Happy Birthday to you, there are times you smell like a zoo...
By the late 1800s, New York City's promise and potential were constrained only by a mass transit system that was becoming somewhat frayed around the edges. Electric streetcars, horse-drawn omnibuses and steam-powered elevated trains could carry passengers only limited distances. Manhattan Island north of Greenwich Village was the suburbs and anything much farther out than that was country, certainly impractical for a regular commute.
Once the first line was open, New Yorkers swarmed the new railroad and the city's appetite for underground rapid transit only grew. Extensions to the Bronx and Brooklyn soon followed and in 1915, the Interborough dipped beneath the East River and roared into Queens through the Steinway Tube, which had been originally constructed for streetcars.