Walking the El

The end came abruptly for the Third Avenue El. At 6:04 p.m. on May 12, 1955 – appropriately four minutes behind schedule – the last elevated uptown train rolled out of Chinatown, bound for the Bronx and then for incineration, Sewell Chan of The Times wrote in 2005.

Subway ridership was declining steadily, and elevated railways, at least in Manhattan, were seen as a thing of the past. So down they went: Sixth Avenue in 1938, Ninth Avenue in 1940 and Second Avenue in 1942. Third Avenue was the last of the borough’s four fully elevated train lines.

A Times staff photographer took this photo of a police officer making the rounds on the abandoned tracks. “Yet despite this and other death knells, the El is far from gone,” Sewell Chan wrote. “It rumbles over the streets of Inwood in Upper Manhattan, in University Heights and Pelham Bay in the Bronx, in Bensonhurst and Bushwick in Brooklyn, in Middle Village and Woodside in Queens.” The article continued: “This urban survivor continues to be threaded through the city’s life. For those who use it, live and work near it, or keep it from falling apart, the El is neither a scourge upon the city nor a touchstone for nostalgia. It simply is.”