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6 Merger, Consolidation, and the Emergence of the BRT (1890–1900) IN THE HISTORY of public transportation in Brooklyn and Kings County, from Colonial times to the present day, no decade was as transformational or as important as the 1890s. When the 1890s began, Brooklyn was served by a number of independent street railway companies whose principal motive power was the horse; elevated railways with trains hauled by steam locomotives were struggling with financing that was anything but sound; and travel to and from Coney Island was dominated by independent excursion railways operating from the periphery of Brooklyn to the shore. By decade’s end, the street railways, the elevated lines, and the excursion railways were operating or on the verge of operating electric-powered equipment, and all were under the unified management of a single entity, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (BRT). In addition, by the turn of the twentieth century, the city of Brooklyn had surrendered its municipal autonomy and become one of five boroughs in an expanded City of New York, an event that had a profound impact on subsequent transportation developments . The population of Kings County grew by almost 40 percent during the 1890s—from 839,000 to 1,167,000. And the 1890s also saw the dawn of a new era in American popular entertainment with the opening, on Coney Island, of the very first amusement parks on the face of the earth. There would be later developments—and important changes—to public transport in Brooklyn, including the construction of a network of subway lines in the early years of the twentieth century, the wholesale shift of mass transportation itself from the corporate world to the public sector some years later, and the emergence of the private automobile as the vehicle of choice for most urban MERGER, CONSOLIDATION, AND EMERGENCE OF THE BRT (1890–1900) 125 travel. None of these eras, though, can rival the 1890s as a period of fundamental change. THE BROOKLYN HEIGHTS RAILROAD When a new Brooklyn street railway that called itself the Brooklyn Heights Railroad operated its first streetcar in the summer of 1891, the company was seen more for the novelty of its equipment than anything else. Rather than using horses that were then powering the majority of American street railways, or even the new electric-powered trolley cars that were beginning to replace older, horse-powered vehicles, the Brooklyn Heights Railroad was a street railway whose cars were propelled by attaching themselves to an endless cable that moved through a vault beneath the pavement . Cable-powered street railways saw limited deployment in Brooklyn . The original shuttle trains that began to transverse the new Brooklyn Bridge in the fall of 1883 were cable powered—and remained so into the early years of the twentieth century. Because these trains crossed the bridge along a private right-of-way, the cable to which they were attached for traction was not encased in a vault beneath the city’s streets but was, rather, a free-running device at track level. (More on the Brooklyn Bridge cable railway later in this chapter.) The bridge railway aside, there were only two genuine cable street railways that operated in Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Cable Company, which intended to run from Fulton Ferry to East New York, used an experimental form of cable technology. Had the company’s plans been successful, Brooklyn Cable would have become part of ‘‘Deacon’’ William Richardson’s Atlantic Avenue Railroad . However, for a variety of reasons the company was anything but a success, and a mile-and-a-half deployment along Park Avenue between Broadway and Grand Avenue was the only portion of the route to be equipped for cable operation and to inaugurate service. It carried its first passengers on March 6, 1887, but was shut down, never to reopen, on July 15 of the same year. The Brooklyn Heights Railroad, on the other hand, was a successful cable road from both a business and an operational per- 126 HOW WE GOT TO CONEY ISLAND spective. It ran the length of Montague Street from Court Street, adjacent to Brooklyn City Hall, to the Brooklyn slip of the Union Ferry Company’s Wall Street Ferry at the foot of Montague Street, a half-mile away. Since a glacial leftover called Brooklyn Heights stood between City Hall and the ferry slip, a double-tracked railway up and down the relatively steep grades of Montague Street proved to be a near-perfect deployment of cable...

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