The Library of Congress has a created a new online collection called the National Screening Room. A lot of the material was there before, but it’s now been organized so you can go strolling through movies of the past; public domain items can be downloaded, others can be watched.
The short clip above is titled “Excavation for Subway” and it was made in 1903, when the opening of the IRT subway was about a year away. The quality is terrible, but you can still make out interesting details about how the subway was built. The camera is mounted near the southeast corner of Union Square , with Fourth Avenue to the right, curving from its NNW* alignment south of the square to being aligned N-S with the grid north** of the square. You can barely make out a piece of 14th Street crossing along the bottom edge of the frame.
The big group of buildings in the distance – at the center of the top of the frame – is Union Square North (17th Street). The tall skinny building near the left end of the group is the Jackson Building, an early skyscraper. The similar group on the left is Union Square West and includes two more early skyscrapers: the Decker Building and the Bank of the Metropolis.
Fourth Avenue has been narrowed to one lane in each direction, and the traffic includes both horse-drawn vehicles and street cars.*** The subway was built cut-and-cover, so the construction site is basically a huge trench with equipment sitting in it and next to it. Based on the shadows, it looks like everything was excavated in the triangle between Fourth and 14th on the east and south and the park to the northwest. I can’t tell if the excavation continues under the still-operating lanes of Fourth: I know that at times and in some places the IRT company built a temporary street above their excavations, but I’m not sure if this is one of those times and places. But one of two conditions has to be true: either (1) the vehicles are happily zipping along on a temporary street made of heavy timbers over an active construction site or (2) they’re traveling on a narrow band of earth temporarily retained on the east and west by timbers immediately adjacent to an active sub-grade construction site. Either way, it’s impressive work.
Several cranes are visible, and towards the end of the clip one lifts a bucket (full of excavated muck, perhaps) out of the hole and up to street level. The cranes predate diesel equipment: the thing that looks like a house with an oversized chimney, just to the left of center and just above center, is an enclosure for a steam engine.
My favorite detail is the presence of kibitzers. There are pedestrians on the narrow stretch of Fourth Avenue, walking along next to the excavation and getting on and off the street cars. Several of them stop to look down in the hole, oblivious to the traffic and the exposed nature of their perch.
* As always, all references to cardinal directions are accepting the Manhattan axis as north-south. It’s not.
** The part of Fourth Avenue between 17th Street (the north side of Union Square) and 32nd Street was renamed “Park Avenue South” in 1959. The part of Fourth Avenue north of 32nd Street had previously been renamed Park Avenue.
*** I’m sure there were cars in New York in 1903, but none happened by this intersection during the filming.
