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Sept. 8, 1910: The L.I.R.R. Reaches Manhattan


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“Day Long Throng Inspects New Tube,” trumpeted the headline in The New York Times.

 

It was exactly 100 years ago, and Long Islanders could now travel to Manhattan by rail.

 

Their destination, at the end of the newly opened tunnel beneath the East River: the steel-and-marble transportation palace known as Pennsylvania Station, at the time the most expensive and largest private construction project ever attempted anywhere, and despite its destruction beginning in 1963, still one of the most beloved.

 

Before the station and its tunnels were completed, the Long Island Rail Road ended in Long Island City, Queens, and passengers continuing to Manhattan were forced to take a ferry over the East River where, at 33rd Street, they could board an extension of the elevated subway line. (In similar fashion, the Pennsylvania Railroad ended at Exchange Place in Jersey City, on the west side of the Hudson River, where another ferry was available to shuttle one across.

 

But on Sept. 8, 1910, about 35,000 people passed for the first time on 196 separate trains that connected Queens and Long Island to Manhattan.

 

After noting that a steady crowd of city-bound commuters emerged that evening from their trip beneath the river and headed en masse to the theaters of Broadway, The Times spent considerable effort detailing the problems that accompanied the opening of the tunnel, which apparently included confusion over new fares (an extra 14 cents was charged to those with tickets valid for Long Island City or Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn) and the inability of harried clerks to accommodate the throng, which was unfamiliar with the new timetables and scrambled, every time a train was called, like “a rush on a college campus.”

 

“The opening of the new station led to several fights in the day,” The Times reported. These consisted mainly of spats among newspaper vendors, trinket merchants and sellers of packaged chewing gum “who disputed the possession of points of advantage.”

 

According to Ron Ziel, a railroad historian, the opening of the station and its east-facing tunnels led to the development — and, depending on one’s view, the destruction — of Long Island as millions of commuters suddenly began to travel back and forth. In 1910, he said, about 33 million people commuted from the island by way of railroad tunnel; by 1929, the number had increased to 119 million, he said.

 

This swarm had been predicted by Ralph Peters, who in 1910 was the Long Island Rail Road’s president and a booster for development. At a dinner of more than 300 celebrants, at the Garden City Hotel, Mr. Peters prophesied that Long Island would become New York’s “garden spot, its summer home, and its health resort,” The Times reported.

 

“The time is not far distant,” he continued, “when the great ocean steamships will land at Montauk Point, and fast passenger and freight trains over the Long Island Rail Road will dash the length of the island to distribute their contents in all parts of the country. The dream of Austin Corbin” — the railroad’s founder — “will soon come true. It will come sooner than anyone here thinks. It is bound to come soon.”

 

With that, the diners rose and offered their applause.

 

1910 NY Times Article

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