Triboro

Nate Dorr | 2021 | 7 min

A trip behind and beneath the street-level skin of the city on the hidden paths of industrial history and once-and-future transit.

The Triboro Line is a 24-mile freight rail in New York City, spanning from the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Bay Ridge, to Co-Op City in the Bronx. Once largely a passenger line, the tracks have since been reduced and repurposed, and now see only intermittent industrial use. In the absence of efficient crosstown trains or subways linking the burroughs without passing through Manhattan, transit advocacy groups have long pressed for restoration of the Triboro line to commuter service. An MTA feasibility study for conversion of the former Bay Ridge Branch, the lower eleven miles of track through Brooklyn to Fresh Pond Junction, opened in early 2020, and at last, with post-Covid infrasturcture funding coming into the city and backing by the governor, the newly rechristianed Interboro Express may at last see operation. Until then, through this rocky terrain, the Triboro Line runs on, rarely observed.

The film Triboro considers the Bay Ridge Branch as it exists now. From September 2019 to November 2020 I hiked the length of the line, taking around 8000 still photographs at regular intervals as regulated by the spacing of the ties, one photo every two to eight ties depending on the section under consideration. By carefully aligning and interleaving these images, created gliding timelapse tracking shots that travel as a train might and condense the eleven miles of rail and four seasons of work into a seven-minute journey.