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

by Most, Doug

  On the evening of Sunday, November 24, the Reverend Isaac J. Lansing, an odd-looking pastor with a small chin, bushy mustache, and big ears, who earlier in the year had caused a great uproar when he called President Cleveland a drunkard, was about to begin his sermon, titled “The Sin of Sodom, Ancient and Modern.” Suddenly there was a loud crash from his private office. Reverend Lansing rushed upstairs to find a powerful jet of water had crashed through his glass window and was flooding the luxurious room, soaking the silk upholstered chairs, his desk, carpet, and bookcase. A worker outside had accidentally struck a main waterline with his pickax, and there was immediately a fear that the church’s foundation was being weakened by the water. The water was shut off, but the damage would not stop the evening’s proceedings. Determined to go on with his sermon, Lansing told his members that working on the Sabbath was an outrage. Of the subway, he said, it is “an infernal hole, in more ways than one.” He said the boss of that hole was not Michael Meehan. Lansing paused for effect, and then shouted, “It is the devil!”

  The devil was apparently an efficient leader, because as the end of 1895 approached, the finishing touches were being put on the section of the subway from Park Street all the way down Tremont to Boylston Street. The tracks were laid. The walls were almost sealed. All that was left was to fill in the top of the subway with concrete, bricks, and the steel beams. And if the devil himself wanted to help in any way, Meehan surely would have hired him for $1.70 per day. Especially if he came from Jamaica Plain.

  * * *

  AS CHRISTMAS APPROACHED, A NOTICEABLE change occurred on the construction site under Jones and Meehan. The Italians joined the Irish. Meehan had initially dismissed them as isolated, but when he decided to reduce the pay he gave his laborers, from seventeen to fifteen cents an hour, his more experienced workers refused the pay cut and left the job. The Italians, he discovered, were more than happy to take his new rate. Meehan’s face lit up as he looked around his job site at his newly invigorated work crew.

  On March 28, 1896, a large party gathered at the Hotel Thorndike, which had opened on Boylston Street across from the Public Garden in 1887. Governor Roger Wolcott was there, along with all five members of the Boston Transit Commission, the legislative committee on metropolitan affairs, and more than a dozen senators and representatives. At ten o’clock sharp, Crocker, the commission’s chairman, wearing a light-colored spring suit and a tall, festive hat, stood up. He explained to his audience the significance of the day, and he told them that because of Representative McCarthy’s early efforts to stop the subway, very little work other than digging was done in the first two months. But since then, great progress had been made. “The Boston Transit Commission has nothing but praise to bestow upon the contractors and engineers for the ability, zeal and indefatigable efforts to secure the prompt completion of the work which they undertook,” Crocker said.

  When Crocker singled out Boston for having “no counterpart in the world,” it was a reference to two specific milestones. The first, of course, was that Boston’s subway system would be powered by electricity, the trains thanks to Frank Sprague and Fred Pearson and the lighting in the stations thanks to Thomas Edison. The second was more technical but no less critical to the subway’s success. Boston’s subway would be the only one to avoid any track crossings at the same grade by trains moving in opposite directions. By designing the subway tracks in a way that junction points at certain spots kept the trains from ever having to cross, the risk of collisions was negligible, delays would be reduced, and the capacity of the tracks was increased.

  Crocker asked everyone to follow him. “I now invite your inspection of the subway,” he said with great confidence. He took the governor’s arm, and they marched across Boylston Street, attracting a growing crowd with each step. It was a significant moment for both men. Crocker’s job was to convince the opponents that this really was the best thing for Boston and to reassure the supporters that they had made the right decision. For Wolcott, who became governor when Thomas Greenhalge died of illness midterm, this was his first official visit to the subway. As the group walked down the incline at the corner of Boylston and Charles streets, the morning light from above faded, and when they reached the bottom everybody stopped moving, suddenly nervous about taking an awkward step in a dark, unfamiliar place. There was no odor or sense of dampness, and the only visible water was drizzling down the inclined path from the sidewalk.

  With no warning, one of Crocker’s attendants pushed a button and flooded the entire space with light, more than one hundred feet down the tunnel. In one startling moment, the entire group was bathed in bright white light, and some men even had to squint for a brief second. The electric current worked! Meehan had tested it before this day, but he knew that was no guarantee it would respond when he needed it most. And it had. Of all the fears from citizens that had been expressed during Boston’s long debate about a subway, one of the most often repeated ones was that walking down into a tunnel would feel like walking to your death. Dark. Damp. Scary. Those were just some of the words heard throughout the public hearings, and yet here was a subway tunnel that was bright, clean, dry, and odorless with shiny white walls and a sparkling white roof.

  The dryness of the tunnel was particularly striking to the visitors. Engineers were well aware that the deeper they dug, the more likely they were to encounter springs of water in the ground directly beneath where the tracks would lie, and they had to keep that water from seeping into the tunnel. Drains were being installed in the stations at the lowest points, where water might pool, and there were pumps powered by electric motors, Frank Sprague’s electric motors, to push the water out. “This subway is like a ship,” one engineer said of the tunnel. “You build a ship and she floats in water. So this subway can be built, immersed in water and yet on the inside be perfectly dry.” As an extra precaution, waterproof coating was being applied throughout the tunnel, and special measures were taken to keep water from percolating through the walls. It was all quite elaborate, and it was clear to Crocker that he had the group’s attention. They were eager to see more.

