Riding the rails, above and below Long Island City 1
Looking west from the LIRR Hunters Point station pedestrian bridge, with a subway train at the left, on April 9, 1948.
Posted: Thursday, July 9, 2015 10:30 am
Queens Chronicle
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Long Island City was always well-equipped with transportation because of its once-large industries devoted to making bread, crackers, chewing gum, cakes, ice cream, snap fasteners, staplers and movie projectors to name just a few. Manufacturing these items here played an important part in developing Queens’ middle class.
With both subway and elevated rapid transit lines, ease of travel was always a strong selling point of this area. Rail traffic was also accommodated by the Long Island Rail Road, a division of the Pennsylvania Rail Road for the first half of the last century, and the railroad that enters Long Island City via the Hell Gate Bridge.
At the Hunters Point station (seen at the right in this photo), Manhattan-bound passengers arriving on trains from Long Island could climb a stairway, walk half a block over a bridge (from which this photo was taken) and descend to the Hunters Point Avenue IRT subway station below street level to take the Grand Central-Fifth Avenue-Times Square line into the city.
In the middle of the photo is an LIRR train headed toward the East River tunnel on its way to Pennsylvania Station.
The picture was taken on the day the Hunters Point Avenue subway station introduced the very first modern chrome turnstiles that were later everywhere.
The factories are mostly gone now but the population has exploded, as many were converted into housing and more residential towers are going up all the time.
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I have often walked
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Thursday, July 9, 2015 10:30 am.
