Fifth Avenue’s Unique Public Transportation History

Have you ever considered that among Manhattan’s central avenues, Fifth Avenue is the only one without a dedicated subway line? There’s the A/C/E for 8th Avenue, 1/2/3 for 7th, B/D/F/M for 6th, and 4/5/6 for 4th/Park Ave… so what happened to Fifth Avenue, certainly as prominent a thoroughfare as all the rest?

As a native New Yorker, I must admit I hadn’t really noticed this oddity before, but as a historian researching the origins of lower Fifth Avenue in celebration of its bicentennial, as soon as I discovered the anomaly, my interest was immediately piqued!

It all comes down to the dedication of a group of local community members and stakeholders, as issues of preservation and urban planning in Greenwich Village and New York City so often do.

For its first half-century or so, Fifth Avenue only hosted private modes of transit — individually-owned carriages and pedestrians traveling by foot. As the young avenue continued to expand northward, the need for organized public transportation increased, and the Fifth Avenue Transportation Company was founded in 1885 to serve this purpose. The company was by no means the first provider of mass transit in New York City, but it did set the precedent for the modes of organized travel that would prevail along the grand Fifth Avenue.

The Fifth Avenue Transportation Company originally filed its founding paperwork as the “Fifth Avenue Railroad Company,” with a goal to create a surface railroad that would run from Canal Street to Washington Square, and from north of the Square along Fifth Avenue to 59th Street. But many prestigious residents of the Avenue immediately opposed the installation of streetcar tracks, instead voicing support for stagecoaches, which could be implemented without carving new infrastructure into the street bed.

The Association for the Protection of the Fifth Avenue Thoroughfare was quickly founded, with members including Cornelius Vanderbilt, John Sloane, William Waldorf Astor, and others, to formalize the opposition to a railroad on the Avenue. 

A fraught legal battle followed (read about it in detail here). The following public statement issued by Clarence Seward, president of the Association, clarified their arguments against the introduction of a streetcar line, especially emphasizing concerns about public safety: “The most dangerous invention for a city’s use in the transportation of passengers are the cable cars… The reason is obvious. They move noiselessly and swiftly and attract no attention in the dark. Carriages and wagons driving at a trot from the side-streets are run into without any warning, the horses killed and the carriages broken up. The cars cannot be stopped under a distance of twenty-five feet, and having no horses, which could be turned aside to prevent collision. Their work of destruction goes steadily on.”

Though cable cars were present along many other streets in Manhattan, these efforts convinced the new company to instead form as the “Fifth Avenue Transportation Company,” with a proposal for a new line of horse-drawn buses, a “horse-and-omnibus” transit system with a route that ran along Fifth Avenue from Greenwich Village to 89th Street. Thus, Fifth Avenue became the only avenue in Manhattan to never see streetcar or elevated rail service.

Another quirk of the system was that its controlling stockholder from 1888 to 1893 was the lawyer, banker, and owner of the Mail and Express newspaper Elliott Fitch Shephard, a religious man, who required the buses to never operate on Sunday in observance of the Sabbath.

The one-of-a-kind Fifth Avenue Transportation Company was active for a mere decade. The company declared bankruptcy in 1896, and was succeeded by the Fifth Avenue Coach Company, which expanded services and operated in Manhattan, The Bronx, Queens, and Westchester County from 1896 to 1954.

In addition to broadening its geographic reach, the Coach Company modernized its fleet of vehicles, ending horse-drawn service in 1907 and launching the double-decker buses that eventually became prevalent throughout Manhattan and beyond in the first half of the 20th century.

While Fifth Avenue is included along several routes of the MTA bus system to this day, no railroad tracks were ever installed there, above or below ground.