#transittuesday

Next stop, #TransitTuesday. This photograph shows New York City’s 14th St. elevated line station, and was taken to document the work of Ward and Gow, a New York advertising agency credited as being among the first firms to systematize advertising in New York’s transit network stations and trains.

This photograph was included in an album compiled by the company in 1910. Each of the fifteen images in the album includes a location in the lower right side of the image and, since many of the advertisements are for theater or vaudeville shows, for which Ward and Gow also did advertising, it is possible to date some of these images within a month's time. 

This #TransitTuesday has us pulling in to a train station to be, on the grounds of a train station that was. These photographs of the construction site of Chicago’s Union Station were taken on this day, June 2, in 1919, looking north and northeast from the site’s southwestern corner at the intersection of Clinton and Jackson Streets in Chicago's downtown-adjacent neighborhood of West Loop Gate. They were taken by Frank M. Hallenbeck (1874-1933), a Chicago photographer with a studio on South Dearborn Street, about a mile and a half away from the site.

The station replaced the first Union Station, built in 1881. Construction on site you see here was finally completed in 1925. At the photograph’s left, you can see the offices of Graham, Anderson, Probst, & White, who assumed responsibility for the site after the death of the structure’s first architect, Daniel Hudson Burnham (1846-1912). The new firm was founded after Burnham’s death by Ernest Graham (1868-1936), Burnham’s former partner in the prominent architectural firm of D. H. Burnham & Co. Today, the station stands as fourth-busiest rail terminal in the United States.

We’re taking shelter this #TransitTuesday in a spiffy 1961 aluminum bus stop, shown here being installed in a commuter lot in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area.

This #TransitTuesday, we’re sharing a 1978 photograph from Metro Center station in Washington D.C., the central hub station of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. At the time this photograph was captured, the station was relatively new. Metro Center, which opened to passengers in 1976, was one of the transit authority’s original Metro stations.

We’re traveling to New York City this #TransitTuesday to share an early 20th century photograph from the Warren Street express station, located at the intersection of Warren and Greenwich in Lower Manhattan. The station, which was built on February 14, 1870 and closed on June 11, 1940, served the now demolished IRT Ninth Avenue Line in the New York City Subway System.

This photograph was captured in 1910 for the New York City advertising agency Ward and Gow, in order to document their work. Ward and Gow is credited as one of the first firms to systematize advertising in the New York subway and elevated marketplace. Founded in 1899 by William Gow and Artemas Ward, a former ad manager for Enoch Morgan’s Sons Sapolio soap, the company worked as a syndicate of contractors in ten cities, selling streetcar advertising space at a standardized rate and terms. Ward & Gow attracted clients with the promise that they could place advertisements for national brands in thousands of streetcars and transit stations in cities nationwide with just a single contract. Ward & Gow’s business also grew to encompass monopoly control over vending machines and newsstands on elevated railway and subway platforms in New York City, as well as booking agent services for performers in the tourist destinations of Brighton Beach and Coney Island, where they also operated concession stands. The partnership was later dissolved in 1907 under poor terms, and Ward & Gow became Artemas Ward, Incorporated.

This #TransitTuesday, I’m sharing a lantern slide image that, more than 110 years after its creation, never fails to remind me that maybe I am just a little acrophobic after all.

This slide shows the Quebec Bridge over the Saint Lawrence River, as seen from above during construction on June 22, 1907. Still the longest cantilever bridge in the world, the 1,801 foot long Quebec Bridge was engineered by the Phoenix Bridge Company, based out of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.

In the two decades prior to the creation of this image, three of the Phoenix Bridge Company’s construction projects had collapsed, with tragic results. The month after this image was captured, a section of the bridge seen here collapsed, killing 75 of the 86 workers on the bridge and injuring the remaining survivors. The bridge was then rebuilt and completed under the oversight of the Canadian government, though not without incident; on September 11, 1916, a span of bridgework fell while being hoisted into position, killing 13 workers. The Quebec Bridge was finally completed and opened to the public in August 1919, and has spanned the river largely without incident in the years since. During these years, however, engineers tasked with investigating the bridge disasters, most notably John Galbraith, dean of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto, continued to advocate for changes in the profession to prevent similar catastrophes in the future. Much of the blame for the 1907 collapse ultimately fell on the consulting engineer, Theodore Cooper, and the Phoenix Bridge Company’s Chief Designing Engineer, Peter L. Szlapka. Cooper, a highly successful engineer with a number of prestigious projects behind him, had dismissed prior warnings from an engineer employed by the Canadian government, protesting that to act on the recommendations being made would “put me in the position of a subordinate, which I cannot accept.” Cooper also refused to supervise construction on site, and tasked the work to Szlapka, who was not qualified for the job. Cooper, Szlapka, and others involved in the disaster were excoriated in the Canadian press for having placed ego and profit above safety, and for neglecting their professional and ethical obligations.