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

by Most, Doug

  Instead, he severely underestimated how many people he had angered in his short time in office. By sweeping out popular but corrupt officials; by taking on the Irish and the Italians, too, in their requests to fly their flags over City Hall; and by closing down saloons and brothels, Hewitt had alienated many of the people who made his election possible. New York was a far better place. But Hewitt would pay for his deeds. The Board of Aldermen loathed him and wanted nothing more than to see him fail as mayor and be ousted at the first chance they got. They never even let his plan out of committee so that it could be voted on by the full board, never mind be subjected to public hearings. And a few months later they got their wish. Hewitt was soundly defeated in his bid for reelection by the New York County sheriff, Hugh J. Grant, who, at thirty years old, was the youngest mayor New York ever had. At nearly seventy years old, after one eventful, tumultuous, and historic term in office, Hewitt was done with politics. But he was not done with his subway.

  7

  WILLIAM WHITNEY’S MISSED OPPORTUNITY

  WHENEVER WILLIAM WHITNEY TOOK ONE of his horses out for a ride in Central Park, the young Irish rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Stuyvesant Square frequently joined him. A native of Dublin, the Reverend Doctor W. S. Rainsford was ten years younger than Whitney and was as tall and straight as a reed. He was also one of the most politically well-connected religious men in the city, thanks to his tight bond with the financier J. Pierpont Morgan. Perhaps it was because Whitney trusted Rainsford, or because Rainsford helped him find a governess for his daughter, or simply because Whitney valued how frankly the preacher spoke his opinion, but whatever the reason, on one of their many rides together in the park Whitney confessed his ambition to his friend. And it was not, as many suspected, to occupy the White House.

  “Mr. Whitney,” Rainsford said, “I suppose you will be our next president.”

  “Oh no,” Whitney answered. “I am done with politics. I must make some money. It is time I did. Mrs. Whitney has money. I have none.”

  Of course that was an exaggeration. Whitney did have money, from his law practice, his political work, and his stock holdings from his late father’s steamship company, but what he meant was that he did not have the enormous riches of his wife’s family. That was what he desired, and to achieve it he had a plan.

  “I am going into the New York street railroads,” Whitney told Rainsford.

  “Well,” Rainsford replied to Whitney’s pledge, “they are in such a tangle you will need a lot of legal work.”

  “Tangle” did not begin to describe the state of New York’s streets in the 1880s. The New York Herald had described New York’s street railways this way: “The driver quarrels with the passengers and the passengers quarrel with the driver. There are quarrels about getting out and quarrels about getting in. There are quarrels about change and quarrels about the ticket swindle. The driver swears at the passengers and the passengers harangue the driver through the straphole.” It was a daily scene that left women disgusted and embarrassed and that alarmed children to the point of tears.

  Crossing Manhattan, from the Hudson to the East River, required switching from one car to another to another and another. There were four different lines and each time riders switched they had to pay a new fare, to go one block or twenty. Free transfers were not an option. More than thirty different street railway companies ruled the streets, each independently owned, and they reported their business to nobody. Most coaches had no ventilation, no source of heat other than a thin bed of hay, and faint light at best, so not only was the smell horrendous but passengers were cold and virtually blind inside. It was a system in drastic need of consolidation and control. And nobody knew better than Whitney the inner workings of New York City politics, thanks to his time as corporation counsel. That knowledge, along with his supreme self-confidence and his growing number of powerful and wealthy friends, was enough to inspire him to believe that he could be the one to transform New York’s streets.

