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

by Most, Doug

  But then, when no one seemed to notice, it wasn’t hell anymore. The new motors coming back from New York worked better than the old ones. The gears stopped breaking down. The trolleys derailed less frequently. The central power plant proved capable of powering the operation. And a system that for weeks was using only ten or fifteen cars was, by the spring of 1888, using twenty. And then thirty. And then, with no fanfare at all, the magic number written into the contract, forty, was reached. Soon, Sprague’s electric railroad cars were averaging eighty miles per day and forty thousand paying passengers per week. Cash was coming in, and relief was in sight. It was a good thing, too. Sprague had 140 men working for him who needed to be paid.

  When the Richmond Union Passenger Railway Company told Sprague he had fulfilled his contract on Tuesday, May 15, 1888, the news, which he would later call a “supreme moment” in his life, could not be celebrated as he hoped. The railroad syndicate that hired him for the Richmond job went bankrupt. Banks took over for the syndicate, but Sprague had lost more than $75,000 making Richmond’s trolley system work.

  It would have been disastrous, except that Sprague, a great engineer, was equally adept at marketing. The day after receiving the news about his contract, on Wednesday, May 16, 1888, Sprague sat down and wrote a letter to Henry Whitney in Boston. Whitney and Sprague were not friends, but they were hardly strangers. Sprague’s electric motors were being used in Boston more than in any city in the world, and Whitney was well aware of it. One of Boston’s biggest printers, C. A. Heyer & Son, went so far as to print business cards that said they used Sprague motors and invited customers to come see them.

  Sprague knew that Whitney was exploring options for his enormous streetcar system, and he wanted to be sure no decision was made before the two men talked. In two weeks, the first horsecar would ride over Whitney’s new Beacon Street route in Brookline, and Whitney knew that could not last. He wanted it electrified. Sprague’s letter had to give him hope. “We are ready to run commercially,” Sprague wrote. “Kindly suspend order of renewal until I come there Friday.”

  As word of his achievement spread north and into the Midwest, Sprague was suddenly very much in demand. Cities big and small that had or were considering trolley lines sent officials to Richmond to witness what he had built and explore whether it could work on their streets. With his tracks, motors, and overhead wires, Sprague had single-handedly transformed an entire technology and at long last found a reliable replacement for the horse-pulled trolley.

  When Sprague had started work in Richmond in 1887, there were fewer than ten electric railways running in the United States, all of them small systems of just a few cars operating over a couple of miles of track. By the end of the decade, more than two hundred electric railways would be operating or be under construction across the country. In New Orleans, a cry for electric trolleys rang out, and signs around the city appeared with a testament to how frustrated city residents had become. “Lincoln set the negroes free! Sprague has set the mule free! The long-eared mule no more shall adorn our streets.” In truth, Frank Sprague had only set the mule free in Richmond. What he needed now was an even bigger customer to take a chance on his system and prove to the world that it worked.

  * * *

  HENRY WHITNEY AND SPRAGUE BY now had traded cordial letters and met in person, and each was well aware of how important they could be to each other. Sprague could make Whitney a fortune. And for Sprague, Whitney represented opportunity. If the owner of the biggest streetcar system in the world embraced and purchased his new technology, cities everywhere would line up to follow. Whitney could make Sprague a hero.

  Sprague was eager to receive his visitors from the north in the summer of 1888, because he’d learned in advance that it was Longstreet, not Whitney, who would need the most convincing. Longstreet’s fear, which he was repeatedly telling Whitney, was that big cities like Boston would be disastrous for electric streetcars. As soon as traffic jammed up and a long line of cars formed, Longstreet argued that it would put a huge strain on a dynamo when the cause of the traffic cleared and all the cars started up at once. Dynamos would constantly be breaking down under the burden of city traffic, at an enormous expense, in Longstreet’s opinion. Longstreet argued that a cable road made the most sense for Boston. Cable-pulled cars were cheaper and cleaner than horses and easy to maintain. As further evidence, Longstreet pointed out to Whitney that New York City was investing in cable as the future of its street railways. But even as Boston began making its own plans to install cables, Whitney was skeptical. It was, he told Longstreet, too important a decision to get wrong.

  Boston’s streets were narrower than New York’s and had far more turns, unlike New York’s long and wide boulevards. Additionally, no one had figured out how to get a cable system across a drawbridge, and Boston had several of those. Would routes merely end at a bridge? That seemed wholly unfair and unrealistic to passengers on the other side. Just because New York was chasing cable didn’t mean Whitney had to follow. What if they were wrong in New York about the future? Or what if cable was right for New York, but wrong for Boston?

  Sprague decided the only way he could convince both men was if he set up the precise situation that Longstreet was most worried about and then proved it was a baseless concern. He knew there was risk to overtaxing his system, for if his experiment failed, surely Whitney and Longstreet would depart on the next locomotive back to Boston and turn to cable instead of electricity to power the Boston streetcars. He dreaded a repeat of what happened with Jay Gould. But Sprague believed he had no choice.

