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

by Most, Doug

  “Oh, but this is the part I have rebuilt,” the son explained. “We’ll come to the end of it in a minute and then you’ll notice the difference.”

  Seconds later, as the driving wheel of the locomotive attempted to brake, the train hurtled off the tracks. It bounced down a fourteen-foot embankment, landing upside down at the bottom. The two Parsons men, as calm and controlled as ever, were stunned but somehow unhurt, and they found themselves sitting next to each other on the ceiling of the wrecked car.

  “There, what did I tell you,” Parsons the engineer said to his father.

  “Yes, son,” his earnest father said back, “it is rougher.”

  When Parsons was promoted to road master with the Erie Railroad, one of the first letters of congratulations he received was from a New York congressman who had his own interests in railroads and engineering, Abram Hewitt. Hewitt would keep his eye on the young Parsons from that day forward.

  * * *

  PARSONS CAME TO NEW YORK in 1886, and he opened an engineering consulting office. He was by now a taken man, having married Anna DeWitt Reed, like him a descendant of a colonial family. Anna Parsons accompanied her husband on some of his most important trips around the world, volunteered for the American Red Cross, opened an orphanage, and became the person that he turned to most often for early reads on his writings. She would also bear him two children.

  Parsons was just twenty-seven when he moved to New York. He needed a partner, and so he and his younger brother, Harry de Berkeley Parsons, a budding mechanical engineer himself who would later design the reptile house at the Bronx Zoo, opened a firm together in lower Manhattan at 22 William Street. They were close, yachting together most weekends, but they were different. Harry was more shy, three years younger and narrow in his thinking. William had grand ambitions. And it was William who quickly got written up in Engineering News for experience that “will place him in the front rank of the profession in this city.” Their small engineering firm quickly established itself as a force.

  In their early days, William and Harry took on railroad projects, new water systems, and even hydroelectric plants, going wherever the work took them, from Ohio to Colorado to Maine to Pennsylvania to Illinois to Texas to California to Maryland. Railroads, in particular, became their specialty, and in 1887 Parsons was named general manager and chief engineer of the Denver Railroad, Land & Coal Co. But even as he traveled the country, Parsons did not lose touch with his home. Reports about New York City’s need for some sort of rapid transit system were intensifying, and Parsons wanted to be there. “During these years I was engaged in various private practice in railroad and other engineering work in different parts of the country,” Parsons wrote later, “but never absent for any length of time from New York, or accepting any assignment that would permanently take me away from New York, in order to keep in touch with the rapid transit problem, which I believed would eventually come to pass.”

  The two most promising New York underground railways, the Arcade Railroad and, after that, the New York District Railway, would both fail. But for Parsons it was for the best. He was still a young man with little experience managing others and only a few years spent working on railroads. But the opportunity gave him a chance to begin exploring the terrain of New York City, not only on the surface but underneath the streets. He studied the maps that were available to him, and, after trekking through the streets himself, he began to create his own topographical maps. In time, Parsons mapped out the entire island. The bedrock in midtown, as he learned, lay much closer to the streets than in most other parts, making midtown far more suitable for the construction of taller buildings, but also more challenging to place a subway tunnel under. He came to understand that in order to design a subway for New York, he would have to resolve not only the best route but also the best tunneling method and the mode of power for train operation.

  There was something else Parsons learned during his climb in engineering circles. In order to achieve anything monumental, he would need friends in high places who believed as strongly in a subway for New York as he did. He already had the attention of Abram Hewitt. In January of 1888, Parsons had even written a letter to Hewitt, asking the mayor to keep him in mind for any future subway commissions. “I’ve had considerable experience in this subject and have given it close study,” Parsons wrote. “I would be much indebted if you should submit my name for consideration.” But it was another unlikely bond that he forged with a likable, hardworking, German-born manufacturer of the world’s finest pianos that gained him his most valuable friend.

