by Most, Doug
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HENRY WHITNEY WAS NOT OBLIVIOUS to the passions the Common stirred, but he argued that nothing should be sacred ground when it came to trying to solve the transit crisis, which affected people of all classes. He had a plan. He had the money. He had the political connections. And he owned a company that had more than a million dollars in cash and assets, a huge sum. He was the world’s largest street railway operator. And on top of it all, business for the West End Street Railway Company was booming. The number of round trips that passengers were taking and the ticket revenue the company was collecting were both on a steady climb.
If there was one curiosity to Whitney’s rise to prominence, it was the lack of any hard skepticism he received from the city’s hundreds of reporters. If he had a speech to make, it was often printed verbatim in many of the papers, more like a paid advertisement than a news article, and often accompanied by a story that simply reported his appearance and quoted from his talk. In 1890, Boston had nine daily and four semiweekly newspapers. Yet day after day Whitney was portrayed only in the most favorable light. It was as if the papers were afraid of him or indebted to him. Or both. Not everyone, however, stood in awe.
As Whitney stood on the cusp of being a hero to his city in early 1888, a small group of young lawyers, journalists, college professors, clergymen, students, and distinguished writers, mostly in their twenties and thirties, formed the Young Men’s Democratic Club of Massachusetts. They met in taverns across Boston. And in a short time they would begin to muster the strength to confront Whitney, to accuse him of scandalous and unethical behavior, and would ultimately aim to topple him.
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ON THE EVENING OF January 6, 1891, a steady stream of carriages rolled down Commonwealth Avenue, one of the most famous boulevards in the world. Two hundred and fifty feet wide and more than a mile long, it was lined on both sides by the most beautiful homes in all of Boston, with tall windows, gothic columns, and enormous, glittering chandeliers visible from the sidewalk. The avenue was split down the middle by a tree-lined park dotted with benches, statues, and a straight-line walking path. Under the light of gas lamps along the mall, the carriages formed a line as they stopped in front of the six-story brick Algonquin Club around six o’clock to unload their passengers for a long night of revelry. Inside the Algonquin Club, bright lights danced off all the gold, silver, and glass while the smell of freshly cooked venison, clams, and duck wafted through the spacious rooms with twenty-five-foot ceilings. Every table had a colorful arrangement of flowers. The Boston Cadet Band was warming up, and the call of an auctioneer, shouting “going, going, gone,” could be heard in the background and out on the sidewalk.
The club was founded as a social clubhouse for the city’s elite, a private place to relax with a drink and a cigar and maybe strike a late-night deal. The winding central staircase, towering fireplace hearths, alabaster columns, vaulted ceilings, museum-worthy paintings, glittering chandeliers, wainscoting, stained glass windows, and leather reading chairs created a luxurious warmth for those who could afford it all. It was also known in town as the place where Henry Whitney offered bottomless glasses of liquor, endless helpings of free food, and fare-free carriage rides to bribe legislators to get what he wanted.
Every important businessman in Boston was at the club—real estate brokers, bankers, merchants, and city and state officials. Being held this evening was the annual formal banquet of the Real Estate Exchange, but the reason for the added excitement was that it was also a chance to celebrate the election of Boston’s newest mayor, Nathan Matthews Jr., who was expected to make an appearance and even say a few words.
After Whitney led an informal reception that ended at eight o’clock, he invited the crowd up to the third-floor dining room, where dozens of tables covered in white cloth and fine china were set for the formal dinner. Once Matthews arrived, late and to loud applause, the head table became quite the collection of power and politics. To Whitney’s right sat Willis G. Jackson, president of the Chicago Real Estate Exchange, and Thomas N. Hart, the former mayor of Boston, and to Whitney’s left sat Matthews and Aaron W. Spencer, former president of the Boston Stock Exchange. Directly across the table sat Col. Francis Peabody Jr. of the banking house Kidder, Peabody & Company and Governor William Russell.
