#transit

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An Unfortunate Title for a “Great” Article on Penn Station

Becky Fifield

Dec 31, 2015
2 min

An Unfortunate Title for a “Great” Article on Penn Station

David W. Dunlap writes the rather fun Building Blocks column for The New York Times. On December 30, 2015, his contribution was titled “Longing for the Old Penn Station? In the End, It Wasn’t So Great.” Really? The pun is there (the “late great Pennsylvania Station” for all you not in the know), but it’s hardly apt. The title tarnishes a rather interesting article about Penn’s last years. Completely bone-headed modern alterations to the station took a terrible toll. They did

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Wanderlust Wednesday: Hudson and Manhattan Railroad Redux

Becky Fifield

Jan 22, 2014
2 min

Wanderlust Wednesday: Hudson and Manhattan Railroad Redux

Better known as the PATH, the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad began shuttling passengers through its cast iron tunnels between Manhattan and points in New Jersey in 1908. My travels have been constrained in the last couple of months due to pregnancy. I haven’t been on a plane since October and my last trip out of the country was a 12 hour jaunt to Montreal in September. I’ve even turned down trips to Paris! Our radius of wanderlust has been increasingly contained within slowly

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Becky Fifield

Nov 5, 2013
2 min

Transit Tuesday: Maryland *facepalm*

OK, we all know it, I’m obnoxiously devoted to my home state. So when I read current “transit” news about Maryland transportation officials meeting with Frederick County Commissioners(1 November 2013), I was disappointed to read that it was all about widening I-70 and I-270. Ever since governments intentionally participated in the trashing of public investment in transportation in favor of the automobile, future funding that prefers interstates makes me yawn. Not only do we p

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Transportation Tuesday: Move Madison Square Garden NOW

Becky Fifield

Feb 26, 2013
2 min

Transportation Tuesday: Move Madison Square Garden NOW

Commuters rush through the LIRR entrance corridor past artwork that evokes the original and only Pennsylvania Station. Andrew Leicester. Ghost Series, 1994. Photo: RL Fifield. If you enter Penn Station through the Long Island Rail Road entrance, you’ll see reliefs along the corridor that depict the tumbling Corinthian columns of McKim, Mead, and White’s Pennsylvania Station (1910). If you’d like to grumble along with me, please follow these links to my prior posts about the d

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Transit Tuesday: How do you get to Annapolis without a car?

Becky Fifield

Jan 29, 2013
2 min

Transit Tuesday: How do you get to Annapolis without a car?

I was peeved. During my Christmas break in Maryland, a winter storm blew in on the day I’d picked to spend some time at the state archives in Annapolis. My plan had been to look at criminal cases involving runaway servants, as well as look up wills and inventories for my 17th and 18th century Harford County ancestors (including the Cole family, see my series Digging Up My Ancestors about their cemetery move, beginning here). But it was really a mess out there, and seeing as D

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Becky Fifield

Jan 23, 2013
3 min

Wanderlust Wednesday: Montreal

I spent a day in Montreal, QC last week. I had forgotten how cold it can be up north. I quickly relearned that northerners find ways to snake through buildings and basements to get from point to point. Here are some of my travel notes from last Thursday: Cords, shirt, thick sweater, run jacket, down parka, hat, hood, two pairs of gloves, hike socks, hike boots. That all was pretty good, except thighs would go so numb that I couldn’t feel them move. I stopped in Ogilvy’s on S

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Becky Fifield

Jan 15, 2013
2 min

Transit Tuesday: The Walking City

Colleagues of mine were up from DC this week for the Alliance for Response NYC program “Community-Based Recovery After Superstorm Sandy” (see the post here). One of them exclaimed “this is New York! look at everyone walking along the streets!” New York didn’t used to have a monopoly on street life. Certainly, my city lends itself to walking. The tight space forces us to live more closely together, further drawn together by our renowned subways, busses, and trains to closely c

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Wanderlust Wednesday: The Johnstown Inclined Plane

Becky Fifield

Oct 24, 2012
2 min

Wanderlust Wednesday: The Johnstown Inclined Plane

People generally know one thing about Johnstown, PA: the flood. The Johnstown Flood National Memorial is located on the rim of the former recreational lake that burst on May 31, 1899 and spilled 20 million tons of water into the town below, killing 2,209. The local Johnstown Flood Museum is located in a former Carnegie Library, a building built to replace the original library destroyed in the flood. Johnstown Inclined Plane – whoa! RL Fifield 2008. The Johnstown Inclined Plan

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Becky Fifield

Oct 23, 2012
1 min

Transit Tuesday: City Hall Station

On the top of my list of cool things to do in New York City: visit City Hall Station, the abandoned star of the New York city subway system. Opened in 1904, the one way loop station’s design and close proximity to the Brooklyn Bridge station doomed it for obsolescence from the beginning. It was closed in December, 1945. Today, it’s used to turn around downtown 6 trains and deposit them back on the uptown bound local track. City Hall Station. RL Fifield photo, 2010. You can to

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Museum Monday: The London Transport Museum

Becky Fifield

Oct 22, 2012
1 min

Museum Monday: The London Transport Museum

Transit Tuesday is moving on in on Museum Monday. London Transport Museum. Old Metropolitan Railway Car. Photo: RL Fifield 2010. If I didn’t live in New York City, I would live in London. It feels like home. And for fans of transit, the London Transport Museum is an excellent time. In the city that invented modern urban transit, a plethora of equipment, signage, photos, and groovy wax mannequins in the old flower market building in Covent Garden just has to be good. In the su

