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

by Most, Doug

  “Frankly I think there is no more chance of his being nominated for governor than there is in his being struck by lightning,” Whitney said.

  But lightning did strike after Cleveland’s aide took Whitney’s advice back to Buffalo, and on November 7, the day after Whitney had resigned his counsel job, Grover Cleveland swept into the governor’s office by a huge margin.

  Whitney was exhausted. It had been an emotional year, between his riding accident, Cleveland’s campaign, his resignation, and Cleveland’s election. He retreated into private life and work, and he spent time with his family. While Whitney had been busy building his career, his wife had come to love the New York society scene, throwing parties and making sure they did not miss any. They certainly didn’t miss the party that came to define the Gilded Age, when Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt threw an extravagant ball on the evening of March 26, 1883. The Vanderbilt mansion at the corner of Fifty-second Street and Fifth Avenue was ablaze in light and the sidewalk outside pulsed with a crowd that watched as mounted police struggled to keep order while more than a thousand costumed guests paraded inside.

  * * *

  AS THE SPRING OF 1883 arrived, Flora Whitney was eager to take the children on a vacation. It was an exciting time in New York, as construction on the Brooklyn Bridge, expected to open by the summertime, was finishing up. But Flora’s mind was elsewhere. Anytime she would see one of the massive British White Star steamers pull into New York harbor, she desperately wanted to board one and sail away. William Whitney was simply too busy with his practice to go, but he wanted his wife to enjoy herself and encouraged her summer getaway. He promised to write her frequently, just as he had during their courtship. She packed up their four children and, on May 23, the day before the Brooklyn Bridge opened to the public, hugged her husband a tearful good-bye, and the five of them boarded a ship for Europe. She was eager for her children to see the museums and the opera, to hear another language, and to broaden their education. As the boat pulled out, eleven-year-old Harry kept his father in sight as long as he could by running the length of the ship.

  Four days after his family left, Whitney mailed off the first of his many letters. “There is nothing prettier in the world than your relation to your children,” he wrote his wife.

  But he grew worried a few weeks later, when she didn’t reply to his question about how the children were. Instead, uncharacteristically, she had sent a very brief letter with few details. In another letter, however, that arrived June 5, he received his answer. Harry and Willie were deathly sick, and six-year-old Olive, their youngest, had just died of diphtheria while they were in Paris. Whitney was crushed and immediately arranged the seven-day voyage to meet up with his family, even as he fretted that more of his children might die before he got there. The day before he sailed, he sent Flora one last cable. “Bear up, My Dear, we must. You must for me and I will for you. It is true that nothing could have taken so much from us as this but it is passed and cannot be recalled. I must see her face once more, remember this in making arrangements.”

  He arrived to find that Harry and Willie had recovered, and Pauline never caught the illness. But Whitney’s heart was broken all over when he saw Olive’s face through a glass-covered coffin and read the diary Flora had kept about Olive’s last hours.

  “The only time [Olive] spoke when I could not understand her was about twenty minutes before she died. ‘Mama, hold my hand,’ rang in my ears. I went away and when I returned to see her she had on her steamer dress, a crown on her head of white rosebuds, garden pinks and white flowers at her feet, with a bunch of pinks in her clasped hands.” Flora wrote how she went down to see Harry, and when she returned to Olive, she was gone. “The eyes sunken, the sweet mouth and nostrils black; but the head and the little ears charming and the expression as though she was dreaming in a soft still way.”

  Before Whitney sent her body back to New York for burial, he clipped a lock of Olive’s blond hair. He placed it inside an envelope and would hold on to it for the rest of his life.

  HENRY

  Boston was bursting, and Henry Whitney was poised to capitalize on the city’s growth and its expansion. On March 4, 1887, he stood before the general court of Massachusetts to present two ideas. He had recently toured Berlin’s popular tramway system, and when he came to speak he was armed with maps, schedules, and even sample tickets from the company that operated Berlin’s system. Because he was addressing a government body that had oversight over Boston and the entire state of Massachusetts, he came in prepared to emphasize that his plan would benefit not only the eight hundred thousand people in the metropolitan district but also those as far out as Lynn, Salem, Lowell, Lawrence, and other cities.

  Whenever he made an important presentation, several habits of Henry Whitney’s surfaced. His dark blue suit, perfectly tailored to fit his stout frame, was his choice of business wear, along with a plain white shirt and light blue tie with white dots. He also tended to drum his fingers in a nervous, impatient sort of way. And, as he learned at a young age, a moistened finger in his ear did a little something to help his defective hearing. His hair was also meticulously combed, dark in the back and on top, but graying above the ears. Only his thick blond mustache hinted at his more youthful side.

  In Whitney’s mind, if he controlled Beacon Street, he controlled Brookline. And if he controlled Brookline, he controlled the one wealthy community that Boston’s leaders and thriving streetcar companies had so desperately wanted for years. The suburbs, he had been telling people, were the key to unlocking Boston’s gridlock. If more people moved farther out of the city, it would encourage the street railway companies to follow them out there. And if those streetcar companies in Boston wanted to capture the growing business coming from Brookline, they would need tracks to connect them there. Tracks need land, and that was something Whitney owned in abundance.