  When they had first stepped into the tunnel, Crocker asked that only three of the incandescent lights be turned on at first. It was plenty bright enough to cause the governor to glance down at the report of the Boston Transit Commission he’d been given and say, “Ample for one to read by, without the aid of glasses.” But that’s when Crocker really wanted to impress. At his signal, three more incandescent bulbs lit up, and then three more after that. Nine bulbs in total were now lighting the tunnel, and it went from feeling like a comfortably lit restaurant to the Tremont Theater when the curtain comes down on a show and every single light in the house comes on, as if nighttime became daytime in a heartbeat.

  “Now,” Crocker told his guests, “we will ascend by this ladder through ventilating chambers and see another portion of the subway.” Most of the men were wearing business attire and shoes that were not ideal for climbing a ladder, but they all managed their way back up to the street without incident. Next, they were heading for the corner of Boylston and Tremont streets, where the work of Jones and Meehan along Tremont would intersect with the work of a fellow contractor, Edward W. Everson, from Providence, who was handling the Boylston Street stretch. Like Meehan, who had Meehanville, Everson had his own village of shanties, dubbed the Everson Stockade.

  When they reached the corner of Tremont and Boylston, the pace of the work taking place was impossible to dismiss lightly. Giant derricks were hoisting huge granite stones into the air or placing them into the ground, a stream of horse-pulled wagons was carrying away piles of dirt or dumping load after load of gravel, and there were at least one hundred men hard at work, not one of them standing still. Crocker then led his troops on foot along the Tremont Street mall to the northern section of Meehan’s work, where the first station, at Park Street, would be. Instead of an incline, here the men had to use a ladder inside a wide ventilating shaft to climb down to the
grade level of the subway.

  On their way down, Crocker told them it was “the finest example of concrete work to be found anywhere on the American continent,” and no one questioned him. One detail that was shown to the visitors was a feature being built into the sidewalls throughout all the tunnels. Notches, about the size of a human being, were being carved out of the walls at close intervals, for workers down in the subway to leap into in the event an oncoming train catches them by surprise and they need a quick escape. As for any doubts about the strength of the subway walls to hold up beneath the weight of overhead traffic, those were put to rest with a simple explanation. First, there was a back wall of concrete one foot thick, plastered and waterproofed. On top of that were two inches of ribbed tiling, a layer of clay terra cotta, four inches of brick, half an inch of cement mortar, half an inch of asphalt waterproofing, and finally three more solid feet of top-grade concrete. The walls were more solid than a rock.

  * * *

  EVEN AS MORE CITIES AROUND the world moved closer to having their traffic underground, a new competitor was emerging that would simply replace one vehicle on the streets with another. Any hope that cities may have had of their streets becoming quiet and safe and pedestrian-friendly in the absence of all that streetcar traffic would be short-lived.

  A young man from Michigan was putting the finishing touches on an idea for a horseless carriage powered by gasoline. He called his five-hundred-pound invention the quadricycle, because it was no more than a bicycle with four wheels and a place to sit and steer. With its two-cylinder engine powered by ethanol, it motored along all by itself, and Henry Ford was so eager to show it off that in the summer of 1896 he traveled to New York to attend a convention of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies. When the thirty-three-year-old Ford met the world-famous Edison and described his gas-powered car, Edison was instantly intrigued and fired questions at the young inventor. Hearing the answers, Edison supposedly banged his fist on the table. “Young man, that’s the thing. You have it! The self-contained unit carrying its own fuel with it! Keep at it!” Ford would keep at it.

  * * *

  AS THE NEW YEAR ARRIVED, anticipation in Boston began to build about the opening of the subway. An important step was achieved on the first day of 1897, resolving one of the biggest problems Boston and New York had struggled with during their debates about how to pay for a subway. Henry Whitney back in his day had demanded that the West End company design, build, and own the system, retaining total control over every piece of the subway. He did not want the city’s interference, and he wanted to be able to determine where the tracks went and how frequently they were traveled. But the Boston Transit Commission had grown wise to the flaws of that plan, and Boston’s citizens had made it clear they were tired of the West End monopoly.

  With Whitney out of the picture and the subway nearly complete, a deal was struck between the West End Street Railway Company and the Boston Transit Commission, and it was approved by the Boston Board of Railroad Commissioners on January 1. The West End company would lease exclusive control of the subway tracks from the city for twenty years and pay the city a fee of 47⁄8 percent of what it would cost to operate the system. Fares for passengers had to remain at five cents, and free transfers would continue. And if, for whatever reason, the West End company could no longer operate the subway, the city would retake control of it. The contract put the system in the hands of the city, not a private company, which meant the city would decide where, when, and how it could be expanded. The West End Street Railway Company would prosper as long as it provided clean, safe, and swift travel in the new subway.