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Wanderlust Wednesday: The Yuengling Brewery in Pottsville, Pennsylvania

Becky Fifield

Oct 17, 2012
3 min

Wanderlust Wednesday: The Yuengling Brewery in Pottsville, Pennsylvania

Beer. Mmmm. Recently, my friend Ms McC and I travelled to Maryland for a eighteenth century event at Fort Frederick State Park (see my posts on nearby Hagerstown and the CCC Museum at Fort Fred). Being like-minded in our love for the American experience, we targeted Pottsville, Pennsylvania as our stop-off point: home to Yuengling Beer since 1831. They claim the title of “America’s Oldest Brewery.” Check out the history of American ale and beer making via the New York Histori

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Becky Fifield

Oct 7, 2012
2 min

New York Diaries Redux

I moved into New York City proper in 2005, and while my journalling habits have given way to blogging, research writing, and fiction, I was curious to see how my own New York entries held up against those selected for the text. In comparison, I wondered at the volume of diaries created today. Do people write for themselves as much? Or have they replaced it with lesser notions of privacy and revealing all to others online? What is Facebook but one lengthy diary, with commentar

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Transit Tuesday: More Griping about Penn Station

Becky Fifield

Oct 2, 2012
1 min

Transit Tuesday: More Griping about Penn Station

Inari sushi – sweetened deep fried tofu skin stuffed with rice dressed with rice vinegar, salt, and sugar. Photo by miwa_in_oz There is one redeeming thing about the current New York Penn Station – it’s Penn Sushi. They have great inari sushi. I always stop in to see the very friendly staff and pick up sushi whenever I travel by train. As for the rail station, it’s a joke. The large photographs of the original New York Penn Station posted around today’s Main Concourse just ba

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Becky Fifield

Sep 4, 2012
1 min

Transit Tuesday – The Elevated in NYC

The El still lives on in Chicago – I’m not sure that they could live without it. But the El once was a vital part of New York transportation, an improvement on surface railways, pre-dating the underground subways, and discarded hastily during the rise of the automobile. The last elevated line in Manhattan was the 3rd Avenue line, at last abandoned in the Bronx in 1973. The Els were noisy and cast shadows on the streets below. There were once elevated lines on 3rd, 6th, and 9t

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Becky Fifield

Aug 28, 2012
1 min

Transit Tuesday: Dusseldorf to Cologne

Say it with me: Hauptbahnhof. What a great word “train station” is in German. I was recently in Germany for work and I had a free day to pop over to Cologne. Unfortunately, it was Monday and nary a museum was open. But I did enjoy using the excellent Deutsche Bahn (German Railway). There were several options of varying costs and speeds, and while I planned to try the zippy ICE (Intercity Express), the timing just wasn’t right. Next trip. Cologne train shed. RL Fifield 2012. I

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Becky Fifield

Aug 1, 2012
2 min

Wanderlust Wednesday: San Francisco

The Cable Car Power House. RL Fifield, 2009. San Francisco is the city where I started to learn to look, compose, and photograph. I feel the town’s scruffiness when I’m there – I still think that the mother lode gold discovery is still expected any day. I suppose the gold rush came more in the form of Silicon Valley, but the city still has turn of the century striver flavor. Maybe it’s all that SRO history (see post here). At the Teahouse in Golden Gate Park. Some turn of the

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Transit Tuesday: Subway, Sesame Street Style

Becky Fifield

Jul 17, 2012
1 min

Transit Tuesday: Subway, Sesame Street Style

Nothing underlines the fact that Sesame Street is a New York product like this 1974 clip “Subway.” It’s a bit discordant and urban, gritty and Muppety, all at the same time. Click here to watch Subway on YouTube. Photo: Muppet Wiki. #ChildrensTelevisionWorkshop #SesameStreet #transit #subway #NewYorkCity #Muppets

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Becky Fifield

Jul 3, 2012
1 min

Transit Tuesday – Cyril E. Power

Yes, I’m a museum professional, but that doesn’t mean I don’t use museum databases to see objects I enjoy when I get home. I’m responsible for long-term preservation activities for a group of objects from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, so as a generalist researcher using museum databases, I tend to relax looking for things very different from the ones I work with. Regular readers are familiar with my penchant for trains, tangled up somewhere in the back of my brain with n

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Transit Tuesday – Central Railroad of New Jersey’s Communipaw Terminal

Becky Fifield

May 22, 2012
2 min

Transit Tuesday – Central Railroad of New Jersey’s Communipaw Terminal

CNJRR Train Shed and Communipaw Terminal. RL Fifield, 2011. Staring out over New York Harbor, the Central Railroad of New Jersey’s (CRRNJ) Communipaw Terminal was an early and major powerhouse of New York City transportation and where two thirds of immigrants landed after their stop at Ellis Island. The CRRNJ began operations among the first of American rail companies, in 1839.The station was built in 1889 to replace an earlier 1864 station. The train shed was built in 1914 t

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Becky Fifield

May 16, 2012
2 min

Wanderlust Wednesday – Albuquerque

I had been warned that Albuquerque wasn’t much. What I saw most in Albuquerque: the AIC meeting at the Albuquerque Convention center. Last week, I attended the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works annual meeting. Much of my time there was observing the southwest-flavored interior of the Albuquerque Convention Center, with a few outings to the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History for a reception and Los Equipales Mexican Seafood Restaurant, where

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