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

by Most, Doug

  “The mayor is too busy to attend the proceedings,” the aide was told. “If necessary, he will send his private secretary, Mr. Courtenay Guild, to represent the city.”

  When the word got back to the group, they were shocked. Curtis had succeeded Nathan Matthews when Matthews decided not to run for reelection the prior year after serving four terms. As strongly as Matthews supported the subway, Curtis opposed it, believing it was only a short-term fix. But city funds were helping to pay the projected $5 million bill. Curtis was a stubborn man and did exactly as he said he would. On the day work was to begin on a subway for Boston, a historic moment in the nation, to be sure, the mayor went off to visit some South Boston businesses and sent his private secretary to be the city’s representative for him. It was a move that did not sit well with his citizens, who, when given the chance later that year, voted him out of office and replaced him with Josiah Quincy.

  At nine minutes after the hour, Governor Greenhalge handed a shiny new spade to Chairman Crocker. “Mr. Crocker of the transit commission of Boston,” the governor said, “I hereby tender you this spade, with which will begin the work on the subway that has been designed for the city of Boston, and I trust that great relief and comfort will come to the municipality when the plans laid out by you and your associates shall have been fully carried out.”

  As Crocker took the spade from the governor, he said, “I now proceed to take out the first shovelful of dirt in the inauguration of the great undertaking that has been entrusted to me and the other gentlemen of this commission.” He reared back and plunged the shovel into the soft dirt with great might, only to see it sink a few inches into the ground. Crocker lifted out a measly sum of dirt and dropped it into the wheelbarrow next to him. The entire ceremony lasted less than five minutes, and there was no great applause to acknowledge the moment. It was brief and understated, and as soon as it was over the men inside the Common scattered, and so did the passersby who’d been watching from a distance. Only the contractors remained.

  * * *

  BY NOON, A DIFFERENT AND more sizable crowd had gathered at the Park Square gate entrance to the Common: five hundred workmen hoping to be picked for the job. They did not care that it would demand they work days, nights, and weekends and right through the winter with no breaks. As a group they were asked to recite an oath that said they were all naturalized citizens, and they gave their names for a list that was being compiled for Jones and Meehan. They were told to return the next day. The first group would be hired, handed shovels and picks, and told where to start digging.

  11

  MEEHANVILLE

  THEY CALLED IT MEEHANVILLE. THE COMMON QUICKLY filled up with wagons, lumber, and tipcarts loaded with dirt. Piles of picks and shovels were all over, and every morning before the sun came up there were dozens of men, sometimes a hundred, jostling for position to get noticed.

  The most important person who stood guard at the front door was not Michael Meehan but his son Robert Emmet Meehan, easily spotted by his bowler hat and the piece of paper always in his hand. The contractor’s office was fitted with a rolltop desk and comfortable chairs, and nobody was allowed in without the password. Meehanville was the makeshift village set up on the Common for the duration of the project. Three shanties were erected and given fresh coats of paint, as places for the laborers to eat their lunches, take a breath, mend their calloused hands and sore feet, or sometimes just wait for their next assignment. No smoking was allowed during working hours, so at noon the shanties also became a place where pipe smoke filled the air.

  From the day the first shovel went into the ground, Robert Meehan was entrusted by his father to take down the names and addresses of the able-bodied workers who would congregate around Meehanville every morning. He was also the timekeeper on the job and the general utility man who answered all questions. Each morning, he would take down the information of the men who’d gathered and explain that if and when their services were required, they would receive a letter in the mail and be expected to arrive promptly at seven in the morning on their assigned day. At first, only twenty-five men were needed, but that was expected to grow to fifty, a hundred, and possibly more than a thousand per day, working day and night shifts, as more equipment was brought in, the trench got deeper and longer, and the process of sealing it up with concrete and steel beams began.

  As soon as the project started, neither Meehan nor Jones, whose faces had appeared in the papers enough times to make them familiar to the average citizen, could walk anywhere without being cornered and pressured for work. They were celebrities, and every day letters begging for work were thrust into their hands. Meehan spoke pleasantly to each man and referred them to his son, except in those instances when they were not up to his standard.

  “Do you want to pick and shovel?” he asked one of the men who approached him.

  “No, I want something easier,” the man replied.

  “Well,” Meehan huffed, “there are no snaps around here.” And he laughed.

  Another man tried a different approach, appealing to Meehan’s softer side with a plea.

  “If I don’t get work today, I’ll get ‘Hail Columbia’ when I get home tonight,” he said, a reference to a popular patriotic American anthem. “My wife told me not to come home tonight without a job, and she means business, too.” It worked. “Well, I’ll save you the time,” said Meehan, a family man himself with a wife, two sons, and four daughters at home. “Take a shovel and go to work.”

