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MAKING TRACKS - Vol. 1, No. 4 - Fall 1995
Entire contents of MAKING TRACKS is copyright © 1995 by Village Crosstown Trolley Coalition,
but may be reproduced either in whole or in part with a clear acknowledgment of the source.
Please report any errors to us at VCTC. Thanks.
A New Vision for the Village
The 8th Street Corridor: A History
By George Haikalis
Cars and trucks roaring down 8th St., Christopher St or St. Marks Place are very intimidating to the many pedestrians strolling on this historic crosstown thoroughfare. Walking to a neighborhood store or to a bus stop or subway entrance becomes a really unpleasant experience amid the din and pollution caused by speeding, free-wheeling motor vehicles. Contrast this to the walking experience in European cities, so often frequented and enjoyed by visiting New Yorkers, where shopping streets have been made auto-free and streetcars--"trams" as they call them--quietly carry travelers through these districts. This long sought quality of urban life can be transplanted to New York City, and the Village Crosstown Trolley Coalition is committed to exploring the feasibility of applying this concept to the 8th St. corridor.
About 800 vehicles travel east on 8th St. between Sixth Avenue and Broadway during the evening peak hour, and lesser volumes use the street at other hours. A total of about 8,000 vehicles use the street on an average weekday. Many of these cars and trucks are making through trips, and use 8th St. to cut across town because in the past the city widened the street, encouraging this kind of traffic. Other vehicles are circling the block in a never ending quest for a "free" parking space. Some are cruising just to show off their cars (and their boom boxes) or to otherwise impress pedestrians.
The relatively modest volume of through car and truck traffic speeding across 8th St. can be handled on alternate arterial streets like Houston St. or 14th St. Some neighborhood streets like 10th or 12th Streets might expect more local flow. But closing a street does not necessarily relocate car traffic to other streets. When Washington Square Park was closed to vehicle traffic on October 30, 1958 (see Auto-Free Press, Nov/Dec 1991), despite dire warnings from the city's transportation officials, traffic chaos did not occur on adjacent streets. Instead volumes declined throughout the area. When the city closed 8th Street on a weekday afternoon and evening, for the Village Alliance's fashion show this fall, only modest congestion occurred on nearby streets, and even this could have been averted with some planning ahead.
As practiced by most New York City transportation planners, the "science" of estimating future vehicle flow is geared toward increasing capacity to accommodate the inevitable growth in roadway use. The process becomes self-fulfilling. Route 9A planners want to increase southbound West St. capacity by 50%, smooth the pavement and straighten curves. Common sense suggests that this will encourage even more traffic to whiz by our waterfront.
But the Village--East, Middle and West--can just say no to more motor mayhem. The Crosstown Trolley and Pedestrian Corridor proposed by VCTC is only a first step in a much needed comprehensive plan to reduce car and truck traffic and improve the livability of our community.
The hundreds of shops and residences obviously depend on motor vehicles for deliveries of food, consumer products and household goods. But trucks are not driven directly into restaurant kitchens or hoisted to apartments on upper floors. Virtually all goods that are too heavy to be carried are placed on hand trucks. These lightweight carts are then rolled along sidewalks from curbs to store or apartment entrances.
Naturally, delivery persons would like this distance to be as short as possible. Yet in a crowded city like New York trucks cannot always find a parking space precisely at the front door of their destination. Truckers are prepared to unload goods onto hand carts and lock truck doors while making deliveries. In many cases this distance can be considerable. For stores in the shopping concourses of the World Trade Center or Rockefeller Center trucks must use designated loading bays, often far removed from final delivery points. While this may increase problems for truckers it clearly is in the best public interest.
Careful planning and attentive day-to-day management will be needed for a vehicle-free Christopher St./8th St./St. Marks Place crosstown corridor to work. Trucks that carry substantial quantities of goods to restaurants and bars on a regular basis, would be allowed on the pedestrian way during designated early morning hours. These trucks would park at specific locations clear of the trolley tracks. Trucks with small package deliveries or making service calls would park at the curb on the nearest adjacent street. Some spaces now used by all day parkers would have to be reserved instead for trucks making deliveries.
With adequate planning deliveries can be accommodated with only a modest increase in time and cost. As merchants in shopping concourses have discovered this added inconvenience is more than offset by increased sales that occur in a pleasant shopping environment.