  Whitney had been drawn into the business back in 1884. Driven by greed and a good-hearted desire to improve the quality of life in his city, Whitney was poised to take on the man who was making life miserable for New Yorkers and who was about to make it a whole lot worse. Whitney had been watching for years as Jacob Sharp became the king of New York City’s street railways through the strength of his Broadway & Seventh Avenue Railroad, and, like other wealthy New York businessmen, Whitney was determined not to let Sharp control any more of the city’s streets without a fight. There was too much money at stake for one man to have so much power. Old Jake Sharp’s vehicles were filthy, and passengers often had rats as company. And by choosing the routes where his vehicles operated, Sharp could maximize his revenues. New York had more people living per acre south of the Harlem River than London or Paris, most of them in slums, a fact that no doubt contributed to a death rate in the city that was higher than any in the country and among the worst in the world. Sharp already ran horsecars between Fifty-ninth Street and Union Square, but he wanted more, and in particular he wanted to run his line all the way down Broadway to the Battery. If Sharp won control over all of Broadway from Central Park to the wharf, he would essentially be able to hold the island of Manhattan hostage for whatever he wanted and earn a fortune in the process. With the city’s elevated lines already at their capacity and horses clogging the streets worse than ever, New York City stood at a critical moment.

  * * *

  JUST AS LONDONERS GREW TIRED of their dark, dank, smoke-filled Underground, New Yorkers quickly grew weary of their Els. The city’s four elevated lines had no more room. They were at full capacity on almost every trip and running as close together as possible without posing a danger. The pillars were not strong enough to support longer trains and heavier locomotives, and when the idea was floated to build additional elevated lines to relieve the pressure, New Yorkers said no more. The giant structures on which the tracks rested cast long shadows over the streets all day long, turning sunny days into what The Times called “a perpetual city of night.” The steam-powered elevated trains were so packed, sluggish, and loud that the only task harder than conducting business during the day over the rumbling was sleeping through it at night. Property values plummeted, as did the morale of New Yorkers.

  As if the vibrating, the noise, and the long shadows did not provide enough misery, as one unfortunate British tourist discovered, steam-powered elevated trains could be dangerous and dirty, too. Walter Gore Marshall was in Greenwich Village crossing the intersection at Sixth Avenue and Twelfth Street one day in 1880 when he decided to pause and look up at the El passing overhead. He regretted it the moment he did. “It was lucky I had not my mouth open at the time,” Marshall recalled, “for as I gazed with my face upturned, I was saluted with a large pat of oil from one of the axle-boxes of a car, which besprinkled my countenance and neck-tie.” Splattered from head to toe, he rushed into a nearby barbershop to clean himself off. “Oil drippings from passing trains are a source of constant annoyance to foot passengers crossing the roadway beneath, a nuisance that could be easily remedied by a proper sort of hard grease,” Marshall said.

  The elevated trains were not as bad as residents insisted, but there was no denying that steam power, for all of its reliability, was just not suited to coexist with city living. And while Chicago and Brooklyn were quick to follow Manhattan and build their own Els, Saint Louis, Philadelphia, and Boston all saw the flaws and decided that steam trains passing overhead and dropping oil, cinders, and soot on pedestrians below was perhaps not the future, after all.

  Decisions had to be made about what should power the city’s transportation system in the future and how it should be expanded to cover more territory so that residents could spread out more. Horses were trusted and reliable, but they were slow, they smelled, and they were at the mercy of the weather. The steam-powered elevated trains were speedier and above the crowded streets, but the shadows they cast on and the dangers they posed for ped
estrians below were slowing down momentum for their expansion. Cables were quiet and smooth and seemed promising, but installing them was wildly expensive, and they worked best on long straight roads, which worked well for portions of New York but not the entire island, and also posed a severe limitation in how far east and west on Manhattan they could go.

  Was the city willing to experiment with electric traction on its streets, which was still in its infancy but showing promise? Or was New York ready to follow London’s lead and build the world’s second subway, and America’s first? Tunneling was now being done much faster than it was when London dug its subway in the early 1860s. In 1869, a new shield had bored 1,350 feet, or a quarter of a mile, beneath the Thames River in just five months, unheard-of speed. Fifteen years later, in 1884, London’s Parliament authorized the use of a shield with additional improvements for digging a pair of railroad tunnels starting near London Bridge. The combination of tunneling with electric traction could be the greatest achievement yet. Clean, quiet, and underground.

