Stop lamenting the subways that weren’t, and start understanding the main drivers of New York’s subway history.
New York boasts not just its built subway system, 472 stations along 665 miles of revenue track, but also an impressive unbuilt subway system. As author Joseph B. Raskin described it, a 1920 city expansion plan — the City never formally committed to it — called for “five new trunk lines and nine new crosstown lines in Manhattan, eight new lines or extensions in the Bronx, thirteen new lines or extensions in Queens, fifteen new lines or branches in Brooklyn, and five new lines to serve Staten Island.” What happened to New York’s ghost subways to consign them to phantom memory? The popular notion is that 20th century urban villain Robert Moses consigned the blueprints to the shredder in favor of roads, and that after Moses departed, we stopped knowing how to build anything at all.
But the truth is more complicated, and interesting, and instructive. In fact, the demise of these expansion plans and so many others like them is proof that the problems that hamper good planning and building to this day — who is in charge? who will pay? — have been with us nearly from the start.
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
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