Most sports are like that. Print the schedule once, and the place will either fill up, or go nearly empty. No need to announce too much that there is a game. The fans know. Music, opera are like that as well.
Even an event as obscure as last night's presentation at the Williams Library, a four hundred square foot cornucopia of books, railroad pictures, memorabilia and mis-matched hotel ballroom chairs, located in upper recesses of Grand Central Terminal, it was nearly filled by virtue of e-mail and word-of-mouth. There were about thirty people, canes and hearing aids, in a room that can't hold much more.
The National Railway Historical Society meets there on the first Thursday of every month, except during July and August, when presumably its members ride the rails. The presentation last night was by Lawrence Stelter, the co-author of the book on the Third Avenue El. He wrote the text to accompany his father Lothar's incredible Kodachrome 1950 pictures that vividly document the era.
There have been two editions of the book. A hardcover version that came out many years ago and the current soft cover second edition, 'By the El: Third Avenue and Its El At Mid-Century.' The books were self-published by Mr. Stelter, an architect with the City who was born in 1957, just after the El was demolished.
My own connection with the book is that I'm mentioned in the Acknowledgements section, having contacted Mr. Stelter several times since the first edition. It is my grandfather's flower shop that appears in the lower left corner of the pages on the 18th Street stop. I remember the El and of course the shop. I thus got an invitation to the presentation.
Mike, the "sexton" of The Williams Library, showed me around half of it. Despite it's relative small size, the other half becomes hard to get in front of when people are sitting in the closely spaced chairs.
The library is reached by an elevator just inside Track 23 on the Upper Level of GCT. You need to be escorted now, post-9/11. This bring you to a level above the Apple store at the east end. From there you proceed along the glassed-in catwalk that allows you to look down at GCT with a view most people don't get. Apple iPads as seen from the Goodyear blimp, almost.
Another long corridor after going through an id card guarded door and you get to an area with staircases going up and down. It looks like a staircase landing at the old 8th Avenue Madison Square Garden. You're there. Mike opens two tight fitting doors and turns the lights on. Air conditioning happily follows as well.
It's a square room that first strikes you as being in shambles. But it really isn't. It is musty looking, however. There are books there that look like they'd fall apart if you took them out. There are periodicals on the shelves, but mostly the place is filled with parts of trains and pictures.
There are glass display cases with pins, patches and signs from the New York Central Railroad.I gathered from the opening comments that the National Railway Historical Society is devoted to fans of the steam locomotive era. Diesel seems frowned on, and electric is not represented.
I asked Mr. Stelter if he comes there all the time. He said, "Oh no, I'm a member of the Electric Train Society." He was a guest as well.
The room holds a somewhat dirty red carpet, displayed like a tapestry, that would have been the upscale welcome mat for the people getting on the 20th Century Limited. The train's logo is woven in. This is the New York to Chicago train that William Powell and Myrna Loy and Asta took in the 'Thin Man' movies. I mentioned to Mike that I used to go to Chicago with my mother on the Broadway Limited that left Pennsylvania Station in the 1950s. Mike didn't exactly put up a sign of the cross with his hands, but did say they were the competition.
There is a small banjo clock on the wall, surrounded by old pictures. There is what looks like the world's heaviest coaster along a ledge halfway up to the ceiling. It's a steel wheel from a train. Models of trains are seen throughout.
As familiar as I am with the Stelter book, I learned several new things. Mr. Stelter himself said he nearly always finds something he didn't first see in the pictures, and when you look at the book you can understand why. There is great clarity in the pictures of everyday 1950s life along Third Avenue.
I didn't realize, even from looking at the book, that the express stations stops were two levels. There were three tracks, with the middle track the express service, reversing direction for the rush hours. There were no signals on the local tracks. It was "line of sight" movement. There were signals on the express tracks, and the express went from 34th Street to 106th Street, an incredible continuous run.
