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

by Most, Doug

  There were occasionally exciting moments during the monotonous days of digging, when a shovelful of dirt brought up a piece of history. The two sons of Michael Meehan, Edward and Robert, were always on the lookout for souvenirs while standing along the Tremont Street ditch. One day early into the construction, Edward spotted a workman turn over his shovel and toss aside a black piece of metal. The young Meehan jumped into the trench to grab it and, after examining it for a few minutes, came to the conclusion that it was a piece of metal from a Revolutionary War cannon. Not long after that, his brother Robert was near Charles Street when he found a French coin dated 1636.

  The deeper the workers went, the greater the risk for them. They were digging around water pipes, gas pipes, and sewer lines, and a leak from any of them could prove disastrous. When Thomas Roy and Michael Grogan emerged from the trench near the entrance to the Common on Charles Street one morning shortly after ten o’clock, they both had a dizzy look about them as they explained to their boss why they could no longer work.

  “What’s the matter?” Meehan asked them.

  “The gas has knocked me out,” Roy answered him. “My eyes are so blurred that I cannot see anything with them.” His partner added, “Mine feel as if I had been peeling onions all the morning.” Both men left for the hospital to be checked out, never to return to the job.

  In the weeks and months before the contract for the subway was awarded, land surveyors had walked the route to bore holes in the ground at sixty-seven different spots to determine just how hard or soft the ground was and how deep it went before it struck something solid. The shallowest holes went twenty-five feet down, the deepest fifty feet. The topography and soil were nothing like what Parsons encountered in New York four years later. Engineers mapped out precisely where, underneath the narrow streets of the route, the gas pipes, water pipes, sewer pipes, and electric conduits were resting. This work proved especially tricky because many of the maps engineers had to rely on were imprecise, using scales of fifty feet to the inch or even one hundred feet to the inch, which made their markings more like guesswork.

  Even though the tunnel was expected to go deeper into the ground than the foundations of the buildings nearest to the planned route, it was critical to know where those foundations were, so that nothing was done during the digging that might weaken a building’s structure or, in a nightmarish scenario, cause it to topple over. Workers went into the basements of buildings with levels to check the flatness of the floors so that they could be rechecked if there was a fear that the digging might be causing a building to lean. Measurements were taken of every building along the route, and every manhole, sidewalk, street lamp, electric post, and streetcar track was plotted onto a map. To satisfy the demands and fears of the Boston Common protectionists, every tree in the park was also marked on a map, and a topographical survey was made to show what areas might be regraded with dirt from the subway trench.

  Perhaps the biggest challenge was creating a detailed outline that showed all the streetcar lines that would be affected by the subway. Twenty-three different maps were drawn showing the various streetcar routes and where they ran through the subway route. There were seventy-six streetcar lines total, seventy-one of them controlled by the West End Street Railway Company and five others by the Lynn & Boston Railroad. With so many lines, stations were mapped out that were very close together. Stations were plotted for Tremont Street, at Boylston; Tremont, at Park Street; Scollay Square, just south of the Park Street station; Adams Square; and finally Causeway Street, or what would later be known as Haymarket Square.

  The question of designing the actual tunnel came next. Walls had to be built and, even more important, the roof over the tunnel needed to be strong enough to carry the weight of moving cars and people. The tunnel needed to be airtight, aside from the openings to accommodate staircases in and out, and, even if it was never tested this way, it had to be capable of floating by itself in the ocean without letting a single drop of water inside. Three plans were studied for the tunnel, all of them similar but with critical variations.

  One called for masonry sidewalls and a masonry arched roof. A second plan also had masonry walls, but the roof was composed of masonry arches resting on steel beams that were laid crosswise over the subway tracks. The third plan had the same roof as the second plan, but its sidewalls were masonry, strengthened by steel beams.