  He had just one problem. Starting up his West End Street Railway Company was proving more challenging than he anticipated. The Boston Globe, in 1887, showed just how busy Tremont Street was downtown when it counted 303 cars passing by the Park Street Church at rush hour, a staggering number. A Globe writer said traffic moved at “a mile an hour pace.” There simply were too many people and not enough trains.

  Riders may not have been happy. But the railway companies were getting richer by the minute, and they would fight to keep any new competitors away from their passengers. Whitney had to convince lawmakers that he had a solution to make the streetcars less crowded, and the streets of Boston, too. His speech showed the confidence of a man no longer living in the shadow of his father, or even his more successful brother in New York.

  “That the streets of Boston are and have for a long time been overcrowded with cars and vehicles,” Henry Whitney said, “and that to remove or diminish the difficulties arising therefrom, and to furnish such further accommodation as the public requires, it has become necessary to construct tunnels under Boston Common and under Beacon Hill, so-called, in said City of Boston, running to some central point near Tremont and Park Streets, and diverging in various directions to different portions of said city.” He said the tunnel he was proposing was “somewhat similar in construction to the Greathead system,” a reference to British engineer James Henry Greathead, whose tunneling shield that dug the London Underground was a vast improvement over the one Marc Brunel had designed for the Thames Tunnel. Whitney even outlined the path of the tunnel. “Our proposed tunnel follows the edge of the Common on Tremont Street, then across Park Street under the Park Street Church, and under the Granary Burying Ground, through Tremont place.”

  It was the first time anybody had proposed to tunnel underneath the streets and parks of Boston. But he was not done. He also asked for what he described as “uniformity of practice” in how street and other railways were overseen, to eliminate the varied fares being charged, the overlapping routes, and the dangerous braking and racing that went on to pick up passengers. It was his way of saying the city neede
d to consolidate its transit system from half a dozen smaller competing companies into one giant operation.

  “Your petitioner,” he said, “further represents that it believes that improvements have recently been made in the use of electricity as a motor which render it practicable to use the same in the operating of street railways.”

  That statement was even more bold than his tunnel proposal. Boston’s population had exploded by 400 percent in Whitney’s lifetime, from 171,030 in 1840 to 848,740 in 1890, and the city’s boundaries had expanded because of all the towns it had annexed. Horses could no longer power a regional transportation network. The electric streetcar could not arrive soon enough.

  The other railway companies fought back against Whitney, to no avail. The oldest ones, the Cambridge and the Metropolitan, merged their powerful systems into one. But Whitney used his financial capital and his political muscle to start buying up stock in the Cambridge, Metropolitan, South Boston, and Middlesex lines, sparking fears that he was moving toward creating a monopoly. The financial capital of his company would grow from $80,000 to $7 million if he got his way, and after weeks of negotiations, he did.

  In the fall of 1887 at a meeting of his new corporation, Whitney spoke not only about his vision for the West End Street Railway, but about his style of management, which he expected his employees to follow.

  “I believe that this company is destined to play a very important part in the lives of this whole community,” he told his employees. “I am myself deeply sensible of the responsibility which this organization holds in this community.”

  One of his first acts was to make sure that not only did he keep his friends close, but he kept his enemies closer. Calvin Richards, head of the Metropolitan line, was the first to exchange his shares of Metropolitan for preferred shares of West End stock and was put in charge of the West End’s daily operations as general manager. Another onetime competitor, Prentiss Cummings, president of the Cambridge Railroad Company, became vice president of the West End Street Railway.

  “Into whose hands will all this pass?” Richards said in explaining his decision. “What kind of men are they? It will pass into the hands, not of a set of speculators, whose headquarters are in a different city, and who long tried to obtain this control, but into the possession of Boston men; will be owned by Boston capital and managed by Boston experience. At the head of it will be a man who has done more to build up our city, both in its real estate and its commercial interests, than any other man of his age; a man who believes, evidently, in the importance of Boston’s citizens to own, run and build the street railways of their own city.”

  On June 15, 1887, three months after Whitney’s impassioned speech, the general court of Massachusetts passed an act that gave Whitney all that he asked for: consolidation and permission to “locate, construct and maintain one or more tunnels between convenient points in said city, in one or more directions under the squares, streets, ways and places, and under public and private lands, estates and premises in said city.”

  With one fell swoop Henry Whitney, a man who had spent the first half of his life squandering opportunities and searching for a purpose, had taken a confusing, expensive mess of a transportation network in Boston and consolidated it into one company. Whitney’s action had, in an instant, handed him control of 3,700 employees, 1,700 street railway cars, 8,400 horses, and 200 miles of track. Those were numbers that made him the sole owner of the single largest street railway system in the world, bigger than anything in London, Chicago, or New York, cities whose populations dwarfed Boston’s.