  * * *

  WILLIAM STEINWEG WAS BORN on March 5, 1835, the fourth of six children in a tiny German village called Seesen. Their father, Heinrich, was a piano maker and anticipated bringing all of his children into the business with him. But then his third son, Charles, at risk of going to war at a time when revolutions were breaking out across Europe, fled for New York, joined the piano-making business there, and then wrote home to his family that they should come, too, because the piano factories in the city were thriving. In 1850, they did come, sailing into the harbor just as the summer began. It was not long after they arrived that their family name, Steinweg, was anglicized into Steinway.

  The children all got jobs in piano manufacturing, but their father preferred to keep the work in the family, and in 1853 he opened a family piano-making business. In a short time, Steinway & Sons was winning prizes and being recognized for its beautiful pianos, and soon it was big enough to open a large factory that stretched the entire block of what was then Fourth Avenue (now Park Avenue) between Fifty-second and Fifty-third streets. A musician at heart who played the piano and was an outstanding tenor, William Steinway, who spoke English more clearly than anyone in his family, also possessed a certain charm and devotion to his craft that made him easily likable. He was a natural choice to take charge of the company’s finances and sizable real estate dealings. Steinway & Sons blossomed into a giant in its field, and Steinway, in his dealings with lawyers, shipping magnates, local businessmen, bankers, newspaper ad salesmen, and politicians became an American business force.

  With his thick, dark beard; bushy head of hair; and upright posture honed from years of sitting straight on a piano bench, William Steinway cut an impressive figure. Almost single-handedly he helped the piano become a symbol of middle-class success, an instrument that reflected being cultured but not pompous. At the 1867 World Exposition in Paris, American and European pianos commanded great attention, and Steinway & Sons and a Boston company called Chickering & Sons received the highest honors for their work. But as the company grew into a worldwide machine, with William as president, sending pianos across Europe and into homes and palaces, it was not the musical side of Steinway & Sons that drew the attention of New York’s mayor, Hugh Grant, to Steinway in the early 1890s.

  Over the years, Steinway, who had cultivated good relationships with his workers, developed swaths of woodland and open meadows in a part of eastern Queens called Astoria for an enormous factory. He boosted property values wherever his company went and even bought his own horse-railway line to make it easier to access a previously remote part of Queens. Inside his piano-making complex overlooking Bowery Bay, he could store mountains of lumber and giant stacks of iron and steel, and he could receive barge deliveries right up to the building. It was an ingenious development plan, and it did not go unnoticed by Grant. A man like Steinway, who was able to juggle so many tasks, disarm anyone he came in conflict with, and convince politicians to give him what he wanted was a man who the mayor recognized could be invaluable for a sensitive job like getting a subway approved.

  After New York’s governor, David B. Hill, signed into law the Rapid Transit Act of 1891, signaling that the city was finally serious about solving its congestion woes, The Times gushed with its headline: NOW FOR RAPID TRANSIT. Grant named Steinway to run the transit commission. Among the other commissioners, Grant also picked a rising figure in New York City, August Belmont Jr.
, whose banker father had died a few months earlier and left him with an enormous sum of money and influence. The commission quickly named two engineers to study the various options and design one or more plans to be considered. At seventy-two years old, William Ezra Worthen, a sanitary and hydraulic engineer, was one of the most experienced engineers in the country, and he was named the commission’s chief engineer. At the recommendation of Abram Hewitt and with Steinway’s backing, thirty-two-year-old William Parsons was named as the commission’s deputy chief engineer.

  On the day Governor Hill signed the Rapid Transit Act into law, Steinway said to a group of reporters that the decision facing New Yorkers was not as obvious as some believed: “The question is practically narrowed down by the conditions under which we are to have rapid transit to the choice of two systems,” he said. “It is to be either a viaduct or underground.”

