Sixth Avenue must have been awfully dark and grimy back in the days of the hulking El. This photo is from 1938. The Jefferson Market clock building and Bigelow’s are still there, of course. But the hideous Women’s House of Detention met the wrecking ball in 1974.
The Sixth Avenue El was dismantled in 1939 and sold as scrap metal to the Japanese, who supposedly melted it into ammo during World War II. Hence the great e.e. cummings anti-war line, “It took a nipponized bit of the old Sixth Avenue El, in the top of his head, to tell him.” The full poem is here.
Tags: e. e. cummings, Greenwich Village, Jefferson market, sixth avenue el
Ephemeral New York 
June 11, 2008 at 4:33 am |
[…] See an earlier post with a 1940 photo of Jefferson Market here. […]
November 10, 2008 at 6:59 am |
[…] The El ran from 59th Street and Sixth Avenue, abruptly turned down West Third Street to West Broadway, then snaked down to Rector Street. It was torn down in the 1930s. […]
May 30, 2012 at 4:51 pm |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Sixth_Avenue_Line says:
“Stanley M. Isaacs, the Manhattan Borough President, said, “at my insistence the contract provided that not one ounce of that steel could be exported to Japan or to any one else.”[4] Isaacs said that the contractor was prohibited from exporting the steel from the El, and carried out his obligation to the letter.[5]”
July 29, 2012 at 8:11 am |
aaasdfsasdfasdf
March 20, 2014 at 6:11 pm |
plato told
him:he couldn’t
believe it(jesus
told him;he
wouldn’t believe
it)lao
tsze
certainly told
him,and general
(yes
mam)
sherman;
and even
(believe it
or
not)you
told him:i told
him;we told him
(he didn’t believe it,no
sir)it took
a nipponized bit of
the old sixth
avenue
el;in the top of his head:to tell
him
December 19, 2023 at 11:11 am |
thank you sam. suddenly timely, again
September 2, 2016 at 8:28 am |
[…] Romany Marie’s, the (Bruno’s) Garret, and the Crumperie on Washington Place are in history’s dustbin. So is the speakeasy Club Fronton and the Sixth Avenue El, memorialized by John Sloan and e.e. cummings. […]
December 30, 2016 at 6:40 am |
[…] the Sixth Avenue El, which was memorialized by poets and depicted by painters, the Second Avenue line didn’t get much […]
April 5, 2021 at 3:00 am |
[…] this lithograph was made by Leonard Pytlak in 1935, Manhattan’s elevated train lines were still screeching and lurching up and down the city’s major […]