  To better organize the business operations, the West End Street Railway Company was split into eight divisions with distinct territories to cover, and each one was responsible for managing their own passengers, employees, horses, and cars. Routes were identified by different colored signs, and signs were placed on cars to tell passengers the final destination. A final change was made that showed the impressive clarity that Whitney had in mind for his system. Instead of continuing to charge riders fares based on how far they traveled, from a few pennies up to ten cents, he implemented a flat, nickel fare for all rides and even allowed free transfers at certain stops. The flat fare was criticized by the small number of riders who rode only a few stops, but they were far outnumbered by the cheers from the increasing number of passengers coming to Boston from the suburbs, who were used to paying the most expensive fare.

  WILLIAM

  When he returned home to New York in the summer of 1883, William Whitney focused on his grieving wife. Flora comforted herself the only way she knew how, in a world of ball gowns, operas, and extravagant parties. Whitney was content to let her be, knowing the joy she took from entertaining. When his father-in-law ran for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, Whitney was there to help him. And when New York Democrats came looking for a name to run for the presidency, Whitney threw out the name of the man he had already helped get elected once. “If our delegation will present the name of Mr. Cleveland with any degree of unanimity, he will, in my opinion, be nominated,” Whitney said.

  He was right again. Cleveland won the Democratic nomination. And on November 4, 1884, when the electoral college votes were counted, Cleveland had 219 to Republican James G. Blaine’s 182. No state decided the election more than New York. Cleveland had won Whitney’s home state by 1,149 votes. That meant if a mere 575 votes for Cleveland had instead gone to Blaine, New York’s electoral votes would have gone to Blaine, and he would have won the White House. Only a few people could reasonably claim that they had personally helped convince at least 575 New York voters which way to go in the election, and therefore could argue they had a direct role in electing the president. Surely one of them was Joseph Pulitzer, whose World newspaper had aggressively hammered Blaine for months and lampooned him as the candidate for the rich. Another was William C. Whitney. Grover Cleveland was the next president of the United States, and there was no way he was going to Washington without the man who landed him there.

  * * *

  ON A FRIDAY EVENING late in 1884, Whitney sat down in his palatial home on West Fifty-seventh Street, took out several sheets of small stationery, and began to pen a letter to his good friend, the president-elect of the United States.

  “Governor—Pay no attention to newspaper or other advocacy of me,” Whitney wrote. “You owe me nothing and I should feel really hurt if I thought you would have any feeling of obligation to me. What I have is from sense of duty to our party and our country—It was right (the result has proved it) and that’s enough—I want you to succeed and you will. If for reasons personal and sound you should desire me that’s one thing—but I hope you believe this of me—that if you shouldn’t it would not make the slightest difference in our relations nor in my feelings nor in what I would do for you—I must free my mind by saying this.” The letter went on for four pages and was serious and business-like, and it ended with Whitney promising to visit Cleveland in upstate New York in the next few weeks.

  It must have been a difficult note to write. Grover Cleveland was Whitney’s close friend and political ally, a man he helped get elected governor of New York and then president of the United States. The two men owed each other enormous debts of gratitude. Cleveland knew that he would not be headed for the White House were it not for Whitney’s wealth and power in their home state and his ability to round up votes. And thanks to Cleveland’s victories, Whitney was officially a man of influence, no longer dependent solely on the fame of his wife’s family.

  It was as if Whitney wrote the letter hoping to convince Cleveland not to offer him a cabinet position in Washington. But Cleveland’s inauguration was scheduled for March 4, 1885, and he was determined to have his full administration in place by then. With Whitney’s involvement in his father’s freight-carrying Metropolitan Steamship Company and his legal background, he seemed like the perfect fit for secretary of the interior. In mid-February, however, Whitney received a telegram at his home, and inside he found a different and unex
pected job offer. Three weeks later, on March 7, 1885, William Collins Whitney was sworn in as secretary of the navy.

  HENRY

  On a summer’s day on the outskirts of downtown Boston in 1887, a problem was reported on Boylston Street of the Roxbury Crossing line of the new West End Street Railway Company. Rather than dispatch one of his men to investigate, the president of the company, as he enjoyed doing from time to time, took to the matter himself. He did not want to cause any alarm among the drivers on the Roxbury line by announcing his intentions, so he merely stepped onto the front end of one of his horse-drawn cars, paid his five-cent fare, and quietly blended in with the rest of the passengers. He stood with one foot on the step and the other on the platform, holding on with both hands while looking down at the experimental conduit beneath the car. He knew his position to be against the railway regulations, but he wanted to see if he could spot the problem himself without making a fuss or attracting attention from passengers. Suddenly, he felt a tap on his shoulder.

  “Excuse me, sir, please step up onto the platform,” the conductor told him.

  Henry Whitney turned and nodded, but he did not come all the way up as required, and so the conductor stopped the car a few seconds later and walked back over to him.

  “You’ll have to step up on this platform,” he said. “It’s against the rules of the road to ride on the step. You might fall off and get hurt and then you’d be suing the road for damages and where would I be?”