The Dawn of Rapid Transit in NYC: The LIRR in the Steam Age
by Elizabeth K. Moore

Colton’s New Map of Long Island, 1876. New York Public Library Digital Collections.

The failure of the LIRR’s express service to Boston had forced it to rely on local business overwhelmingly concentrated in Brooklyn. But inhabitants of the villages dotting Long Island’s north and south shores demanded service for themselves.

This Main Line had been built miles from their homes, so they depended for daily necessities on the visits of coastal steamers. In winter, as harbors iced, travel to the city meant an expensive stagecoach ride of six to nine miles to the railroad, and a long, frigid wait for one of two trains a day. Things were worse on the South Shore, where coastal travel was difficult in any season.

Residents wanted a North Side line and a South Side line, but the LIRR needed traffic for its struggling Main Line. Stockholders saw no dividend in offering better service for the same passengers.

Over the next fifty years, as historian Vincent Seyfried detailed, this basic conflict would result in  the branch structure the LIRR has today, and feed the fabled resentments of its riders. No one was the focus of more of that ire than Oliver Charlick, president of the railroad from 1863 to 1874, who had amassed a fortune and political clout operating New York City streetcar lines. Charlick rapidly developed the LIRR’s branch network, but destroyed his reputation in the process.

“The most unpopular (railroad) president in the United States, for his length of line, is Oliver Charlick of the Long Island R. R.,” the Washington, D.C. Star remarked in 1871.

The New York Times was blunter about what it called Charlick’s “parsimonious and stupid mismanagement.” On Long Island, said the Times in 1873, “there is, probably, no man in the country who is so thoroughly hated and despised… it has long been a maxim that it is impossible to libel Charlick…who has for years been utterly deaf to all remonstrances from the ill-used people… and who treats with cynical contempt the public opinion of three counties.”

Wealthy Flushing residents had been the first to revolt against the LIRR’s intransigence. In 1853, they built their own Flushing Railroad from the village to a ferry dock on Newtown Creek. The railroad  failed,  but was revived by a consortium that included industrialist Peter Cooper and five past and future New York mayors: William F. Havemeyer, Walter Bowne, Daniel F. Tieman, Cooper’s partner Abraham S. Hewitt  and his son, Edward Cooper.

Glen Cove residents were watching closely. In 1858, they held a public meeting to organize their own Glen Cove Branch Railroad. Many preferred the Flushing Railroad’s  more natural and direct route to New York, rather than a link to the LIRR Main Line. But Charlick, then a Long Island Railroad Company director, quickly stepped forward with warm promises to guide Glen Cove as a director of their branch railroad. The LIRR offered to build it on generous terms. Grateful residents agreed to link to the LIRR. They rounded up subscribers, solicited donations of land, and advertised for bids. But the line went unbuilt.

The two maps above, published in 1866 and 1876, show the route the LIRR apparently was expected to take — and how Charlick changed that route to head off the threat posed by the North Side Railroad of Long Island.

The next deep coastal inlet to the east of Hempstead Harbor was Cold Spring Harbor. Its wealthy residents had financed the building of a branch to their village from the Main Line, which had been completed about a mile past Syosset. Abruptly, and to their fury, Charlick’s crews abandoned the line north of Syosset, diverting the branch east and then north toward Huntington. It would come nowhere near Cold Spring Harbor. Then, for good measure, Charlick bought control of the Flushing railroad and its eastward-bound subsidiary.

So Huntington would have only one railroad to choose from: the LIRR. The village would soon face another shock as the track crews were nearing its downtown. Charlick decided villagers were demanding extortionate prices for land on the final stretch of right of way. So again he abruptly swung the tracks east, building Huntington’s station a mile and a half south of its Main Street. Instead of Huntington, the branch would now terminate in Northport, where eager villagers had proffered land and money. But Northport’s triumph soon turned to lamentation: Boosters in Smithtown and Port Jefferson were financing a further extension of the line. Northport, too, would be bypassed, the village greeting its last, occasional train in 1899.

Charlick’s ruthless haste was partly driven by an existential threat on the South Shore. There, Charles Fox had formed the South Side Railroad of Long Island, and begun building a line from Williamsburg to Patchogue, reaching the village of Babylon by 1867.

