Ancestors Followed the Subway Out of Manhattan

1989 map of New York
City subway system

Sometimes a map or multiple maps can help us understand ancestors' movements within a city or region. That's the case with my immigrant Farkas and Schwartz ancestors who lived in New York City around the turn of the 20th century. 

Although they began their new lives in Manhattan, my maternal great-grandparents and grandparents were able to move to less-crowded residential neighborhoods in the northern borough of the Bronx because of the subway.

The Farkas family rode the subway and "the el"

My collection of now-obsolete
New York City subway tokens

My great-grandfather Moritz Farkas (1857-1936) was escaping financial ruin after hail destroyed his crops in Hungary. He sailed to New York and initially was a boarder in someone else's Lower East Side Manhattan tenement apartment. This was in August of 1899, before any modern mass-transit systems were even built. Once his wife, Lena Kunstler Farkas (1865-1938) and their children arrived from Hungary, they moved to an apartment of their own on the Lower East Side.

By 1920, however, Moritz, Lena, and their family (and many of the married children) were living in the borough of the Bronx, just north of Manhattan. This move was made possible by the expansion of the city's subway lines into what was then a much less-populated area. Ironically, many of the subway lines were actually overhead, not underground, and were usually called "the el," short for "elevated."

Now Farkas family members could ride the subway to work and to visit each other, not to mention go to the Bronx Zoo, the Bronx Botanical Gardens, and Coney Island by train! Family stories, corroborated by more than one cousin, say that to save money, Lena sometimes gave her two middle sons only a nickel each per day to ride the subway to work...one way. They had to walk home when the nickels ran out.

Teddy and Minnie never needed a car

My maternal grandpa Theodore "Teddy" Schwartz (1887-1965) also came to New York City from Hungary, arriving in 1902, before the subway opened to the public. He lived as a boarder on the Lower East Side for the first nine years, then married my grandma Hermina "Minnie" Farkas (1886-1964) in 1911. At that point, the subway system was growing by leaps and bounds, reaching far and wide year after year.

With affordable mass transit within walking distance, Teddy and Minnie moved their family from Manhattan to the south Bronx, then a fast-growing residential area with new schools and parks. They settled on Fox Street, directly across from an elementary school, and Teddy opened a grocery store down the block.

Teddy and Minnie never had a car and didn't need one, given the ongoing improvements of the New York City subway system. Here's what the network looked like in 1939. By that time, all three of their children were working--taking the subway into Manhattan and back to the Bronx on every business day. The price was right and the subway was the fast track to better-paying jobs in the heart of New York City.

"On the map" is the #Genealogy prompt for week 38 of the #52Ancestors series.

Father's Day: Where Dad Lived (and Why)

For Father's Day, I'm telling stories of where Dad lived, and why, and stories he told me about everyday life. Harold Burk (1909-1978) was born in Jewish Harlem, 77 E. 109th Street in Manhattan. That's the address on his birth certificate and the address where he lived at the time of the 1910 Census. It's just a short walk from the Northern end of Central Park.

Thanks to the images in the New York City Public Library's digital collections, I can see tenements similar to the building where Dad lived and read about conditions there. These East Harlem buildings were not quite as cramped and dank as tenements in the Lower East Side. Another plus: They were "uptown" and therefore more desirable, with less-crowded streets and within reach of greener pastures (literally) in upper Manhattan and lower Bronx.

The reason Dad's family lived uptown, rather than downtown in the Lower East Side where so many immigrants lived, has to do with family connections as much as infrastructure. When my grandpa Isaac Burk (1882-1943) got to New York City in 1904-5, he boarded with the Mahler family at 1956 Third Avenue in Manhattan. That's where Isaac married my grandma Henrietta Mahler (1881-1954) in June, 1906.

The bride and groom may have been cousins, a possibility I'm still researching, because documents show Isaac's mother's maiden name as Shuham and the maiden name of Henrietta's grandmother as Shuham. Both of those families had roots in Lithuania. Strong possibility of family connections, but no proof (yet).

By 1909, when Dad was born, his parents Isaac & Henrietta were living only a seven-minute walk from Henrietta's Mahler family apartment on Third Avenue. By 1915, according to the New York City Census, the two families were living in separate apartments in the same tenement house at 7 East 105th Street in Jewish Harlem. Built-in babysitters for a growing family: Dad was 6, his older sister was 8, and there were two more siblings under the age of 4.

