Upper East Side Subway?

"In a pig's eye" (as the saying goes).

     In the early 1800s, the upper-east side of Manhattan was marsh and farmland, intersected only by the Boston Post Road and NY & Harlem Railroad.  The single train station at 86th Street created the German-cultured area of Yorkville.  As the city's population quadrupled by 1855, it expanded northward.  
     Central Park was never part of the original Commissioners' Plan of 1811 (which gave the city its street grid).  Before the park, that space was a swamp surrounded by meadows that were occupied by squatters, freed slaves, livestock, and shantytowns 

     (Those shanties returned to Central Park during the Great Depression of the 1930s.  You can see them in the film My Man Godfrey.  Evidently, the park was allowed to deteriorate, so those slums reverted to it again).

     In 1858, the Olmsted brothers won the bid to design Central Park's 778 acres.  They finished in 1873.  That signaled Manhattan's (and America's) elite to build homes on either side of the park.

     The Third Avenue Elevated train was built in 1878. 

The Second Avenue El was built in 1879.  More people arrived.  
     While on the topic of trains, train tracks filled the land that is now Park Avenue.  It resembled this...

     Before Park Avenue was created to cover over the railroad tracks, in 1910, fashionable New Yorkers shunned the area and only favored Fifth Avenue.  After the tracks got covered by pavement, the extra-wide street became a haven for elite residences, some surpassing Fifth Avenue's grandeur. 

Park Avenue's width is unmistakable from an ariel view...

Beneath it, trains zoom northbound, out of the city.

     The Gilded Age didn't last long; the first apartment house to replace a private mansion on 5th Ave was in 1916.  From that moment onward, Manhattan's financiers fought each other and had the losers' mansions demolished... so America lost irrevocable architectural heritage. 
     Meanwhile, the Second Avenue Subway was proposed in 1919.  It intended to connect the boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx with Manhattan.  Construction never started.  Yet, "in anticipation of that subway route", the elevated subways on 2nd and 3rd Avenues were demolished.  Those were lies to allow those subways to be dismantled... never to be returned.  Passengers were furious. 
     Thus, the Lexington Avenue Subway line is the only one on the Upper East Side, and is therefore the busiest line in the United States!  It has 1.3 million daily riders!  It carries more passengers than the combined ridership of San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston's entire transit systems!  
     Why would a burgeoning and successful metropolis NEVER create another subway line, to ease the pressure?  Why wouldn't they care?  You must consider that the Upper East Side is the most valuable real estate in the nation.  Some of the world's wealthiest and powerful people have residences at the city's most expensive addresses there.
     Harlem sits directly north of those addresses.  The "borderline" is the top of Central Park: 110th Street.  [If you look at a map of NYC, Ivy-League Columbia University sits in that area, but it's not called Harlem: it's called Morningside Heights.  A steep geological ravine "protects" the area from the rest of Harlem].  

     Why does Harlem matter in this subway situation?
     After the Civil War draft riots (where rich folks paid someone else to take their place in battle), the neighborhood was a refuge for poor Jewish and Italian immigrants.  



     By the 1880s, the area gentrified... mostly due to anticipation of the subway line, which would connect Harlem to the rest of the city.  Handsomely ornate Victorian homes were built, as seen below...  

     Polo was played at the NY Polo Grounds.  In 1889, Oscar Hammerstein opened the Harlem Opera House.  That same year, the Harlem Monthly Magazine wrote, "it is evident ... that the centre of fashion, wealth, culture and intelligence must be found in honorable Harlem."  
     However, the delay in building the subway led to a fall in real estate prices, which attracted more immigrants.  A mass migration of black residents moved to Harlem in 1904.  Whenever you see a pattern of something, it's not by chance: it is being orchestrated.  Caused by black real estate entrepreneur, Phillip Payton, Jr., the migration funneled a black population into Harlem, from other areas in the city.  The construction of Pennsylvania Station demolished black tenements, too, and they relocated to Harlem.
     Overall, the early 20th-century's "Great Migration" of black people to northern cities was fueled by the promise of a better life than the "Jim Crow" South.  "Promise" is the key word, for there were no assurances.  (Just like the Statue of Liberty, which I'll blog about next).  They took trains from Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia and West Indies.  As blacks moved in, whites moved out.  In 1910, Harlem was 10% black; by 1930, it was 70%.  By the 1970s, even Italian Harlem (once represented by progressive NYC Mayor Fiorello La Guardia) was vacated by Italians and had become a slum.  Harlem's future, symbolized by those Victorian homes, was waning, as low-income families filled the area.
     But, an uptick occurred.  The Harlem Renaissance happened during the 1920s: jazz, poetry, acting, dance, literature.  

