Postcard Thursday: What's in a Street Name?

image of the Malbone Street subway crash courtesy of the New York Transit Museum

When Governor Andrew Cuomo jokingly (?) suggested the other day that the Newtown Creek be renamed the Amazon River in a bid to woo Amazon's HQ2 to New York, it was easy for historians to get worried. All joking aside, Newtown was the colonial name for the Elmhurst section of Queens, and if the creek were to be renamed, another chapter in the city's history--already all-but forgotten--would be further erased.

But New York has a long history of such street renaming. In Lower Manhattan, as we write in Footprints in New York:

most of the other English names that once defined the city are gone.... [To the English, the Dutch] Pearl Street...was known as Great Dock Street. The nearby Beaver Path—where pelts had once been carried to waiting ships—became Princess Street. During the eighteenth century, new roads were constructed north of Wall Street and given names like Crown, King, and Little Queen.

In a fit of patriotism in 1794, all these British names were swept away. Great Dock reverted to Pearl; in a sort of reverse fairy-tale move, the Princess was turned back into a Beaver. Pointedly, Crown Street became Liberty Street. In this case, history was written by the winners on the street signs.

It isn't just the Newtown Creek renaming that has brought this topic to mind. Today marks the centennial of the worst subway disaster in New York City history, the Malbone Street Wreck. On November 1, 1918, a Brooklyn Rapid Transit subway train traveling at a high rate of speed and piloted by a driver with no experience crashed during the evening rush hour, killing at least 93 people and injuring hundreds.

Today, most people have never heard of Malbone Street. That's because the crash was so horrific that Malbone Street was renamed Empire Boulevard so that people wouldn't associate it with the tragedy. Just as it had done in the early American era, the city was renaming the street in order to forget the past.

However, because so many streets in New York are a little off-kilter, this doesn't always work.

In Lower Manhattan, for example, we still have Hanover Square--named for the British royal family--and Thames Street stands near Trinity Church as a reminder of the city's English roots.

In Brooklyn, one block in Crown Heights remains Malbone Street to this day, as you can see in the Google street view photo above. The map below is from 1898 and shows the issue. Malbone Street had an odd spur--probably the result of street names being appended in the area before there was any sort of comprehensive urban planning--which meant that in the 19th century, Malbone essentially ran parallel to itself for a block. (This is very similar to the issues we still have with Waverley Place in Greenwich Village.)

So, when most of Malbone Street became Empire Boulevard after the subway crash, the spur stayed  Malbone--as it remains to this day.

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Want to hear more about NYC history?

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Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

August Belmont's Private Subway Car

October 27 marks the 104th anniversary of the opening of New York’s first subway, the IRT. On that day, Mayor George “Max” McClellan took hold of the controls at the City Hall station and enjoyed it so much that he kept driving all the way to Broadway and 103rd Street, where the motorman was finally allowed to take over.*

(When the city celebrated the subway’s centennial in 2004, we thought it would have been great for Mayor Bloomberg to reenact McClellan’s joyride, but—alas—no such luck.)

The IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit Company) was created in 1900 to build and operate the first subway and its principal financier was August Belmont, better known today for building Belmont Park, the home of the Belmont Stakes. Part of the IRT’s first complement of rolling stock was a private car for Belmont, named the Mineola (after the family seat on Long Island).

As New York Times columnist Meyer Berger noted in Meyer Berger’s New York, the Mineola was decked out with

Philippine mahogany…, mulberry silk drapes, knee-deep carpeting, sliding leatherette curtains, a kitchenette with kerosene stove and old-fashioned icebox, special subway-pattern china and glassware, overstuffed reclining couch, swivel chair and roll-top desk.

Talk about commuting in style. While it is certain the Belmont used the car for entertaining and showing off the IRT to guests, stories have also persisted for years that the Mineola would whisk Belmont and his guests from a siding under the Belmont Hotel on 42nd Street all the way out to Belmont Park. In theory, this would have been possible (switching from IRT to LIRR tracks at Atlantic Avenue), but there is no evidence that the Mineola ever made that journey.

After Belmont’s death, the car was eventually sold for scrap. However, it never quite managed to end up on the junk heap and in 1973 was acquired by the Shoreline Trolley Museum in East Haven, Connecticut, where it remains to this day.

You can read more about Belmont and the building of the IRT in Inside the Apple.

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The Subway That Never Reached Williamsburg

The Times FYI column posted a question we've always wanted to ask:

Q. Most subway stops’ names use only the street number (42nd Street, for example). How come West Fourth Street and a few stops in the Bronx (like East 180th Street and East 149th Street) are given an east/west distinction?

A. Mainly to avoid confusion.

Herb Schonhaut, manager in New York City Transit’s Office of Station Signage, said the Fourth Street station uses the word “West” to distinguish it from the planned but unbuilt “South” Fourth Street Station in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Now, that's the kind of answer that raises more questions--such as, what South Fourth Street Station?

Luckily, the folks over at the Waterfront Preservation Alliance of Greenpoint and Williamsburg have all the answers in an excellent blog post today, which details the IND Second System that was to have opened in the 1930s.

The first New York City subway, the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit) opened in 1904 with a line that ran from City Hall to 42nd Street (today's No. 6 train), across 42nd Street to Times Square (now the Shuttle), and up the West Side along Broadway (now the No. 1 train). More on the subway and its impact in the shaping the city can be found, as always, in Inside the Apple, due out in early March 2009.

Photo by Pro-Zak on Flickr.