Here is a fragment of a 1930s-vintage New York City transit map, showing a now-extinct elevated line that ran almost exactly where the F line runs now, from Ditmas Ave down to Coney Island.
It shows a stop between Avenue X and the West 8th Street stop where it hooked up with everything else to end up at Coney Island / Stillwell Ave. The F train has a stop near to that same location called Neptune Ave. The elevated train stop, however, bears a label that I can’t make myself interpret as “Neptune Ave”. It looks to my eyes like VANSCHLEN or VANSEHLEN or possibly even EVANSEHLEN, with no “Ave” or “St” designation.
If Van Siclen Ave were right in that area, I’d believe Van Siclen, but based on fuzzy memory and a couple of MapQuest searches, I’m under the impression that Van Siclen is somewhere substantiall east of this.
Anyone from the area, and/or possessed of great skills at reading badly-scanned maps, figure out what this stop was actually named?
It’s the one almost dead-center in this fragment, with Avenue X left and above it and W 8th St right and below. Coney Island/Stillwell is at extreme lower left.
I’m looking at my copy of Van Nostrand’s Map of Brooklyn 1934. I can see the El line (it looks like you’re taking the image from the BMT map at NYCsubway.org). My map shows that El station as “Neptune Avenue.” There is no street in that area that starts with a “V” I see Rodman, Cortland, Holmes, Canal, Sheepshead Bay, and various numbered streets. There’s an alley called “New,” but it’s too short to tell if that was it’s name or part of it.
NYCsubways.org also says the station name was Neptune Ave., which is logical, since that was one of the main thoroughfares of Coney Island.
If you’d like a scan of the area as it looked in 1934, e-mail me your e-mail address.
Microsoft Streets & Trips 2001 (mapping software on CD-ROM) shows the current F-line subway stop at Neptune Ave and W. 6th St as “Neptune Ave/Van Sicklen” (I can e-mail you a PDF printout of a map if you need me to). Van Sicklen Street runs parallel to the F-line for a while, but seems to peter out about 1 mile north of where it should cross Neptune Ave, right by the mystery El station.
Punching “593 Van Sicklen Street, Brooklyn NY” (a guess as to its southernmost street address) into Yahoo Maps gives us this map – you can see Neptune Ave down at the south edge. There’s a huge empty space with no named roads (just Jim Franco baseball field) where Van Sicklen St. should continue. Wonder what’s there?
Ah! Microsoft Terraserver provides the missing clue. You can see the baseball diamond near the center of the aerial photo, right next to — a whole mess of rail yards where Van Sicklen St. should be.
So, my guess is that when they first named the station, there was a vestige of Van Sicklen that ran further south than it now does, and the station was named Neptune Ave / Van Sicklen. This part of VS was overlaid by the rail yard, and the station name was simplified to Neptune Ave, as it appears in current subway maps. For some reason, MS Streets & Trips picked up on the old name.
Thanks for the research endeavor. On a lark, inspired by the 100th anniversary of the subway system, I’ve started playing with the modern subway map format* , showing the routes and stops as they were at different points in the past. This map is a 1930s-vintage route map.
(which is easiest for me to read and understand, with different colored lines based on the route they take through the “key” grid 14th thru 42nd St in Manhattan, rather than split into separate maps for BMT, IRT, and IND)
Thanks for that link. I (barely) remember the McDonald Avenue trolleys, which I’m guessing were eliminated in the late 1950s, when my father owned a candy store on McDonald around Church Street, I think. I was a toddler, but I remember standing on the sidewalk and watching the trolleys.
I also have a vestigial memory of seeing Van Sicklen signs in the area you’re describing.