  In February 1897, a gigantic new piece of equipment designed by an assistant city engineer arrived on the scene and caused great excitement among the laborers. It was an unusual shield, and it weighed twenty tons and had a span of almost thirty feet. Shaped like a crescent moon and not a complete circle like the Greathead shield, it had a much simpler purpose: It was a roof shield.

  One of the trickier parts of the subway work proved to be digging a sufficiently smooth surface at the very top of the sidewalls of the tunnel in order to properly seal it off. The workers spent weeks swinging their shovels and picks, trying to knock loose the hard dirt above them. With the new shield, workers could move through the tunnel dislodging the hardest dirt at a much faster pace than a group of diggers ever could. The machine was hailed in the newspapers as a “labor and time saving machine,” and it was hoped that the new shield might cut weeks off the final preparations of the tunnel. It had cost $10,000 to make but paid for itself in the amount of time and labor it saved. By the time the shield arrived, very little cutting in the cut-and-cover method was being done, and most of the work involved covering. Citizens could no longer peer down and see an enormous dirt trench at most spots along the route. The trench had been covered by hundreds of beams, and workers were preparing to put down the masonry arches and concrete and begin the process of sealing off the roof.

  During the construction, the city managed to keep its busiest streets open to traffic and to close them only after 11:30 at night, allowing just enough room for fire trucks to get by. The path of the first leg of the subway ran almost directly above the sidewalk down Tremont Street, but building the tunnel required a much wider construction site than the mere width of the sidewalk. The cutting and covering of the tunnel extended far into Tremont Street, directly into the path of the street railway tracks. But rather than eliminate street railway service for more than two years, which would have caused enormous hardship to citizens and businesses along the route, the engineers took the extraordinary step of designing a detour of the tracks, which was constantly shifted to accommodate the tunnel work. The temporary tracks coming down Tremont Street from Scollay Square veered toward the Common directly in front of the Park Street Church and made a wide turn in the shape of the letter C before veering back into Tremont Street. That took the streetcars around the construction work, no more than fifteen feet from the laborers, before they continued on their way down Tremont.

  * * *

  BY MARCH OF 1897 ALMOST two years had passed since the work on the subway began. It had not been an accident-free project, but there had been no massive catastrophes. At one point early on in the work, Meehan had said, “I had hoped to go through with this job without injuring a man. In all the work I have ever done I have not had a man under me hurt.” That may have been true. But it was safe to assume that Meehan had never taken on a job with so much potential for disaster. Forty-foot steel beams swinging from a boom. Enormous scoops of dirt and concrete hanging from above. Gas leaks. Flooded trenches. Deep holes that could claim a life with a simple slip. There were so many ways to get hurt.

  One worker was killed when a sheet of concrete paving foundation fell on his head. Another died when he was crushed by a piece of falling masonry. Digging a two-mile stretch of subway was proving to be less dangerous and not nearly as challenging as the decade-long building of the Brooklyn Bridge, which required thousands of miles of cable and claimed the lives of almost thirty people along the way. But the subway construction site provided unique perils.

  Two friends and laborers, Patrick Gaffney and Michael Powers, were badly injured one morning when they carried lighted lanterns into a sewer tunnel where gas was leaking from a pipe. The loud explosion threw both men to the ground with badly burned faces and caused a small cave-in. Three men were nearly crushed to death when an engineer raised the dirt-filled scoop on his derrick too high, causing the scoop to break free from its boom and fall into a trench. In the crash, Edward O’Donnell had his foot crushed, Michael Eagen injured his back, and John McCue bruised his foot. And on the same day, only a few hours later, another scoop broke free from its eighty-foot boom and rained a load of concrete down on John Micher, a laborer working in the trench. After Micher was dug out, scared but unscathed, Meehan was fed up. He fired the engineer who lost the concrete-filled scoop. “I’ll have more careful men if I change engi
neers every hour,” the boss said.

  But no matter how careful his men were, nothing could have prevented two gruesome accidents that occurred four days apart in the fall of 1896. During the night of September 16, Charles McMullen, a fresh laborer who had only started work that evening and who was unfamiliar with the terrain of the project, stepped backward and fell into a deep shaft in front of the Park Street Church. He dropped forty-two feet to his death. A similar tragedy nearly ended the life of William Doherty days later. Climbing out of the same shaft on Tremont Street, Doherty’s feet slipped off the ladder, and he plunged back down almost thirty feet, where he struck a bucket. He was badly hurt and lost an eye, rendering him incapable of hard labor.

  By early 1897, the pace of the subway construction was almost frantic. The site was an around-the-clock operation. The early days of a few dozen workers were long gone. It was more typical now for there to be a few hundred laborers working in shifts from noon to midnight and back again. The tunnel was complete, and the focus had shifted to making sure the thousands of sewer, water, and gas pipes underground were rerouted, connected, and sealed; that the roof and floor of the tunnel were secure enough to begin piecing the streets back together again; and that any excess dirt was either carted away or packed back into the ground. A date was scheduled for the opening, September 1, and at the rate the work was progressing, only an unexpected disaster could prevent America’s first subway from opening on time.