Polite clapping greeted Whitney when he stood to make his opening remarks. Ridership for the West End Street Railway Company was soaring. In 1890, 114 million passengers rode the company’s cars, an increase of 10 million from the previous year and almost double the number that rode streetcars in Boston in 1880. Those passengers brought the company $5.7 million in revenue, and as the company reduced its reliance on horses and electrified more miles of tracks, it became a more efficient operation. Not only was Whitney’s business thriving, but his wife, Margaret, was newly pregnant with their fifth child. It was no wonder he was in a good mood as he stood to talk.
“I am in my capacity as president of a transportation company brought every day in contact with vast numbers of people,” he said. “I see day by day and month by month the throngs in our streets, which testify to the prosperity of our city.”
Barely twenty-four hours after Matthews had been sworn in, Whitney begged Boston’s new mayor to give real estate developers, like those filling the very room in which he spoke, what they needed to continue the prosperous times. “Give us on the main avenues wide streets; give us room for the development of transportation interests. And I am saying nothing at all on behalf of the West End Railway Company, but I am saying what is absolutely essential for the future prosperity of the city.”
The real estate leaders stood and roared for Whitney. But what Whitney was only just beginning to realize was that Matthews had his own ideas for how a city should grow and prosper. And they did not align with Whitney’s.
To Matthews, it was completely acceptable for a big business like the West End Street Railway Company to earn enormous sums of money, as long as it was honest and respectful in the way it treated its customers and its partners. But it was not, in the mind of Boston’s new mayor, the job of the West End Street Railway Company to dictate the course of the city, to decide which neighborhoods got trolley stops or wider streets and which ones did not, or to determine how far into the suburbs the transit lines went. Most important of all, Matthews believed that it was irresponsible of the West End company to be so indecisive as to hold the city hostage over the question of building an elevated rail or a subway, when at least one of those, or possibly both, was so badly needed.
Just one day earlier, in his inaugural address, Matthews had said, “The City of Boston is no longer a New England town on a large scale; it is a great commercial and industrial city, the metropolis of New England, with a population greater than that of the whole state of New Hampshire.” As their mayor, he pledged that it was time to take back the streets from the corporations that ruled them and return control to the people.
Matthews dedicated the greatest portion of his words to the subject of rapid transit, and he expressed his frustration with Whitney’s company. “Many schemes have been suggested during the past few years, none of which, it is safe to say, are entirely satisfactory,” he said. “On the other hand, the demand for rapid transit is a genuine one, and should be met at an early date. I believe that the city government itself should grapple with this problem and endeavor to settle it to the satisfaction of the people, rather than leave the matter entirely to the interested action of private corporations.” He recommended the appointment of three people to a rapid transit commission, “to consider the whole subject of rapid transit, including elevated roads, tunnels, routes, systems, companies, and in particular, the best means of protecting the financial interests of the city as a corporation.”
Matthews was well informed. A traffic count on Tremont Street had recently showed that 332 streetcars passed by a single point in one hour. That was the equivalent of a car passing by every eleven seconds, unacceptable to the new mayor. From the
moment he set foot in office, Matthews set out to make sure that the city of Boston, not the West End Street Railway Company, was working to solve the transportation crisis.
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WITH HIS ROUND SPECTACLES, prematurely gray hair, youthful face, deep brown eyes, and bushy, well-groomed, silver and black mustache, Matthews swept into office behind a change in momentum that saw Democrats seize control of Massachusetts after a long reign of Republican leadership. By the time he chose to leave City Hall after winning four one-year terms, Matthews would carry with him a legacy as the “father of the subway.”
