The Long Island Rail Road: A Comprehensive History, Part Two: The Flushing, North Shore & Central Railroad/Chapter 1

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The Long Island Rail Road: A Comprehensive History, Part Two: The Flushing, North Shore & Central Railroad
by Vincent Francis Seyfried

Chapter I: Construction Days: The Flushing R. R. Takes Shape

Chapter 2

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4285439The Long Island Rail Road: A Comprehensive History, Part Two: The Flushing, North Shore & Central Railroad — Chapter I: Construction Days: The Flushing R. R. Takes ShapeVincent Francis Seyfried

CHAPTER I

Construction Days: The Flushing R. R. Takes Shape

BY 1850 THE VILLAGE OF FLUSHING, situated at the head of Flushing Bay and facing Long Island Sound, had already passed its 200th year of existence and had become populous and wealthy. Located only six miles from New York City and endowed with many scenic advantages, Flushing had already become well-known as a rural retreat for many wealthy New Yorkers, whose substantial homes dotted the village. Historically, Flushing was the home of the Quaker movement on Long Island, George Fox himself having preached in its rural lanes, and John Bowne having won the fight for religious freedom in Dutch days. Commercially, Flushing had long been famous for its botanical gardens and nurseries, which exported rare trees and flowering shrubs to the entire eastern seaboard. By the year 1850 there were about 2000 persons in the village itself and as many more in the township.

The people of Flushing, because of their proximity to the water, had for years depended primarily on steamboat accommodations to reach New York. Besides the boats which left the Town Dock several times a day, two or three lines of stage coaches provided communication with Brooklyn on the west, Jamaica to the south, and the north shore villages to the east. The coming of the railroad to Long Island in 1832 marked the beginning of a new era in communication. Because of the east-west orientation of Long Island, it was but natural that the first railroad should be constructed the length of the island from Brooklyn to Greenport. A village of the size and importance of Flushing, however, could not long remain outside the railroad network. The financing of the Long Island Rail Road itself had been a slow and difficult process, and the road was in no condition to undertake branch lines. It was clear that Flushing, if it wanted the benefits of rail connection with the metropolis, would have to finance and build a road of its own. The first impulse toward a rail project arose in the early 1840's and gradually gained momentum as line after line began to be built and successfully operated in and around New York City. The Flushing Journal took up the project as part of its campaign for municipal improvement, and regularly presented to its readers accounts of successful railroad schemes in towns of comparable size and situation.

The railroad project was not without its opponents, however. At the very time that a Flushing Railroad was first being seriously discussed, the plank roads were enjoying a surprising revival. Half a century before, in 1801, the first plank road was built from Flushing to Brooklyn. Thereafter, others were built at intervals, but in the short period 1850–1855, plank roads again sprang into public favor as a form of investment, and several new roads of this type appeared in Queens County. For a few years an active debate went on among Flushingites as to the relative advantages of a plank road vs. a railroad.

Gradually, the advocates of rail travel prevailed. It was argued that stage coaches on plank roads were limited as to size and uncomfortable to ride in, and the road itself precluded fast travel. The railroad, on the other hand, offered comfort, space, speed, and prestige to the community that boasted it. The completion of the Burlington & Mt. Holly R.R. in New Jersey in 1849 provided the first statistics on the probable cost of a Flushing R.R. The Jersey road was of comparable length and served a similar territory. It boasted two each of engines, coaches, freight cars and flat cars, and cost in all $90,000 to build and $12 a day to operate. The same engineer went over the Flushing ground and estimated that a road could be built for $121,000, and that the total time of travel, including ferry passage, would be only 23 minutes. There were at that time roughly 80 to 100 commuters daily to New York; if these paid 12½¢ a trip, the full daily running cost of about $13.50 a day would be earned, with a comfortable surplus for maintenance. Way passengers and freight would increase the profit further. It was pointed out that the trunk railroads out of New York had greatly developed building and settlement in the suburbs and the same could be expected from a road through Queens.

