This Day in History: April 6, 1957

New York City ends trolley car service

New York’s electric trolleys ran their last trip through Queens to Manhattan.

New York City used to be an electric trolley town, beginning in the 1870s on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. Dozens of elevated lines rose and swiftly traveled over traffic-clogged streets. Whole neighborhoods came into being as former farmland was converted for business and residential purposes at the coming of elevated trains. The electric trolleys in Brooklyn and Queens replaced surface railroads and eliminated dangerous grade crossings.

Now New York City has replaced their trolley system with a subway system. By the time the first subway opened (which was originally a trolley car service), the lines had been consolidated into two privately-owned systems, Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (BRT, later Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation, BMT) and Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT). The city was closely involved; every line built for the IRT, and most other lines built or improved for the BRT after 1913, was built by the city and leased to the companies (via the original Contracts 1 and 2 for the IRT subway, and the Dual Contracts for later extensions and widenings). The first line of the city-owned and operated Independent Subway System (IND) opened in 1932; this system was intended to compete with the private systems and allow some of the elevated railways to be torn down, such as the New York City trolley car service.

The New York City Transit Authority was created in 1953 to take over subway (and bus/streetcar/trolley) operations from the city, and was placed under control of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1968.

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I am very excited that today is Friday, even though I will spend most of my weekend doing homework.

I hope you all have a better weekend than that!!
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Here we have this NYC Steinway Trolley model. During the first part of the 20th-century, trolley cars like these were a fixture in big cities. Designed in 1915, Birney Safety Cars bustled commuters for decades. The NYC Steinway Trolley ran past the infamous Steinway Piano Factory in Queens.