  Most times, his instincts were right and his men showed up on schedule and put in their honest day’s work. Only occasionally did a workman disappoint: in one instance, an Irishman on the job for several weeks stopped showing up, was spotted frequently imbibing at a nearby tavern, and then was arrested for stealing tools from the construction site. But those incidents were rare, as Meehan and Jones tried their best to hire men they had worked with before and trusted. In fact, there were two well-known ways to get hired for sure, as Meehan had made no secret of them. The first was to be citizens of the country. The second was to come from the same neighborhood as Meehan, Jamaica Plain.

  Meehan made no secret of his affection for the Irish and his disdain for the Italians who showed up at the site every morning. One morning Meehan spotted a group of Italian men sitting by themselves and talking only in Italian, and he knew right away they would not make his list. “The Italians, you see, they are not wanted,” he said. “They hold aloof from the others. I told them that none but voters would be employed. And why not? I’m going to employ my friends. I never lost anything by standing by the men who supported me.” That was not entirely true. He lost money. The Italians would have worked for lower wages, but Meehan didn’t care. “If I hired Italians at $1.20 a day, as other contractors are doing, and worked them ten hours, I could make a good deal more of money on this job,” he said. “But I’m not doing business that way.”

  Of the first twenty men Meehan picked to work, nine were laborers who had worked for him before from Jamaica Plain. The rest came from other parts of Boston. Meehan kept true to his word about the Italians. As long as they kept speaking Italian and isolating themselves from the others, they would have to wait for their opportunity to work in Meehanville, at least until the demand for more bodies was greater.

  * * *

  THE POTENTIAL OBSTACLES THAT CAME with building a subway ranged from the benign to the disastrous. There were big questions like what to do with all the tombs along the subway route and how to properly ventilate the tunnel so passengers could breathe fresh air. And there were smaller issues, like how many trees in the Common might need to be replanted and where to put all the dirt that would be dug up to make way for the tunnel. The chief engineer for the transit commission, Howard Adams Carson, left none of them to chance.

  He was born in central Massachusetts in the town of Westfield in 1842, left high school to serve as an engineer during the Civil War, and graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1869. Mo
st of his experience had been with water and sewers when the Boston Transit Commission hired him as chief engineer to oversee the building of the subway. But Carson had other appealing qualities. He had traveled through Europe to study various sewer systems, which was appealing because a similar trip would likely have to be made to study European cities that were building or making changes to their own rapid transit systems. Carson had also shown tact in dealing with private contractors and public citizens in his work, and that was critical given the raucous debate over the subway. His tact also became a big reason why, late in his life, both Philadelphia and New York would seek out his opinion on tunneling their own subways. Carson was described as having “scrupulous honesty and impartiality, moderation and modesty in all things, and faithfulness to the point of extreme self-sacrifice.”

  And he wasted no time after the transit commission appointed him to head overseas. He visited London, Budapest, Glasgow, Paris, Berlin, and Cologne, all cities that happened to be building subways or elevated structures. He even spent time meeting with the British engineer James Greathead, whose improved metal circular shield was the key to digging London’s latest subway branch. Carson came home on the largest and fastest passenger ship afloat in the 1890s, the British ocean liner Campania, which crossed the Atlantic in six days. So anticipated was his return that before he could even step off the ship, the longtime Globe political reporter Michael E. Hennessey snuck on board and intercepted him to find out what he had learned.

  “What’s the news in Boston?” Carson asked Hennessey with a smile. Their pleasantries were brief, and Carson shared with candor his lessons from abroad.

  “Over on the other side they are discussing the transit question with the same degree of earnestness as we are in Boston and New York and other American cities,” Carson told the reporter. He said most of the tunnels were poorly lighted and not very welcoming and that the plans Boston had drawn up compared more than favorably to anything he saw in Europe. But he did take away some useful bits.

  In Berlin, he enjoyed how passengers dropped their money into a slot and got a ticket in return, eliminating the need for ticket sellers at every station and reducing the system’s operating costs. In Liverpool, the ventilating system was the best he had seen. And he was also struck by how easily London’s elevators whisked people up and down into the stations from the surface. But the more he thought about that for Boston, the less inclined he was to push for it. The London tracks were so far down beneath the streets that reaching them by stairs would have been an exhausting, time-consuming exercise. Boston’s tracks could be reached in probably no more than twenty or thirty stairs, a far more doable task. But Carson did begin to think about some sort of lift or moving staircase that might help the elderly or injured into and out of the subway. With those same passengers in mind, Carson considered how other cities were handling slippery stairs during inclement weather. Some covered their iron steps with rubber, but that wore down quickly and was costly. Others had wood stairs, but those would not last long. When he saw one city using little ribs of steel on its steps, he said he knew that was the best option and made sure to jot down some notes in his pad. It was that sort of attention to detail that made Carson the perfect man to oversee the Boston subway. But even Carson’s estimable presence could not quiet the subway’s loudest protesters back home, who remained determined to squelch the project even after it was under way.