While solutions to these traffic and delivery concerns are outlined the task will not be easy. A comprehensive feasibility study is needed to fully appreciate the dimensions of these problems. And a better understanding of the damage to city living that occurs from unfettered automobility needs to be developed. We encourage our neighbors to join us in this exploration.
By William K. Guild
Light rail on the Village Crosstown line would not merely replace a slow, noisy, polluting fleet of diesel buses with modern, efficient light rail vehicles, but would restore an amenity absent from our streets for 60 years. Until their demise in 1936, as many as 46 streetcars per hour carried thousands of daily passengers along the 8th St. route from river to river, with branches north to Central Park, south to Delancey St. and, for a few years, even to Brooklyn. Trolleys can again provide frequent and reliable service, improving access for homes and businesses within the Village and to other transit lines reaching throughout the city.
The 8th St. transit corridor traces its history to the Christopher & 10th St. Railroad, a horsecar line chartered in 1873 to a company headed by Lewis May. From its East River terminal at the Greenpoint ferry, the tracks ran across 10th St. to Ave. A, turning south to 9th St. (westbound) and St. Marks Place (eastbound), then joined again at 4th Ave. to run double-track through 8th St. (then called Clinton Place) to 6th Ave. After a short jog up Greenwich Ave, the tracks divided into West 10th St. (westbound) and Christopher St. (eastbound) before joining at Washington and Christopher Streets for the final run across West St. to the D.L.& W. Hoboken Ferry pier. This is nearly identical to both the present route of the M-8 crosstown bus and the light rail route proposed by VCTC.
Disputes quickly flared with merchants and landowners, including one John Taylor Johnston, who occupied a house and stables at the southwest corner of 5th Ave. and 8th St. During the harsh winter of 1874-75, Johnston and others sought to restrain use of snow plows in front of their premises. Some even shovelled the snow back onto the streetcar tracks! The courts eventually ruled that the franchisees had a duty to keep their cars running, but required them to remove the snow to some other location within a reasonable time.
The 2¼ mile Christopher & 10th St. was leased in 1890 by the Central Crosstown Railroad, which also operated the 14th St. crosstown line. The 1890s were active and turbulent years for the street railways, with rapid conversion to electric traction and consolidation of smaller lines into a few large systems. Like all other Manhattan lines converting to electricity at the turn of the century, the 8th St. crosstown adopted a costly underground conduit feeder rather than overhead trolley wire, an "improvement" representing a tenfold increase in capital investment.
The 8th St. line began service to Brooklyn on February 16, 1904, two months after the official opening of the Williamsburg Bridge. The crosstown streetcars turned south at Ave. A to Delancey St. and across the bridge to Havemeyer St., allowing Manhattan (and even Hoboken) riders to reach Brooklyn directly. The trolley was a great way to reach Peter Luger's--Williamsburg's venerable (and still popular) steak house.
Economies of scale led to control by the Metropolitan Street Railway of virtually all Manhattan streetcar lines, but by 1907 even this immense system was in receivership. In 1912 the 8th St. line emerged as part of New York Railways, the "Green Line" which divided Manhattan surface operations with the Third Avenue Railway for a quarter-century. While the red-and-cream Third Avenue cars survived until after World War II, the "Green Line" succumbed a decade earlier to pressure from the LaGuardia administration to abandon þold fashionedþ streetcars in favor of buses. The 8th St. line ran its last streetcar on March 3, 1936, clearing the way for the crosstown bus and ever-increasing swarms of automobiles and trucks.
For many years 7th Ave. streetcars used the 8th St. crosstown tracks, from just west of 6th Ave. to Ave. A (see photo on page 1). This route, one of the busiest in the city, ran from 59th Street along 7th and Greenwich Aves. and, during rush hours, turned south to reach Delancey St. on the Lower East Side. In 1930 it averaged nearly 11,000 daily passengers, and the 8th St. line itself had another 9,000. The peak load point was Astor Place at the Lexington Ave. subway and Wanamaker's--the Village's once great emporium.
As originally proposed in the "Comprehensive Transit Plan" under which the 8th St. bus conversion was carried out, the line would have become two-way throughout. Between Astor Place and Ave. A, buses were to run in both directions on Stuyvesant Place and East 10th St.--designated a "secondary crosstown traffic thorough-fare"--and Christopher St. was also to become two-way. This part of the plan was not adopted, however, and the route was split even more when West 8th St. was made one way. The VCTC plan would unify the route without by- passing St. Marks Place, an ideal segment in a lively pedestrian corridor which can be drawn together and made more accessible by a modern light rail transit system.
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