Lost to Time

by Martin W. Sandler

  Amazingly, night after night the project moved on without incident, until it suddenly came to a standstill as workmen encountered a stone wall blocking their path. The vexing question for Beach was whether or not the wall could be removed without causing the street above to collapse, which would literally bring the project to a crashing and, in all probability, tragic halt. But, with Beach directing the removal stone by stone, the structure, which was later revealed to be the wall of an old Dutch fort, was successfully taken down.

  By the end of the first week of January 1870, the subway was almost completed. But then the unexpected happened. Somehow, a reporter from the New York Herald found out what was really going on underneath Broadway, went through the department store, descended into the basement, and saw what was taking place. Beach was disappointed at having his secret uncovered so near to the end of the project, but he had to admit that it was remarkable that the project had not been discovered before then. When both the Herald and New York Times published stories describing what was being built below Broadway, he knew what he had to do next.

  First, he needed to make sure that everything involving the tunnel, the cars, and the waiting room was as perfect as he could hurriedly make them. Then he needed to hold a lavish reception for city and state officials, showing off what had been accomplished. Then he would open the subway to the public. But before all that could be completed, he needed to buy himself some time, so he had Dixon write a letter to all the newspapers explaining the relatively brief delay. The letter was published in the January 8 edition, and stated in part:

  Our original intention was to construct the entire line of tunnel from Warren to Cedar-street, before opening it for inspection, but we have concluded to yield to the strong desire manifested by the Press for an earlier examination. We have, therefore stopped work on the tunnel, and are now fitting up the blowing machinery, engnes [sic], boilers, waiting rooms, &c, with a view of inviting public inspection. . . . Our tunnel commences at the southwest corner of Broadway and Warren-street, curving out to the centre of Broadway and continuing down a little below Murray-street. . . . The top of the tunnel comes within twelve feet of the pavement, so that the walls of adjoining buildings can in no way be affected. We should have preferred to keep silent until our work could speak for us; as it is we beg the Press and public to have a little patience, and in three or four weeks at furthest we will cheerfully afford them an opportunity of inspecting our premises and forming their own judgment as to its merits.

  On February 26, Beach held his reception for the region’s dignitaries and the press. It caused a sensation. Every newspaper featured the story on its front page. “PROPOSED UNDERGROUND RAILROAD—A FASHIONABLE RECEPTION HELD IN THE BOWELS OF THE EARTH—THE GREAT BORE EXPLORED,” read the headline in the Herald. Other newspapers focused on what they viewed as an extraordinary accomplishment. “The problem of tunneling Broadway has been solved,” exclaimed the Evening Mail. “There is no mistake about it . . . the work has been pushed vigorously on by competent workmen, under a thoroughly competent superintendent, whose name is Dixon. May his shadow increase for evermore.” It was only the beginning of the praise heaped upon Beach and his subway. “Different papers [will] give different account of the enterprise,” the Sunday Mercury wrote, “but the opening yesterday must have convinced them all of the power of human imagination.” “This means the end of street dust of which uptown residents get not only their fill, but more than their fill, so that it runs over and collects on their hair, their beards, their eyebrows and floats in their dress like a vapor on a frosty morning,” exclaimed Scientific American. “Such discomforts will never be found in the tunnel.”

  TRAVELING UNDERGROUND in comfort; from the Frank Leslie’s article.

  It was praise that exceeded Beach’s hopes. Immediately he announced that on March 1 the subway would be open to the public and that for twenty-five cents, a passenger could experience the joy of being quietly and comfortably transported in a car propelled by air. By this time, each New York newspaper seemed to be trying to outdo its rivals in heaping praise on what had been revealed. “Such as expected to find a dismal cavernous retreat under Broadway,” exclaimed the New York Times, “opened their eyes at the elegant reception room, the light, airy tunnel and the general appearance of taste and comfort in all the apartments, and those who expected to pick out some scientific flaw in the project, were silenced by the completeness of the machinery, the solidity of the work, and the safety of the running apparatus.”

