Page:Vincent F. Seyfried - The Long Island Rail Road A Comprehensive History - Vol. 2 (1963).pdf/13

 The Flushing R.R. Takes Shape Ferry and promising not to use steam inside the city limits (Bushwick Avenue). Meanwhile surveyors checked on the feasibility of the Greenpoint route. The newspapers championed the Greenpoint route in their pages and insisted that a terminus there would be cheaper to acquire and less crowded, not to mention being slightly nearer.

After almost a year of waiting, the Common Council unexpectedly granted the Flushing Railroad a route in April 1853. The road would come by steam through Greenpoint and then use horse cars the full length of Kent Avenue and Wythe Avenue (one direction only), returning through North Thirteenth and South Eleventh Streets. Grooved rail was to be used and the grant would run for twenty-one years. No sooner had the Common Council acted than a public outcry arose against their action; Mayor Berry vetoed their grant, and the councilmen, unwilling to be caught out on a political limb, hastily rescinded their action.

Four months passed and the directors then publicly announced their final choice of terminus: the barren, swampy and wholly unsettled area of Hunter's Point. When this decision was made in September 1853, Long Island City as such had no existence at all. The whole area was low meadow and swamp land, covered with salt grass and dotted with occasional rock outcroppings. Several excellent reasons prompted this startling choice of site. By going to Hunter's Point the company could go through all the way to the water by steam; also it could operate over its own land the full distance. These two major advantages were available nowhere else. In addition, the Hunter's Point route was nearly all level, shorter, and therefore cheaper to build, and ran the length of Newtown Creek where way passengers and freight might reasonably be expected.

With the beginning of pleasant spring weather in April 1853, active work on the road began. The directors appointed Colonel James Warren Allen as chief engineer, and Mr. Cross sub-engineer; to Mr. D. F. Hoadley of Bridgeport, Connecticut, went the contract for grading and masonry between Flushing and Newtown. The directors themselves were busy negotiating for the right of way; some landowners resisted selling at all, resenting the invasion of their privacy; others held out for exorbitant sums for lands of little intrinsic value.