In January 1851 proponents of the railroad scheme drafted articles of association and began preparations to sell stock. In May a corps of engineers walked the Flushing meadows and reported back that a solid gravel stratum underlay the muck at a depth of 15–20 feet. At this point the project again became quiescent and months passed. In February 1852 the backers of the road formally incorporated and elected officers and a board of directors. The most solid men of the community were behind the project, bearing names like Bowne, Parsons, Underhill, Peck, etc.—names still commemorated by the streets of Flushing of our day. The capital stock was set at $200,000 and shares set at $20 each, so as to be within the reach of all classes. On March 3, 1852 the charter of the new road was officially issued at Albany. With the company officially launched, active promotion of the railroad scheme was begun in newspapers and public lectures. The directors made efforts to buy up the right of way as quickly as possible, for news of the scheme was inflating the value of land daily. The backers predicted a rosy future for the investors of the road and reasoned that the short, fast haul would divert all the business from the steamboats.

The enthusiasm of the Flushingites received its first check when some of the directors went to the neighboring village of Newtown (Elmhurst) to sell stock. The men set up headquarters in Wheeler's Hotel on Broadway, and in the course of one full day, failed to sell one single share of stock. Inquiries were made and explanations forthcoming. Newtowners brought forward three objections to the road: 1. Possible settlement in the wake of the railroad might drive out the market gardens from which Newtowners derived their revenue. 2. Railroad crossings would endanger life and property. 3. The travelling time to New York would probably not be materially shortened. The directors took this rebuff in stride and determined to do a little missionary work in Newtown to sell the railroad idea.

In Flushing, meanwhile, sales were going slowly, averaging about $15,000 a week. The newspapers scrutinized the subscription list, and commented that the buyers were too often wealthy men; the working class and those that owned property were insufficiently represented, and the paper urged their support as a public duty and moral obligation. Sales promotion continued all through the spring and summer of 1852 and in the fall public rallies were held. No public hall existed so the speakers mounted a wagon in front of the porch of the hotel and harangued the citizenry. Nothing in the way of construction could be done until enough money had been raised to buy the right of way and let contracts. As the months flew by, the directors had been dismayed to notice the spiraling price of land, and the beginnings of villages along the proposed route further complicated the acquisition of land. Statistics were released on travel and income designed to prove that the road would pay: 600 through passengers at 15¢ each and 300 way passengers at 12½¢ each would yield a profit of $27,084 a year, or between 13 and 14% on the capital stock. At the worst the return would be 7 to 8%. In December even the little village of Whitestone held a railroad rally and subscribed 100 shares of stock on the spot.

With the advent of the new year 1853, the directors and officers felt that further delay in land acquisition would be fatal and that enough money was on hand to let contracts. One important problem, however, still defied solution: where was the road to terminate? No one, from the beginning, had considered any other terminus than the Brooklyn waterfront. The problem was, to which ferry should the railroad run? Unfortunately, the main ferry terminals were located in heavily populated, commercial areas, and the streets all about were 80 feet wide at the most and choked with carriages and wagon traffic.

The directors had originally planned to operate by steam to Bushwick Avenue, and then operate horse cars over wooden rails to the Bridge Street Ferry in downtown Brooklyn. Later it had been decided to shorten the long horse car haul by running to Peck Slip Ferry at the foot of Broadway in Williamsburgh. An informal application to the Common Council of that village was rejected, on the ground that railroad operation would depreciate property, especially if steam power was used. Mayor Berry of Williamsburgh expressed the opinion that plank roads were of greater benefit to his city, and that he would veto any application for railroad operation in the street.

Faced with exclusion from Williamsburgh, the railroad men turned to Greenpoint as an equally favorable outlet. Greenpoint had been farmland until 1834, when streets were laid out, but by 1850 settlement was still very thin and no local opposition to a railroad could be expected. In any case a modified application was again made to the Williamsburgh authorities in May 1852, asking to use Montrose Avenue and Broadway to the Broadway 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.

The route, as finally settled on, ran from Main Street, Flushing, in almost a direct line to Maurice Avenue, Winfield; then curved very slightly southwest and again moved in a straight line to just short of Newtown Creek, where the road curved west and followed the creek line closely to the East River. By following the Newtown Creek route the road served Calvary Cemetery, founded five years before, and skirted Maspeth and Winfield, both new villages founded the year before (1852).

