BMT Myrtle Line: Central Avenue, 1952 — from nycsubway.org

Once upon a time, Bushwick was part of Brooklyn. Bushwickers could get to our own downtown on a train without going through Manhattan or Williamsburg. And then in 1969, it was over, and they knocked the Myrtle elevated down, save for a bit of ghost trusses for a few hundred feet west of Broadway. Of course now that most traffic-generating buildings on western Myrtle have been bulldozed for projects or burned down, the bus shoots down the road and you’re downtown in 15 minutes. Problem solved!

I can’t tell if Robert Moses had anything to do with the destruction of this particular line, but let’s just blame him, ok? I’m sure the evidence is out there, I just don’t have to time to look it up. Actually, it’s easy to blame one man — and Moses was a whopper of a man, no doubt — but he was working in a time and within an administration that thought lightly of moving hundreds of thousands of fellow human beings around like pawns in a civilizational chess match. The 20th Century was a time of previously unsurpassed totalitarianism, mostly abroad, but the philosophy reared its head here in the States, too. And so the majority of New York’s transportation and housing problems stem from the damage the philosophy of top-down urban planning did to our city. That was substantial damage, and we are still recovering.

Anyway, enjoy the photo and think back to a time when there was an entire rail line just to take people from Bushwick and Ridgewood to the beach!