by Most, Doug
Parsons was dispatched to visit Europe, where the cities were more advanced than Chicago or Boston in their rapid transit plans, even though Boston residents were about to vote in a few weeks on their own subway. Parsons, who set sail in July, had already been to Berlin, where he saw urban train systems that ran at street level with mixed results. Now he was to visit other cities. In London, of course, the Underground was a model for the rest of the world. In tiny Liverpool, an electric elevated train more advanced than Chicago’s was running. Paris was also on the brink of approving a subway. And Glasgow was digging a subway tunnel that was intended to be cable operated, but for which electricity was also being considered. Parsons’s orders were to go and study them all and to return with a report that settled once and for all whether the tools and technology were there to bring to New York a subway with electric-powered trains. Parsons was skeptical.
His appointment as chief engineer had not been unanimously embraced. Despite his experience from the earlier Steinway commission, he was still only thirty-five years old, and there were far more seasoned engineers in the city. Many New Yorkers said his hiring “was a mistake,” as the writer Arthur Goodrich wrote in a profile of Parsons for the magazine World’s Work. “But the commission wanted a young man—no one but a young man could possibly complete the inevitably immense plan they were beginning.” And, as Goodrich wrote, no one knew the underbelly of New York quite like Parsons.
Shortly after his appointment, there came an incident when he was put on a witness stand to testify about the work that would be required to dig a subway tunnel. Courtroom observers could not believe the level of detail he was able to spout off, about what sewer pipes were at what corner and at what depth beneath the street. It was as if he had a snapshot of the guts of New York in his brain. After hours of questioning from lawyers who were opposed to a subway, they gave up, acknowledging that they would not be able to fluster him. “The devil take him,” one of those lawyers was overheard saying. “He’s making fools of all of us.”
When he was asked whether he had “the maturity to see this plan through,” Parsons didn’t hesitate in answering.
“Success doesn’t depend on age, nor does it depend on will or enthusiasm,” he said. “It depends on the rigorous analytical methods of a trained and educated mind.” It was what he believed, and it explained why he often liked to quote the famous Greek mathematician Archimedes, who, it is said, once proclaimed: “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I’ll move the world.” It could have been a motto for Parsons.
Parsons also engendered goodwill among those who worked for him. When the Civil Service Commission changed its rules to require that a special exam be taken for every pay raise of $150 in salary, Parsons angrily convinced the commissioners to withdraw the action. He was modest by nature, because, as one man said, “he doesn’t know any better.” It was a trait that made his workers want to please him more. Later in his life, Parsons would take a moment to reflect on his appointment as chief engineer for the subway, and he realized how it was a job that required a man with patience. “I am glad I was not older,” he said. “I doubt if I could now undertake or would undertake such a work under similar conditions. But I had the enthusiasm of youth and inexperience. Had I fully realized all that was ahead of me, I do not think I could have attempted the work. As it was I was treated like a visionary. Some of my friends spoke pityingly of my wasting time on what they considered a dream.”
* * *
PARSONS SAILED BACK FROM EUROPE in September 1894 and went to work on a report for his commissioners. In the meantime, New Yorkers had ballots to cast. Only four months earlier, they had read how the citizens in Boston narrowly approved construction of a subway. Now New Yorkers had their turn. On November 6, the election of a new mayor was relegated to an afterthought. In addition to voting in a Republican dry-goods salesman named William L. Strong as their new leader, New Yorkers overwhelmingly said, Yes to public ownership! Of the 184,035 ballots cast, 42,916 voted against city construction and ownership, while 132,647 voted in favor (399 ballots were deemed defective).
The 1894 Rapid Transit Commission had achieved in four months what the 1891 Steinway commission could not in more than two years. New York City was on its way.
