part of the Independent Subway System (IND). As part of the plan, three of New York City's private subway companies (the IND; the IRT; and the Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit Corporation, or BMT) would be combined into one system, and the IRT Sixth Avenue elevated would be demolished. The city of New York acquired the line from the bondholders of the Manhattan Railway Company for $12,500,000, of which the city recovered $9,010,656 in back taxes and interest, in 1938. Subsequently, the El was closed on December 4, 1938. It was razed during 1939 to make way for the IND line. The section of the IND line that was located under Sixth Avenue opened in December 1940. The footings for the elevated were rediscovered in the early 1990s during a Sixth Avenue renovation project. Allegations demolition scrap was sold to Japan In order to alleviate any concern that the scrap metal might be exported to the Japanese, demolition contractor Tom Harris, who had received $40,000 to demolish the structure provided affidavits to the New York City Council that none of the iron would leave the United States. The inaccurate rumors were later included within the lines of E. E. Cummings's 1944 poem "plato told." Twenty thousand tons of scrap metal from the El was sold to a dealer on the west coast who was in the export business. The New York Times pointed out in December 1938 that even if the scrap did not go directly to Japan, for possible use against China, such a large amount of scrap metal arriving on the market would free up metal to be sent to Japan. At a meeting of the New York City Board of Estimate in 1942, Stanley M. Isaacs, the Manhattan Borough President, denied that steel from the El was sold to Japan. Isaacs said that when the demolition contract was drafted in 1938, "at my insistence the contract provided that not one ounce of that steel could be exported to Japan or to any one else." Isaacs said that the contractor was prohibited from exporting the steel from the El, and carried out his obligation to the letter. Reports of the supposed sale of the scrap to Japan persisted. In 1961, an attorney for the Harris Structural Steel Company, which was involved in the demolition, told syndicated columnist George Sokolsky that continued reports of the sale of steel from the El to