  The first plan was ruled out because the masonry arches were thought to be vulnerable to cracking if they were used alone for the roof so close to the surface of the streets with nothing else to support them. They would be better for a deeper subway, but not Boston’s. The concern about the second and third plans had to do with the steel beams. On one hand, the steel would be at full strength the second it was laid in the ground, unlike concrete, which would take months to harden. But would the iron and steel weaken over time from oxidation? Engineers investigated the question, and, after learning that the Romans had used iron beams to strengthen the stone masonry of the Colosseum and that many of those beams were still there, virtually unchanged, they put their fears to rest. Lead, cement, and concrete could help protect the beams from weakening, and the price of steel was also at a level that made the third option the cheapest of all. After the transit commissioners took the three options and asked a number of leading engineers in the country to render an opinion, they unanimously supported the third design. And so it was agreed that the first section of the subway, to run from the corner of Tremont and Park streets to the corner of Tremont and Boylston streets, would be built with masonry walls strengthened by steel beams and topped by a roof of masonry and steel beams lying crosswise over the subway.

  Thanks to Frank Sprague, ventilating the Boston subway was not expected to present the same challenges that London faced in 1863 when steam locomotives first operated underground. But to reassure Bostonians that every precaution was being taken, the transit commissioners sought the opinion of a regular citizen. S. Homer Woodbridge, a heating and ventilating engineer and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was asked to submit his opinion. He estimated that if steam locomotives were used in the subway, then at least thirty times more fresh air would have to be ventilated into the tunnels than if electric trolleys were used. The commissioners were satisfied that their focus should be on removing any stale air rather than blowing in good air, and they decided they would stand large electric fans inside the stations that would draw air from deep inside the tunnels and expel it through specially created vent shafts.

  * * *

  IN MID-APRIL, THE DAY ARRIVED that everybody who had followed the subway debate knew was coming. The living and the dead came face-to-face. Dr. Samuel Green, a former mayor of Boston and one of the city’s kindest and most distinguished physicians, arrived at Park Street and Tremont Street early in the morning of April 19, 1895. The workers stood by, holding their shovels and picks, as the sixty-five-year-old physician, a rotund man with a thinning head of dark hair and a long, scraggly white beard, made his way onto the construction site. Green bent down to pick up some tiny fragments from the ground that looked like small rocks or twigs. Had they been found anywhere else in Boston, they would probably have been tossed aside. But Green knew precisely where he was standing and what he was holding. The workers had dug up pieces from a human skeleton. There would be no more digging on this day.

  Green knew the discovery of human remains in the place where Boston was digging its subway tunnel would stoke the fears people had about going underground to ride a train. During the long debate in Boston about whether to build a subway, one skeptic, after visiting London, said the subway gave him a “buried alive” feeling. Yet another asked officials if they had any desire to go underground before it was their time. He certainly did not.

  Green had tried to reassure the public that such fears were misplaced in his first report to the transit commission. “I would say that there would be no danger whatever to the workmen,” he wrote. “The earth is a
good disinfectant and a burial of more than half a century would wipe out and destroy any germs of disease that might still linger after death.”

  But Green’s report had been forgotten by the time the bone fragments were discovered four months later. On the morning Green arrived, the Boston newspapers had heard about the workers’ discovery, stirring up the decade-long debate about the safety of a subway and whether building it was worth all the trouble. Almost fifty years had passed since Marc Brunel successfully dug his tunnel beneath the Thames River in London, and yet much of the public around the world remained skeptical about how safe underground travel could be. “The dead are not allowed to rest quietly in their graves,” The Daily Advertiser in Boston wrote. “The subway must be passed through the Boston Common, even if sacrilegious hands are to be laid on the dust of Boston’s historic dead.”

