The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway

by Most, Doug

  “A tube, a car, a revolving fan!” he wrote. “Little more is required. The ponderous locomotive, with its various appurtenances, is dispensed with, and the light aerial fluid that we breathe is the substituted motor.”

  New Yorkers believed.

  “Passengers by a through city tube could be carried from City Hall to Madison Square in five minutes, to Harlem and Manhattanville in fourteen minutes, to Washington Heights in twenty minutes, and by sub-river to Jersey City or Hoboken in five minutes,” The Times wrote after the fair had ended.

  Beach was jubilant. Just as it had in 1856 for his typewriter, the American Institute Fair once again awarded him its top prize, and New Yorkers were buzzing with talk about this sleek, quiet, smooth-riding train and how Alfred Beach had struck upon a solution to the overcrowding that everybody was clamoring for. Everybody, that is, except for the one person who really mattered, a three-hundred-pound state senator who also happened to be the crime boss ruling New York City.

  * * *

  WILLIAM MAGEAR “BOSS” TWEED JR. ran the most corrupt political machine in the country, Tammany Hall, and it was tied closely to the city’s omnibus system. Tweed, with his blue eyes and long mess of a gray beard, stood six feet tall and was grotesquely overweight. Nothing happened in his city without his approval.

  Born into a Scottish-American family in 1823, he joined his father’s business making chairs as a boy, and in his early twenties he showed his outgoing spirit by convincing some seventy-five friends and strangers to join a fire company he was starting up. It came to be known as “Big Six,” and it was the first sign of the power of persuasion that Tweed could have over people. His men wore red shirts, and they elected their husky leader as foreman; soon he was wearing a white fire coat while leading Americus Engine Company Number 6 in fighting fires. It proved to be a short-lived career for him when the city’s chief fire engineer booted him out for fighting with other fire companies, but all that did was raise Tweed’s profile in a city where Democrats were hungry for leaders. They drafted him to run for assistant alderman as a twenty-seven-year-old in 1850, and he lost. But a year later he was back, and this time his victory marked the beginning of what would be two decades of ruling the city by whatever means necessary.

  Using kickbacks, violence, and bribery, Tweed became the third largest landowner in the city and one of its richest men (a point he took great pride in, by flaunting his giant mansions, private cars, yachts, and a diamond pin that he wore every day on his shirt). For years, as New York’s deputy street commissioner and later as public works commissioner, he extorted a nickel out of every omnibus fare in the city. And with twenty-nine bus lines and fourteen horse-pulled lines carrying more than one hundred million passengers a year in New York, Tweed had become a very wealthy man. Boss Tweed, determined to maintain his stranglehold on the city’s street transit system, blocked any attempt that came along that might threaten his empire, with a whisper, a nudge, a payoff, a threat, or a promise. He instructed those in power, all the way up to the governor’s office, to reject what he said to reject and approve what he said to approve. And they did. Most men who ran up against Boss Tweed eventually backed down, knowing it was a fight they could never win. One did not.

  * * *

  TWEED REFUSED TO GIVE BEACH a penny for his project or to grant him the charter that he needed. In 1868, Tweed was at his most powerful, after the candidates he owned had won city and statewide offices. If he didn’t want something done, it didn’t get done. But Beach was a foe unlike any Tweed had encountered. Beach believed that his pneumatic subway was going to change the city, maybe even the world. That attitude drove him in the same year that he unveiled his subway to donate a large sum of money to open what eventually became the Beach Institute in Savannah, Georgia, a school for freed slaves that was staffed with white teachers from the North. With his school, as with his subway, Beach was determined to build a proud legacy. And nobody, not even the man who ruthlessly reigned over the city, was going to stop him.