The third tube of the Lincoln Tunnel is made from steel taken from the demolished El. The sidewalk clock at 85th Street seen in the 1945 movie 'The Lost Weekend' is still there. It doesn't have the pawnbroker's three gold balls above it, as seen in the book. The clock still works. When Ray Milland woozily walks by it in the movie it's one o'clock, and a train can be seen above. In the book it's five o'clock in the afternoon.
The presentation closes with a picture of the rear of the train on its last run along the elevated tracks: May 12, 1955. Mr. Stelter's parents took the ride, along with many others. His parents are both still alive, with it being mentioned in passing when his presentation got to the Cooper Union stop that his mother [my emphasis] graduated from there. His father worked for New York Telephone and photographed the El on his lunch hour from various spots depending on where he was sent for the day.
Mr. Stelter quipped that he thinks he was conceived when his parents met at a seminar on how to use Kodachrome film better. The recent discontinuance of Kodachrome by Kodak was treated like a death in the family.
A member of the audience said that he too was on that last train ride. He recounted the story that the emergency cord was constantly being pulled so the train would stop and people could take pictures of the surrounding areas. Mr. Stelter relates that his father said a cop finally cut the cord so that it could no longer be pulled.
The Third Avenue El was the last of the Manhattan El trains to be discontinued and demolished. At one time there also were El trains on 9th, 6th, and 2nd Avenues, with crosstown trains at 34th Street and 42nd streets in the latter part of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th. So unknown were these other avenue Els that engineers doing work on 6th Avenue didn't even know of the El's existence until they unexpectedly found footings buried in the street that hadn't been removed, delaying a then current roadway project.
So, who killed off the dinosaurs? Mr. Stelter explains that there was a 1950s study by some city planners that argued that declining ridership and unsightliness were reasons enough to discontinue and demolish the line. Mr. Stelter recounts he did his Master's thesis on this planning decision. The Bloomingdale family, whose department store bumped up against the El at 59th Street lobbied heavily to have it removed.
Its removal did have the effect of opening the avenue up to light, and development. Big development. Third Avenue had an established seedy reputation by the time the 1950s rolled around; bars, rooming houses, and pawnbrokers. Lots of bars. Mr. Stelter said he found over 100 bars listed in a 1950s phone book. There could be several on the same block. An old-timer co-worker my friend once visited in a St. Albans,Vermont nursing home answered the question if he watched much TV with the response that there was "nothing on TV but Third Avenue trash." There are those who might find that remark timeless. Barbara Stanwyck in the 1941 movie comedy 'Ball of Fire' makes a nearly similar disparaging remark. The reputation remained.
The corner building that flower shop was in and where my father's family basically grew up was torn down. The shop moved across the street to occupy the corner store of the new northwest corner 1950s six-story apartment house that replaced the building barely seen in the 18th Street stop photo. I remember the hole in the ground for the foundation of this building. The building was built by the landlord developers Belkind and Brenner, who had several other apartment building in the area, and whose building I can still pick out.
They missed the absolute high-rise boom, however. The southwest corner became a high-rise 'luxury' building that is still there: The other two east side corners each also became high-rises, each succeeding one taller than the other. At one point in the early 60s I remember some old-timers claiming they were going to rename the avenue 'Paradise Avenue.'
Luckily, 'Paradise' was not adopted as a name, and the numerical designation sticks. Even 6th Avenue, after years and years (since the 1940s) of officially being known as Avenue of the Americas is now also labeled 6th Avenue. Thank goodness.
Second Avenue is only now getting a rail replacement for the 2nd Avenue El, discontinued in 1942. My father remembered a 1930s bond issue that was reappropriated after approval that was meant to build a subway line. Mr. Stelter added his father's recollection of this as well. Sounds somewhat like a Bob Dylan song, "It's been a long time coming," And if the Irish sandhogs don't blow up the street level buildings, there might actually be a line there someday.
As the 1955 newsreel concludes, "The El is at the end of the line. The El belongs to the past."
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