  Green didn’t know what else he could do to reassure people. But he also knew this was only the beginning, not the end. There were more skeletons to be found. He ordered boxes for the workers to collect the bone fragments, and he made sure that great pains were taken to try and put the bones of one person into one box to avoid mixing up collections. When the fragments of two tombs were identified, they were quickly taken by members of those families so they could be reinterred elsewhere. That was rare, unfortunately. Most of the coffins had decayed so much that they were filled with bones, rocks, and dirt, and it was near impossible to separate the human remains from the earth, never mind identify who the remains belonged to. Day after day, workers carted away new piles of remains. By the summertime, more than nine hundred fragments had been removed and reburied. Opponents to the subway became angrier as the public learned the names of the dead whose remains were disturbed, taken from the inscriptions on the tombs: Lydia Kimball, died October 29, 1821; Solomon Hawes, died January 30, 1834; Zeal Skidmore, died February 7, 1827; Gideon Williams, died January 23, 1830. No longer were the fragments anonymous bones.

  Other than its taverns, the most revered places in Boston are its old burial grounds. They tell the city’s history, and the survivors of the deceased treat their granite tombstones like family heirlooms. Along the proposed route of the subway that Boston was building were tombstones bearing the names Hancock, Revere, Cushing, Winthrop, Bowdoin, Faneuil, Adams, Paine, and Otis. There were signers of the Declaration of Independence, governors, war heroes, victims of the Boston Massacre and the battle of Bunker Hill, and the parents of great Americans like Benjamin Franklin. But there were also ordinary citizens, mothers and fathers, grandchildren and grandparents. Their tombstones were the book jackets of Boston, weathered, beaten, cracked, and chipped but still able to tell a good tale.

  A week into Green’s work in late April 1895, workers lifting a huge flagstone were surprised to find a tomb beneath it bearing a solid silver plate that bore an inscription:

  William Keith Spence Lowell.

  Aged 9 years 4 mos.

  Died Feb 12, 1823.

  Green had remembered being contacted recently by a Commonwealth Avenue woman, Frances P. Sprague. Her maiden name, she explained, was Lowell and she knew that the Lowell family tomb was buried in the vicinity of the subway excavation. When Green contacted her after the discovery, she confirmed that the five bodies in the tomb were indeed her family’s remains, and she arranged for an undertaker to hold the remains until she decided where she would reinter them. Green was relieved to have made the connection.

  The Lowell family was no ordinary clan. The great-grandfather of Frances P. Sprague was a judge appointed by President George Washington, and Sprague’s brother, John Lowell, was appointed to the judicial bench by President Lincoln. Sprague’s other brother, Augustus Lowell, was a prominent businessman and philanthropist whose children achieved great prominence of their own. A daughter, Amy Lowell, became a celebrated poet; their eldest son, Percival Lowell, founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona; and another son, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, became president of Harvard College for more than two decades.

  For Green, it was a rare and gratifying episode during the project of identifying remains and trying to put them into the hands of surviving relatives. Throughout the excavation process, a line of buried tombs from one corner of the Common to the other was discovered, and Green was usually left frustrated. Some had been completely destroyed; others were in good condition. Inside the tombs, the coffins were mostly rotted to nothing and the bones were scattered and decomposed. And in many cases, the brick arches that had once covered the tombs collapsed on top of them and created a mess of stones, dirt, granite slabs, and bone fragments that was impossible to sift through.

  * * *

  THE CHARLES STREET SIDES of Boston Common and the Public Garden were often damp and putrid year-round. They were the lowest parts of the parks, and they were dumping grounds for city workers looking for a place to put snow and ice and mud and street refuse in the winter. Additionally, the Public Garden had been built upon a salt marsh of fibrous peat, which, when uncovered, gave off an eye-watering rotten-egg smell. The result of all this was a moist stew that reeked and that was a mess to walk over, steering people to other parts of the park. The only solution was to raise the grade with additional soil and then to make sure it was no longer used as an unofficial city dump. But the enormous amount of dirt needed was always too costly, and the problem was continually avoided. It was estimated that 9,000 cubic yards were needed for the Public Garden, and 62,000 cubic yards for the Common. With a single cubic yard weighing about 3,000 pounds, that was roughly 14,000 tons of dirt for the garden and a whopping 93,000 tons for the Common.

  But suddenly, there it was.

