Contemplating and Commemorating Rapid Transit in New York City
S.W. (Samuel W.) Green. Illustrated Depiction of the Broadway Pneumatic Underground Railroad. 1871. Museum of the City of New York. 42.314.142.
The recently opened Second Avenue Subway, and dreaded closure of the L train in 2019, has all of us at the Museum looking back on the very beginnings of the New York City subway system. Commuting between and in the five boroughs was not always so easy. New Yorkers relied on several varieties of transportation: ferries between Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, horse-drawn streetcars, elevated trains, and even a short-lived pneumatic underground railway.
Steve Scott Birmingham 