operated by cable as branches. The Broadway Line was electrified with conduit in May 1901. The Broadway and Seventh Avenue Railroad was leased by the Houston, West Street and Pavonia Ferry Railroad on June 30, 1893, and the lessee merged with the Broadway Surface Railroad and South Ferry Railroad on November 29, 1893 to form the Metropolitan Street Railway. Buses were substituted for streetcars by the New York City Omnibus Corporation on March 6, 1936, as route number 6. That company changed its name to Fifth Avenue Coach Lines in 1956; the Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority took over operations in 1962. Reroutes along north-south avenues When Broadway from 34th Street to Columbus Circle, Sixth Avenue from 34th Street to 59th Street, and Seventh Avenue from Times Square to 59th Street became one-way streets on March 10, 1957, the Broadway-Seventh Avenue route 6's northbound route was shifted to Sixth Avenue between 34th and 59th Streets. When several lower Manhattan streets were converted to one-way traffic on June 3, 1962, the 6's northbound path in the area was rearranged to travel along Greenwich Street, Trinity Place and Church Street. Following the one-way conversions of Sixth Avenue below 34th Street to one-way northbound, and of Broadway between 34th and 23rd Streets and between 14th and Canal Streets to one-way southbound, on November 10, 1963, the NYCO's Sixth Avenue bus (numbered 5) was discontinued and absorbed into the 6, now designated the Broadway-Seventh Avenue-Avenue of the Americas Line, and later M6.Meanwhile, the Fifth Avenue Coach Company had been operating its own route 5, the Fifth Avenue–Riverside Drive line, since August 5, 1900. For decades up to the 1962 MABSTOA takeover, its route largely held the same: running from 168th Street – Washington Heights to Washington Square Park, traveling through Fifth Avenue south of 57th Street, then turning onto Broadway through Columbus Circle, turning at 72nd Street towards Riverside Drive on its way to its northern terminus. The only change in the route path was following Broadway's conversion to one-way southbound between Columbus Circle and Herald Square in 1957, requiring the northbound 5 to turn at 57th Street onto Eighth Avenue en route to Columbus Circle. Bus service In the first decade following MABSTOA's 1962 takeover of all Fifth Avenue Coach and Surface Transit lines, several changes to the M5's route were made. After Washington Square Park was closed to bus traffic