The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  A young woman was knocked down and fatally injured by an automobile vehicle while crossing Broadway on Christmas afternoon. She was a trained nurse, and therefore presumably intelligent, prudent, and active. The vehicle was moving rapidly, just how rapidly is not reported. The engineer in charge of it saw the young woman crossing the street and rang the gong in warning. Apparently, however, he did not abate speed of the machine nor attempt to steer it out of the way. He considered his responsibility fully discharged by the ringing of the gong.

  Until 1900 almost all cars were custom-made and regarded as playthings of the rich. In that year the entire United States contained only 13,824 automobiles. Probably half the men and women of America had never seen a car. The nation’s first automobile show was held in the old Madison Square Garden in 1900, 51 exhibitors displaying their latest models. Many were electric vehicles. Most were steered by rods, rather than by steering wheels. The show featured starting and stopping contests. Some cars were driven up a wooden ramp within the Garden to demonstrate how they could climb hills.

  Some New Yorkers complained about the growing traffic problem. One of the best reporters in American history, Ray Stannard Baker, made this monumentally wrong prediction: “It is hardly possible to conceive the appearance of a crowded wholesale street in the day of the automobile vehicle. In the first place, it will be almost as quiet as a country lane—all the crash of horses’ hoofs and the rumble of steel tires will be gone. And since vehicles will be fewer and shorter than the present truck and span, streets will appear less crowded.”

  In 1901 New York State ordered motorists to buy license plates at $1 apiece. The same year the Automobile Club of America, which had a clubhouse at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street, sponsored a 464-mile endurance race between New York City and Buffalo. A French car won with an average speed of 15 miles an hour. On November 16, 1901, for the first time in American history, an auto exceeded the speed of a mile a minute in a race held by the Long Island Automobile Club on Brooklyn’s Ocean Parkway. Within minutes, however, the speed record was broken.

  The city’s first traffic regulations for automobiles went into effect in 1903. Because the traffic situation worsened, the next year the state passed a law holding cars to a maximum speed of ten miles an hour in congested areas of the city. In 1905 the Fifth Avenue Coach Company introduced a twenty-four-passenger double-decked bus imported from France. The following year an automobile row began to develop along Broadway in the upper Fifties. In 1906 Woodrow Wilson, the president of Princeton University, said that “nothing has spread socialistic feelings in this country more than the use of the automobile” which represented “to the countryman. . . a picture of arrogance of wealth, with all its independence and carelessness.” The Fifth Avenue line was so pleased with its French buses that it bought more of them and on July 30, 1907, removed the last of its horse stages from Fifth Avenue. Taximeter cabs made their first appearance in New York on October 1, 1907.

  According to a traffic study made here in 1907, horse-drawn vehicles moved at an average speed of 11.5 miles an hour. (In 1966, during the daytime, automobiles crawled through Manhattan’s central business district at an average speed of 8½ miles an hour.) The nation’s first electric traffic signals were installed in Cleveland in 1914. New York City didn’t get its first traffic towers until 1922, and by then the city was well along its way toward the automobile congestion that remains one of its most pressing problems.

  London opened the world’s first subway system in 1863. Ten years later Abram S. Hewitt made a speech in Cooper Union calling for city ownership of all New York’s rapid transit lines. A bill to this effect was soon introduced into the state legislature, but it was voted down. In 1877 cars hanging from an overhead rail were tried out in Brooklyn, only to prove unsuccessful. Elevated trains began crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883. Three years later elevated roads carried 1,000,000 passengers a day and could hold no more. Rapid transit? It was a joke. Newspapers crusaded against indecent and inhuman congestion. Every seat was taken, and standees held onto leather straps and swayed and swore in the aisles. Pointing out that passenger traffic once again had outstripped all means of conveyance, the World asked, “Who will be die Moses to lead us through this wilderness of uncertainty?” Abram Hewitt seemed to be the man. He became mayor of New York in 1887. Appealing to the state legislature to study the problem further, Hewitt said, “The existing railroads have practically reached the limit of their capacity. Besides, though operated with great care and ability, they are not in reality satisfactory to any class of the community.”

