Q. I heard there used to be a monorail running out to City Island. Whatever happened to it?
A. In Broadway terms, it bombed.
Inventors proposed a number of monorails in New York City and elsewhere in the 19th century, some of them highly fanciful and most of them never built or used only in test runs on short stretches. They couldn’t get financing or permission to operate, or they couldn’t overcome design flaws.
The two-mile monorail to City Island in the Bronx, which began its short life in 1910, was the first in the city to actually go into commercial service, followed much later by a monorail at the 1964-65 World’s Fair. It was also the only monorail in the nation at the time.
It consisted of a single cigar-shape orange car, optimistically named the Flying Lady by its promoters, running on a single rail, with two overhead rails providing electric power and added balance. The New York Times described the car this way:
“Each end points down to a nose like a collie’s, and the shabbiness of the one car gives the appearance of some ancient and unknown form of vehicle which might have been used in prehistoric days and which has been unearthed and pressed into service against its will.”
The track ran across City Island Bridge from the Bartow station of the Harlem River branch of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. The trip to City Island took 40 minutes by horse or car; the monorail would require three to five minutes, its officers declared.
The Pelham Bay Park and City Island Monoroad Company got its franchise from the old Board of Estimate in 1908. The company spent much of the next two years obtaining financial backing. With little work done and the franchise set to expire on July 4, 1910, construction began in earnest only that May. The company got a 10-day extension and spent early July testing the car, letting a few passengers ride free.
For its inaugural run on July 16, several hundred passengers, eager for City Island’s summer delights, rushed off the commuter train and tried to crowd into the monorail’s 75-foot-long car, which had a normal capacity of 40. At the controls was its inventor, Howard Hansel Tunis, who frantically signaled the conductor to fend off the mob. With about 100 aboard, he started for City Island, eventually moving about 20 miles an hour.
“Everything was all right until we entered the third curve,” Mr. Tunis said from his bed at home later that day. Under the car’s weight, the ties of the cheaply built, uncemented roadbed sank several inches into the loose dirt. The car lost contact with the upper rails, swayed and tipped on its side against a stanchion, which, fortunately for the screaming passengers, bent but did not snap. A worse disaster was averted because the accident occurred 100 yards from the company’s power house, where an alert engineer saw the car tilt over and immediately cut off the electricity. Only one passenger was reported seriously injured. (Eugenia Tunis, 6, the inventor’s daughter, bruised her face.)
After more work was done improving the roadbed, service resumed and continued into 1913 — but at low speeds, and subject to cancellation in strong winds. Enthusiasm for the monorail never returned. By 1914, it was gone.
Q. A young friend of mine who takes Batman seriously tells me the Caped Crusader was born in the Bronx. True?
A. Not only true, but one of the subjects of “Living in Sequence,” an exhibition of comic book artwork at the Poe Park Visitor Center at 2640 Grand Concourse in the Bronx, through March 9. In a statement, the parks department said, “This vibrant collection of Bronx artists pays homage to the strong ties between Poe Park and the history of comics.”
According to the department, Batman’s creators, Bob Kane and Bill Finger, thought up the series in 1939 during an hour spent in Poe Park, which includes the recently restored home of Edgar Allan Poe. They were soon joined in their collaboration by another artist, Jerry Robinson, who rented an apartment near Mr. Kane’s Grand Concourse home. Other characters like Robin and the Joker followed.
“In time, Poe’s stories would provide key story lines for some of Batman’s adventures, and in 2003 the superhero and Poe teamed up to solve mysteries in the comic mini-series ‘Batman: Nevermore,’ ” the parks department said.
A report in the F.Y.I. column in some editions last Sunday about the history of monorails in New York City referred incorrectly to the modern-day AirTrain to Kennedy Airport. It is not a monorail. (The city had a monorail for a short time beginning in 1910 and at the 1964-65 World’s Fair.) Another report in the column about Batman’s having been created in the Bronx misstated the given name of one creator. He was Bill Finger, not Joe. (He and Bob Kane thought up the series in 1939 during an hour spent in Poe Park.)