  Beach knew he couldn’t outmuscle Tweed. And he was far too proud to be bribed and pay Tweed a cut of his subway fares. He would have to outsmart him. In 1869, he applied to the New York State legislature for a charter to build not the giant, people-moving tube he had shown at the fair, but the much smaller one to carry mail. He proposed building an underground mail line near Broadway that would run between Cedar and Warren streets, connect to the main post office at Liberty Street, and provide even faster mail service than the telegraph. Tweed studied Beach’s proposal carefully. The tubes Beach was proposing to build each had a diameter of just four and a half feet, far too small to carry a train car that could hold people. Satisfied that Beach’s idea posed no threat to him, Tweed and the rest of the state lawmakers granted Beach his fifty-year charter to build mail tubes under the city.

  But Beach’s deception had only begun. A few weeks later, he sheepishly returned to the state legislature with a minor request. He asked the lawmakers to amend his charter so he could build one large tube for much less money than it would take to build two smaller ones. Tweed, by then, had moved on to other concerns and nobody questioned Beach’s request. It passed.

  That tweak gave Beach the proper paperwork he needed to carry out the most daring project New Yorkers had ever seen. He had no intention or desire to speed up mail service in New York. He was going to build a subway in secret. And he would do it almost directly across from City Hall and Boss Tweed’s minions.

  * * *

  DEVLIN’S CLOTHING STORE WAS A five-story, thriving commercial success. Brothers Daniel and Jeremiah Devlin opened their business in 1843 a few blocks away from City Hall, but when business took off they needed more space for their endless racks of ready-made frocks, suits, umbrellas, underwear, ties, and trousers. One of the reasons the new space near the corner of Warren Street and Broadway worked so well was the gigantic basement, which went two levels deep underground.

  Alfred Beach needed just such a space for his own new business, the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company. After scouting for real estate all along Broadway, when he saw the basement of Devlin’s and noticed that it could be accessed from the sidewalk of Warren Street, he negotiated a deal with the brothers. For $4,000 dollars a year, starting on December 1, 1868, he leased their entire basement for a period of five years.

  Beach spent the next year focused on the single piece of machinery he would need to dig his tunnel. The device he came up with was ingenious. It resembled a hollowed-out barrel and used a water pump to exert pressure and a sharp digging mechanism that could loosen sixteen inches of soil with each push forward. He also designed a metal hood over the edge of the shield that would protect his workers from falling debris, or in the catastrophic event of a collapse.

  But before he could start digging, a different kind of catastrophe nearly derailed Beach’s project in the fall of 1869. A pair of Boss Tweed cronies schemed to drive up the price of gold by buying it in bulk. By late September the price of gold had risen to an astronomical $137 per ounce, and by the morning of Friday, September 24, it had risen to $150. Frenzy enveloped Wall Street, and riots nearly broke out. The National Guard was put on notice. And yet gold kept rising, to $160, as lunchtime passed. Brokers’ lives were destroyed, and one even shot himself at home before the day was over. By the time the government intervened in the afternoon and sold $4 million in gold, it was too late. Wall Street’s first “Black Friday” exposed how two men, acting alone, could bring the country to the brink of financial ruin.

  Black Friday touched everybody, including Beach, who lost a fortune. But he was too far invested in his subway to stop, and three months after Black Friday, he was ready to start tunneling. In late December of 1869, Beach; his son, Frederick, whom he tapped to be the foreman of the project; and a small group of men started arriving at Devlin’s after the store had closed for the night. They brought down picks, shovels, covered wagons, bricks, lanterns, and other tools. Following Beach’s instructions to tunnel so
uth directly under Broadway from Warren Street and then curve slightly to just below Murray Street, the laborers worked quietly to avoid rousing suspicion on the streets above. Night after night, six men would stand inside the shield while another half dozen would perform the more tedious tasks to polish the tunnel. Some carried out the dirt in the covered wagons, others laid the bricks to line the tunnel, and still others laid the tracks to carry a single car. The walls were painted white, iron rods were installed through the tunnel’s roof up to the pavement, and gaslights and oxygen lamps were hung. It was an efficient operation. But it was also scary work, too claustrophobic for some workers, who simply walked off the job. The rumbling from a street railway’s wheels overhead created a terrifying roar that made the late-night work nerve-racking. Still, thanks to surprisingly soft soil and the efficient tunneling shield, the digging went quickly. On a good night, one crew would dig forward eight feet.

