Postcard History

Soon after New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 1883, cable cars and elevated trains started running on the bridge. By 1888 the trains were carrying more than thirty million passengers a year and were completing the trip across the East River in about five minutes. On the Manhattan side, the massive Park Row Terminal – with its giant train shed jutting over Park Row – served to gather up and discharge this endless flow of humanity. By 1944 automobile traffic made it and the similar Brooklyn Terminal obsolete, and both terminals were torn down and the four tracks converted to car lanes.

The early postcards of the lost Park Row terminal, some by the leading postcard publishers of the day, shown in the array below, capture the remarkable and immense swells of human traffic jams during the morning and evening rush hours, and in the in-between hours.  

The men and women in these spectacles scurry about on different levels, some coming and going to and from nearby subway lines and trolleys.

Newspaper sellers hawked the latest news from the nearby newspaper offices in Printing House Square, such as Joseph Pulitzer’s highly influential New York World, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, and the New York Times.

We can only guess where these people worked, many probably in the office towers in Lower Manhattan, or if they were not at work, perhaps they were shopping, or in Manhattan to visit family or friends.  All in all, it is a remarkable parade of people frozen in time, and of all different sorts: newspaper boys and other peddlers, office workers, restaurant staff, store clerks, students, and tourists.

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Gustave Le Bon, the French anthropologist, who is best known for his 1895 work, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, wrote, “Crowds have a character of their own, they breathe together, they move together in one direction, then another, as if guided by an unnamed angel and when a crowd dissolves the individual forgets the rules he obeyed while being part of one.”