Both the Burk and Mahler families found it convenient and desirable to live uptown in East Harlem because workers could commute by "el" (elevated trains) to jobs located in midtown or downtown. The Third Avenue El, as it was known, was fast and affordable.

This elevated train line stopped running during my lifetime as other mass transit options took its place, and the car culture took hold. In the early 1900s, however, the el and later underground subway lines enabled working people to escape the dirty, noisy, crowded Lower East Side. The NYPL has some atmospheric photos of the "el" at various periods.

Dad told stories of playing stickball in the streets as a youngster (maybe ducking the few cars that passed). He also told of boys daring each other to jump from one tenement rooftop to another. Even though the tenements were often butted up against each other or barely a few inches away, it wasn't at all easy or safe. Dad admitted he was just plain lucky to live through those escapades. Bet his parents never knew what he was doing!

Dad also told stories of taking horse-drawn buses from his Harlem home north to the Bronx for a daylong picnic outing. Sounds like the children would eat and then play while the adults shmoozed and snoozed before returning to their tenements. By the time I was old enough to hear these stories, it was hard to imagine the Bronx as a bucolic collection of farmlands and rural picnic vistas--but entirely true, as photos in the NYPL collection demonstrate.

Happy Father's Day to my Dad and I'm delighted to keep his memory and his stories alive for future generations, in the spirit of #52Ancestors and the #GenealogyBlogParty's Dynamite Dads.

Genealogy Do-Over, Week 7: Digitizing Maps and More

Old maps have dates and memories that add richness and detail to my genealogy research.
In week 7 of the Do-Over, I'm digitizing the maps that have been passed down in my family because they're clues to my ancestors' daily lives and some of the places they lived and visited--places that were meaningful to them and to me.

My grandparents on both sides (Schwartz, Farkas, Mahler, Burk) settled in New York City. They never owned a car but they and their children and grandchildren knew the subway and bus routes very, very well.

My in-laws (Wood, McClure) liked to drive to New York City from their home in Cleveland to visit family, see Broadway shows, etc. My father-in-law also saved state maps that were given away by gas stations, including old maps for Indiana, Ohio, and beyond.

Above, part of the family's collection of New York City transit and street maps. The Hagstrom's maps are the oldest, and the World's Fair maps are the youngest (just 50 years old!). All being photographed and inventoried as part of Week 7 in the Do-Over.

PS: The Do-Over participants explained how to add my blog's name to photographs I post. Thank you!

Sentimental Sunday: Got a Token for the IRT?

Top row: 1953, 1970, 1980 tokens; bottom row: 1979, 1986, 1995 tokens

Growing up in the Bronx, the IRT subway was the fastest way to get from the northern end of the city to anywhere else in the Big Apple. (IRT is short for Interborough Rapid Transit.) My sisters and I rode the subway to high school. And of course we dropped a subway token into the turnstile to get to "the city"--Manhattan--for any reason. We thought nothing of being a straphanger for an hour to get to a museum or work or Radio City Music Hall. My penny loafers had tokens instead of pennies, just in case I was ever stranded somewhere and needed carfare.

Today's New York Times discusses and pictures 15 additional objects that readers chose to represent New York City, supplementing a list of 50 objects printed by the Times a few weeks ago. Alas, the iconic subway token pictured in the article (with the cutout Y) has now been consigned to the scrapheap of history by undistinguished MetroCards (introduced in 2003).

But as shown above, I have a sentimental collection of tokens, and I identified the intro year of each with the help of a NYC Subway website (unaffiliated with the actual subway).

One treasured keepsake in my collection is a token issued at only one place, the bus terminal at Orchard Beach in the Bronx, to get on a bus and connect with a subway or another bus elsewhere in the borough. The bus terminal was operated by the Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority (MABSTOA)--shortened to M.A.B. in the center of the token, shown below.

Orchard Beach token issued by Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority

On a summer's day, Sis and I would take a bus up Pelham Parkway to connect with a second bus going to the Riviera of the Bronx. On the return trip, we'd line up at the beach bus terminal, buy a token, drop it into the turnstile slot, and board the bus that would take us back to Pelham Parkway for the connection with our bus home. Total travel time was about 40 minutes, if memory serves, and the return trip was sandier, of course.