  But there was another decision that needed to be resolved even before that, and it was the problem Abram Hewitt foresaw back in 1888. The Rapid Transit Act left the burden of paying for a subway to private industry, in an attempt to remove any chance that history might repeat itself and allow a corrupt politician to block construction and pocket millions of dollars in kickbacks, just as Boss Tweed had done. The commission would tackle the responsibilities of deciding what routes a new elevated line or a subway should follow and what private company should be in charge of building and operating it. But that’s it. It was as if the city was shirking any responsibility in solving its biggest crisis and was instead banking on a Carnegie, a Vanderbilt, a Whitney, a Belmont, or anyone else with tens of millions of dollars at their disposal and a strong interest in rapid transit, showing up unannounced at the doorstep of City Hall with a bag of cash and a shovel.

  * * *

  IN NEW YORK CITY in 1891, two downtown buildings that stood only a few feet apart near Exchange Place suddenly became the most important places to be. One was a restaurant. One was a boardroom. It was not unusual for deals that were struck over steak at the former to be approved over paper and ink at the latter.

  Delmonico’s, with its third-floor, private dining room, a luxury few restaurants could afford, and a basement wine cellar stocked with more than ten thousand bottles, had a long history in the city. Giovanni Del-Monico opened a small shop in 1827, where he personally bottled casks of wine. When he and his brothers opened a café and pastry shop, they dropped the hyphen from their name, and soon they were taking over various locations around lower Manhattan, including one that became a favorite haunt of Thomas Edison, who liked to visit with his wife while coming to the city for a weekend getaway. When a group of nearly two hundred wealthy financiers feted their candidate for president, James G. Blaine, with a dinner at Delmonico’s in 1884, The World newspaper called it “the Royal Feast of Belshazzar.” In 1891, the newest Delmonico’s restaurant was opened at 2 South William Street. Eight stories tall, and the first to feature electric lights, it still had touches of the Old World, like its lavishly decorated dark wood inside and two Pompeii pillars framing the front door on the outside. Its private dining room became the newest destination for anyone who was out to cut a deal, legal or otherwise, and wanted a discreet location to do it.

  Almost diagonally across the street was 22 William Street. It was the engineering office of the Parsons brothers whose company became the host for the public hearings and board meetings of the Steinway commission.

  * * *

  THE FRUSTRATION OF THE STEINWAY commission boiled over late in the afternoon of October 2, 1891. Steinway invited dozens of reporters to come in, and the commissioners proceeded to dump nearly a hundred typewritten pages onto the table. Then they told the reporters to see what they could make of them. Among the papers were maps, drawings, and reports of the commission’s experts and engineers, and the commissioners were bluntly honest about their own review of the documents. They were divided and unable to make a decision almost a year after they got started. The commissioners thought that by showing the public just how difficult their decision was, they would garner some sympathy for how long it was taking them and gain some useful insights into how passengers felt.

  Two plans were on the table. The Worthen plan, as it was called, had four tracks, two for local trains and two for express trains. And they were all on one level, essentially a four-track road, with a concrete base and supported by wrought iron girders and posts. The ceiling was a plate-iron cover that was coated with a coal tar that would seal it off from water and help preserve the iron. Worthen, however, did not address what to do with the myriad of water, gas, and electrical lines that were already buried in the streets and would have to be disturbed during the tunneling.

  Parsons’s plan called for digging deeper into the ground, with two double-deck tunnels, for local and express trains. One side of the street was for trains headed north, or uptown, and the other for those headed south, downtown. By stacking the tracks instead of placing them side by side, Parsons required two deeper tunnels, but he also created space in between the tunnels, where he proposed burying the pipes and conduits for the utilities.

  There was no question that Worthen’s plan was the simpler of the two, which is why three of the four consulting engineers the Steinway commission hired to review the plans and make recommendations preferred it to Parsons’s plan. But the lone holdout was not just anyone. It was Octave Chanute, the outspoken French-born president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Chanute’s preference for the Parsons plan, with his own modifications, created a headache for the Steinway commissioners. Now, instead of having two plans to choose from, they had three.

