The milestone: 26 November 1967
The most important event in the New York subway’s 1967 was the opening of the Chrystie Street Connection on Sunday, 26 November. It was a set of tunnels and track in lower Manhattan that joined lines which had been built by separate companies decades earlier, and it brought a wide reorganisation of train services across the city. Nothing else in the subway that year matched it, and it is the reason 1967 is remembered in transit histories.
A system built in three parts
To see why the connection mattered, it helps to know how the subway was built. The first lines were opened in the early 1900s by a private operator. In the 1910s and 1920s two other systems grew: the Brooklyn Rapid Transit company’s lines, later called the BMT, and the city-owned Independent Subway System, or IND, which opened its first lines in 1932. The city took over the private lines in 1940, so all three were operated together. But they had been designed separately, and they were physically divided.
The BMT and IND tracks in Manhattan joined in very few places. As a result, trains arriving from Brooklyn on the Manhattan Bridge, which carried some of the BMT’s busiest routes, could not simply continue onto the IND tracks of Sixth Avenue. Planners had discussed ways to connect the two networks for years.
What the Chrystie Street Connection did
The Chrystie Street Connection linked the tracks from the Manhattan Bridge in the Lower East Side with the Sixth Avenue lines of the IND to the north, by way of a new section of subway running along Chrystie Street. It opened with a new station at Grand Street. The link allowed trains from Brooklyn lines to run through to Sixth Avenue and beyond, and it allowed some trains from the Sixth Avenue lines to run into Brooklyn.
In practice the opening led to a significant revision of train services. Many lines were rerouted, extended or renamed, and routes that had ended in lower Manhattan could now serve midtown. Riders gained new one-seat journeys between Brooklyn and midtown, and the extra capacity on the Manhattan Bridge helped distribute the load among lines. The reshuffle also confused some riders for a while, and it produced a period of adjustment. Because of the number of changes involved, readers interested in a specific line should check a service history for that route, since details varied by line and time of day.
The connection also included room for expansion. The Chrystie Street tunnel was built with space for further lines, partly with a future Second Avenue subway in mind. That line, long planned, was not built at that time, and parts of the structure remained unused for decades.
Fares and tokens
The subway of 1967 ran at a time of low and tightly controlled fares. The fare had been 15 cents for years, paid with a token from 1953. It was increased to 20 cents in 1966, and the token was adjusted to match. This fare would rise again to 30 cents in the early 1970s. The fare history is a reminder that the system relied on inexpensive tickets while its costs were rising, and it was operated by a public authority with limited funds.
The New York City Transit Authority ran the subway, and it was linked to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, created in 1965 to coordinate transport in the New York region. The MTA’s governance changed again in 1968, when it took over the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and other bodies, so the 1967 subway sat in a period of institutional change.
The wider setting
The 1967 subway ran in a city under strain. The population was changing, many riders were moving out to the suburbs and relying on cars, and the system itself suffered from ageing equipment and graffiti and vandalism problems that grew in the next decade. A 12-day transit strike had hit the city in January 1966, soon after Mayor John Lindsay took office. Memories of the Northeast blackout of 1965, when the subway stopped for the night, were also still recent.
At the same time, other cities were opening new transit systems. Montreal’s metro opened in October 1966, in time for Expo 67, and in Japan the Tokaido Shinkansen had begun service in 1964. The Chrystie Street Connection was, by comparison, a modest piece of engineering, but it gave New Yorkers more flexibility inside the existing system.
What happened later
In later decades, the Manhattan Bridge tracks needed major repair, and services were reorganised several times over the years that followed. The Chrystie Street link remains in use as part of the connections between Brooklyn and Manhattan. The 1967 opening is therefore best seen not as a single success but as a step in a long process of adjusting a system built by rival companies to the needs of a unified city.