  * * *

  ON A WARM NIGHT in early July 1888, after service for the day had ended and Whitney and Longstreet had retired to their downtown hotel, Sprague had his men park twenty-two streetcars at the base of Church Hill, inches apart from one another, in a straight line. He told his central-station engineer to build up as much steam as the boilers could hold and to keep the fires hot. It took almost five hours for all of the preparations, and it was almost midnight when Sprague was ready.

  He had one of his men rouse Whitney and Longstreet from bed. They were part of a group of a half dozen who had come down from Boston. Most of the others were members of the Boston Board of Railroad Commissioners, but two of them had financial interests in the trip. Samuel Little was the president of the Rockland Bank, and Asa Potter was a longtime friend of Whitney’s and president of the Maverick Bank. All the men had ventured to Richmond for the same reason Whitney did, to see if Sprague’s electric railway really worked. If it did, Whitney, a rich man in his own right, knew he would need the help of other capitalists to invest in it.

  All the men were staying at the five-story Exchange Hotel, at the corner of Franklin and Fourteenth streets. Whitney was sleeping when there was a knock at his door. He was told a test run had been arranged that would surely quash Longstreet’s cynicism and that it had to be seen at once. “On receiving word about midnight that we were willing to make such an experiment, he immediately arose and we were soon on our way to the eastern sheds, two miles from the station,” Sprague recalled years later.

  The entire group of men walked the few blocks to the central station in the dark, and then they were taken by horse-drawn carriage two miles away to Church Hill. When they arrived at the corner of Twenty-eighth and P streets, Sprague explained to his audience that he had lined up twenty-two cars in tight formation in a place normally designed to power only four cars, spaced well apart. But tonight, he said, they would see much more than that. Before his guests’ arrival, he had ordered his engineer back at the central power station to raise the pressure of the maximum voltage in the system from 400 to 500 volts and to hold it there no matter how much strain was put on the system.

  * * *

  AT 12:20 A.M. ON July 8, 1888, with his groggy visitors from Boston looking on, Sprague waved a lantern in the air, and the motorman inside the first of the twenty-two cars started to inch his car forward, and as soon as they had room in front of the
m, the motormen behind followed. The system had never had to endure such a huge strain, and a few seconds after the convoy began, the lamps inside the cars dimmed almost completely out, until only a faint orange glow appeared. Back at the central power station, the engineer strained as the voltage dropped to 200 volts per car. But it didn’t matter. Gradually the lights inside the trolleys brightened again, and the cars picked up momentum with every foot. No fuses blew. No motors stalled. All twenty-two cars climbed the hill successfully and soon disappeared over the hill and out of sight.

  “This was an experiment that had never before been made in any part of the world,” The Richmond Daily Times reported. “And it was perfectly successful.” Whitney, Longstreet, and the rest of the Boston contingent headed for home the next day, their questions answered, and their city’s future decided.

  * * *

  TWO YEARS EARLIER, THE Third Avenue Street Railway Company of New York City had been faced with a decision almost identical to the one that Whitney had been wrestling with for Boston. The men in charge of the New York decision had traveled north to Providence late in 1886 to see how well an experimental electric line there was working. It was operating smoothly, and it offered great promise, but when the New Yorkers learned that an electric railway would cost their city 25 percent more than a cable-pulled railway, their decision was made in haste.

  In making his decision, Henry Whitney did not ignore the cost. It was clear that cable was the cheaper alternative. But now, at the age of forty-nine, with a wife; five children; a beautiful, ivy-covered home in Brookline; a vacation estate on the South Shore in the pretty coastal town of Cohasset; and an enormous operation in the West End Street Railway Company, he was a changed man, a patient, mature businessman. His patience had led him to Richmond, introduced him to Sprague, and helped him set the course for the future of Boston.

  In 1888, there were six thousand miles of street railway systems across the United States, and more than 90 percent of those miles were operated by horses. Only eighty-six miles claimed electricity as the power source, and the remaining miles were powered either by cable-pulled streetcars or tiny steam locomotives. As for the streetcars themselves, 21,736 were pulled by horses, 2,777 by cable, 258 by steam, and just 166 by electricity. It was very much a horse-pulled world when Henry Whitney and Frank Sprague turned Boston, and the rest of the country, in a new direction. Boston was going to be the first major city to say good-bye to the horse and welcome the age of the electric trolley.

  * * *

  IT WOULD TAKE A DISASTER unlike anything history had ever seen in order for New York’s leaders to reach the same, obvious decision. Heading into the weekend of March 10, 1888, New York City, like the rest of the East Coast, was winding down one of the warmest winters in years. Snow was the furthest thing from peoples’ minds. If not for the events that were about to unfold, New Yorkers might have ridden cable-pulled streetcars and elevated railways well into the next century, and a subway might have been put off for another fifty years. But on that unusually mild late winter weekend, bright sunshine turned to light rain. And then it started to come down harder. And finally the wind kicked up. Hundreds of New Yorkers were about to die. And as the clock ticked past midnight and into Monday morning, their only clue that something catastrophic was unfolding was that it started to get a little colder outside.

