Bob
Postcards
Photos
and Poems
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Besides Coffeedrome.com,
I maintain another web site, Rumbledrome.com, which is devoted
to the history of championship auto racing in America in the
20th Century.
To find
material for Rumbledrome (photos, old programs, tickets, etc.),
I regularly visit eBay and search, using the search term "speedway."
It often happens that pictures or postcards are available featuring
the Speedway, in New York City.
This Speedway
has nothing to do with auto racing. Instead, it was a stretch
of road running along the west edge of the Harlem River from
155th Street to 208th Street where trotting horses exercised
and raced at the turn of the last century.
Today
the Speedway is part of the Harlem River Drive and the scene
in the postcards below is a familiar one to me. I see it driving
home almost every night.
A note from Coffeedrome visitor Don on Feb. 6, 2012:
From the Dec 10, 1919 Horse Review:
The Harlem River speedway, New York, has passed as an exclusive pleasure ground for harness horses. For years the automobile interests have tried to gather it into their fold, always being defeated by the faithful followers of the trotter until last spring, when a bill was passed in the New York legislature throwing it open to the autos, which was formally done about a week ago.
Regards Don
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Map from Scientific American,
February 6, 1897, showing the location of the Harlem River Speedway,
then under construction.
Read the article.
Card printed in Germany, about 1905.
Mailed Feb. 25, 1905
Card printed in Germany, about
1908.
Undated photograph.
Mailed from New York to Petaluma,
Calif., Aug. 4, 1914
Not dated, not mailed.
Printed in Germany. Date uncertain.
Printed in 1905. Not mailed.
Mailed in 1906 from Brooklyn
to Brooklyn.
Printed in 1901. Not mailed.
Postcard printed after 1908.
Not mailed.
Postmarked in Lakeville, Ohio,
December 31, 1910.
Mailed from Hoboken, N.J.,
to Norton, N.J., Feb. 19, 1906.
Postcard printed in 1903. Not
mailed.
Mailed from New York to Mount Union,
Pa., May 26, 1905
Mailed from New York to Elgin, Ill.,
Jan. 27, 1914
Mailed from New York to Cooksburg,
N.Y., March 26, 1906
Undated. Never mailed.
Mailed April 11, 1905, from Hoboken,
N.J., to Le Havre, France
Mailed from Albany, N.Y., to Ipswich,
Mass., June 24, 1904
Mailed from Albany, N.Y., to Ipswich,
Mass., June 24, 1904
Printed after 1908. Not mailed.
Date uncertain (but those are cars
on the Speedway, not horses).
March 28, 2004