  A myriad of issues faced New York, and William Whitney was eager to take them all on, even if doing so meant splitting his life between Washington and New York.

  Secretary of the navy was never a passion or a career ambition for Whitney. President Cleveland, who had not yet married his twenty-year-old girlfriend Frances Folsom, was a social oaf in Washington, and he relied on the Whitneys for companionship. The two men played in a poker group regularly, and Flora held so many lavish parties, always inviting the president, that Whitney had to tell his wife to be careful about earning Cleveland a reputation as a rich, party-going elitist. Cleveland treasured how Whitney watched out for him. “Mr. Whitney had more calm, forceful efficiency than any man I ever knew,” Cleveland later said of his friend. “In work that interested him he actually seemed to court difficulties and to find pleasure and exhilaration in overcoming them.”

  It was an accurate description, and it explained why Whitney could not resist the pull of New York even as he was restoring the navy to its glory.

  * * *

  IN THOMAS FORTUNE RYAN, an aggressive Irish-American, Virginia-born stockbroker, Whitney found a mate to go to battle with and to take on Jake Sharp. The two men became fast friends and mutually set out to rip from Sharp’s hands his most prized possession: Broadway, the spine of Manhattan.

  Whitney and Ryan helped form what they called the New York Cable Railway Company. And only a few months later, in early 1885, they joined forces with a trio of Philadelphia transit men, William Elkins, Peter A. B. Widener, and William Kemble, who were behind a cable road that was recently launched on Market Street in Philadelphia, where they dominated the city’s street railways. It was a formidable team these men created, and they would form one of the most famous alliances of wealth and power in American history. They would in a few short years acquire aging horsecar lines that covered Columbus Avenue, Lexington Avenue, Fulton Street, Thirty-fourth Street, and Twenty-ninth Street. With one deal after another, sometimes buying, sometimes leasing, other times overpowering, they soon controlled virtually every horsecar line in Manhattan. They were not profitable lines, but the businessmen had other schemes in mind for making a fortune. They believed the money wasn’t in the subway itself but in the utilities required to operate it, namely gas and electricity. What Ryan and Whitney lacked in transit experience they made up for with their powerful connections, legal expertise, and deep knowledge of the ways of New York politics. And while the Philadelphians were outsiders to New York, they brought with them experience in street railways and in promoting cable streetcars. Together they were five men with vast amounts of money, influence, experience, and connections, and they shared the mutual goal of bringing to New York a streamlined street-transit network. If there was a weak link to their group, it was Whitney. His partners worried whether he could remain committed to taking down Sharp and taking over New York’s street railways while rebuilding the navy from Washington. Whitney assured them he was on board, even as he became more entrenched by the day in the political and social scenes of Washington.

  * * *

  ON MAY 28, 1886, a letter arrived at Whitney’s home at 1731 I Street in Washington’s Northwest District that proved how important a man he had become.

  “My marriage with Miss Folsom will take place at the White House on Wednesday (June second) at seven o’clock in the evening,” President Cleveland wrote to his close confidant. “I hardly think that I can creditably demean myself unless you and Mrs. Whitney are present to encourage and sustain me in the new and untried situation. May I expect to see you both on the occasion?” Cleveland had been courting Frances “Frank” Folsom for years. She was the daughter of Oscar Folsom, his former law partner from his time in Buffalo. Oscar Folsom had been killed in a carriage accident and left Cleveland in charge of his estate, asking him to help his wife raise their then-twelve-year-old daughter, Frances. By the time Cleveland was elected president, she was an attractive brunette in her early twenties and he was rotund with thinning hair and approaching fifty. Still, their relationship evolved from paternal to romantic, and they traded letters for years until the spring of 1886, when he proposed in the mail and she accepted.

