History
Park Avenue was originally known as Fourth Avenue and carried the tracks of the New York and Harlem Railroad starting in the 1830s. The railroad originally built an open cut through Murray Hill, which was covered with grates and grass between 34th and 40th Street in the early 1850s. A section of this "park" was renamed Park Avenue in 1860. In 1867, the name applied all the way to 42nd Street. When Grand Central Depot was opened in the 1870s, the railroad tracks between 56th and 96th Streets were sank out of sight, and, in 1888, Park Avenue was extended to the Harlem River.
In 1936 the elevated Grand Central Terminal Park Avenue Viaduct was built around the station to allow automobile traffic to pass unimpeded. In October 1937, a part of the Murray Hill Tunnel was reopened for road traffic. Efforts to promote a Grand Park Avenue Expressway to Grand Concourse in the Bronx were unavailing.
On May 5, 1959, the New York City Council voted 20–1 to change the name of Fourth Avenue between 17th and 32nd Streets to Park Avenue South. In 1963, the Pan Am Building was built straddling Park Avenue atop Grand Central Terminal, between the automotive viaducts.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“The history is always the same the product is always different and the history interests more than the product. More, that is, more. Yes. But if the product was not different the history which is the same would not be more interesting.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“I saw the Arab map.
It resembled a mare shuffling on,
dragging its history like saddlebags,
nearing its tomb and the pitch of hell.”
—Adonis [Ali Ahmed Said] (b. 1930)