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4 Excursion Railways (1864–1890) AS CONEY ISLAND GREW in popularity as a seasonal seaside resort, five steam railways were constructed in Kings County in the 1860s and the 1870s to carry passengers there from the southern limits of the city of Brooklyn or from steamboat and ferry connections with Manhattan. The rights-of-way used by four of the five excursion railways remain in operation in the twenty-first century as elements of the subway network of New York City Transit; the fifth was abandoned in the early decades of the twentieth century. In addition to the five excursion railways that provided service to and from Coney Island, several kinds of intra-island railways were constructed to link sections of Coney Island with one another, and the area saw a variety of other short-lived steam railroad ventures. By every measure, the excursion railways constituted the largest and most distinctive early transport system to and from Coney Island. THE BROOKLYN, BATH AND CONEY ISLAND RAILROAD Each of the five steam-powered excursion railways enjoys unique characteristics. An operation that began during the Civil War as the Brooklyn, Bath and Coney Island Railroad (BB&CI) was the first of the breed. However, when it carried its initial passengers in the summer of 1864, it was not a steam-powered excursion railroad , but a horse-drawn railway not that much different in operation from typical city streetcars or from the service provided by the Coney Island and Brooklyn Railroad. More important than the new road’s initial source of power, though, was the nature of the service it provided. While many of the other Coney Island excursion railways saw their mission as 68 HOW WE GOT TO CONEY ISLAND speeding across the lightly settled flatlands in southern Kings County so passengers from the city of Brooklyn could reach the oceanfront at Coney Island in the least time and with the least bother, the BB&CI had an important intermediate market it wished to serve along the way. Bath Beach, named after the famous spa city of Bath, England, was both a seasonal resort on the shore of Gravesend Bay in the town of New Utrecht, and a community with a year-round residential population. As an early seashore resort, Bath Beach was never the equal of Coney Island in scope or size, although it did boast such attractions as mechanical amusements, a bathing beach, and a steamboat landing at one time or other. Bath Beach was a sufficiently important source of passenger traffic that the BB&CI was laid out so it would reach Coney Island via Bath Beach and link the city of Brooklyn with both. Construction of the new railway began in 1862, the same year the Coney Island and Brooklyn Railroad inaugurated horsecar service to the shore. The company’s northern terminal was an offstreet depot in Brooklyn on Fifth Avenue between 26th and 27th Streets and opposite Green-wood Cemetery, which passengers could reach from downtown Brooklyn aboard horse-drawn streetcars . To this day, the cemetery preserves the older and hyphenated rendition of its name, unlike Greenwood, the neighborhood adjacent to the cemetery (see map 2). Railway service was inaugurated between the 27th Street terminal and Bath Beach on June 4, 1864, and it was this initial service that used horse-drawn railcars. The company’s right-of-way was largely along such thoroughfares as Fifth Avenue and New Utrecht Avenue. In 1867, three years after service was inaugurated between Greenwood and Bath Beach, the road was extended to Coney Island . It was also during the late 1860s that steam-powered trains at first supplemented and eventually replaced the company’s original horse-drawn equipment. Documentation about precisely when the company shifted from animal-powered cars to trains hauled by steam locomotives is scanty, but it seems that by the time the BB&CI reached Coney Island in 1867, the company had begun to use mechanical motive power. EXCURSION RAILWAYS (1864–1890) 69 Map 2: Relative orientation of the five major Coney Island excursion railroads. 70 HOW WE GOT TO CONEY ISLAND The BB&CI underwent a series of corporate realignments in the years between its founding and 1890. The first change came on September 18, 1868, when the company was sold under foreclosure proceedings and control passed into the hands of C. Godfrey Gunther, a wealthy merchant who had served as mayor of New York City between 1864 and 1866.1 In keeping with a fairly common convention in nineteenth-century railroading, the BB&CI was frequently identified...

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