Stations

A friend came upon this old picture of the Church of the Holy Apostles, back when Ninth Avenue still had an elevated train running along it. I knew about the Ninth Avenue El, of course, having often mentioned it in connection with the location of the first site of The New School in the 1920s, but New School's brownstones on West 23rd and 24th Street were in the middle of the block between Eight and Ninth Avenue (just as the next site was to be off the Sixth Avenue Elevated on West 12th St), so I didn't think much about the racket. Judging from this picture, Holy Apostles must have had quite a bit of noise! The Ninth Avenue El, New York's first elevated train line, came down by 1940, but a quick Wikipedia search turns up a fascinating factoid. The northern end of the first stretch of the elevated line, opened in 1868, was at West 29th Street, just next to the church, which had just been completed 20 years before! (Apparently several railways lines had their terminus on Ninth Ave, starting at West 30th Street.) The line grew, reaching 59th Street and then Harlem, and already by 1873 the 29th Street station had been dismantled. But the trains will have screeched and rattled past for another sixty years.

This was the terminal, and this the view from the churchyard...