mott haven

November 29, 2022

Through the Lens of Anthony Angel: New York City Rail Infrastructure in the 1950s

As a photographer, explorer, and now-New Yorker I’ve found myself curiously drawn to the work of Angelo Rizzuto. Anthony Angel, as he called himself, was a street photographer who captured the city from the late 1940s until his death in 1967. His body of work was largely overlooked by the fine art world, seen more as snapshots from a madman with a camera than any sort of photographic art. Yet from a historical perspective, the images resonated with me. Angel created a nearly 60,000 image strong visual time capsule of New York City—his photos of the old Pennsylvania Station, of...

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May 21, 2015

The Lost Train Station of the Bronx – 138th Street, Mott Haven

If there seems to be one constant with we humans, it is that we spend much time tearing down vestiges of our past to make room for the supposed future. We build bigger, taller, and seek the more modern, or the more profitable. Many venerable buildings have met the wrecking ball, and although some are well remembered, such as New York’s Pennsylvania Station, others are largely forgotten. One such forgotten New York City gem is the New York Central’s 138th Street station. Upon construction it was considered one of New York City’s most notable examples of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture. Featuring...

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March 13, 2015

Keeping the trains clean – A look back at Mott Haven Yard

Early last month some alarms were raised about an Amtrak traveler that rode from Penn Station to Albany that was infected with measles. Any poor sap riding that train who failed the common-sense milestone of getting vaccinated could potentially have been exposed. Occurrences such as these in the modern day are far less common, but in the early 1900’s health became a subject in the forefront of train riders’ minds – especially when trains often carried the (generally perceived) “dirty” immigrants out west. Today Mott Haven is only a small yard facility operated by Metro-North, located where the Hudson Line...

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May 14, 2012

Random photos from a weekend full of trains…

I hope everyone had a spectacular weekend… Although I managed to get slightly sunburnt, we certainly had some lovely weather! Maybe you even partook in some of the events for National Train Day in Grand Central? I saw quite a few of you there, apologies to the folks I never got a chance to meet up with and say hi. My weekend was quite full with Train Day festivities, as well as my first photographic foray to the foreign territory that is the Hudson Line. At Poughkeepsie I achieved the milestone of my 100th Metro-North station photographed. When you think...

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April 9, 2010

Friday’s From the Historical Archive: Old Maps and Station Names

Some of the very first things that were added when I created the Historical Archives were maps I found thanks to the Library of Congress. It was interesting to see the network of railroads in the country grow in size exponentially through the 1800’s, and then later in the mid 1900’s crash and quite a few disappeared. There was one map, however, that caught my attention. That map lists a station along the Harlem Line: Golding’s Bridge. Was it a typo? In the back of my mind I had always wondered about the apostrophe thing. Is Goldens Bridge written properly...