  Cable cars, a form of transit inaugurated in San Francisco in 1873, had begun running in New York by 1885. The first local cable car rattled along 125th Street. It was drawn by a moving cable housed in a slot below street level; contact was established by a gripman standing in the front vestibule of the car. But soon the Tribune was crying that “the cable car is a Juggernaut, a murderer on wheels, a maimer of men and a destroyer of women and children.”

  Mayor Hewitt addressed the railway committee of the state senate and assembly on March 29, 1888. He urged that New York City be given the legal right to build its own subway system. His ideas were written into a bill introduced into the legislature, but the measure wasn’t even reported out of committee. Neither Democratic nor Republican political bosses wanted a transit system rivaling the horse-cars and elevateds in which they held a vested interest.

  The mayor, the Chamber of Commerce, and others continued to agitate for a subway, and in 1891 the state passed a rapid transit act. This called for the creation of a board consisting of the mayor, city comptroller, and the city commissioner of public works. They could hold public hearings, listen to proposals, and then draft a plan for construction of a subway system. On October 21, 1891, city aldermen approved plans for an underground railway. Despite this, several powerful persons balked. Jay Gould, who partially controlled the elevated lines, was against it. Russell Sage, one of Gould’s business associates, said contemptuously: “New York people will never go into a hole in the ground to ride. . . . Preposterous!” Chauncey M. De-pew, president of the New York Central, warned that if New Yorkers used subways, they would develop claustrophobia. The Metropolitan Street Railway Company, undisputed master of surface transportation in Manhattan and the Bronx, fought its potential rival.

  The city announced that it would accept bids for construction of the subway, but nothing happened; contractors were afraid to enter bids and begin construction because subway opponents might interrupt the work with lawsuits. In 1894 the state legislature created another rapid transit board, and in an election a majority of New Yorkers declared that they favored municipal ownership of subways. Over the next several decades the city built the subway system; then private companies took them over, but eventually the city got them back again.

  In 1897 Boston became the first American city to inaugurate an underground railroad. The next year, while plans were being drafted for New York’s subway, Harper’s Weekly reported that the number of people commuting daily to Manhattan was greater than the total population of Cincinnati. About 100,000 commuters arrived by bridge and ferry from Brooklyn, another 100,000 or more came by ferry from New Jersey, and more than 118,000 arrived daily at the overcrowded Grand Central Station from Westchester County and from Connecticut. By 1900 New Yorkers were riding the city’s streetcars—a billion times a year—or trying to. The same year an underground railway opened in Paris.

  In New York a contractor, named John B. McDonald, wrote optimistically that “surface travel will be an oddity twenty years from now.” McDonald wanted to build the subway. He had gained experience constructing tunnels in Baltimore for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. In February, 1900, he signed the first New York subway contract. For $35,000,000 McDonald agreed to build, equip, and operate the road for 50 years. He was a member of Tammany Hall and a close friend of Andrew Freedman, one of Boss Croker’s financial partners. Since New Yorkers had voted for a subw
ay system, Croker and his colleagues decided to profit from the inevitable by helping McDonald get the contract; they hoped that this would result in fat subcontracts for themselves. They also schemed to put thousands of Tammany voters on the payroll as day laborers.

  But for all of McDonald’s ability and political connections he didn’t have enough money to swing this deal. To his aid came August Belmont II, who had succeeded his father as head of the banking firm of August Belmont & Company, and had retained close business relations with the Rothschild family. Belmont became president of the Rapid Transit Subway Construction Company, and Rothschild money poured into the project. On March 24, 1900, ground was broken for the subway in front of City Hall.