  Beach was relieved at how smoothly the work progressed until one night when the shield buckled and the ground shook. The soft dirt had come to an abrupt end, and the workers stared at a stone wall in front of them. It was an old Dutch fort from before the Revolutionary War. Beach faced a dilemma. Either the wall had to come down or the project was over. And nobody knew if removing the wall would cause Broadway to buckle or collapse from above. Beach told his men to carefully chip away at it and take it down, stone by stone. It took several nights, and Beach stood by as every stone was removed and passed from worker to worker and carted out into the night. But the ceiling held, the wall came down, and the digging resumed.

  As hard as Beach tried to keep the work a secret from the world above, it was impossible. The operation required wooden scaffolding and iron tubes and occasional pieces of enormous machinery that would arrive at the corner of Broadway and Warren, where it would sit for hours or days before mysteriously disappearing down the steps, never to be seen again.

  New York’s mayor, Abraham Hall, one of Boss Tweed’s loyalists, grew increasingly suspicious of what the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company was up to, and when a section of Broadway near Warren Street sunk ever so slightly, the mayor acted. On January 3, 1870, he sent an aide over to the construction site with a written order, demanding to be let in so he could inspect the work. He got nowhere. Beach’s men had strict orders to let nobody in and to remind anyone who tried that they were granted a charter by the state to complete their tunnel. As for whether his work was responsible for that minor sinking of Broadway, the response from Beach was simple: Nonsense! The New York Times reported the flap the next day and suggested that Hall was not going to back away.

  “As the street in which the company have commenced operations is partially blocked up with wooden scaffolding and iron tubes, it is likely the mayor will at least counsel them to remove these,” the paper wrote.

  But Beach was equally stubborn. On January 8, he released a statement: “In reference to the ridiculous stories that have been circulated about our men being sworn to secrecy, and the doors being closed to all persons, there is no truth to them.” The company promised to make any repairs to the surface roads and begged for four more weeks of patience.

  Mayor Hall backed off, and Beach bought himself time. And one month later, fifty-eight days after the digging began, the tunnel was finished. It was a perfect cylinder of 312 feet. All that was needed now were the two most important pieces, the subway car and the fan to blow the car down the tracks.

  The design for the car was unlike anything people were riding on the streets above. It was much smaller than the horsecars, and upholstered seats lined the sides so that it felt like a comfortable lounge inside, with bright lighting and plenty of room to hold twenty-two people. The sliding doors closed with a whoosh.

  As for the fan, Beach knew that he needed one so powerful it could easily blow a car 120 feet long and fourteen feet wide down the tracks. He found it in Connersville, Indiana, where the P. H. & F. M. Roots Company had built a powerful fan to ventilate mines. The Roots Patent Force Rotary Blower, nicknamed the Western Tornado, was the critical piece to Beach’s pneumatic subway. At fifty tons, it was so big it took a train with five platform cars to deliver it from Indiana. It was discretely placed at the Warren Street end of the tunnel, and testing of it began.

  The air for the fan came through a shaft and grate near Murray Street, inside City Hall Park, and when the fan was working it would occasionally blow the hats off unsuspecting pedestrians passing over the grate. Down below, it worked just as Beach hoped. Vacuum-tight doors in both stations controlled the air pressure so that the passengers barely noticed the breeze from the fan. When it was in “blowing” mode, the car gently but swiftly flew down the tracks at about six miles per hour, until it tripped a wire that caused a bell to ring back at Warren Street. That was the trigger for the engineer to pull a rope that reversed the fan, putting it into “sucking” mode. And then the car would return in an equally smooth ride.

