The Interborough Offers the Only Hope of Early Relief. Published by the Interborough Transit Company, printed by M.B. Brown Printing, NY. 1911, 8x5", 15pp, map on the rear wrapper. Original wrappers. This is a look at the upcoming expansion of the realtively-newly opened IRT that would come two years after the publication of this pamphlet, in 1913.
Provenance: Library of Congress, with their original hand-written LC card for the card catalog.
Condition: nice copy. There is a LC surplus/duplicate stamp on the rear cover, in the middle of the full-page map. (The stamp doesn't obscure, anything, really...it just isn't "pretty".) Scarce: only four copies located in WorldCat: Hagley, Yale, NYPL, NY State Archives. $125
“The first IRT subway ran between City Hall and 145th Street at Broadway, opening on October 27, 1904. It opened following more than twenty years of public debate on the merits of subways versus the existing elevated rail system and on various proposed routes.
Founded on May 6, 1902, by August Belmont, Jr., the IRT's mission was to operate New York City's initial underground rapid transit system after Belmont's and John B. McDonald's Rapid Transit Construction Company was awarded the rights to build the railway line in 1900, outbidding Andrew Onderdonk. On April 1, 1903, over a year before its first subway line opened, the IRT acquired the pre-existing elevated Manhattan Railway by lease, gaining a monopoly on rapid transit in Manhattan. The Manhattan EL was the operator of four elevated railways in Manhattan with an extension into the Bronx. The IRT coordinated some services between what became its subway and elevated divisions, but all the lines of the former Manhattan EL have since been dismantled. In 1913, as a result of massive expansion in the city, the IRT signed the Dual Contracts with Brooklyn Rapid Transit (BRT) in order to expand the subway. The agreement also locked the subway fare at 5 cents for forty-nine years. The IRT unsuccessfully attempted to raise the fare to seven cents in 1929, in a case that went to the United States Supreme Court.”--Wikipedia (on the IRT)
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