  Twelve thousand laborers began tunneling through the earth. Most were Italian, Polish, and Irish, but among these brawny workers was a frail poet, named Edwin Arlington Robinson. Maine-born Robinson spent two years at Harvard and moved to New York in 1899. Slender and erect, with good breeding visible in every line of his scholar’s face and his small mouth solemn and set, he peered through prim spectacles with burning brown eyes. So neurotically sensitive that he called himself “a man without a skin,” Robinson smiled a twisted Yankee smile and admitted that “the world frightens me.” When he arrived here, the only money he had earned up to then from poetry had been seven dollars for a sonnet praising Edgar Allan Poe. Threadbare and desperate, the shy New Englander took a job underground at twenty cents an hour for a ten-hour working day. Later his poems won him three Pulitzer prizes.

  Robinson checked the loads of stones removed from the growing tunnels. By 1900 Governors Island had dwindled from 170 acres during the Dutch era to a mere 70 acres because of erosion by waves. Soil and stones dug from the ground were carted and barged to the island to enlarge it. Commuters saw this tangible evidence of a new kind of transportation and gave silent thanks. The subway’s popularity was reflected in an advertisement declaring that Abbey’s Effervescent Salt was “The Rapid Transit to Health.”

  In 1901, while the subway was still under construction, horses were taken off streetcars, which converted to electricity. This was a mere stopgap measure, and soon the electric streetcar became a menace. So fast and confusing were Brooklyn’s trolley cars that harried Brooklynites dubbed themselves the Trolley Dodgers. A local baseball team, known successively as the Superbas, Kings, and Bridegrooms, ultimately became the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  The first leg of the city’s first subway went into operation for the first time on Thursday, October 27, 1904. The weather was crisp. The official ceremony began at 1 P.M. in the aldermanic chamber of City Hall. The city’s new mayor was George B. McClellan, Jr., whose father had been one of Lincoln’s generals and his Democratic rival for the Presidency. Thirty-nine-year-old McClellan was a scholar and author with a handsome, narrow, clean-shaven face. That great day a wearisome series of speeches was made. After the benediction had been pronounced, August Belmont gave the mayor a mahogany case containing a silver throttle. Taking out the throttle and waving it aloft, McClellan cried, “I now, as mayor, in the name of the people, declare the subway open.” Then, donning a shiny silk topper and a chesterfield coat, McClelland led the procession out of City Hall.

  Followed by other city fathers, Belmont, McDonald, and more than 200 whiskered and mustached Wall Street financiers, the mayor walked into a subway kiosk and down into the City Hall station. This was the southern terminus of the line. Standing in the station was the first train, 5 wooden cars sheathed in copper, their tops painted a flaming red. Each car seated 56 passengers. The front car, named the Belmont, had no doors on its sides. The celebrities had to board it via a door at the end. The mayor entered the motorman’s closet and fitted the silver throttle into place. Photographers snapped pictures of him standing rigid and frozen-faced. McClellan had never operated any kind of train.

  At 2:35 P.M. a cannon boomed in City Hall Park, whistles blew, bells rang, and the celebrity-packed train began to move. It headed north under Broadway, continued up 4th Avenue to Grand Central Station, turned west to Times Square, and then followed upper Broadway toward 145th Street. With McClellan still at the throttle, the train hit a top speed of about 45 miles an hour. The distance of 9.1 miles between City Hall and 145th Street was traveled in 26 minutes—exactly on schedule.

  At seven o’clock that evening any and all New Yorkers were allowed to make this exciting trip. Tickets cost five cents each. A World reporter wrote: “Men fought, kicked and pummeled one another in their mad desire to reach the subway ticket office or to ride on the trains. Women were dragged out, either screaming in hysterics or in a swooning condition; gray-haired men pleaded for mercy, boys were knocked down and only escaped by a miracle from being trampled under foot. . . .”

  Times Square became so congested with people that it looked like New Year’s Eve. At the 145th Street subway station policemen struggled to control the throngs. During the confusion a passenger had his $500 diamond stickpin stolen; it was the city’s first subway crime. The first day a total of 111,000 people rode the new rails. Friday it was 319,000; Saturday, 350,000.

