1922 Regional Plan Map and Infographic of New York City Railroad Passenger Traffic

This is a 1922 Regional Plan proof state infographic map of New York City, highlighting passenger rail traffic. The map is an early attempt to analyze the New York commute to better manage passenger rail networks.

A Closer Look

The map covers the five boroughs of the city along with portions of Long Island, Westchester County, and Connecticut. The contours and features of the land are faint, overlaid with more prominent lines and shading indicating passenger rail routes. A wider area of shading denotes more passengers in a given 24-hour period, and narrower shading illustrates relatively fewer passengers. However, all the lines thus represented carried at least several dozen trains in each direction in a given day. This system explained in a legend at bottom-right, reveals that the Long Island Railroad and New York Central were the busiest lines, while New Jersey saw a great number of passengers reaching Manhattan via a larger number of lines, so numerous and dense that color shading is employed here to help distinguish them.

Historically, passengers crossing either the Hudson River or East River would need to disembark and take ferries to Manhattan, but the completion of rail tunnels under both waterways between 1906 and 1910 revolutionized travel, allowing passengers from distant parts of New Jersey or Long Islands to take one continuous train journey (on an electrified rather than steam train) into the heart of the city, at Pennsylvania Station ('Old Penn Station') (passengers utilizing Grand Central Station for travel to/from the north would have used the older Park Avenue Tunnel, which was upgraded and renovated around this time to also run electrified trains).

The First Regional Plan for New York

The impetus for the creation of the Regional Plan of New York was driven primarily by three factors: first, the greater affordability and mass adoption of automobiles in the 1920s; second, the explosive growth of New York City's population at the turn of the 20th century; and, third, the contemporaneous Modernist affinity for ambitious urban planning. Inspired by similar plans for other cities, particularly the 1909 Burnham Plan for Chicago, a group of business and civic leaders led by banker Charles Dyer Norton and the Russell Sage Foundation formed an advisory committee in 1914 to propose an equivalent project for the New York City metropolitan region. Delayed by World War I (1914-1918) and other obstacles, the committee nevertheless made progress, adding prominent members (including future President Herbert Hoover) and forming a permanent body in 1922.

After years of research and discussion, maps, publications, and other media were brought to the public starting in the 1920s, especially the late 1920s. Although the Regional Plan was not associated with the legendary urban planner Robert Moses (1888-1981), their ideas were largely congruent, and the Regional Plan provided added momentum to the push for building highways (including parkways) in the city in a more deliberate and comprehensive manner. While the emphasis here is on passenger rail, the number of automobiles on the road was skyrocketing when this map was being prepared. It is worth noting that although the 1930s saw a deep economic depression throughout the country, many infrastructure and urban planning projects were undertaken in New York City during these years, leaving the city with most of the bridges, tunnels, and highways that it maintains today.

Publication History and Census

This map was prepared in 1922 by the Physical Survey section of the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs. It appeared in the 1923 book Maps and diagrams showing present conditions, New York and its environs, March, 1923, published by the Physical Survey. However, unlike the published version of the map, which includes a page number (p. 23) and a title banner, this example lacks those features and is mounted on linen. The present example is a proof state of the map. For instance, the Erie Railroad here is outlined in pink but unshaded within the outline, whereas in the printed map, the area within the outline is shaded. The stamp of the Physical Survey at the bottom-left is also suggestive.

The only known independent cataloging of this map is a microfilm reproduction produced by the National Archives in the 1950s (OCLC 77006200). The Olmsted Archives of the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site also likely holds it, cataloging two separately issued maps from 1922, on different scales, with a nearly identical title. (The Olmsted Brothers advised the Regional Plan in the early 1920s.)