Born in Boston’s West End neighborhood in 1854, he attended the prominent private school, Epes Sargent Dixwell, before going off to Harvard College, traveling in Europe and returning home to attend Harvard Law School. He embarked on a life of law and serving the citizens of Boston. As much as he loved the law, Matthews embraced politics even more. Massachusetts was a Republican state in the early 1880s, but a shift was under way as the ranks of Irish Yankee Democrats gained strength. Matthews joined the wave of supporters who got behind Democrat Grover Cleveland in 1884, and he befriended important men, like the first Irish mayor in Boston, Hugh O’Brien. When a group of his friends set off to form the Young Men’s Democratic Club in 1888, Matthews signed up, and they tapped Matthews to lead them. The New York Times described him as a “brilliant orator, and a fearless champion of clean politics and decent methods in administration.” Matthews ran for mayor in 1890 and trounced the Republican Moody Merrill.
He was joined in victory by the newest Democrat on the Boston Common Council, nicknamed Honey Fitz because of his warm disposition; those who knew him called him Johnny Fitz. But John Francis Fitzgerald, born in Boston in 1863 to Irish immigrants, did not become one of Boston’s greatest politicians because he was a pushover. He earned his respect from an early age. His favorite neighborhood growing up was by the water, the North End, a place where wagons and pushcarts filled the streets and he could watch how people worked from sunup to sundown and still earned barely enough to have a place to sleep at night. His first job as a newsboy at fourteen saw him rising at 3:00 A.M. to get his papers, shout out the headlines, and sell as many as he could before the workday started. As a boy he played baseball, and he was the fastest runner among all his friends, luring them to race and never losing. He was sixteen when he got a brief tour of a manor house on Beacon Street that happened to belong to a Harvard professor and future U.S. senator named Henry Cabot Lodge.
The teenage boy could not have known that as a young Irish man growing up in Boston, his interest in politics came at the absolute perfect time and that his heritage would help him rise to prominence alongside the owner of that Beacon Street mansion. He got into the prestigious Boston Latin School and eventually into Harvard Medical School, and soon enough he was serving on the Boston Common Council. Honey Fitz would go on to be a mayor, a senator, a congressman, and, late in his life, well into his eighties, he would teach his grandson, the future president John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the tricks of running an aggressive political campaign.
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THERE WAS NOT MUCH to like in Boston during the days when horses ruled the streets. The city smelled. The rides were bumpy. All the clopping of hooves made such a racket it was impossible to carry on a conversation on the sidewalk. And crossing the street could be an exercise in futility at rush hour, as there was so little space between the back of one streetcar and the front of the next one. On the other hand, the horses moved at such a slow pace that at least it was easy to anticipate their movements, and any sure-footed pedestrian could cross a street fairly easily in front of them with little worry of being struck. If a horse got too close, a quick swipe of a cane, a swing of a shopping bag, or a wave of an umbrella usually was enough to shoo the animal into slowing down or veering to the side. The horse became more efficient when streetcars were put on rails instead of cobblestone streets, making it easier for horses to do their work, but it was the introduction of the electric streetcar that spelled the beginning of the end for horse-pulled cars. For the passengers, the rides were quieter and smoother and the smell was gone. For pedestrians, the adjustment was more challenging. No longer could they simply hop in front of a horse trotting along at five miles per hour. And no cane or umbrella or shopping bag was going to slow down an electric streetcar.
The electric streetcar in the early 1890s was not, as it turned out, the only new sight taking over Boston’s streets. A two-wheeled invention called a safety bicycle became popular very fast, especially among children. Quiet side streets on warm nights were crowded with people of all ages learning to ride these bikes. The more adventurous ones made their way over to Columbus Avenue, where they learned to ride amid throngs at Colonel Pope’s bicycle rink. There were many models of bicycles, but the more expensive Columbia, which sold for about $100, and the cheaper Lovell Diamond, for about $85, were the most popular. One young boy born in 1887 in Boston vividly recalled a typical evening in the city as the bicycle was growing in popularity. “From dusk to about 10 p.m.,” wrote the historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who turned five years old in 1892, “the street was filled with young people learning to ride the bicycle, and resounded with tinklings, crashes, squeals and giggles.”
