Florida had been a state only since 1845, and was still desperately poor, desperately eager to sell the federal land grants which were its major asset in 1883 when Flagler started investing in the state. Thirty years later, when he died at the age of eighty-three, the railway he had financed reached from Jacksonville on the border with Georgia down through the resorts he had developed – St Augustine, Daytona, Palm Beach, the new city of Miami – and continued island-hopping over the Florida Keys to Key West, far out in the Gulf of Mexico.
Flagler began as he meant to go on: in Saint Augustine, the old Spanish town which was the oldest European settlement in the United States, he built a magnificent resort hotel, the Ponce de Leon, designed in the Spanish style by Hastings and Carrère, architects of the old Metropolitan Opera House and the New York Public Library, and adorned with stained glass designed by Louis Tiffany. But Flagler knew that the only way to attract rich men like himself to Florida was a direct rail link to New York. The existing railroads down the East Coast of Florida were primitive, involving numerous changes of gauge. Using his persuasive powers – and as much money as was required – Flagler persuaded the state legislature to grant him the right to construct the line to Key West. (He also arranged a bill making insanity grounds for divorce. This enabled him to get rid of the second Mrs Flagler.)
The first stop along the line was Palm Beach, an idyllic peninsula Flagler had already visited in his yacht in the late 1880s. At Palm Beach he built the Royal Poinciana, ‘the largest resort hotel in the world … equipped and staffed in the most luxurious fashion imaginable’ – and built in a mere nine months. The guests did full justice to the luxury, with a hundred private railway cars arriving each winter at the station on the hotel’s doorstep, their occupants prepared to spend fortunes for the Washington Birthday Ball held every 22nd February – a ball famous for the way the country’s most powerful men (including Flagler) would attend in the most elaborate drag costumes, complete with fishnet stockings, powdered wigs and strings of diamonds. He also built West Palm Beach for those who could not afford the Royal Poinciana.
Flagler did not want Florida to be a purely service economy. He established a ‘Model Land Company’ which, in Chandler’s words ‘did more perhaps towards actually building up the Florida East Coast than any of his other undertakings’. He encouraged the planting of vegetables, citrus fruit and pineapples, and when an unprecedented snowstorm wiped out the fledgling industry in the winter of 1884–85 he secretly spent a lot of money supporting the unlucky farmers. He even arranged a link-up with the weather forecasters. When a drop in temperature was forecast his engineers would sound six long blasts of their whistles as they passed through the orange groves, and the owners could then hurry out with their smudge pots.
The next stop was Biscayne Bay, protected from the Atlantic by another barrier island, and watered by the little Miami River. Flagler brought his railroad to the site and promptly set about building another luxury hotel, the Royal Palm. The barrier island, unlike Palm Beach, was no paradise. In Chandler’s words, the thin strip which subsequently became famous as Miami Beach was originally ‘mostly swamp, and was filled with mosquitoes, snakes, mangrove thickets and Spanish Bayonet’ – a nasty type of cactus.
The locals wanted to name the town after Flagler but he insisted on naming it after the Miami river. Miami was not his final destination, however. ‘There is an impelling force within me,’ he told a friend; and the force drove him to Key West. The move made better financial sense than his other, purely speculative, Florida ventures. By the time his plans were ready President Theodore Roosevelt had authorised the building of the Panama Canal, and Key West was 300 miles nearer the canal than any other deep-water anchorage in the country.
As with all his other ventures in Florida, Flagler simply found the best man for the job and told him to get on with it. The chosen engineer, Joseph Carroll Meredith, had to cope with problems undreamt of elsewhere in the United States: bottomless swamps, a lake a mile long unmarked on any map, snakes, alligators, mosquitoes, a dearth of fresh water – and a terrible hurricane which delayed construction for a year. But Flagler lived long enough to ride in triumph on the railroad he had financed, a road to the very edge of the United States. The next year he died, leaving a state bound by his creation.
The 1935 Labour Day Hurricane washed away 40 miles of the Middle Keys section of Flagler’s railway.
Unfortunately the dream railroad lasted less than a quarter of a century: the track across the Keys was destroyed on Labour Day, 1935, in the worst storm for a century, a storm in which the barometer dropped to the lowest level ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere. But Flagler had built well. The highway which replaced the railroad is built on the roadbed he had financed.
* Though they could be useful for the wealthier, and mean, classes. During the Great Exhibition of 1862 six county families from Lancashire were caught transferring their whole households to London using excursion tickets.
IX
RAILWAY IN TOWN AND CITY
1
Growth and Creation
In theory railways could override all previous natural, social or geographical reasons why people should congregate in a particular locality. Yet in fact they tended to reinforce, rather than disturb, existing patterns. To attract traffic, and to minimise construction costs, they tended to follow the routes pioneered by roads and canals, routes which already connected a country’s major centres of population. In Technics and Civilisation Lewis Mumford pointed out that:
the poor performance of the railroad on grades of over two per cent caused the new lines to follow the watercourses and valley bottoms. This tended to drain the population out of the back country … with the integration of railroad systems population tended to heap up in the great terminal cities, the junctions, the port towns … steam power thus increased the area of cities; it also increased the tendency of the new urban communities to coalesce along the main line of transportation and travel.