  In the summer of 1895, thousands of loads of dirt had been dug up and the wagons carting it all away were struggling to keep up with the fast-moving workers. In anticipating this possibility, the transit commission had said, “So rare an opportunity for making this important improvement at a trifling cost should not be lost.” And so it was done. A plan was drawn up that called for plowing up portions of the parks, putting down the new dirt to create an undulating surface, planting new grass seed, and inviting lawn bowling, lacrosse, and other games onto the grounds. In fact, any game was welcome, except for baseball. In the end, the new surface in the two parks was in some places a full six feet higher than the old, and 3,500 square feet of new paths were created.

  On the last day in April, more skeletons were unearthed while three different derricks helped workers push deeper into the ground and get past the layer of dirt to where the soil was stiff blue clay. The clay was a critical discovery because it ensured a stronger foundation for the subway.

  * * *

  NO VISITOR HAD AS MUCH history with the subway as the man who first proposed it eight years earlier. When Henry Whitney, who still kept a home in Brookline, stopped by the Common briefly on April 30, it did not go unnoticed. The West End Street Railway Company of 1895 looked nothing like the one he founded back in 1887. Instead of eight thousand horses housed in sixty different stables across the city, the company owned fewer than a thousand horses, and that number was continuing to dwindle fast. And a transit operation that started out owning zero electric motors now had 1,842 of them. Virtually every mile of track had been electrified by 1895, including most recently the ones that ran into Brookline near Whitney’s house.

  What had not changed was West End’s growth and prosperity. It was earning a thousand dollars more per day from passenger rides than the previous year, a success story that no doubt would have made Whitney proud. During his visit to the subway site, the fifty-six-year-old Whitney made little fuss and did not wish to talk to reporters, especially since it was difficult for him to hear through all the racket. But he left impressed, and he said only that he was pleased that something he had suggested so long ago was finally happening. A subway, Whitney said before leaving, was the only practicable and possible solution for Boston’s rapid transit woes. Savvy Bostonians must have been left shaking their heads, wondering why the man who ha
d been in charge of the West End Street Railway Company for so many years and who brought them electric streetcars never made a serious effort to fix the broader problem himself.

  * * *

  BY EARLY MAY, 130 ELM trees that were in the subway’s path had been replanted, with forty of them going along the sidewalk of the Public Garden by Arlington Street. On May 21, 1895, the site was a bustle of activity. An enormous pile driver was slamming its hammer into the ground with a great loud thud to loosen the dirt for the workers, who quickly shoveled it into the wagons and waited for the next drop. A stout iron chain kept back onlookers fascinated by the powerful, 2,300-pound pile driver, and every time it slammed down with a whack, whack, whack! a collective “ohhhh” shot up from the crowd.

  Nearby, a large wagon was pulling slowly onto the site behind four horses. The wagon was loaded up with giant granite blocks, and as it came to a stop, laborers prepared to wrap a chain around one of the stones so it could be hoisted out.

  David Keefe, a young worker from Charlestown, was shoveling out dirt that had been loosened by the pile driver when he momentarily lost his whereabouts and leaned too far forward without looking up. Before he could react, the wicked blow from the swinging hammer grazed his forehead and arm and knocked him to the ground unconscious. His coworkers instantly assumed he was dead, that nobody could survive a blow from a hammer that size dropping eighteen feet. Miraculously, the hammer had only stunned Keefe. Had his head been another two inches forward, he would surely have been crushed. He regained consciousness quickly and was taken to the hospital to have his gash dressed and broken arm mended. It was the first serious accident on the construction site. It would not be the last.

  There were certain buildings in Boston near the construction site that were given special care to make sure no damage came to them, either because of their proximity to the tunnel or their historic place in the city. There was no more important church in Boston than the Park Street Church, and the subway was going to raise its visibility even higher because it stood directly across the street from the first station scheduled to open, and exiting pedestrians’ first sight as they climbed the stairs would be the church’s majestic white steeple.