  High praise indeed, topped only perhaps by accounts from those members of the public who were among the first to ride the pneumatic railway. “We took our seats in the pretty car, the gayest company of twenty that ever entered a vehicle,” a passenger later wrote.

  The conductor touched a telegraph wire on the wall of the tunnel; and before we knew it, so gentle was the start, we were in motion, moving from Warren street down Broadway. In a few moments the conductor opened the door and called out “Murray street!” with a business-like air that made us all shout with laughter. The car came to rest in the gentlest possible style, and immediately began to move back again to Warren Street, where it had no sooner arrived, than in the same gentle and mysterious manner it moved back again to Murray street; and thus it continued to go back and forth for, I should think, twenty minutes, or until we had all ridden as long as we desired. No visible agency gave motion to the car, and the only way that we upon the inside could tell that we were being moved by atmospheric pressure was by holding our hands against the ventilators over the doors. When these were opened, strong currents of pure air came into the car. We could also feel the air-current pressing inward at the bottom of the door. I need hardly say that the ventilation of the pneumatic car is very perfect and agreeable, presenting a strong contrast to the foul atmosphere of [omnibuses and horsecars]. Our atmospheric ride was most delightful, and our party left the car satisfied by actual experience that the pneumatic system of traveling is one of the greatest improvements of the day.

  Among the most glowing of the reports were those that hinted of things that even Beach would have declared to be impossible. “So the world goes on,” stated Helen Weeks in the February 1871 issue of Youth’s Companion, “doing more and more wonderful things every day and who knows but that before you . . . readers are old men and women, you and I may go down [into the subway] and in a twinkling find ourselves in England? Who knows?”

  Fanciful of course, but to Beach the reality of his overwhelming success meant that the time had come to push for a charter allowing him to extend his subway throughout New York. “We propose to operate a subway all the way to Central Park, about five miles in all,” he stated. “When it’s finished we should be able to carry 20,000 passengers a day at speeds up to a mile a minute.” In her article, Weeks noted “The days of dusty horsecars and rumbling omnibuses are almost at an end. Snow and dust, heat and cold find no kingdom [in the pneumatic subway]. Warm in winter and cool in summer. . . . The weary man or woman who [now] spends hours daily getting to and from business may, when that joyful day of a completed underground comes, allow five minutes for going five miles.”

  Five minutes in five miles—what an incredible prospect, so much so that even the strictest legislators were ready to overlook the fact that by building a passenger system rather than a mail delivery system Beach had certainly deceived them. But there was one man who was not willing to either overlook or forgive. As acclaim for the subway mounted, so too did Boss Tweed’s anger. His Tammany Hall cronies had never seen him so furious. The master of the art of deception had been hoodwinked. A passenger system, not a mail system, had been constructed under buildings across the street from City Hall, where Tweed spent so much of his time. Worst of all, as far as he was concerned, not a dime had passed into his pockets.

  Despite Tweed’s outrage, Beach was confident that the legislature would enthusiastically grant his charter. He was right. His application for the extension of the subway was overwhelmingl
y approved. But he had underestimated Boss Tweed’s reach. Once the legislature had granted the charter, the only thing that could revoke it was a veto by New York’s governor, John T. Hoffman. And, as Beach should have realized, Hoffman was controlled by Tweed. Not only did Hoffman veto the legislature’s action, he gave his approval to another bill that had been submitted by none other than Tweed.

  Known as the Viaduct Plan, Tweed’s proposal called for the construction of several elevated railways at a cost of more than 80 million. Unlike the subway extension proposal, which Beach had promised to subsidize through money he would raise from private investors, Tweed’s plan called for the elevated railway to be built at taxpayers’ expense, which provided the Boss yet another way to steal millions of dollars.

