Third Avenue Gets Its Sky Back

The Third Avenue Elevated had run above Manhattan since 1878, when the line opened from South Ferry to Grand Central and reached Harlem by December of that year. By the 1950s it was the last elevated train still standing in Manhattan, and City Hall and the real estate industry wanted it torn down, backed by a Third Avenue Elevated Noise Abatement Committee that had been fighting the racket since 1941. On the evening of May 12, 1955, the last uptown train pulled out of the Chatham Square terminal just north of City Hall and rattled north one final time before the line to East 149th Street in the Bronx shut down for good. Crews spent the rest of the year pulling the structure apart, station by station and girder by girder, finishing the job by February 1956, with some of the scrap steel melted down for the new third tube of the Lincoln Tunnel.