  On June 2, beginning at 6:30 in the evening, William and Flora Whitney joined the other cabinet couples as they were ushered into the Blue Room at the White House for a small intimate ceremony. Flowers, ferns, and palms, all from the White House greenhouse, decorated the floor, and John Philip Sousa, the marching music king, led the Marine Band in the Wedding March. The engaged couple, with no ushers or bridesmaids leading them, descended the stairs together, with the bride leaning on Cleveland’s left arm, and they stopped beneath a chandelier covered in flowers in the Blue Room. He wore a stately tuxedo, but all eyes were on his young bride, who wore an elegant white satin dress with a long silk veil, fifteen-foot trail, and low neckline and adorned with real orange blossoms. A brief ceremony led by the Presbyterian minister Reverend Byron Sunderland was understated, and it ended with him placing his hand over the clasped hands of the couple.

  “Grover, do you take this woman whom you hold by the hand to be your lawful wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of wedlock?” the minister said.

  “I do,” the president answered, and he then fussed into his waistcoat pocket for the wedding ring and slipped it onto her finger.

  The minister repeated the question for the bride, and she, too, answered in a clear voice with no hesitation. “I do.”

  “Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder,” Sunderland said in conclusion, and the only wedding that has ever been held in the White House was complete.

  * * *

  WHILE FLORA WHITNEY WAS PREGNANT with their fifth child in the fall of 1886, her husband was deeply immersed in the matters of the navy and plotting his takeover of the New York street railroads. What he was attempting was not illegal, but it was certainly unwise politically since it gave the appearance that Whitney was more interested in earning a fortune for himself in private enterprise than he was in repairing the navy’s image. Most of his visits to New York passed without any notice, as he was able to sneak in on the train incognito, hop straight into a carriage, hold meetings at his Fifty-seventh Street mansion, and return to Washington just as quietly. But when The New York Tribune and The Times got wind of his repeated visits to New York, they began a crusade to publicly embarrass him.

  “The Secretary of the Navy has spent much more time in this city recently than the general public is aware of,” The Tribune wrote, “but he has not been occupied with naval business.” It reported that he was solely in town to pursue his plan to seize control of Sharp’s Broadway railroad. “Mr. Whitney was in town a week ago yesterday, although few New Yorkers discovered it. He did not proclaim his presence on the house-tops.” Instead, he huddled in his home with Ryan and the rest of the Philadelphians, focused entirely on Jake Sharp.

  They knew that they could never build a comp
lete transit system in New York if they controlled only the streets running across the island and not the boulevards that ran down the middle as well. “The system could not be perfected with crosstown lines alone,” Widener argued at a public meeting in 1886, “and no trunk line could be used with so much advantage to the system as that of the Broadway and 7th Avenue roads.” Broadway, in particular, was to New York what Market Street was to Philadelphia. And all five of the men knew that whoever controlled the busiest thoroughfare in any city controlled the city itself. In the mid-1880s, in New York, that was Jacob Sharp.

  If Whitney and the others knew one thing, it was how to start a fire. And when Sharp, who by now was pushing seventy years old and dying of diabetes, pushed back against their efforts to buy him out, and even brazenly raised his asking price, they had their opening. New Yorkers became enraged at his refusal to consider a sale or to improve their way of life by allowing changes to the transportation system. Whitney’s group took advantage of the public ire and persuaded one of Sharp’s stockholders to file a lawsuit against him and demand access to review the company’s books. That suit became irrelevant when it caught the attention of the New York State Senate, which opened its own investigation into Sharp. And in a matter of a few weeks, Sharp was under fierce attack. His bribes to city officials were exposed, and the aldermen, branded as forty thieves, were publicly excoriated; some of them even fled for Montreal rather than face the possibility of a corruption trial and jail time. As for Sharp, when he too confronted the possibility of incarceration at Sing Sing, he finally caved. He sold to his powerful rivals all ten thousand shares in his Broadway & Seventh Avenue Railroad, valued at almost three million dollars, and, finally, Whitney had his prize. Broadway!