FORGOTTEN Fan Steve Stein passes along a pair of recent photos taken at 39th Street and 5th Avenue in Sunset Park showing some unearthed trolley tracks, and a bit of Belgian block pavement, exposed while the street is being milled for repavement.
Two streetcar lines ran on 39th Street: the #8 (39th Street, Church Avenue) and the #30 (39th Street, 8th Avenue). They were replaced by bus lines that run essentially the same route, the B35 and the B70.
The #8, running on Church Avenue, was in fact the last trolley line to be replaced by bus, running until 10/31/1956; the Queensboro Bridge trolley line survived a year longer. A widening of Church avenue for three blocks either side of Ocean Parkway is a legacy of its streetcar line: a tunnel was dug there over a century ago to allow streetcars to avoid busy Ocean Parkway traffic. Similar arrangements exist on busy east-west Bronx streets intersecting with the Grand Concourse, such as Kingsbridge Road.
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4/3/26
2 comments
There are tons of photos of the old Brooklyn streetcars on “Al Ponte’s Time Machine” on Facebook.
I had always heard that the reason for the trolley tunnel under Ocean Parkway at Church Avenue was that overhead wires were not allowed over the parkway. There were no trolley lines crossing the Ocean Parkway north of Neptune Avenue.