The fifth in a series celebrating bus routes in Queens County. The cache is a MKB.
The mighty Q101 line goes back to the days of Steinway & Sons piano makers. Son William Henry Steinway was an adventurous man. He was involved in horse-car railroads in Astoria, New York, where in the early 1870s Steinway & Sons built another factory in the company town of Steinway across the East River from Manhattan. He and principal partner brewer George Ehret built the North Beach Amusement Park (originally called Bowery Bay Beach) which had the benefit of providing recreation and entertainment to Steinway & Sons' piano-making workforce living nearby in Steinway Village. It also created a demand for Steinway’s network of streetcars, trolleys, and ferries that provided access to the park on land that is now LaGuardia Airport. William also assisted a number of entrepreneurs who established businesses and manufacturing plants on the Steinway holdings. He purchased a distributor of natural gas in the Astoria area, and was a principal figure in several banks throughout the region, especially the Queens County Bank, the Bank of the Metropolis, and the German Savings Bank. In the last decade of his life he became interested in the work of Gustave Daimler, and helped to capitalize the company which much later became Daimler-Benz.
Some of the few remaining buildings from the Steinway Village are around the corner on 20th Avenue. The Steinway Mansion can still be seen a block away on 41st Street between 18th & 19th Avenues. Drive to the top of the hill and look quick as the building is landmarked but the surrounding property is not. Then think about the good old days and what Astoria was like. The Steinway Railway was the merger of the Rikers Island and Sanford Point Railroad and the Steinway and Hunters Point Railroad in 1892. The railway was acquired by the NY & Queens Railway in 1896 and was sold to the Third Avenue Railway System in 1922 operating as an independent company. In 1938, the Steinway Railway Company was sold to the Queensboro Bridge Railway Company . The QBBRW operated the last remaining street car line in New York City until 1957 when the service ended and the Q101 was extended across the bridge to Manhattan. The trolley line that this route follows continued until November 1, 1939 when Steinway Railway changed its name to Steinway Omnibus and started to tear up its rails. The name changed again in 1959 to Steinway Transit. In 1988 Queens Surface acquired Steinway Transit and in 2005, the MTA acquired Queens Surface Corp. Old time residents will remember that Steinway buses were always orange in color. The depot for this line is now out of the old Triboro Coach garage in Jackson Heights.
The Q101 route travels from the East Side of Manhattan at 61st Street and 2nd Avenue across the Queensboro (Ed Koch) Bridge, along Northern Blvd, Steinway Street and 19th Avenue ending at 77th St and Hazen Street at the foot of the Rikers Island Bridge, in Steinway Village.. When the Rikers Avenue Bridge was built in 1966, the Q101R crossed the Bridge to the island servicing the various prison facilities. When the Q100 was created in to replace the Q101R, the Q101 lost the title as the only transit bus in New York City to travel through Three boroughs (Rikers Island is geographically in the Bronx.)