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16-565: By the late 1870s, the elevated railways in Manhattan were operated by two companies, the Metropolitan Elevated Railway (Sixth Avenue) and New York Elevated Railroad (Third and Ninth Avenues). The Metropolitan also began constructing a line above Second Avenue. The Manhattan Railway Company was chartered on December 29, 1875, and leased both companies on May 20, 1879. The company was the subject of investigation by

32-575: A coalition of commercial establishments and building owners along Sixth Avenue campaigned to have the El removed, on the grounds that it was depressing business and property values. In 1936, work started on the underground Sixth Avenue Line , operated by the city as part of the Independent Subway System (IND). As part of the plan, three of New York City's private subway companies (the IND;

48-684: A series of companies and jurisdictions, mainly the IRT, the elevated lines began to disappear, with the first line closing in 1938, and the final section closing in 1973: Substation 7 , built by the company around 1898 to convert alternating current to direct current, survives at 1782 Third Avenue, at 99th Street and is on the National Register of Historic Places . The contemporaneous 74th Street Powerhouse at York Avenue supplies electricity for Consolidated Edison . IRT Sixth Avenue Line The IRT Sixth Avenue Line , often called

64-501: The Manhattan Railway Company , which also controlled the other elevated railways in Manhattan. In 1881, the line was connected to the largely rebuilt Ninth Avenue Elevated; it was joined in the south at Morris Street, and in the north by a connecting link running across 53rd Street. And it ran 24/7. Due to its central location in Manhattan and the inversion of the usual relationship between street noise and height,

80-613: The New York State Legislature 's Hepburn Committee which exposed a scheme that involved barely legal business practices and massive watering of the company's stock in order to raise its nominal value from $ 2 million to $ 15 million. The exposure of the shady business practices of the company led the Hepburn Committee to propose an act of the legislature outlawing fictitious "ownership" of railroads via leases and related stock watering schemes. From 1881,

96-814: The Sixth Avenue Elevated or Sixth Avenue El , was the second elevated railway in Manhattan in New York City , following the Ninth Avenue Elevated . The line ran south of Central Park , mainly along Sixth Avenue . Beyond the park, trains continued north on the Ninth Avenue Line. The elevated line was constructed during the 1870s by the Gilbert Elevated Railway , subsequently reorganized as

112-550: The IRT; and the Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit Corporation , or BMT) would be combined into one system, and the IRT Sixth Avenue elevated would be demolished. The city of New York acquired the line from the bondholders of the Manhattan Railway Company for $ 12,500,000, of which the city recovered $ 9,010,656 in back taxes and interest, in 1938. Subsequently, the El was closed on December 4, 1938. It

128-632: The Manhattan Railway Company, when Gould refused Croker's attempt to attach compressed-air pipes to the Elevated company's structures. Croker owned many shares of the New York Auto-Truck Company, a company which would have benefited from the arrangement. In response to the refusal, Croker used Tammany influence to create new city laws requiring drip pans under structures in Manhattan at every street crossing and

144-510: The Metropolitan Elevated Railway. The line opened on June 5, 1878 between Rector Street and 58th Street. Its route ran north from the corner of Rector Street and Trinity Place up Trinity Place / Church Street , then west for a block at Murray Street, then north again on West Broadway , west again across West 3rd Street to the foot of Sixth Avenue, and then north to 59th Street. The following year, ownership passed to

160-533: The Sixth Avenue El attracted artists; in addition to being the subject of several paintings by John French Sloan , it was also painted by Francis Criss and others. As of 1934, the following services were being operated: As with many elevated railways in the city, the Sixth Avenue El made life difficult for those nearby. It was noisy, it made buildings shake, and in the line's early years, it dropped ash, oil, and cinders on pedestrians below. Eventually,

176-670: The Third Avenue Line and the Sixth Avenue Line were in service 24/7. The Suburban Rapid Transit Company , operating the Third Avenue Line in the Bronx, was leased on June 4, 1891; all three companies were eventually merged into the Manhattan Railway Company in February 1890. Richard Croker , boss of Tammany Hall , was in the newspapers in 1899 after a disagreement with Jay Gould's son, George Gould , president of

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192-557: The contract provided that not one ounce of that steel could be exported to Japan or to any one else." Isaacs said that the contractor was prohibited from exporting the steel from the El, and carried out his obligation to the letter. Reports of the supposed sale of the scrap to Japan persisted. In 1961, an attorney for the Harris Structural Steel Company, which was involved in the demolition, told syndicated columnist George Sokolsky that continued reports of

208-479: The requirement that the railroad run trains every five minutes with a $ 100 violation for every instance. The Interborough Rapid Transit Company , incorporated in April 1902 as the operating company for its first subway line , signed a 999-year lease on the Manhattan Railway Company lines on April 1, 1903, over a year before the subway opened. Finally, after 60 or more years of service, and after having operated under

224-573: The scrap did not go directly to Japan, for possible use against China, such a large amount of scrap metal arriving on the market would free up metal to be sent to Japan. At a meeting of the New York City Board of Estimate in 1942, Stanley M. Isaacs, the Manhattan Borough President, denied that steel from the El was sold to Japan. Isaacs said that when the demolition contract was drafted in 1938, "at my insistence

240-599: The structure provided affidavits to the New York City Council that none of the iron would leave the United States. The inaccurate rumors were later included within the lines of E. E. Cummings 's 1944 poem "plato told." Twenty thousand tons of scrap metal from the El was sold to a dealer on the west coast who was in the export business. The New York Times pointed out in December 1938 that even if

256-475: Was razed during 1939 to make way for the IND line. The section of the IND line that was located under Sixth Avenue opened in December 1940. The footings for the elevated were rediscovered in the early 1990s during a Sixth Avenue renovation project. In order to alleviate any concern that the scrap metal might be exported to the Japanese , demolition contractor Tom Harris, who had received $ 40,000 to demolish

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