9
THE RISE AND FALL OF HENRY WHITNEY
AFTER HENRY WHITNEY RETURNED HOME from his trip to Richmond, where he witnessed Sprague’s successful experiment, he immediately placed his order. He asked the Sprague Electric Railway & Motor Company to supply thirty cars for Boston and to electrify the line that ran along Boylston Street from Park Square to West Chester Park (a street that today is Massachusetts Avenue), and then along Beacon Street, out toward his home in Coolidge Corner in Brookline and to the Allston railroad station in neighboring Brighton. It was an ambitious order in total, giving Sprague control of thirteen miles of track, and it would cover a large portion of the West End Street Railway’s traffic. Whitney envisioned the day when the electric trolley would quietly whoosh relaxed passengers into and out of the city, encouraging growth farther out into the suburbs while reducing congestion downtown. It would not happen easily.
“We went to work vigorously on the contract,” Sprague said. “But Mr. Whitney ran into a snag with the city fathers.”
That snag almost doomed the business relationship between Sprague and Whitney before it had even begun. One of the biggest questions that arose during the race to electrify streetcars in the early 1880s was whether the current of electricity was best strung through overhead wires connected by poles or underground conduits, and when Whitney told city leaders of his plans to use overhead wires, he was told that option would not be allowed. Sprague preferred the overhead wires, no doubt because one of his other inventions was the electric trolley pole. His twelve-mile system in Richmond relied on a long network of trolley poles strung together. Whitney and Sprague decided that to get their way, they must once again run an experiment and convince the decision makers.
On a fall morning in 1888, Sprague arranged a demonstration and invited the Boston city councilors to ride aboard his electric streetcar. Determined to prove once and for all his design was the future, Sprague pushed the car to its limits, even though he knew he risked jumping the tracks. Fifteen miles per hour, then twenty, and finally twenty-five miles per hour, faster than anything Bostonians had ridden before. Almost five times as fast as the typical horse-pulled car. The little electric car cornered the rails with a slight lean and remained in constant contact with its overhead wire, but it never felt in danger of tipping, and when he finally pulled it to a stop, the dazzled city officials were won over.
“They gave Mr. Whitney permission to erect overhead wires throughout the city,” Sprague said.
* * *
IN BUILDING HIS STREETCAR EMPIRE, Henry Whitney needed more than the electric motors provided by Sprague. He needed his own engineer to oversee the conversion of his entire system from one powered by horses to one powered by electricity. It was a massive undertaking, but Whitney didn’t have to look far.
As a young boy growing up in Medford, Massachusetts, a few miles north of Boston, Frederick Stark Pearson, the son of an engineer who died when he was just fourteen, wasted little time proving to his teachers that he had a special ability to decipher complex ideas that grown men struggled with. His teachers learned to no longer be surprised after one day Pearson was seen engrossed with a book on metallurgy. While studying at nearby Tufts University, Pearson worked at the Medford Hillside train station, taking tickets, counting money, managing the telegraph, and manually operating the signal system. When he grew tired of racing back and forth from campus to the station half a dozen times a day just to drop the signal arm after each train pulled out, Pearson invented an ingenious solution. He rigged a tripping device from the chemical laboratory to the tracks that could raise and lower the red signal arm by electricity. He taught at Tufts after graduating and then started two businesses, the Somervi
lle Electric Light Company and the Woburn Electric Light Company, supplying entire communities with electricity and light. On the banks of the Mystic River, Pearson had quite the little power plant going. And when Whitney went searching for an engineer, he took a ride to Somerville; after two interviews, he offered Pearson $2,500 a year to be the chief engineer of the West End Street Railway Company.
The twenty-seven-year-old Pearson quickly put his mathematical mind to work. He determined that to power an entire streetcar system by direct current electricity would require a central power station like nothing else that existed. West End’s power was coming from a small plant in Allston, as well as the Cambridge Electric Light Company, but combined they still were not providing anywhere near the power that Pearson needed. Pearson set out to build the biggest power station in the world. He built it on Albany Street at the intersection with Harrison Avenue. The chimney, at 250 feet high, was the tallest structure in Boston, thirty feet higher than the Bunker Hill monument. And when his experienced mechanical engineer challenged the twenty-seven-year-old Pearson for pushing the work too quickly, Pearson had a ready answer.