* * *
THREE YEARS AFTER WHITNEY had won permission to create the world’s largest streetcar operation it was obvious the experiment had failed. In the one-third square mile of downtown Boston, there were 16 miles of track, 55 miles of various wires, 714 tall posts, 195 street crossings, 257 switches, and 149 junctions of intersecting tracks. Boston was once again grinding to a standstill and patience with the West End Street Railway Company was waning.
In 1871, 34 million passengers rode the street railways within a ten-mile radius of downtown Boston. A decade later, the ridership had doubled to 68 million, and another decade after that, in 1891, it had doubled again, to 136 million passengers. There were too many people and not enough seats for them, and in June 1891, a city desperate for relief finally acted. Matthews, after ordering that a commission be formed to study the problem and present a solution, had set aside $20,000 for its work. It was called the Commission to Promote Rapid Transit for the City of Boston and Its Suburbs. On June 10, the members were named; on June 18, they were confirmed by the city council; and on June 20, they met at the mayor’s office for the first time.
Among the commission members were Henry Lee Higginson, a Civil War hero and philanthropist who, a decade earlier, had founded the Boston Symphony, and John Quincy Adams, a Harvard-educated lawyer and the great-grandson of President John Adams and the grandson of President John Quincy Adams. After four years of dickering and debating with no progress, one new, swift-acting mayor, in a span of just seventeen days, had put the pieces in place for Boston to finally solve its transportation crisis. The commission’s first order of business was to hear from the public.
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AT ITS FIRST HEARING ON June 25, 1891, a dozen or so citizens, including Henry Whitney and several prominent businessmen and railroad leaders, came to City Hall at the corner of School Street and Tremont Street. At eleven o’clock, Mayor Matthews called the meeting to order, and he noted how much time the commission had. Its deadline, he said, was April 1892, at which point it was expected to submit a detailed report.
As the hearing commenced, Whitney volunteered to go first, but he had only a few words to say. He said that his West End Street Railway Company had submitted a number of proposals for the city and the commission to study, and he asked only that the plans be kept private unless his company agreed to release them. The most serious of those proposals, he explained, was being prepared by the company’s chief consulting engineer, who outlined an attractive plan that included a subway and an elevated structure, both for electric trains.
After Whitney spoke, one man after another stood up to speak. A former Boston mayor from the late 1870s, Frederick Prince, now a seventy-four-year-old man with a bushy gray mustache that turned d
own at the tips, showed up to ask if the hearings were open to everybody, or only those with ideas to suggest. “We intend to hear everybody,” Matthews replied. A retired physician, Ira Moore, who represented a trust that held millions of dollars of downtown property, stood up to say only that he was firmly in the camp against any and all elevated roads, while a Brookline gentleman, W. W. Toussaint, said he had plans for a tunnel beneath the sidewalks. Even the American Express company sent a representative, who proposed tracks straight across the Common. After the meeting ended, the only decision reached was a logistical one. If so many citizens were going to be coming forward with their own plans, the commission agreed a stenographer needed to be on hand to record the ideas on a typewriter so they could be reviewed in detail by the commission.
Ten months later, and after fifty more public hearings had been held and two commission members had traveled across Europe to study how other cities were handling their overcrowded streets, the commission’s work was done. On the morning of April 5, 1892, a 296-page report was submitted for approval to the general court.
“The length of this report is greater than we had expected,” it said on page 103. Perhaps that explained why a few months later Matthews confessed that he had yet to find a single person who had read the full report. No document would be so detailed, so meticulously researched, so full of questions. It’s no wonder it divided the city into factions. Who would build and operate and pay for the next project, private businesses like the West End Street Railway Company or the government? How could the steam railroads be improved to handle the growth in the suburbs and the growing wave of people riding the trains into the city? And, finally, would Boston get a subway, elevated tracks, or both?