  The pneumatic subway worked. But Beach didn’t just want to impress the visitors he was planning to invite down. He wanted to dazzle them, not to mention distract them from any fears they might have of being underground with vermin and demons. He remembered the stories about how dark and miserable the London subway was. And he knew he had only one chance to convince New York that his subway was the future of transportation. He spared no expense, using more than $70,000 of his own savings to make sure the station was a place where people would actually enjoy waiting. The waiting room was enormous, more than 120 feet long, and it was lavish, with chandeliers, mirrors, a towering grandfather clock, a fountain with a basin stocked with goldfish, paintings, settees, and a grand piano.

  News that the tunnel was finished leaked out on February 19, 1870, after a reporter for The Tribune disguised himself as a worker and snuck in. His story the next day provided a detailed description of the tunnel and the stations, but it was the accompanying editorial attacking the subway as useless and not worth any further attention that galled Beach. A week later, he decided it was time to let his work be judged. On February 26, 1870, Beach invited lawmakers, reporters, and dignitaries from the science community to step down into the basement of Devlin’s.

  * * *

  THE FINAL TOUCHES PAID OFF. Not a single criticism was heard. The tubular train worked beautifully, whisking the visitors one block, from Warren Street to Murray Street, and then sucking them back. The reviews the next day were glowing.

  “The problem of tunneling Broadway has been solved,” wrote The Evening Mail.

  “Certainly the most novel, if not the most successful, enterprise that New York has seen for many a day is the pneumatic tunnel under Broadway,” The New York Times gushed. “A myth, or a humbug, it has hitherto been called by everybody who has been excluded from its interior; but hereafter the incredulous public can have the opportunity of examining the undertaking and judging of its merits. Yesterday the tunnel was thrown open to the inspection of visitors for the first time and it must be said that every one of them came away surprised and gratified. Such as expected to find a dismal cavernous retreat under Broadway, 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 entered 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.”

  Beach reacted swiftly, and two days later, on March 1, he threw open his tunnel to the public. Come and ride my subway, he crowed, for just twenty-five cents. And to prove that he, unlike his nemesis Tweed, was not motivated by money, Beach promised to donate all the money raised to the Union House for the Orphans of Soldiers and Sailors.

  Come they did, by the thousands. They had read about the tunnel and the enormous fan, and they sat down in the car leery that it would blow them right out of their seats. Instead, the breeze was barely noticeable and many of them enjoyed the ride so much they stayed on for multiple trips, going back a
nd forth between Murray and Warren for twenty minutes or more. One woman later described her ride as “most delightful” and called Beach’s invention “one of the greatest improvements of the day.”

  “We took our seats in the pretty car, the gayest company of twenty that ever entered a vehicle,” she 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 to Warren Street where it had no sooner arrived, than in the same gentle and mysterious manner it moved back again to Murray Street.”

  This, Beach told his visitors, was only the beginning. He proudly told them the days of riding in a dusty horsecar on crowded streets were coming to an end and that no snowstorm would ever again cripple their city. Daily trips to work that used to take an hour might only take a few minutes, he promised.

  “We propose to run the line to Central Park, about five miles in all,” Beach said. “When completed, we should be able to carry twenty thousand passengers a day at speeds up to a mile a minute.”

  There was only one obstacle. Boss Tweed was enraged. Not only had Beach snuck around him to complete his subway, he had done it directly across the street from him.

  “New York needs a subway,” Beach said after learning of Tweed’s reaction.

  Tweed was unmoved. The two men were poised to go to battle. It would not be a fair fight.

  * * *

  IN LESS THAN A YEAR of operating, more than four hundred thousand passengers rode Beach’s one-block train for the sheer novelty of it. That emboldened Beach even more. Imagine, he argued, if it actually took them places! State legislators saw the public’s enthusiasm for the subway and wasted no time taking up Beach’s request to extend his line up to Central Park and to raise the $5 million he needed from private investors. But at the same time, Tweed was drafting his own bill. He called his the Viaduct Plan, and he made sure that it landed on the desk of Governor John Hoffman, a man he helped get elected, at the same time as Beach’s proposal.