On Tuesday, May 10, 1853, the first ground was turned over at Cedar Point, the upland on the Corona side of the Flushing meadows. Mr. Hoadley, the contractor, had several teams of men and horses grading through Elmhurst and Corona, and a deadline of October 1 was set for completion of grading. Orders were placed for fifty-six pound rail. In June and July a line of piles was driven from the Flushing Creek across the low, swampy meadowland to the Corona upland. The present level of the Flushing meadows is comparatively modern, filling having been commenced in 1916 and continued until fifteen to twenty feet of ashes and rubble have obliterated the former extensive swampland. The wide, reedy Flushing Creek bridged by the engineers of 1853 was a far broader and deeper stream than the sluggish brook that remains today.

In September commissioners appointed by the courts condemned the last parcels needed for the road and awarded damages to the few stubborn holdouts who had tried to extort fortunes for their lands. At the same time the rails arrived and were being distributed all along the right of way. On October 1, 1853 the piling was completed on schedule and word arrived that the two locomotives and six cars would be ready for delivery on November 1.

In mid-October the editor of the Flushing Journal undertook to walk the whole right-of-way as a public service and noted that the superstructure on the pilework was all ready for track laying; as far as the eye could see, cross ties and iron dotted the route. Carts and gangs of men were busy making cuts and using the dirt to bring low spots up to grade. From Greenpoint Avenue in Long Island City another line of pilework began and continued for half a mile westward into Hunter's Point.

In order to give those of its patrons who might want to go to Brooklyn access to that place, the company secured permission from the Legislature to buy out the old Ravenswood, Hallett's Cove & Williamsburgh Turnpike & Bridge Co., which owned the Manhattan Avenue Bridge over Newtown Creek into Brooklyn, and Franklin Street on the Brooklyn side, down to Bushwick Creek, the border of Williamsburgh. The Brooklyn City R.R. was at that time (1853) extending its crosstown horse car line north up Kent Avenue to Bushwick Creek. The Flushing R.R. planned to lay track across Newtown Creek and down Franklin Street to the Bushwick Creek Bridge, where its passengers could change cars for all the Brooklyn ferries.

During the course of construction another dispute arose as to the exact location of the Flushing terminal. When the railroad scheme was first envisaged, two possible sites for a depot were considered, the first just below the bridge at Northern Boulevard and the second, the Prince Nursery grounds, extending from about Fortieth Road to Forty-first Road and from Main Street west to the creek. Advocates of the bridge site urged purchase of the existing bridge so as to save the expense of constructing a new one; also that the depot would be in the heart of the business district. (In 1850 Roosevelt Avenue was the southern limit of the built-up area in Flushing). The nursery site involved damages to the Prince family who owned the nursery and meant that the depot would be on the southern fringe of the village.

In February 1853 the directors settled on a depot site on the east side of Main Street midway between Northern Boulevard and Thirty-seventh Avenue. The selection of this site raised a storm of objection among Flushingites, particularly because trains would have to cross Lawrence, Hamilton, and Prince Streets, all three thickly populated and lined with houses, in order to reach the depot. When the directors saw the storm they had raised, they rescinded their resolution and voted to adopt the Prince nursery site.

To the great surprise and pleasure of the directors, a large strip of land and considerable frontage on Main Street was freely donated to the company for use as a depot site by William Redwood, owner of a mansion fronting Main Street on what is now Fortieth Road. After prolonged haggling with so many landowners for much less valuable sites along the right of way, it was a pleasure for the directors to meet with such a rare instance of generosity and public spirit! On October 4, 1853 contracts were advertised for the construction of a depot building, engine house, and car shop, returnable within ten days. Sylvester Roe, a Flushing builder, won the contract and commenced collecting materials on the site during November.

The gift of the Redwood property did not solve the depot problem completely; it merely provided land for a station and buildings. Mr. Prince instituted legal action to compel the company to change the angle of approach through his nursery grounds. He insisted that if the company were to place a curve on the meadows on the Corona side and then run the road in a straight line along a projected extension of Forty-first Avenue up to Main Street, damage to his nursery grounds would be at a minimum. He charged that the sole reason for the company's line of route was to secure the earth on several knolls on the Redwood property, and that this was a trivial reason for the location of a permanent installation like a railroad. The Prince claim received scant sympathy in the newspapers because of the delay it caused, and there were those who hinted darkly that Mr. Prince merely sought higher damages by this devious method.