  Part Two

  THE BLIZZARD AND THE BILLIONAIRES

  5

  THE BLIZZARD THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

  IT WAS SWALLOWING HIM UP like white quicksand. And the more that ten-year-old Sam Strong struggled to climb through the heavy snow in his new, thigh-high rubber boots, navy blue overcoat, heavy winter cap, woolen gloves, and the muffler around his neck, the more it buried him alive. “You could go to the North Pole in that outfit,” his aunt had said to him only a few minutes earlier. But she went right on buttoning him up, and on the morning of Monday, March 12, 1888, she pushed him out the door as if it was just another day. “Hurry up now, so you won’t be late for school.”

  The night before, Sam had looked out the window of their apartment on West 123rd Street near Lenox Avenue north of Central Park and amused himself by watching through the raindrops as the gas lamps on top of the wood and iron posts flickered to life. Lamplighters walked by nightly with a five-foot-long stick. They would reach up until their burning wick was safely under the glass globe, turn the gas lever to ignite the gas jet, and wait until the lamp inside was aglow before moving on to the next one. For a young boy, it was endless entertainment to see globe after globe light up on the street.

  The next morning after breakfast, Sam was again looking out the window, but now the rain had stopped and the street was blanketed in white. He watched as a grown man, at least a full hundred pounds heavier than he was, got blown right over by the howling wind. He told his aunt what he saw, but she wasn’t worried. She needed him to run an errand for her before school. A dressmaker was coming to the house at seven thirty in the morning, and she gave Sam a list for the store. Whalebones, chalk for the dressmaker, and a large needle, all to help sew a new corset. When Sam went to the basement to leave, he found it blocked by a pile of snow. He turned around, came upstairs, and went out through the front door instead, floundering and slipping and sliding down the steps without actually feeling them under his feet. The snow was whirling so much it was nearly impossible to see. It felt like needles on his soft cheeks. But for a schoolboy who came from Indiana, it was also an adventure.

  The streets of Harlem should have been bustling with pedestrians on their way to work, schoolchildren, and horse-pulled streetcars, and there should have been a constant rumbling overhead from the steady stream of elevated trains. Instead, as he set out on his walk, the city felt deserted. The entire transportation network was being shut down, one system at a time, first the wagons loaded with goods, the horsecars next, and ultimately the steam-powered elevated trains would be paralyzed, too. Any cars that were visible were either abandoned or barely able to move. The snow was waist deep with every step Sam took, and when he finally made it to Lenox Avenue, then Sixth Avenue, and headed north, the wind nearly blew him backward until he could go no farther. He was thrown into a tall snowdrift, and, unable to move, he cried out for help. The whipping wind drowned him out, and the barrage of flakes started to overtake his small body.

  The worst natural disaster in American history was reaching its epic force, a storm that, when it was over, would force cities up and down the East Coast to reexamine everything from the way food was delivered to stores to how power lines and telephone lines sent signals into homes to the way transit systems kept passengers moving no matter how miserable the weather. It would spark the rise of one of New York’s most important political advocates for the construction of a subway. But it would also claim more than four hundred lives. Sam Strong was one of the first to face the full brunt of the storm’s wrath.

  * * *

  IF ANYBODY EVEN SAW THE brief item inside The New York Times on the bottom of page 13 on Friday, March 9, they probably ignored it. The four lines appeared under the headline A BLIZZARD IN MINNESOTA and described a heavy snow storm that was crippling trains in that state. Coming only a few months after the “Schoolhouse Blizzard,” another storm that killed 235 people, mostly children on their way home from school, across Montana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas, this latest one was tracking a similar path. If its course held, it would strike Pennsylvania, and if it didn’t fizzle out there, New York would be its next target.

  In what seemed like a strange move at the time, John Meisinger, the hardware buyer for E. Ridley and Sons, a department store in Manhattan, spent $1,200 leading into the weekend to purchase three thousand wooden snow shovels. He was merely planning ahead, expecting to keep them in his basement until the following winter, but when a newspaper reporter learned of his curious purchase in such warm weather, he mocked him in an article, calling him “Snow Shovel John.”

  Saturday was a beautiful spring
like day that caused purple and yellow crocuses to prematurely bud and brought out a long line of carriages in Central Park. On Long Island, farmers planted potatoes, and up in New Haven, picnickers lined the riverbank near Yale University, watching the rowers glide down the calm waters of the Connecticut River. In Washington, President Cleveland and his young wife took advantage of the springlike weather and left town for a vacation weekend. That night, on the ninth floor of the Equitable Building, one of the tallest buildings in the world, the army sergeant Francis Long stood in the offices of the New York City Weather Station, where he worked a desk job for the U.S. Signal Service. He looked out at the great city and saw bright stars against the dark clear sky. Down below, he saw throngs of people walking back from the three-mile-long torchlight parade celebrating the arrival of the Barnum and Bailey Circus. With spring beckoning, Walt Whitman, the staff poet at The New York Herald, wrote a short piece that weekend titled “The First Dandelion.”

  Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close emerging.

  As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics had ever been.

  Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—innocent, golden, calm as the dawn,

  The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face.