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| Re: Nighttime Shot of 3rd Ave El at 67th Street (1953) (1457676) | |||
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Re: Nighttime Shot of 3rd Ave El at 67th Street (1953) |
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Posted by qveensboro_plaza on Sun Dec 10 11:12:25 2017, in response to Re: Nighttime Shot of 3rd Ave El at 67th Street (1953), posted by JOE @ NYCMTS - NYCTMG on Thu Dec 7 14:04:16 2017. JoeThank you very much for this photo of the original 161 Street station, and the clarification of MUDS vs Composite. What a bustling thoroughfare Third Avenue was! In the early 1970s I taught at an elementary school at 139/Willis Avenue in the South Bronx. The former private ROW of the Third Ave El passed right behind the school, and high on the wall of an adjacent (then-abandoned) tenement building was a faded sign that read "All Cars Transfer to Bloomingdales," similar to the one on the building in your photo. I wish I had thought to take a photo of it at the time. (Back when the El was running, Bloomingdale's was not the upscale boutique store it is today, but a typical large department store catering to a broad segment of styles and budgets. The El must have been a big source of customers who wanted to shop downtown rather than at The Hub, so it is no surprise that Bloomingdale's advertised heavily all along the El route.) Regarding the MUDC cars, I remember my father (who was an IRT motorman for 35 years) taking me to ride on the Third Ave El before it shut down. I was four years old. We boarded at 42nd Street, having traveled in from Queens on the 7 train, and rode downtown. There was a shop back then that sold model trains (I think on 23rd Street, if I recall correctly) and I remember we went in to look, then took the El back up to 42nd Street. The only thing I remember clearly about the El ride was the very strange looking doors, with their narrow vertical windows, and the sound they made as they opened and closed. The trains seemed such a contrast to the modern R-12 and R-15s we had on the Flusing Line. Funny the things that stay in a child's memory. When my father passed away many years ago, my mother found that he had kept one of his motorman's tools - is it called a throttle? A metal handle with (again, if I recall correctly) a square or hexagonal hole at one end that fitted on to the power console in the motorman's cab. He also kept a mimeographed bound set of instructions from 1948 regarding lo-V operating procedures. I don't know what my mother did with these items, but they disappeared sometime over the years. Again, thanks very much for your incredible research and knowledge. |
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