Lab Tested End Of The Line Quality Assured [ilayr15C]

With downtown buildings hovering in the background and a busy street scene below, this photograph lovingly documents the Third Avenue El at the14th Street station before the line was dismantled in the 1950s. The train made a creaky and sooty run of 14 miles from City Hall in downtown Manhattan to Gun Hill Road in the Bronx for more than seven decades. Its last run was May 13, 1955.

"Pretty soon ... the Third Avenue line will be in wreckers' hands, and the structure and rolling stock will vanish, the last vestiges of high-riding local trains that have been part of the New York scene for almost seventy-five years," Meyer Berger of The Times wrote on August 4, 1951.

"The high riders are accustomed to open-air assignment, even if the working track threads through dark and melancholy tenements and warehouse areas. They have always lived in fear of the day when, as they put it, 'We'll have to go down the hole,' which is their term for subway runs.

"Clustered around the checkered-board back of the Gun Hill Road dispatcher's office in the Bronx, they brooded over the steady curtailment of service and shortening of the line - a snip here a snip there and a shutdown of night service in the offing. They love the line and hate to see it die."

At the peak of its history in 1921, the Third Ave El used more than 300 cars and carried 145 million riders in a 12-month period. It thinned down to 55 trains and less than 58 million fares in 1951.