These main lines included many historic trade routes, like the Old Silk Road to China. In R. N. Taaffe’s prosaic words: ‘The Kazalinsk route also reinforced the position of Tashkent as the gateway for the overland commerce of Central Asia. Even today, all the interregional rail freight of this region, with the exception of northern Kighiziya, must be channeled through the Tashkent Junction.’1 Similarly the railway through Anatolia enabled Smyrna to regain its role as the most important Mediterranean outlet for the whole of Asia Minor.
Ludgate viaduct: rail in the heart of London.
Everywhere railways gave profound, immeasurable, permanent encouragement to centralisation, reinforcing the supremacy of capital cities the world over – in Uruguay every station had a sign giving the distance from Montevideo. Yet their effects have often been exaggerated and distorted. To the British reader the idea of the railway in the city is at once cosy and dramatic. The cosiness derives from the mental pictures of the many suburbs it is popularly supposed to have spawned. The drama derives from vague memories of Dickens’s description, in Dombey and Son, of the havoc wrought as the railway crashed through London, how:
the first shock of a great earthquake had … rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood … Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcasses of ragged tenements and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing.
Euston arch: London’s first monument to steam
Building the greatest steam shed of its day at St Pancras.
Both images, the co
sy and the dramatic, were true. Both were misleading. The railways created surprisingly few suburbs in the generation after they were built. And for every sort of reason – communal, financial, technical – railways found the greatest difficulty in penetrating into the heart of major cities like London, Paris and Berlin. It was said of the first line into Rome that ‘the train does not leave Rome and never arrives at Frascati.’ At the time they were built stations like the Gare de Lyon or Euston were on the outskirts of the cities they served, an idea difficult to grasp now because Paris and London expanded so quickly in the decades following the railways’ arrival. In both cities the idea of a single central station inevitably foundered on simple economics. The Pereires never succeeded in their dream of building a station in the Place de la Madeleine and in Britain no one took seriously the idea of ‘the Great Victorian way’ to connect the main railway stations.*
The actual intrusions into city centres made the point even more dramatically. The final mile of track from Shoreditch to Liverpool Street on the eastern edge of the City of London cost the Great Eastern £2 million – a hundred times that figure in today’s money. Not surprisingly the station was described as a ‘white elephant of the largest magnitude’.† One scheme in Glasgow cost the same, another in Liverpool £1 million, while the last four miles of track into Charing Cross in the West End and Blackfriars in the City cost £4 million and triggered off the Overend Gurney crisis, the biggest financial panic to hit the City of London during the whole century.
It was soon clear that only underground or elevated railways could provide access into the heart of major cities at anything like reasonable social or economic cost. In 1863 the Metropolitan Railway made the point by opening the first underground railway in the world, from Paddington Station to the City of London. The mass of underground railways, metros, subways and the like built in the succeeding half-century merely confirms the surface railways’ defeat, and for this reason alone the enormous effects of underground systems do not belong in this book.
By the 1860s all the main lines into London had been completed, yet only a tenth of the 600,000 people who worked there travelled by train. Most lived close enough to their place of work to walk or use horse omnibuses. Even at the turn of the century not more than 250,000 commuters travelled by train. Although most of today’s suburban lines had been built they were not heavily travelled until London exploded, and the railways south of the Thames were electrified, between the wars.
In provincial cities the figures were much smaller. For a long time most major British cities remained very compact, with the merchant class living within a couple of miles of the centre of the city, which also housed huddled masses of workers. In Birmingham and Manchester, for instance, only a few thousand commuters travelled by train; though in Glasgow there was a considerable counter-flow, with thousands of workers making the daily trip from the inner city to the factories along the Clyde.
Most major railway companies were not unduly interested in promoting commuter traffic; quite the contrary. In the early part of this century the Great Northern was highly embarrassed by the growth of London’s northern suburbs as the passing trains interfered with the company’s most profitable source of income, its main-line goods traffic. The company’s lack of interest was natural because only the Metropolitan Railway was legally allowed to speculate in land or promote new developments.
The beneficiaries of the spread of railways near London were the individual managers, directors, and above all, their solicitors, many of whom made fortunes from profitable land speculation. Nor was there a mass of customers waiting to be served. Even clerical workers were operating on a tight budget, as an official report at the end of the century makes clear. It pointed out that these commuters, by the nature of their employment ‘are compelled to preserve a respectable appearance. If they fail to do so they may lose their employment, and very seriously impair their prospect of advancement. To such persons the payment of a daily fare constitutes an appreciable pecuniary burden.’ Although the companies were forced to provide cheaper ‘workmen’s fares’ these had a limited impact.
