The first automobile fatality happened on the Dangerous Stretch

On the evening of September 13, 1899, Henry Bliss stepped down from a southbound trolley at Central Park West and 74th Street in New York. He turned to help his companion alight and was struck by an electric taxicab. He died the next morning.

Bliss is generally identified as the first person in the United States killed by an automobile. That category makes the event sound like a simple encounter between a pedestrian and a startling new machine. The contemporary newspaper account describes a busier piece of street.

Bliss was leaving a trolley. The cab driver, Arthur Smith, said a large truck occupied the right side of the avenue, forcing him close to the streetcar. The passenger in the cab happened to be a doctor returning from a sick call; he treated Bliss until an ambulance arrived. Smith was arrested and charged with manslaughter, then later released.

The report also gave the location a name used by trolley motormen: the “Dangerous Stretch.” There had already been many accidents there that summer.

The automobile fatality was new. The traffic problem was not. The street carried rail vehicles that stopped to release passengers, trucks that took up road space, pedestrians moving between curb and car, and a small but growing number of automobiles. They did not occupy separate systems. They negotiated the same strip.

Later accounts naturally isolate the electric cab, because it began a grim statistical category that would become enormous. But the collision itself involved three kinds of vehicle before counting the ambulance. It happened while one transport system was unloading a passenger, a second passed alongside it and a third narrowed the available space.

The automobile supplied the first entry in a new fatality count. The Dangerous Stretch was already there.