  MORE RAPID-TRANSIT TALK, the Times’ headline said the next day. The story singled out Chanute for holding up the process. “It is undoubtedly this report which has caused hesitation and delay in coming to a definite conclusion on the general question of construction. With only the other reports before them they could probably have reached a decision on this; but Mr. Chanute’s report has given them so much to think about that they have declared that no decision will be given out for several days.”

  * * *

  THREE WEEKS LATER, THE Steinway commission announced its decision. Two separate routes would branch off one main line. The main line would start at South Ferry and head up the west side beneath Broadway to the Bronx. The second line would commence off the main line at Union Square and go up the east side under Madison Avenue and also cross the Harlem River into the Bronx. The tunnel would be built with a shield designed especially for the project, but the depth of the tunnels would be decided by the contractor. The trains would most likely be powered by electricity, though the commissioners remained skeptical about that. On the express lines, it was estimated the trains could reach forty miles per hour, a speed that seemed supersonic for a city that had been riding on plodding horses or congested Els for half a century.

  * * *

  ON JANUARY 1, 1892, a fifteen-year-old Irish girl with rosy cheeks and fair skin named Annie Moore was the first of 148 passengers to be escorted off the steamship Nevada. She and the others were placed onto a small transfer boat that was colorfully decorated in bunting, and when it docked a few minutes later Annie was hustled into a new building for arriving immigrants in New York harbor. Foghorns and whistles clanged to signal her arrival, and, after a brief stumble, she walked up to a registry desk, where she was registered as the first arriving immigrant at Ellis Island. She was handed a ten-dollar gold coin, the most amount of money she said that she had ever held, and then she explained to the throng of witnesses, workers, and reporters that she was here in America with her two younger brothers to join their parents on Monroe Street in New York City.

  If there was a moment that signaled how desperately New York needed a subway, the arrival of Annie Moore was it. In 1877, sixty-three thousand immigrants arrived in New York City, passing through what was then the arriving station for immigrants, Castle Garden. When the Bureau of Immigration was put in charge of registering immigrants in 1890,
it was clear that Castle Island could no longer handle the arriving flood of immigrants. A new station was needed to screen for fleeing criminals or merely the sick and the homeless, and the immigration bureau quickly settled on the empty landfill Ellis Island, which opened for business New Year’s Day in 1892. In its first year, Ellis Island registered 445,987 immigrants, more Germans and Irish than any other group and more than seven times the total that had arrived fifteen years earlier. It was all the evidence needed to prove that New York City had to do more than merely expand its livable space to accommodate its surging population. It had to create a better way for all those new people flooding into the metropolis to get around.

  * * *

  IT TOOK MORE THAN A YEAR for the Steinway commission to write up a detailed contract outlining how the subway would be built, who would operate it, and how the fare money would be disbursed. Only then could the date be set to auction off a 999-year contract to build and operate a New York City subway: December 29, 1892.

  A financial meltdown overseas in London back in 1890 triggered by the collapse of the city’s oldest merchant bank, Baring Brothers & Co., had begun to cause financiers around the world to hold on to their cash a little tighter. This would have far-reaching implications. And when the king of New York’s elevated trains, Jay Gould, died suddenly on December 2, 1892, it threw the city’s transit future into greater turmoil. A few days later, when Steinway was cornered by a reporter at a transit commission meeting, he acknowledged that times had changed in the two years since the subway talks began in earnest. There was even a new yet familiar president of the United States. Once again, with the backing of his old friend William Whitney, Grover Cleveland had taken the White House in the 1892 election, winning revenge against the incumbent president, Benjamin Harrison, who ousted him from office back in 1888. The Democrats were again in power, though this time, unlike Cleveland’s first term, the country was on much shakier financial ground, and a collapse seemed all but imminent. Despite so much upheaval, Steinway insisted he was not worried about the subway contract.