3-077-729 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

America revisited by our Special Artist: Sketches in New York, 1890. 'The Cyrus W. Field Building & the elevated railroad; A bit of old & new New York; The way the trains run; Sketched in the elevated cars...The fourteen-storey high building, generally known as the Washington Building, although frequently called the Cyrus W. Field...is devoted to purely business purposes, being chiefly occupied as brokers' and land and railway offices...The Elevated Railroad...[is an] undoubtedly useful feature of city transit... No locomotives were put upon it to begin with, for fear that it was not strong enough to bear...this additional weight. Nevertheless, this tremendous danger staring them in the face, within a few days the cars were crowded, the ladies seated, the men standing and holding on by the straps and along the centre of each carriage. The railways...are erected upon a line of columns on each side of the street-car roads, connected at the top by open elliptic arch girders...The Metropolitan Company, running through Sixth Avenue, is the most ornamental and the best equipped of the lines yet constructed...The tracks are laid upon a firm road-bed, composed of piers and girders, forming a species of arcade above the tracks of the horse railroads'. From "Illustrated London News", 1890.