Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/776

756 the proposition that 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 localities—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 generation 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 railway ever proposed to be built in the city of New York (in 1867 or 1868) 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 arms, 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 success 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