Many Forms of Transportation, New York City

Creator

Keystone View Company

Preview

Creation Date

1905

Description

In this lantern slide, various methods of transportation are present on and above the New York City streets. In the upper portion of the image is one of the city’s elevated railways, an innovation incorporated into the city between 1867 and 1870 by Charles Harvey and the West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway company. Harvey and his company were contributors to a major transportation trend in New York City at the turn of the Nineteenth Century, where elevated railways and cable cars covered much of the Manhattan and western Brooklyn areas. None of the elevated railways remain today, but some were later incorporated in the subway systems that replaced them. Throughout the image, automobiles are also present. The future of New York City’s transportation network would be dictated by early automobiles, since the increasing number of privately owned vehicles demanded new and better roads for their use as well as legislative to manage the proper use of the new technology. Automobiles would play an even greater part in shaping the city when John D. Hertz started his Yellow Cab Company in 1915, which capitalized on the usefulness of automobiles for transportation by hiring vehicles and driver out to patrons.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.