The South Side had immediately taken away many Charlick’s passengers and a share of his mail contract, and business was following wherever that railroad went: Electus Litchfield bought acreage and founded the village of Valley Stream in 1869; and in 1870, trainloads of German immigrants poured into 5,000 acres of former farmland developed as “Breslau” (now Lindenhurst). Now, South Fork villagers, tired of waiting for the LIRR to build a branch to their village, were agitating for the South Side to build one. And the South Side had won state permission to build as far as East Hampton.

So Charlick agreed to finally build a Sag Harbor branch from Riverhead, the Suffolk county seat. But he was unsatisfied with the response from Riverhead’s landowners. So instead, he built a branch that served the railroad, rather than citizens or passengers. The branch departed the Main Line more than nine miles west of the county seat, at a sparsely populated spot calculated to box in the South Side Railroad. Only after the South Side went bankrupt and came under the LIRR’s control a decade later as its Montauk Division, would Patchogue be connected with the East End by rail.

America’s era of railroad overbuilding had begun, and rail lines were spilling across the country like million-dollar spaghetti. When the new craze for sea bathing led the South Side Railroad to build a profitable line serving Rockaway Beach, Charlick hurried to match it with a branch of his own, its tracks running side by side with the competition.

Then department-store millionaire Alexander Turney Stewart built a new railroad to serve a planned community he called Garden City. He linked his line with one built by College Point industrialist Conrad Poppenhusen, allowing Stewart to carry passengers directly from the East River ferries to Garden City, and all the way to a ferry dock on the Great South Bay at Babylon.

Charlick replied to this new threat with a fare war. He built another unneeded rail line across Flushing, painted the cars white and  began selling 100-ticket coupon books at a deep discount. A thousand passengers switched from Poppenhusen’s railroad to Charlick’s “White Line” overnight.

But Charlick was ill by then, and would be mauled by a pair of New York City scandals. Former Mayor William F. Havemeyer, an LIRR director, had been re-elected after helping to drive Tammany Hall’s Tweed Ring from power. In 1873 he appointed Charlick to the city’s reformed police commission, with new responsibilities for ensuring fair elections and clean streets. Charlick’s political and business skills were always in demand in the city, but his record on the LIRR prompted howls of protest.

“What greater insult could Mayor Havemeyer put upon his betrayed fellow-citizens than to compel them to entrust the safety of their lives and property to this man?” the New York Times asked.

Tammany Hall, now out for revenge, filed a criminal complaint against Charlick for illegally firing certain of its election inspectors known to have tampered with votes. Then a series of anonymous letters accused Charlick of directing a corrupt “ring” to profit from the city’s filth, by using city workers, tugs and scows to haul street waste and shovel it as fill behind bulkheads for the manure handling dock he was building near the Long Island Railroad depot. With 110,000 horses on the streets of New York by that time, there was a lot of manure to handle.

After lengthy public hearings into what were called the Street Cleaning Bureau Frauds,  the Assembly called for Charlick to be fired; he also was convicted on the election charge. Defending Charlick, Havemeyer called “Honest John” Kelly, Tammany’s new Grand Sachem, more corrupt than Tweed. Kelly sued the mayor for libel. Havemeyer was on his way to the city from a weekend stay with Charlick on the first day of that libel trial when the LIRR’s engine broke a piston rod. After walking more than two miles in the cold, Havemeyer arrived at City Hall badly chilled, asked for a brandy, shuffled some papers and collapsed. He was the first New York mayor to die in office.

Charlick would die, too, five months later; black bunting went up at every railroad station on Long Island — except at Huntington, where he had not been forgiven for bypassing Main Street.

Popularity did not run railroads. The busy South Side Railroad had taken on too much debt, and failed in the Panic of 1873. Poppenhusen, widely admired for his acumen and philanthropy, and his well-appointed trains and service, brought all the competing lines under a single corporate umbrella. But when he had had a closer look at all their books, Poppenhusen concluded that the Long Island Railroad Company was in the soundest financial condition and should be the parent company.

Both Poppenhousen, personally, and his new, combined railroad soon were sunk by the weight of its debt, and the LIRR passed into another receivership. But some later observers believe the “parsimonious, stupid mismanagement” and sharp dealing of Charlick likely helped to preserve it as the nation’s oldest passenger railroad still operating under its original name and charter.

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©2023 Text by Elizabeth K. Moore