     It ended with the Great Depression of 1929 (which was created by NYC-based financial institutions).  

     After WWII, East Harlem was claimed by Puerto Rican and Latin American immigrants.  It's now called Spanish Harlem.  
     With an increase in poor population, Harlem began to deteriorate into a slum, lasting for decades.  It's amazing to NYC residents how its police force has condoned "certain areas" as crime-infested and simply hasn't cleaned it up in a century.  (It took Disney to clean up prostitute/drug-infested 42nd Street, after 70 years of the city letting it be that way).

Poor maintenance of buildings, lack of police, neglect by city government and "town fathers"... all fed the festering area.  

     You may have seen poor villages in other parts of the world.  They are modest but tidy.  They have decent residents.  

They are not necessarily slums, like the kind that Harlem turned into.  That takes coordinated effort to allow.  

     Unlike a poor village, Harlem also suffered higher infant mortality, crime, slum landlords, gang warfare, and destruction.  By the 1960s, race riots occurred, as blacks sought equality in our country, the "land of the free".  Yes, now the police were there.

     Understand the situation?  Okay, lets return to the subway situation.  (Remember that in 1889, East Harlem was an up-and-coming luxury community.  In 1910, the area was 10% black; by 1930, it was 70%).  
     In 1918--midway through the black migration--the Lexington Avenue subway line finally continued northward to 125th Street.  With that, the Upper East Side suddenly became easily accessible to the population from East Harlem and beyond.  Imagine their chagrin.

    A year later, in 1919, the Second Ave subway was proposed.  It is no wonder that "the powers that be" prevented any more subway lines from encroaching their elite territory.  Thus, no subways were built.  
     (In fact, the Lexington Avenue line has three trains: 4, 5, and 6.  The 4 and 5 make a stop at 59th Street--the beginning of the Upper East Side--and they don't stop again until 86th Street.  They don't even allow people to get off within the Upper East Side).

     UES residents don't use the subway, so they don't use their influence or wealth to pressure the authorities to fix it.  Instead, they pay taxes for the subway that they don't use and pay again to have "luxury shuttle buses" carry them to their offices (farther south on Lexington or Madison Avenues).

    They also pay for (dirty) taxis to carry them.

    The most-affluent ones pay salaries to chauffeurs.

     They also use police badges (obtained via favors/influence) to keep their cars illegally parked for their convenience.

     Yet, NYC's elected officials kept assuring their taxpayers that a new subway connection would be built to alleviate their commute on that side of the city.  
     Nothing happened.
     In 1964, Congress approved federal funding for mass transit projects across the country.  NYC used it for the Sixth Avenue line, but nothing was done for the Second Avenue "proposal".  In 1968, voters approved a transportation bond (worth $17,682,000,000) for a "Program for Action".  !!!  The Second Avenue subway was given top priority.  Nothing happened.  The money "evaporated", and by 1975, NYC was having a fiscal disaster (probably from the same money-hemorrhaging schemes that were permitted during the Boss Tweed and Beau James eras).  Some things never change.  
     After nearly a hundred years of insufficient public transportation, a tunneling contract was awarded to a "consortium" in 2007 to create a Second Avenue subway line.  Anyone who knows the corrupt construction stories of New York (like the Brooklyn Bridge, capital building of Albany, or Freedom Tower) will understand that such "construction" will soak up billions of dollars and go very very very slowly.  
     Ten years after the millennium, realtors and developers started renovating and reclaiming handsome properties in Harlem.  Gentrification resumed, for a third time since 1880.  

     In 2010, the infamous MTA turned on their tunnel boring machine, which stopped at 63rd Street in 2011.  According to the dishonest MTA, the section of line (1.5 mile segment) from 63rd Street to 96th Street should open by 2017.  Almost a century after it was proposed!  Incidentally, the Upper East Side begins at East 59th Street, northward until East 96th Street.  Since that's the next segment to be accessed by the Second Avenue subway, I'm skeptical that it'll happen.  In fact, I'm skeptical that it'll happen before Barcelona's Sagrada Familia is ever finished (and must finally be accepted/consecrated by the Catholic Church).  Meanwhile, folks will have to "press on" with the busiest subway line in America.

     City leaders have promised Second Avenue subway's completion by the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 90s and 2000s.  It may take another score of years to finish.  
     Most things happen for simple reasons.  The layers of complexity are only put in place to disguise the reasons.  Why corporations sabotage one another, why wars are launched, why nations get involved in foreign affairs, why intelligence agencies adopt programs, and why struggles continue.  Most are due to simple reasons/causes.  Mankind hasn't matured entirely.