  Aware of what Tweed was attempting to do, the legislature met in special session in an attempt to override Hoffman’s veto. But to Beach’s shock and dismay, their vote fell short. After all the acclaim, after he had come so close to having his dream become a reality, Beach was being denied. Still he refused to give up. Mounting a direct appeal to the press and the public, he wrote, “It is only through an underground railway that rapid transit can be realized in New York. The elevated road is inevitably an obstruction, in whatever street it is built, for it is simply an immense bridge, which no one wants before his doors. On the other hand the underground railway is entirely out of sight and disturbs no one.”

  It was just one of scores of statements that Beach planted in the press. But as months wore on and as thousands of people continued to ride his short subway with joy, even he became discouraged. He could not get the legislature to make another attempt to override the governor’s veto. Then yet another unexpected development took place.

  IN JULY 1871, AN OUTRAGED AND DISSATISFIED New York County bookkeeper appeared at the New York Times downtown offices. In his arms he carried a huge stack of county records. The documents, he claimed, provided the first concrete proof of the hundreds of bribes and kickbacks that Tweed had received over the years. Soon, other records that were produced provided proof of the millions of dollars that had been stolen during the construction of the new courthouse.

  TWEED AND HIS TAMMANY HALL CRONIES are depicted as a group of vultures waiting for the storm to “Blow Over” in this Thomas Nast cartoon from September 23, 1871.

  The continuing series of New York Times articles that followed shocked even the most staid New Yorkers. Among them was a Harper’s Weekly artist named Thomas Nast, who, when only twenty-four, had become the nation’s leading cartoonist. Now Nast mounted his own anti-Tweed campaign, lambasting him in scores of widely viewed cartoons, calling for Tweed and his Tammany Hall villains to be brought to justice.

  For his part, Tweed had been caught by surprise and taken aback by the Times’s revelations. But he was even more concerned with Nast’s depictions. Arranging a meeting with Harper’s Weekly’s editor, he reportedly shouted, “I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles; my constituents don’t know how to read, but they can’t help seeing them damned pictures!”

  He was right, and soon the combination of the Times articles and Nast’s cartoons had an effect that went beyond outraging the public. Other New York newspapers, which had for so long been afraid to challenge Tweed’s influence, began printing their own exposés of his criminal acts. Ironically they were joined by a host of newly emboldened city and state officials, long angry with Tweed for not having included them in his payoffs.

  Finally, on October 27, 1871, the hitherto indestructible Boss Tweed was arrested. So complex was the case against him that it took fifteen months before he was brought to trial. To the dismay of his prosecutors, the first attempt to convict him ended in a mistrial, but he was tried again in November 1873. This time he was found guilty of fraud and corruption and given a twelve-year sentence.

  Tweed’s lawyers, however, had another card to play. Filing an appeal to a higher court on the grounds that even though their client had been tried for multiple offenses he could only be legally sentenced for the punishment applicable to just one of the crimes, they succeeded in getting Tweed’s sentence reduced to just one year.

  The story was still far from over. Upon his release from prison, Tweed was arrested again on civil charges and placed back in prison until he could post bail of 3 million. When it originally appeared that he would be arrested, Tweed had responded to reports that, given his influence, he was bound to try to escape by stating: “Now is it likely I’m going to run away? Ain’t my wife, my children’s children, and everything and every interest I have in the world here? What would I gain by running away?”

  But as he often did, Tweed had lied. During his second incarceration, in a prime example of the influence he still had, he had been allowed to pay a visit to his family. While there, on December 4, 1875, he simply walked out a back door and escaped. He fled to Cuba, then boarded a ship and headed for Spain. What he didn’t know was that the government had discovered his eventual destination. When his ship put into a Spanish port, he was arrested, put on a U.S. naval vessel, brought back to America, and imprisoned once again.

  Totally deflated and aware that, in exchange for lighter sentences, some of his closest Tammany Hall associates were about to testify against him, Tweed fell seriously ill. The end came on April 12, 1878, when the man who had spent most of his life surrounded by sycophants and curious onlookers died alone in a dingy prison cell.

