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

“Commuting,” or daily transit on discounted tickets, is an American term that goes back to the steam ferries serving Lower Manhattan from Brooklyn, the nation’s first suburb.

And in 1838, a Black stevedore named James Weeks bought a parcel straddling the tracks in what is now Crown Heights, and with other investors and activists established the community of Weeksville. Its convenient rail service was used to market lots, and Weeksville became a haven and power center for Black New Yorkers. Passenger seating was segregated. But in August 1851, Frederick Douglass’ paper reported, the LIRR provided a special train with 10 cars for a picnic of several thousand people on Black-owned land near Weeksville, celebrating emancipation in British West India — a forerunner of today’s J’Ouvert carnival.

The Central Railroad of New Jersey promoted commuter pricing  both as a business tactic and a form of social engineering, which would redistribute the urban population to wholesome environs while building up the railroad — and enriching developers. Its vice president, Dr. R.H. Gilbert, was a former director of field hospitals in the Civil War, and chief engineer and promoter of the first elevated railroad operated in New York. Rail freight was where the money was; commuter service was a loss leader.

By offering monthly tickets at a discount, Gilbert explained, railroads could encourage city dwellers to move their households to serene new homes in the countryside. Those commuters would attract other commuters. The railroad would deliver lumber to build their new homes, and coal to heat them, as well as home goods, groceries, ice, newspapers and mail. Wives and children would pay full price to ride the railroad into the city for entertainment and shopping, and would send their purchases home using the railroad’s horse-drawn express delivery service.

That was the model that was rapidly building the early railroad suburbs of America, such as Llewelyn Park in West Orange, NJ., Riverside, Ill, and Bronxville, NY. By 1852, the Hudson, Harlem and New Haven lines were channeling 2.5 million passengers a year into the city. The LIRR’s traffic was not so heavy: fewer than 200,000 riders were counted in 1845; but more than four times as many by 1869.

In Queens, a short railroad line linking Flushing with the East River triggered the building of the new community of West Flushing, now  Corona. East of Jamaica, “Woodville” was marketed in what is now Woodhaven. Much farther east, the railroad experimented with schemes to encourage development of the cheap real estate along the tracks in what they called the Wild Lands at the island’s empty center.

The early railroads experimented with ticket prices and car designs that could pay the bills while yielding to implacable social boundaries of race, class and gender. The first railroad cars were divided into compartments, English style. “Respectable” travelers found it distressing to be forced to mix with people of lesser station in  railroad cars, or as George Templeton Strong put it, the “riffraff and ragamuffins of every color and degree” he encountered on the deck of a cross-Sound ferry, when steamboat operator Cornelius Vanderbilt cut prices in a fare war.

 For women, railroad travel posed particular challenges. In 1835, Samuel Breck, a wealthy Philadelphian, huffed his disgust in his diary after declining to give up his seat on a New England train for a group of young female mill workers on a day’s outing:

“The rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant, the polite and the vulgar, all herd together in this modern improvement in traveling… Steam, so useful in many respects, interferes with the comfort of traveling, destroys every salutary distinction in society, and overturns with its whirligig power the once rational, gentlemanly and safe mode of getting along on a journey… Talk of ladies on board a steamboat or in a railroad car! There are none. I never feel like a gentleman there, and I cannot perceive a semblance of gentility in any one who makes part of the traveling mob… To restore herself to her caste, let a lady move in select company at five miles an hour, and take her meals in comfort at a good inn, where she may dine decently.”

A younger observer, Walt Whitman, alluded to that anxiety in 1846, writing about the social changes ushered in by the Long Island Railroad.

“There are divers old fashioned folks, ancient ladies and those under their charge, who cannot get out of their minds a dim connection between the steam-engine and Sathanus — who eschew modern innovations and wish to be taken in Christian style, by the aid of horses’ legs, to the very door of their destination,” he reflected in a Brooklyn Daily Eagle column.

The design of steam  engines makes locomotives very slow to accelerate from a standing start. As urbanist Lewis Mumford pointed out, this characteristic made it impractical to place stations closer than a mile apart, giving early American suburbs everywhere their spatial coherence. But it also made steam railroads a bad fit for a rapidly densifying city.

New York rejected steam locomotives from its urban core, and Brooklyn sharply restricted them from the beginning. The population objected to the soot, ash, noise, disrupted traffic, and especially their lethal tendency to startle urban horses. But the railroad’s value to industry and commuters would keep this question controversial in Brooklyn for sixty years.

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©2023 Text by Elizabeth K. Moore