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.
Read more about this topic: Park Avenue
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)
“History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)