  For Beach, the demise of his greatest nemesis seemed to signal a complete reversal in his fortunes. In early 1873, the legislature, free of Tweed’s influence, once again voted to give Beach his extension charter. And a new governor quickly signed the measure.

  But the subway was not to be. In late 1873 the United States, as a result of overspeculation in the railroads and the financial markets, was experiencing the beginning of the worst economic depression it had ever experienced—one that would last six years. Many of those who had promised to invest in Beach’s enterprise were among the hardest hit. Faced with financial disaster, the New York state and local governments found that supporting a subway system was far down on their list of priorities. Even Beach had to admit that his dream had vanished.

  It would be more than a quarter century before New York City would get a subway—not through the vision of a man like Beach or the determination of a group of city officials, but, ironically, through an act of nature.

  March 10, 1888, was one of the warmest and most beautiful early spring days that veteran New Yorkers could remember. But the next day was something else entirely. By the time most citizens arose, a howling blizzard was under way, threatening to bury the city in snow. Still, thousands of hardy New Yorkers went to work.

  It was a gigantic mistake. By noon, as the snow continued to mount, thousands tried to make their way home. Fallen live electrical wires posed a deadly danger. Signs, tree limbs, and other objects flew uncontrollably through the air, striking and killing or severely injuring scores of others. In one of the most dramatic and dangerous events of the disaster, thousands of passengers attempting to get home via the elevated railroad found themselves terrifyingly trapped high above the city.

  A NEW YORK STREET is covered in snow during the blizzard of 1888.

  More than four hundred people died in the storm, shocking city officials to the point that, at last, they realized the absolute necessity of constructing an underground transportation system. Mother Nature had accomplished what Beach and other subway proponents had been unable to do. It took two years for construction of the subway to begin. But Beach had been right. Within weeks of the subway’s opening on October 27, 1904, New York City’s traffic problem, at least for the foreseeable future, had been dramatically alleviated.

  Within three years of its initial construction, the subway had become so popular that various extensions were being made, and Beach’s vision of an underground system throughout New York and Brooklyn was being realized. Then, in 1912, a startling event took place. As workmen dug an extension o
f the Broadway line, they broke through a steel and brick wall and discovered Alfred Beach’s pneumatic tunnel. There was the subway car, his tracks, his hydraulic shield, and even his fountain. Time, of course, had taken its toll, but they were all still there. Amazingly, rather than bringing these historic objects to the surface where they might be preserved and appreciated by generations to come, the workmen left them there and moved on. One cannot help but wonder what remains, a century later, of Beach’s buried achievement. Devlin’s Department Store has long been torn down and replaced by another structure, probably destroying the elegant waiting room in the process. Whatever other destruction of America’s first subway has taken place, it’s safe to say that it has been permanently buried from view.

  So too has general knowledge about Beach’s other extraordinary achievements. His printing machine for the blind led to the typewriter, the machine that transformed both business and the nature of the workforce. He was a pioneer in the development of pneumatics. The magazine he established remains the world’s leading scientific journal. And his hydraulic shield revolutionized the way tunnels were dug. Yet, like his remarkable subway, his name and all that he did has been largely lost to history.

  NINE

  PESHTIGO

  Great Fire in the Forest (1871)

  Almost everyone has heard of the Great Chicago Fire of October 8–10, 1871. Although it didn’t really start, as legend has it, with Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over a lantern in the barn, the Chicago Fire is the most famous of all American conflagrations, a blaze in which some three hundred people were killed and 100,000 were left homeless. Yet, on the very same day that the Chicago Fire started, a firestorm in the tiny lumbering community of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, and its surrounding forests destroyed the entire village and took the lives of more than 1,200 men, women, and children. It was the most devastating fire in U.S. history, but because of the attention historically given to the Chicago Fire, few have heard of it, history books have mostly ignored it, and it has been lost to time.