  * * *

  TWO DAYS AFTER THE GROUNDBREAKING for Boston’s subway, in Charlestown a Globe reporter knocked on the front door of the blustery state representative Jeremiah J. McCarthy. A stout man with a pointy nose, McCarthy had just offered a resolution to the legislature that asked for the subway acts to be reconsidered and submitted for a revote and for any work being done to stop at once. He was convinced that the subway would cost much more than the citizens had been promised and that it would leave the city bankrupt and unable to perform any future maintenance or to extend rapid transit out to the suburbs.

  “I regard the subway as a big humbug,” McCarthy said. “It will rob the citizens of Boston of $20 million before it is completed, and rapid transit will not be secured.” He much preferred an elevated rail instead. “The subway, if ever needed, will not be popular with the people, as they will not use it when opportunity is afforded to travel overhead,” he said. “Subways are damp and unhealthy, and mostly constructed for crossing a river when no other way is offered.” The next day’s Globe gleefully blared McCarthy’s best quote across the front page: IT’S A HUMBUG.

  But his resolution went nowhere, and when it died on the afternoon of April 29, a young courier raced straight from the statehouse across the street to the Common, hat in hand, hair rumpled and breathing heavily, to deliver the news to Meehan himself. Though great progress had been made in just one month, McCarthy’s blabbering had made the transit commissioners nervous and halted them from placing all the necessary equipment orders that Meehan needed. He had expected most days to have more than a hundred men working, but instead it was usually closer to fifty, and so the news of McCarthy’s defeat brought great relief.

  “McCarthy was buried out of sight,” the young boy said, as he explained that the repeal bill was defeated.

  “Good,” Meehan said to the small crowd that had gathered around him. “Now the subway will be pushed along, and don’t you forget it. I’m mighty glad that the house has the sense to refuse to pass the bill repealing the subway. In the first place we would be the laughingstock of the country, and in the second we have not pushed the work as rapidly as we wished, owing to this agitation.”

  McCarthy may have lost, but he and others who favored elevated travel over the subway did win one concession in the planning of the subway. Because it was agreed that one day the subway might need to connect seamlessly with a future elevated line, an assumption that would prove correct, every height, width, and curve that was included in the design of Boston’s subway was measured so that one day, a car identical in size to the ones being used by the Manhattan Elevated Railway could easily fit into the tunnel.

  * * *

  THE WORKERS WORE BAGGY PANTS, suspenders, long-sleeve shirts with the sleeves rolled up their forearms, and hats to protect their hair and eyes from flying dirt and rocks. They started at the corner of Boylston and Tremont and made their way down toward Charles Street. The carts with their big wooden wheels were slowly pulled out of the hole by horses and replaced by an empty cart, which was quickly filled and pulled away just the same. It was tedious, but in the course of a nine- or ten-hour day, with more than three dozen men applying their muscle nonstop except for a thirty-minute lunch break, fast progress was made.

  The commission agreed that the subway should be built as close as possible to the surface of the streets. And the tunnel would also mirror the grade of the street, so that if the street took a slight upward tilt, so did the tunnel. The London Underground tunnels were typically between one hundred and two hundred feet down, which was why the invention of the Greathead shield had been such a critical breakthrough. The Boston tunnels would be no more than fifty feet down, and there were three reasons for this. A shallower trench could be dug faster and would produce less dirt to cart away. The likelihood of damaging neighboring buildings was greatly reduced if the tunnel was closer to the surface. And a shallower subway meant fewer stairs for passengers to have to walk up and down to get into and out of the stations.

  In the first month, a routine was quickly established for how the trench would be dug. For the first ten feet in depth, workers simply shoveled the dirt into carts that were hauled out at one end of the trench. But as they got deeper, more effort and equipment was needed. The trench was dug in sections, ten feet long by twelve feet wide and six feet deep. Wooden braces were fixed against the dirt walls to prevent a cave-in and were placed across the top of the trench to provide the foundation for where bricks would be laid. Also, a derrick was brought alongside the trench. At this point, the dirt would be shoveled into s
kips, which were hoisted to the surface by the derricks and then dumped into small, steam-driven trains. The derricks were also used later to handle all the stones, timber, and beams for the retaining walls. As the trench got deeper, the steel support beams were laid along the sides of the walls and along the top, perpendicular to the tracks. The tunnel was then being constructed in two places. Underground, workers in the trench poured concrete, laid the floor on top of it, and then put down a bed of crushed stone. Wooden ties were sunk into the stone while steel rails were hammered into them with heavy iron spikes. Back on the surface, laborers placed bricks on top of the steel beams and sealed them in place with mortar. Once the roof was sealed with more concrete, a final layer of soil was dumped on top of it so that the road and sidewalk could be restored to its original condition.