The ability to print the maps shown in color of course enhances the presentation. There is also an online interactive version which for some reason is not linked or referred to in the story, but is available if you follow @emmagf on Twitter, the NYT mass transit reporter who has now been promoted to be the City Hall Bureau Chief and who now rides a different subway to work.
The full page depiction is great, but only goes as far back as 1972, a year I'm sure that predates Emma and most of the NYT Metro Desk reporters, but a year that hardly predates myself. My comment to Ms. Fitzsimmons is one she can understand coming from me: you didn't go back far enough.
The other morning I checked out Turner Movie Chanel (TMC) and was rewarded with Clark Gable at Hialeah in a 1937 movie titled 'Saratoga.' The movie had already started, but through the ability of the DVR I was able to record the movie from the start. Being a life-long horse player, I'm looking forward to a full viewing later.
The scene I caught was the Gable character, clearly a fast-talking bookmaker of the pre-parimutel era, (in a double-breasted suit with sharp labels, no checkered coat) sitting with someone else and discussing the upcoming day's races. The person sitting with Gable describes the wiles of a woman as someone "who double-crossed you like the 6th Avenue El."
Well, maybe a close second to Gable, who has laid the hypnotic desire in Walter Pidgeon to place a $5,000 bet on a nag called Rest Her. Gable has apparently spent some time with Walter's girlfriend who is back at the hotel, and got her to convince Pidgeon, the pigeon that she's got a premonition that Rest Her is going to score big time.
Gable offers 7-1 odds to Pidgeon, who sits and watches the unfolding of the race, with Rest Her fading badly to finish last and who will likely only make it back to the barn, "just in time for dinner." Chicanery rules.
But the 6th Avenue El reference hits home. At one point there were elevated trains on 9th, 6th, 3rd and 2nd Avenues. I only remember the 3rd Avenue El that came down around 1955. The others were respectively demolished between 1938 and 1942.
My friend's father, who passed away in 1968, was born in 1902 near the 9th Avenue El in upper Manhattan. We remember him telling us it was one "high up there" line. At points, it looks like a roller coaster.
If you've ever seen photos of the 6th Avenue El wending its way through Herald Square you would know why the character sitting with Clark Gable remarks that is was crooked. It certainly was, as it would need to be if you understand how 6th Avenue and Broadway cross each other at Herald Square. (They still do, but now it's mostly a pedestrian plaza with bistro chairs and tables, a sometimes piano, and a permanent ping-pong table. Yes, a ping-pong table. And Mom always said you shouldn't play in the street. The times, they are a changin'.)
Somewhere in my collection of paper I have an old subway map that shows at least the 3rd and 2nd Avenue Els. The map is of course black and white. I also have photos of the 2nd and 3rd Avenue lines.
The 1972 map has been referred to as the Mondrian Map, as its straight colored lines can be seen to resemble his famous paintings. The map was a favorite depiction on t-shirts and coffee mugs, and I'm sure can be obtained at the Transit Museum gift shop.
That map resembled the 1930s map of the London subway. It's drawback was that it didn't show what was around the various stops. It really gave you no sense of say how to get to the Museum of Natural History.
All that was addressed in the 1979 and the 1998 versions. The current version is a true visual map of what's next to each stop, with the city's geographic terrain accurately depicted as well as the true shape of the subway lines.
You don't need an old map to pick out there are many "crooked" subway lines. Is it just my imagination that they seem most crooked in lower Manhattan, where the stock exchange, courts and City Hall are?
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