  Because this single line of die Interborough Rapid Transit Company was far from sufficient to solve the commutation problem, in the next few years ever more subway tracks pronged through the bowels of New York. In time the city’s subway system developed into the most heavily traveled passenger railroad in the world.

  Chapter 38

  THE GENERAL SLOCUM DISASTER

  A FEW MINUTES after nine o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, June 15, 1904, an excursion boat, named the General Slocum, left her pier at the foot of East Third Street and headed north up the East River. Although a light breeze blew from the south, the day was sunny, hot, and humid. The steamboat was a white three-decked side-wheeler with twin stacks that belched smoke as she gathered speed.

  Aboard were about 1,400 passengers, mostly women and children. German-born or of German descent, they lived in Little Germany, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. They were parishioners of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, located at 328 East Sixth Street, and this was their annual Sunday-school outing. Flaxen-haired boys and girls carried fat picnic baskets which they planned to unpack at Locust Grove, on Long Island Sound. German men had gone to work as usual that day, happy that their wives and children could enjoy a day in the country. While the steamboat captain, William H. Van Schaick, stood his post on the bridge, a band aboard the ship played a Lutheran hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

  As the vessel drew even with East 125th Street a fire was discovered in a cabin on the main deck, and the children’s happy chatter thinned out. Since the passengers were women and children and since land was within easy reach on both port and starboard, the skipper should have beached his craft as quickly as possible and hurried his passengers ashore. Instead, he ordered an increase in speed. He planned to proceed under forced draft to North Brother Island, just off the southern shore of the Bronx, and disembark his passengers there. The engines pounded. The paddle wheels churned. The ship vibrated. The increased speed stirred up a breeze that spread the flames. The crackling fire rippled the length of the ship. Children screamed. Mothers grabbed tots to their breasts. Boys and girls climbed onto deck chairs and waved frantically toward the shore. Now the encroaching flames set their clothing afire. Terrified women tried to herd the children to the stern, but the panic-stricken screeching youngsters could not be managed. A girl in a blue dress leaped over the side, hit the hood of a paddle wheel, slipped off, and fell under the threshing wooden blade. Her screams ended in watery gurgles. Sixteen-year-old Albert F. Frese, who sorted mail in the Funk & Wagnalls publishing house, jumped from the stern, feet first, ankles together, arms rigid against his side. He swam to safety and lived to become treasurer of the firm.

  By this time people on Manhattan’s eastern shore were running along the riverbank, trying to keep up with the floating inferno. Others sped toward the waterfront in carts and wagons. Some threw barrels into the river for us
e as makeshift life preservers. Spectators shouted to the steamboat captain to head into shore. He ignored them. The doomed ship kept pounding upriver, while onlookers wept in frustration. Small boats took up the chase but were unable to catch the speeding General Slocum.

  Docked at 134th Street was a barge owned by the Moran Towing Company. The barge captain sprang ashore and telephoned his boss, Eugene F. Moran, in downtown Manhattan. He shouted that the General Slocum was on fire. Then he cried to Moran, “Get a tug!” Moran checked his operations sheet but found that he had none anywhere near the burning vessel.

  About this time a wall telephone rang in the city room of the World on Park Row. A man, who failed to identify himself, said that he was standing in his office at 137th Street and could see a ship in flames heading north. The World rewrite man who took the call shouted to the city editor. The editor told a reporter to telephone Moran. The reporter asked Moran if he could provide a tug to rush World staff members to the scene. Moran said that they could get there faster by taking an elevated train at Park Row and getting off at the Port Morris station. Because of the anonymous caller and Moran’s commonsense suggestion, World reporters beat their competitors to the scene of the tragedy.

  By now the General Slocum was beached on North Brother Island. She listed. Smoke and flames enveloped her. Floating in the water and scattered along the shore were bodies blackened and bloody, torn and seared. Veteran reporters looked and wept. Then they scattered in search of phones. They delivered such sickening descriptions that rewrite men who took their stories dashed to the men’s room and vomited.