it from the nearby thoroughfare. By the late 19th century, the Bowery had become synonymous with skid row.

A lot of the Bowery’s reputation was deserved, but at least part of the blame for its near-universal name recognition was the musical A Trip to Chinatown, which featured the song “The Bowery.” Its chorus boasts:

The Bow'ry, the Bow'ry
They say such things and they do strange things,
On the Bow'ry! The Bow'ry!
I'll never go there any more.

By 1916, the street’s reputation had gotten so bad that civic groups battled to come up with a new name for the thoroughfare. One suggestion was “Cooper Avenue” in honor of Cooper Union founder (and Jell-O pioneer)* Peter Cooper.

A rival proposition recommended “Central Broadway.” It’s hard to imagine the chaos this name change might have brought about in a city that already featured Broadway, West Broadway, and East Broadway.

Neither of these suggestions had any real traction, perhaps because there was still nostalgia for the old Bouwerie of Peter Stuyvesant. Indeed, that nostalgia was so strong that in 1956 a group of merchants suggested that Third Avenue be renamed “The Bouwerie,” to invoke the charm and refinement of a bygone age. (That this would have given the city a Bowery and a Bouwerie a block apart seems not to have figured into their calculations.) Plans were underway at the time to remove the last vestiges of the Third Avenue “El,” and it seemed logical to local boosters to get rid of the name Third Avenue—which they saw as intimately connected to the failure of the “El”—and replace it with Bouwerie, which would increase the street’s cachet and, presumably, retail rents.

(See our earlier post about York Avenue for another example of a street renaming in the same era for much the same reasons.)

* Peter Cooper and his gelatin fixation will be the subject of a future post.

 

You can read more about the Bowery in Inside the Apple; visit our home page www.insidetheapple.net.

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