“It’s got to be done,” he said. “Whitney has promised it.”
Pearson was soon besieged with job offers from around the country. And while he did accept a few consulting positions, he remained loyal to Whitney for having hired him at such a young age for an enormous task. Whitney would not forget.
* * *
A FEW MINUTES AFTER MIDNIGHT on January 1, 1889, while bells were ringing out the cold and ringing in the new year, two new electric streetcars quietly pulled out of the Allston railroad depot. There was no crowd to witness the start of the historic journey, the first ride of the West End electric streetcars, and there were no passengers on board other than Henry Whitney himself. They merely drove off into the night, with Frank Sprague manning the controls of one car and one of his electricians driving the other. They had a precise route to follow that Whitney and Sprague had mapped out, from Allston to Park Square downtown, passing through Coolidge Corner in Brookline.
The ride was going smoothly, with both the overhead wires and underground conduits working to perfection, until they reached the corner of Boylston and Church streets, where a bad patch of track caused both cars to fall off the rails. But they were quickly returned to the tracks, and by 12:30 A.M. they had reached Copley Square, where a crowd was still lingering from the new year’s celebration. Whitney, so pleased at how the trip went, told Sprague he wanted to load up both cars with as many passengers as they could fit and drive them up Beacon Street and back, to let them be the first to experience what the future for their city held. The next day’s Globe, under the headline PRESIDENT WHITNEY’S TRIUMPH, said, “Both cars were quickly filled and were soon speeding over the rails.”
* * *
THE ELECTRIC STREETCAR WAS QUICKLY embraced by most, but not all, Bostonians. Soon after the first cars started running, a wealthy woman wrapped in pricey furs walked into the offices of The Transcript newspaper in Brookline to complain how it was a shame that she could not drive out to her country home without being bothered by the sight of the ugly electric cars. Others referred to them simply as “great electric monsters,” and when an overhead cable crashed down and killed two horses one day, it only heightened the fears of those who longed for the days of being pulled safely and slowly down the street by a handsome four-legged animal.
No business highlighted the shortfalls of the horse more than the department store, which saw its rise in cities coincide with the transition of transit systems from horse-pulled to electric-powered. Market Street in Philadelphia, Canal Street in New Orleans, State Street in Chicago—all saw departments stores act as magnets for women who would come in during the morning, browse, buy, or sometimes just window shop; enjoy lunch in the enormous new stores; shop some more; and eventually return home in the late afternoon. It was a new paradise, a place where, as one shopper was moved to write, she could find everything “without having been obliged to leave the store.”
W. H. Macy’s, the onetime upscale dry-goods store that had blossomed into an enormous and diverse department store, had its own stable on West Nineteenth Street in New York and employed dozens of helpers, drivers, and wagon boys to handle the fastest-growing part of its business—deliveries. As the 1880s wound down, Macy’s was delivering more than a million packages a year, and after years of insisting it would only offer delivery to Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Jersey City, it quickly saw the potential of expanding its circle. On purchases of five dollars or more, Macy’s began to provide free delivery within one hundred miles of its New York store, and soon there were busy routes out to Long Island and western and central New Jersey. The volume alone should have made the longer routes profitable. But instead Macy’s lost money. The extra miles put an enormous strain on the horses, which forced the company to buy more animals and erased any windfall that long-distance delivery might have provided.
Boston’s version of New York’s Macy’s was Jordan Marsh and Company. Started in 1851 by Eben Jordan, it became as famous for its blueberry muffins and afternoon concerts as for its luxurious shopping experience. Like Macy’s, Jordan Marsh struggled with its reliance on horses to move its goods through Boston’s crowded downtown from its flagship store.
