He declared that the Third Avenue el would not be demolished until the city built the Second Avenue subway. It soon became painfully clear to him, however, that the city could not afford the subway.
     The failure to build transit, however, cannot solely be attributed to property owners' unwillingness to pay for it through their taxes. If there were massive, widespread support among the city's residents for the Second Avenue line, politicians would have taken notice. Transit lines, however, almost by definition, serve particular communities within the city.
     Any grassroots public support for the Second Avenue line would have to have been been community-based, not city-wide.Such community interests have a difficult time getting their voices heard, and often the interests of different communities may conflict. Opposition to el demolition in the Bronx and Queens illustrates the limits of community-based calls for transit.

By the 1930’s, however, developers were coming to see automobiles as more powerful engines of development. Real estate therefore lost interest in transit. Consequently, property owners did not want to pay for transit. The First Avenue Association, for example, in 1941 advocated a subway fare increase "to relieve real estate of the $30,000,000 burden now imposed on it because of inadequacy of the nickel fare to pay the cost of operating the subways." The association viewed transit not as beneficial to real estate, but as a wasteful government expense that kept property taxes too high.

Politics and the Fare -- Again
     City officials found transit to be an annoying political quandary. La Guardia knew that permitting transit to run deficits annoyed property owners, who resented that their tax dollars went to subsidize the subway. He also knew that any attempt to cover the deficit by raising fares would arouse the ire of New York's millions of subway riders. His only hope, therefore, was that Unification would create a transit system that would break even, or even earn a profit. To ensure this, he sought to tear down the unprofitable Second Avenue el. Given the political necessity that transit be self-sustaining, a new line could only be built if planners thought that it would not lose money. In this context, the Second Avenue subway was not felt to be a good deal.

A preliminary study of the Second Avenue subway, prepared for the Board of Estimate in 1944, concluded that "the Second Avenue line would not produce any additional revenue for the New York City Transit System, but would merely divert passengers from existing lines, and greatly increase the expense of operation of the System, besides adding about $12,000,000 per year to the City debt service."
     Essentially, the report's message was that, at a time when transit funding was quite precarious, the city could not afford to build or even operate the Second Avenue subway. As a temporary expedient, La Guardia kept the Third Avenue el running, to relieve overcrowding on the Lexington Avenue subway.

Second Avenue Express. Ten of these R11 model cars, dubbed "The Million Dollar Train" were to be the prototype for a fleet expansion to serve the new Second Avenue Subway. The rest of the fleet was never built and, like the BMT's Zephyr and Green Hornet experimentals, the prototype train ended itsr service life on Brooklyn's Franklin Avenue Shuttle.

©2001 Alexander Nobler Cohen. ©2001 The Composing Stack Inc. All rights reserved