The Missing Links

From Max Hubacher’s tour of elevated trains and streetcars, “Lexington Avenue El” from October 13, 1950: If you’re reasonably familiar with NYC’s transit, that sounds very strange. The Lexington Avenue subway was constructed to replace the Third Avenue el. The clarification is simple: this is Brooklyn, not Manhattan, and we’re talking about a completely different street called “Lexington Avenue.” Subway maps are just about always distorted, but let’s start with one, a 1924 map of the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT) lines: This is a company-specific map and does not show the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) lines in Manhattan and the Bronx. It does show the Flushing line (here called the Corona Line because it ends in Corona, with the last three stations to Flushing shown dashed for “to be constructed.”) because that line was run jointly between the BMT company and the IRT. In 1924, IRT service went over the Queensborough bridge and then downtown on the Second Avenue el,…