In London the great exception was the poor Great Eastern which desperately needed the money to pay for Liverpool Street Station. So it encouraged the development of the working-class suburbs which still extend far into the north-eastern edge of London, suburbs far denser than those in other directions. Nevertheless, as F. M. L. Thompson points out in The Rise of Suburbia even before the arrival of the underground railway, horse trams ‘had a much more widespread effect than workmen’s trains and fares in enabling the lower middle-class and the artisans to push out into suburbia’.
For the progress of suburban development was slow and irregular, depending more on the break-up of major estates through death and the introduction of death duties in 1894 than on the railways. In Thompson’s words ‘a railway should be regarded as a necessary, although not a sufficient, condition for outer suburban growth’. Nevertheless, in Britain as elsewhere, according to Kellett, the railways ‘profoundly influenced the internal flows of traffic, the choices of site and patterns of land use, the residential densities and development prospects of the central and inner districts of the Victorian city.’
Inevitably the first urban railways traversed working-class districts where the inhabitants, living in rented housing, could simply be turfed out into already overcrowded streets without any compensation. These ‘improvements’ merely increased the rents of the inhabitants by up to a quarter, making a mockery of the claim that they ‘ventilated’ the city, that in Kellett’s words ‘they let in light and air by providing open spaces and air courses through densely crowded and noisome areas of working class housing, and that they improved the drainage.’
In their brutal progress the railways occupied nearly a tenth of all the land in Britain’s five biggest cities. They also intruded into the earlier grid of city planning in which the landed estate had been the basic unit. Not surprisingly, they were no respecters of persons. The intrusion so graphically described by Dickens in Dombey and Son was caused by the London & Birmingham Railway as it made its way into Euston. Altogether, the three major lines into Euston, King’s Cross and Saint Pancras uprooted around 150,000 people.
Even Dickens never suggested that the wretched inhabitants should have been compensated in some way. This idea was a rather later by-product of the Victorian social conscience to which the railways contributed, if only by creating so much disturbance and misery. Within a couple of decades successive commissions of enquiry had established sophisticated methods of measuring the density and flow of traffic and the railways’ economic effects, and had started to examine the social costs of new forms of transport.
Brighton Station: an early masterpiece.
Slowly but surely, however, a pattern emerged: a commercial and above all financial core devoid of residential life, surrounded by a ring of inner-city decay, and outer rings of housing moving steadily up the social scale the further you moved from the centre – a logical progression at a time when only the wealthy could afford to commute more than a few miles. It was they who occupied the small groups of detached houses built within easy reach of railway stations in Surrey. As early as 1845 a first-class season ticket was introduced at the then enormous annual cost of £50 for those wanting to live in Brighton and work in London, fifty-five miles away. Three years later an observer quoted by Simmons noted that ‘merchants who formerly made Dulwich or Dalston the boundaries of their suburban residences now have got their mansions on the south coast and still get in less time, by a less expensive conveyance, to their counting-houses in the City.’
By the 1870s a Manchester observer quoted by Kellett was complaining how ‘a large portion of the middle-class, the clerks, warehousemen and others seize upon the new suburbs, vacating their houses in town, which are most frequently absorbed for shop and business purposes, or sub-divided and sublet, until the dwelling which has served for one household contains as many families as it di
d persons.’
Outside Britain the railways played an even less important role in the growth of major cities. In the United States, however, the railways often defined your status: when a settlement was first established along the tracks the saloons and other disreputable buildings were on one side ‘the wrong side of the tracks’, and avoided by all right-thinking people.*
Most American cities remained ‘walking cities’ while continental European cities grew upwards rather than outwards, with the inhabitants preferring apartments to houses. Nevertheless, scattered round New York and London, as well as a few other major British and American cities are a host of ‘railway suburbs’, and very pleasant they were too. As Lewis Mumford pointed out, they ‘had a special advantage that could be fully appreciated only after they had disappeared. These suburbs, strung along a railway line, were discontinuous and properly spaced … The size and scale of the suburb, that of a neighbourhood unit. Being served by a railroad line, with station stops some three to five miles apart, meant that there was a natural limit to the spread of any particular community’.
Before the days of the motor car the houses, themselves well spaced out, had to be sited ‘within easy walking distance of the railroad station’. Among Mumford’s examples of what were cosy villages, rather than impersonal dormitory towns, were Bronxville near New York, with fewer than 7,000 inhabitants, while Riverside, Illinois housed only just over 9,000. ‘They were natural pedestrian communities with natural greenbelts. It was the car which destroyed the pedestrian scale of the suburb.’ In Britain the pattern is still recognisable in Cheshire and in Surrey, where Surbiton (see page xxx) was the prototype. Such suburbs are now scorned: in fact they were agreeable but not major contributors to the urban scene. It was the horse-bus, and above all the electric tramway and the underground railway which formed today’s cities to a far greater extent than the steam railway.
The World the Railways Made Page 34
