Pomonok

{See map) When a little island is balanced on the finger tip of an island many times its size, and when the larger island has a population as great as that of Indiana, a population much of which wishes to visit the little island daily, logic would seem to indicate but one conclusion: that the railroad providing the transportation should have a very profitable job. Yet the Long Island Railroad has only a long record of lean years and deficits to show for performing that sort of job. From 1897 to 1926 inclusive it manfully carried Long Islanders to their daily work and pleasure in Manhattan without paying any dividends. In 1928 for the first time its net income crossed the $4,000,000 mark. Last week the commuters of Long Island and the legal department of New York City urged the Interstate Commerce Commission not to let the Long Island R. R. be charged more rent for its Manhattan terminal. No gratitude, as ignorant persons might presume, was behind this move. The Long Island R. R. is almost entirely owned by the Pennsylvania R. R., which is its Manhattan landlord. William Wallace Atterbury is president of both roads. Commuters were anxious to stop him from paying himself more rent, because they feared that if he did so, he would use it as an argument to raise their fares. The Commuters. The commuters of Long Island live almost all on the western half of the island. The eastern half of the long finger-shape is sparsely populated. Westernmost is Brooklyn in the County of Kings, once an aristocratic little city in its own right, now a large, rather shoddy suburb of the great metropolis. The Long Island R. R. means little enough to Brooklynites, who have three bridges and a subway to take them to work. Eastward from Brooklyn stretches a great desert of sub-suburbia, miles of houses, all cut from the same pattern. Beyond comes bourgeois suburbia with strongholds for racing (Belmont Park, Aqueduct, Jamaica), tennis (Forest Hills). There the Ku Klux Klan, righteous bulwark against the polyglot city masses, burns crosses on the hills and empty lots. Along the south shore are Jewish spas. The peninsulas of the north shore are the resorts of the tycoons: first Great Neck with a distinct theatrical colony, with George M. Cohan, Jane Cowl, and a sprinkling of financiers like Jesse Livermore and Harry Ford Sinclair; next, Sands Point with rich-but-not-social persons like Mrs. Hearst, the Guggenheims, Herbert Bayard Swope; third, Glen Cove and Locust Valley, home of the Tycoonist--J. P. Morgan, Davisons, Harknesses; fourth, Oyster Bay with a family air about it, home of Roosevelts and Doubledays; fifth, Lloyd's Neck, where Marshall Field III from Chicago and the bathroom-supplying Colgates settled, with Otto Hermann Kahn's growing domain just inland. Here the island is almost as it used to be, with crow-loud woods, quail in the fields, opossums (near Huntington this year) in the hedgerows. Great earth boomings (not land booms) sometimes give a prehistoric overtone--the unexplained phenomenon of terrestrial detonations which geologists call bombiti. For all the island-dwellers--from tycoons to clerks--there is one common problem: how to reach Manhattan. On the north shore men of wealth solve it with speedy launches. For the many the choice is between automobiles and the Long Island R. R. There are a few trunk highways on the island--the old Jericho Turnpike (central), Merrick Road (southerly), the new Nassau Boulevard (northerly)* but these converge upon only one bridge to Manhattan (Queensborough) which sometimes takes an hour to crocs. Cars line up for miles at intersecting streets, and any who seek the other three bridges to Manhattan must first thread the truck-clogged labyrinth of Brooklyn. New York City is now planning a vehicular tunnel at 38th street undtr the East River (last week the War Department granted its consent) but several years will pass before it can make motoring easier. The relief that this tunnel may give can be judged from the fact that 35,000 automobiles per day, at 50 cents each, use the new Holland Vehicular Tunnels on the Jersey side. Commuters who cannot bear motor jams, and who wish to read newspapers en route to work, go by the Long Island R. R.