756 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the proposition tliat the place to build a railway was where the 

 people to ride on it lived ! right at home in their own packed and 

 overcrowded city ! 



Surely the history of cheap interstreet transportation in New 

 York has been a veritable whirligig. The archaic hackney coach, 

 then the lumbering old Knickerbocker stages, the driver of each 

 a true Tony Veller, and then the tardy appearance of a street-car 

 line or two on the extreme avenues east and west, as if the old 

 impetus which settled the city along its water fronts must first be 

 consulted in land passenger transportation : and then, as horse-car 

 lines began to appear nearer the spinal center of the city, an effort 

 for a choice of passengers. As who does not remember when the 

 old red Third Avenue cars bore the titles of those departed locali- 

 ties Yorkville and Harlem (as forgotten now as Greenwich or 

 Chelsea or Strawberry Hill) ; or, when one could read on certain of 

 the yellow sides of the lumbering Sixth Avenue cars, " Colored 

 people allowed to ride in this car"; and how Broadway, the best 

 and cream of all thoroughfares for traffic lines, was left for a gen- 

 eration to " stages " of lighter models and better lines than the old 

 Knickerbockers, but still as clumsy and lumbering as they could 

 well be made ; and how, when the " Gilbert " elevated road ran one 

 day, carrying all who came to demonstrate its safety and speed, 

 New-Yorkers woke up next morning to find these familiar old 

 hulks a thing of the past ! (We wise ones know how many of 

 them are still waiting to carry us precariously from some local 

 station to some modern hamlet in the Jersey foothills, perhaps, but 

 we never mention it !) 



It is rather a remarkable fact that the very first elevated rail- 

 way ever proposed to be built in the city of New York (in 18G7 or 

 18G8) was intended to be operated by the same contrivance as, thirty 

 years later, was to be adopted by the costliest street surface railway 

 plant in the world ! This first tramway, as everybody remembers 

 the Greenwich Street, or one-legged road, was built on pillars 

 shaped like a letter Y, the rails being on the top of the two arras, 

 while between them, over sunken wheels, traveled a continuous 

 cable operated by steam power generated in stations built in pits 

 dug under the street corners at considerable intervals along the line. 

 These plants were failures, and after a few passenger loads were 

 taken off the cars in ladders, the proprietors gave it up and sold the 

 road for old iron to the highest bidder. This old one-legged road 

 stood where it was, however, the purchasers either defaulting or 

 allowing their purchase to remain unmoved. It was the later suc- 

 cess of the " Gilbert " elevated railway which stimulated another 

 company to acquire ultimately this old one-legged road and rebuild 

 it after the Gilbert pattern, thus bringing it into the same system 

 as it now remains. Meanwhile, upon the completion of the Gil- 