Mr. Cross, the company surveyor, publicly testified that Mr. Prince's route had been checked, but that it would require 4300 feet of piling as against 3800; also that a curve would have to be located on the pile work, which was undesirable from an engineering point of view, and, finally, that the creek would have to be crossed diagonally, requiring a 500-foot bridge as against a 250-foot bridge. In view of the safety and cost factors the present route was preferred. To settle the dispute, the court appointed commissioners to check on the value of the 1.94 acres in dispute. Prince fulminated once more against the company, charging the engineer with imbecility and the directors with vanity, but his ruffled feathers were soothed on December 26th with a handsome settlement of $3200, of which $1200 was for trees. The large size of the award, double that of any other, was no doubt in deference to the Prince family, one of the oldest and most prominent in Flushing.

In the last days of 1853 the depot building in Flushing was rapidly being built, the drawbridge over Flushing Creek installed, the turntable dug out and laid with track, and the frame engine house and car shed completed. Some embarrassment was caused the company by stock delinquents, who were holding back the payment of their assessments. In spite of all the handicaps and delays and even abuse experienced, the company in its New Year's Day message expressed satisfaction in the progress of the work and tentatively suggested April 1–15, 1854 as the date when the "snort of the iron horse might be heard in our streets."

In February 1854, the company made provisions to overcome another difficulty, this one occasioned by the location of the terminus at Hunter's Point. At that early period no ferry existed at Borden or Jackson Avenue for the good reason that neither of these streets existed as yet, and that no one lived in Hunter's Point. To get its passengers to New York, therefore, the railroad had to acquire and operate its own ferry boats. In March 1854 the company succeeded in getting possession of two small steam ferry boats, the Enoch Dean and the Island City, two being acquired instead of one because ferry boats were liable to frequent repairs and very often a substitute proved unavailable at any price at the exact time wanted.

The Enoch Dean was purchased outright and the Island City chartered at $5 a day. One boat was to act as a ferry between Hunter's Point and Fulton Market Wharf, while the other, when not needed as a substitute, would ply between Flushing and New York at hours other than the railroad trains. In May the newly renovated Island City accidentally caught fire, and had it not been for the great exertions of the deckhands, would have burnt to the water line. Fortunately for the company, the boat was spared for future service and the insurance paid for all the damage.

The spring days of 1854 were devoted largely to putting the finishing touches to the railroad. By this time the company had secured full title to every foot of the right-of-way and had sufficient funds on hand to pay off the contractors. A deep cut near Penny Bridge was the last remaining obstacle on the road. In May the contractor announced that thirty clear working days would serve to finish the road; meanwhile the two locomotives ordered arrived in the week of May 6–13.

It happened that the last four days of June 1854 were scheduled by the New York Racing Ass'n. as racing days and the directors of the Flushing R.R. resolved to profit from the event by operating the road, even though it had not been formally turned over by the contractors. The National Course, formerly the Fashion Course, was located just east of Junction Avenue and north of Elmhurst Avenue in Corona, and attracted a large turnout of "sports" and "swells" as the racing devotees of that day were known. Access to the race course had previously been only by stagecoach from Astoria or Flushing; now it became possible for the first time to carry large crowds by rail. The Flushing Journal exulted in the prospect and paid honor to those who had piloted the railroad project through the many pitfalls of the last two seasons. On the eve of opening the road, the directors made two appointments: W. W. Kingsley as baggage master, and E. T. Dudley, late of the Harlem R.R., as superintendent. The first experimental trip was made over the road on June 23, 1854 in the late afternoon. As the locomotive steamed into Flushing at 4 P.M., it made a great impression and rejoiced the hearts of those who had believed in the project from the beginning.

The great day—June 26th—came and went without mishap and for the next four days the little engines and cars shuttled back and forth between the National Course and the East River with their loads of humanity. From the New York press, which covered the races and the results of each day, we learn that the event drew large crowds of men and fashionably dressed women, while many of the blooded horses of the day, some even brought up from the deep South for the event, ran daily heats. Mr. Dudley, the superintendent, ran ads in the dailies, offering "special" trains every half hour, running direct to the National Course; the running time is given as 30 minutes, and the fare 25¢. It was expected that there would be some kind of public celebration to mark the opening of the new road, but there is no record that any such occurred. After the last racing day (July 1st) the directors cut down the service to three trains only per day to give the contractors a chance to put the finishing touches to the road; then on July 17, 1854 the first timetable went into effect.