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The IRT Ninth Avenue Line, often called the Ninth Avenue Elevated or Ninth Avenue El, [1] was the first elevated railway in New York City.It opened in July 1868 as the West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway, as an experimental single-track cable-powered elevated railway from Battery Place, at the south end of Manhattan Island, northward up Greenwich Street to Cortlandt Street.
In 1875, the Rapid Transit Commission granted the New York Elevated Railway Company the right to construct the railway from Battery Park to the Harlem River along the Bowery and Third Avenue. [6] At that time the company already operated the Ninth Avenue Elevated , which it acquired in 1871 after the bankruptcy of the West Side and Yonkers ...
IRT composite construction subway cars replaced the wooden elevated cars on the line, but retained the elevated third rail shoes. [14] Dual third rail operation remained in use on the Jerome Avenue Line to the yards at Bedford Park until shuttle service ended in 1958; the structure and the bridge were removed in 1962. [14]
A competitive network of plank roads and surface and elevated railroads sprang up to connect and urbanize Long Island, especially the western parts. New York was not the first to develop rapid transit in the United States, but soon caught up. Elevated trains, after a modest introduction on 9th Avenue, spread in the 1880s.
It carried two tracks of the New York and Putnam Railroad, and later the 9th Avenue elevated line of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), as well as two pedestrian walkways outside the superstructure. The bridge opened to rail and pedestrian traffic on May 1, 1881, and operated until all rail service was discontinued on August 31, 1958.
The first cars were built in 1906–1907 by American Car and Foundry Company and St. Louis Car Company, which together delivered 182 all steel MUs to the New York Central Railroad. They were built for the electrification of the Hudson Division north of High Bridge and the electrification of the Harlem Division north of Wakefield. [1]
The following year, ownership passed to 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. [2]
On April 23, 1939 express service was inaugurated weekday and Saturday daytime in Queens between Queensboro Plaza and 111th Street, and elevated trains were cut back to 111th Street. On September 8, 1939 Astoria trains were rerouted in the weekday PM peak to City Hall. The Second Avenue Elevated was closed north of 59th Street June 12, 1940.