* * *
IN 1889, THE WEST End Street Railway Company abruptly announced that it was withdrawing its plan to build a subway and instead wanted to pursue building an elevated rail line. It might have been a shocking change of direction for another company, but for one owned by Henry Whitney it was hardly a surprise. In the two years since he had proposed tunneling beneath Boston Common, much had happened. He had consolidated all competing railway lines into a single operation. He had created the world’s largest streetcar company. He had begun weaning the city off its reliance on horses and introduced electric streetcars as the future of transportation.
Back when Whitney first set his sights on transforming Boston’s street railways, horse-drawn streetcars generally went no farther than four miles from Boston’s downtown. With more and more of his system being powered by electricity, six miles became the new reach. His company’s ridership increased by 25 percent in its first four years, but it was not doing the one thing the people of Boston were demanding: reducing congestion. If anything, things were getting worse.
When he made his annual report to West End’s stockholders in 1890, Whitney explained what a roller-coaster ride it had been. “Experience has shown,” he said, “that wherever electric lines have been installed, travel has enormously increased; and indeed travel over the line increases so rapidly that it is well-nigh impossible for the company to keep pace with the demands upon it.”
That demand was overwhelming, he explained, increasing by an average of thirty thousand per day over the previous year. “The number of passengers transported by the street railways in 1880 was about 160,000 per day; it is now nearly 360,000 people per day,” he said.
What prompted Whitney to abandon the project that he had proposed and that would have transformed the city and made him a hero to its citizens? He never said. But as the final decade of the nineteenth century began, deciding precisely where to dig a subway tunnel was an argument that was dividing the city. The roads that were most in need of relief, mainly Boylston Street, Park Street, Tremont Street, and Washington Street, all happened to run directly alongside or around Boston Common, or were very close to it, and they formed the busiest intersections in the city. If building a subway meant tearing up even the fringes of Boston Common, never mind going right through the heart of it, well that was one decision some Bostonians just could not imagine making.
* * *
THE REVEREND WILLIAM BLAXTON was living alone on top of a small hill on a grassy plot in Boston in the year 1634. Thirty-nine years old, and with no family, he had chosen his spot because it was on the southwest slope of Beacon Hill and seemed to receive just the right amount of shade and sun. There were only a handfu
l of trees on the field at most, and his only companions were the sheep and cows that grazed there, but its gentle slopes kept the land from flooding in the rain or becoming too hot during the summer and made the spot perfect for planting an orchard. For these reasons, Blaxton built his small cottage where he did. An ordained Anglican priest, he had arrived in America in 1623, and when his fellow travelers returned to England he decided to remain, making him the first European settler in the city of about three thousand people. He spent much of his time reading from the two hundred or so books in various languages that he had brought with him from England. His story is an unremarkable one in Boston’s rich history, except that when he left for Rhode Island and vacated his land in 1634, he sold back forty-five acres to the city in return for thirty pounds and kept six acres for himself in case he decided to one day return.
Blaxton never did come back. And more than 250 years later, the land where he settled was at the heart of the city’s subway debate. The Common, by its very name, was a symbol for the everyman in Boston, where the rich and poor could sit side by side on a bench or cross paths as if they were from the same bloodline. But as Boston developed, and as its downtown became a thriving commercial hub, this enormous park of untouchable land, with its increasing number of winding paths and rows of towering trees, became as much a blessing as a curse for the city. Every tree had its history, every hill had a legend, and every man and woman could share a story about romping through the Common as a child like it was their personal playground. There were those who held little regard for the park and had no problem sacrificing it for the greater good, especially if it meant a faster travel through downtown or to their outlying neighborhood. Then there were the protectionists, who believed that Boston would not be Boston without Boston Common and that everything must be done to protect it from development. “A stake may as well be driven here that no such desecration of ‘the people’s birthright,’ the Common, will be permitted under any circumstances,” wrote The Boston Evening Transcript on April 5, 1892.