--and curse above their breaths. It too is subject to frequent traffic jams; also breakdowns, seat shortages. A commuter custom gravely observed by many an upstanding, elderly Long Islander is "writing to the Public Service Commission." The Commission is polite and sympathetic, but also either helpless or evasive. Its favorite answer is that its state jurisdiction ends at Jamaica, where the railroad comes under the authority of the city's transit commission. The Railroad. Most people consider that there is but one Pomonok* poet, Walt Whitman, but there are others. One such is a person called "Si Tanhauser," whose Rhymes of the Sunrise Trail has just been published and is advertised by the Long Island R. R. to divert its customers. In Si Tanhauser's "song of trans- portation" occurs this passage: I am the railroad, infinite, supreme; I am the god whose unbenumbered shrines Are set upon a hundred thousand hills. The fires of my altars light the fanes And temples of unbound'ried empirates. Unlike many railroads, the Long Island does its chief business in passengers, not freight. In 1928 it carried 112,500,000 passengers and 9,000,000 tons of freight. The passengers (calculated at 150 lbs. each, not allowing for baggage) would weigh almost as much as the freight (and of course pay more per ton). There were only 27,500,000 passengers and 3,500,000 tons of freight handled in 1909 before the Pennsylvania built its station and tunnels under the East River, for use by the Long Island. The great increase in the Long Island's business is largely attributed by railroad officials to the use of the Manhattan terminal, paraphasing, as it were, the "song of transportation": ... I am the rock, The spiked foundations of the plan ye rear Among the mazing stars. The rental. Last fall the Long Island R. R. was denied a 20% increase in commutation rates by the New York Transit Commission. Commuters contend that now the Long Island and Pennsylvania are planning to perform a bookkeeping miracle, by raising rent on themselves to make it appear justifiable to raise commuters' fares. Until 1923 the rental paid by the Long Island R. R. for Manhattan terminal facilities of the Pennsylvania was small, ranging up to $300,000 a year. Railroad officials explain that the Long Island was "in the red" and to help nurse it to health merely a nominal rent was charged. Since 1923 the rental has been fixed by an agreement forced on the two railroads by the New York Transit Commission. Since that date the Long Island has payed on a wheelage basis (i. e., in proportion to number of its cars entering the terminal), the expenses "of the track level," and on the same basis for its share of the original investment in tunnels, tracks, power equipment at 4% and 4 1/2% interest. The phrase "of the track level" means that the Long Island paid nothing for the maintenance of the waiting rooms, ticket offices, etc. and nothing in interest on the station investment. Now the Pennsylvania proposes to charge the Long Island for its share of the original station (as well as track, tunnel and power) investment at 6%. Commuters assert that this will increase the rental from some $2,835,000 to $4,450,000. They assert they do not use "the spacious waiting rooms," "regal restaurants," "commodious concourse with monumental and artistic features" (all, if anywhere, on the "Pennsylvania side" of the station)--that therefore they should not pay for them. The railroad answers that of 59,000,000 people using the Pennsylvania Station in 1928, 48,500,000 were Long Island passengers. The Railroad answers further that it has no present intention of raising commuters' fares but even if it had there is no reason why the terminal rental should be kept inadequate in order to let commuters ride at lower rates than if a proper rental were paid. Although the railroad's brief before the Interstate Commerce Commission did not say this, its "song of transportation" did: The pallid horseman's ghastly saffron steed, The wretchedness, the suffering, the strife, The inhumanity of man to man That marked the mileage posts of yesteryear Are gone forever and the golden glow Of this the dawn of our enlightenment Hath labor crowned and service deified. And I, the railroad, even I, am he That curtained down the horror-stricken Past, And with my flaming falchion cut the cords That bound ye to its wheel.

* At the turn of the century, when it seemed possible that a great port might develop far out on Long Island, W. K. Vanderbilt bought up the nucleus of a right-of-way for a possible second railroad. The port did not develop. In 1908 the right-of-way was made into a smooth, narrow Motor Parkway without intersections or speed limit, reaching from within ten miles of Manhattan to Lake Ronkonkoma in mid- island. Handy chiefly for length-of-the-island trips or for reaching central clubs and airports on holidays, it is used by only some 300 motorists daily; toll $1. --The Indian name for Long Island.