No, not the confusing crosswalk thing going on down around City Hall Park these days.
This was the Park Row Terminal, a transit hub that provided access to railroads and street cars that took passengers to the Brooklyn side.
Street cars disappeared from the bridge in 1950. I don’t know when the terminal bit the dust, but I like the open view of the bridge we have today.
Tags: Brooklyn bridge, Brooklyn Bridge transit, New York in 1906, Park Row Terminal, streetcars on Brooklyn Bridge, vintage Brooklyn Bridge postcards, Vintage NYC postcards
July 12, 2012 at 1:13 pm |
Some of its platforms served until 1944; demolished shortly thereafter.
Before we had a consolidated city, before we had a vision for “inter-borough” service, and before we granted railroads suitable charters, the terminal was the next best thing. Many Brooklyn elevated lines used it. Passengers paid another fare and made various connections through the years: trolleys, subway, City Hall spur of the 2nd/3rd Ave els.
According to the September 18, 1932 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the terminal traffic dropped from 16,699,727 in 1920 to 9,550,299 in 1931.
Pressures to raze the terminal included a general animus towards elevated lines, desire to create an open-air plaza approaching the Brooklyn side of the bridge, and the insatiable urge to add more lanes for automobiles.
Big subject for railheads.
July 12, 2012 at 5:35 pm |
The original of this is a glass plate in the LoC’s Detroit Publishing Co. collection.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/det1994002256/PP/
Download the biggest tif file and you can zoom in on faces. I love looking at these images.
There were a couple other images of it:
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/det1994009320/PP/
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/det1994015492/PP/
July 15, 2012 at 5:51 am |
You must give the city planners and transit people a lot of credit back then. No one had ever had to deal with this type of passenger influx before.