Mon 30 Nov 2009
Saluting The Vacant Bronx Station Houses
Posted by TJ under Bronx, New Rochelle
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The Sunday “Real Estate” section of the NY Times has a big story on the vacant Bronx station houses of the old New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad.
A dozen stations were projected in 1904, when the railroad began upgrading the Harlem River Branch from the southern Bronx up to New Rochelle. But not all were built and, in addition to Westchester Avenue, three survive today: Morris Park, Hunts Point Avenue and City Island, which is a ruined shell. (The historian Joseph Brennan has closely investigated the stations and has posted his research at columbia.edu/~brennan.)
Gilbert, newly minted as a starchitect with the 1899 commission for the United States Custom House at Bowling Green, got the job of designing the stations, and gave them widely different styles.
The stations didn’t serve their intended purpose for long, notes Christopher Gray.
In 1909, The Real Estate Record and Guide noted the “marked architectural beauty” of the new stations. John A. Droege, in his 1916 book “Passenger Terminals and Trains” (McGraw-Hill) noted that “the ordinary wayside passenger station is not the proper field for the architect who wishes to rival the designer of the Paris opera house.” But he reviewed Gilbert’s stations in depth, apparently with approval.
The railroad overestimated the potential traffic, and service ended in the 1930s. According to an article in The New York Times, the railroad was losing $25,000 per month on Westchester commuter service.
These days, adds Gray, the Hunts Point and Morris Park station houses aren’t much to look at. But the Westchester Avenue house remains intriguing.
Right next door is Concrete Plant Park, a combination green space and industrial archaeology project that runs along the Bronx River. Two sides of the station are visible from the street, and two sides are visible on the park side, for a 360-degree view of this train wreck of decay.
On the street side, the terra cotta is somehow intact, if not pristine, and the chimney still stands, but the red-tiled roof looks like a nubbly blanket attacked by an avenging army of moths.
On the park side, the colors of the terra-cotta facade are still bright, but whole sections have peeled off. The exposed iron strap work leaves the body of the structure looking like an architectural X-ray, about to collapse onto the tracks below.