In 1955, New York City began demolishing the Third Avenue El — and 17-year-old Sid Kaplan was there with his camera.
“I’ve always been interested in New York history,” Kaplan, now 78, tells The Post. “I also happened to be lucky that the high school I was going to was right off Third Avenue, so I didn’t have to walk that far!”
His shots, on view at the New York Transit Museum’s Grand Central Gallery Annex, along with signs and other artifacts, chronicle the beauty and chaos of New York City’s changing landscape. “I don’t think of myself as a photographer as much as a recorder,” Kaplan says.
The Bronx native fell in love with photography at 10, when he saw a picture emerge from a developer. In high school, he started taking pictures of the elevated trains, which he found “very picturesque, and definitely from another century.”
But photographing the demolition of the El, which ran from South Ferry all the way to the tip of Manhattan (the Bronx portion remained open till the ’70s), wasn’t easy. Often, two crews — one uptown, one downtown — would be working at the same time, and Kaplan would run between locations to document their progress. Plus, getting the best vantage points involved trespassing.
Luckily, Kaplan says, “being a street kid from the South Bronx, I knew about how to walk into tenement buildings nonchalantly and work my way up to the roof.”
The East Village resident likes to visit the Transit show “incognito” and eavesdrop. “My favorite is when I hear someone say of one of my pictures, ‘I didn’t know that was there!’ ”
“Deconstruction of the Third Avenue El: Photographs by Sid Kaplan” runs through July 9 at the New York Transit Museum’s Grand Central Gallery Annex, at Grand Central Terminal.