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

by Most, Doug

  Reed smiled. But he turned serious as his car rounded a bend, and he braked to a stop to allow another dozen passengers on board. “All aboard for the subway and Park Street,” he shouted with confidence. A voice shouted back at him, “That’s right, Jim, you did that without a stutter!”

  “Dling, dling, dling,” the bell rang out, and the car pulled away again. The journey from Allston through Cambridge to Boston took about twenty minutes most mornings, but the unusual number of passengers at this hour delayed it a few extra seconds at each stop. By the time the car reached Pearl Street in Cambridge, just across the Charles River from Boston, an older gentleman wanting to get on board found there were no seats left, and he was told he’d have to wait for the next car. Not a chance, he shouted back.

  He announced that his name was C. W. Davis, that he came all the way down from Dickerson Street in Somerville to enjoy this privilege, and that he deserved to make history with the rest of them. He said that back in 1856 he had ridden on the first horse-pulled car of the Metropolitan Railway line and that he wanted to achieve another first today. “The running schedule called for a car every half hour in those days,” he told his audience. “And that was thought to be fast running. People have learned to live and move faster in these days.” The passengers on board could not refuse the charming Mr. Davis, and they scurried to clear a space for him as he climbed up and hung on to an upright pole. When a photographer hollered at Reed to let the historic trolley sit for a minute at Pearl Street so he could photograph it, the motorman refused, too nervous about falling behind schedule.

  As the car got closer to Boston, the crowds along the street grew in numbers, with men, women, and children waiting and waving their hands high. Flower bouquets that Reed and Trufant had been handed were visible up front, but they were being crushed more with each stop. The car by now was brimming over its edges, with passengers standing on the footboard and dangling off the side and limbs visible out of the windows despite the pleas of Stearns to keep all parts inside. As Reed steered his car down Boylston Street, both sides of the street were lined with a sea of people and the roar became louder. Up ahead, he could barely make out the entrance to the tunnel, a black hole surrounded by a sea of people dressed in black.

  At the final stop before the tunnel entrance on Boylston between Arlington Street and Charles Street, when it seemed there was not a single inch of room left inside, two more people reached up from the sidewalk and grabbed hold of an arm that was being held on to by another arm, and they were pulled on board and swallowed up by the excitable mass.

  “The spaces between the seats were filled with standees,” The Boston Evening Record wrote of the car, “the platforms were packed like sardine boxes. Each running board was two deep with humanity, while both fenders were loaded down until there was not enough room for a fly to cling!” A car with seats for forty-five passengers and standing room for a few dozen more had 140 passengers. With Reed at the controls, the Public Garden on his left, and the clock on the Arlington Street church pointing at six o’clock, car number 1752 crept to the summit of the subway tunnel’s downward slope.

  * * *

  IF THERE WAS A TIME to stop and acknowledge the moment, this was it. Perhaps a speech from Mayor Quincy was in order, or from the ex-mayor Matthews, or Henry Whitney, or Governor Wolcott, or the chief engineer, Carson—anybody who had a hand in bringing America’s first subway, an electric subway, to this day. Not only was it completed on time, in two and a half years, it came in at $4.2 million, under the $5 million projected cost. Along with the ten killed in the gas explosion, four others died in the building of the subway, and it was constructed without as much disruption to the streets as had been anticipated.

  Municipal governments (as New Yorkers would surely agree) at the time were notorious for being small-minded, underachieving bureaucracies too easily intimidated by business interests and susceptible to corruption. Boston had defied all of those labels and even managed to preserve the one piece of land its people cherished the most, Boston Common. The uncovering of 910 bodies in the path of the subway route was an unfortunate finding, but Dr. Green’s delicate handling of it had mitigated the public’s worries. The subway was a success by every measure before it even opened. And as small flags waved amid the deafening cheers, the crowd almost seemed to be clamoring for someone to stop and recognize the achievement.

  It had been ten years since two men, Henry Whitney in Boston and Abram Hewitt in New York, first made serious overtures about tunneling beneath their cities. A decade later, one of those cities stood at the brink of history while the other had yet to put a shovel into the ground. For Boston, that was satisfaction enough. By now Reed’s car was so crowded it seemed in danger of tipping over, and it was difficult to imagine the electric motor having enough power to move it. Trufant pulled on his strap signaling that he was ready, Reed clanged his gong and switched on the electric current, and Allston car number 1752 eased forward, crested the hill, dipped down the incline, and disappeared beneath Boylston Street. The passengers in the front seats stood up on their tiptoes and leaned forward, peering ahead to see what sights awaited them. And from the rear, a shout rang out. “Down in front!”

  * * *

  A “HORROR OF TUNNELS,” is how one Chicago resident once described the idea of a subway. One Bostonian used more vivid terms, saying subways gave him a “buried-alive feeling.” Even John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, a member of the 1892 Massachusetts Rapid Transit Commission, came back from his trip overseas and described the noise of the London Underground like “the roaring of the ocean after a storm.” But then along came Frank Sprague and Thomas Edison, and suddenly it was possible not only to use quiet, clean, and safe electric trolleys underground but also to light up those tunnels with bright-white electric lightbulbs. At the start of the nineteenth century, barges were still stacking up at the entrances of canal tunnels as their nervous crews argued over who would steer into the darkness first. By the middle of the century, the Thames Tunnel was complete and the London Underground was operating. Now, near the dawn of the twentieth century, public opinion in America had officially swayed. And when Jimmy Reed guided his trolley underground, any lingering fears were quashed for good.

  “Oh, dear, isn’t it delightful!”

  “I thought it would be quite dark and gloomy looking.”

  “Oh, come, and let us ride around again.”

  “My, how white it is.”

  There were no screams of fear or groans of disgust or complaints of rank odors. Nobody was more impressed than old C. W. Davis, who found no comparison between the trip he took above ground in 1856 and this one forty years later. “What a difference there was in the ride this morning,” he said the moment his journey from Somerville to Cambridge to Boston had ended. “Why you could not scare up as many people on a dozen trips as we had on that car when it reached the subway. And the cars! Think of a car that would hold comfortably about twenty persons, drawn by one horse, and not a fast one at that. None of the comforts of open cars then. The door was at the rear end and the driver was conductor as well.”

  The reviews were glowing. Only the draft blowing through the car elicited complaints. It was bright enough to read, with the white bulbs bouncing off the white enameled brick walls and combining with the sunlight that peeked down through the staircases and in through the overhead vents to make it feel like noon on a sunny day. It was dry enough to sit on the ground, thanks to automated electric pumps tied to the city sewers that took care of the water that leaked into the stations from the inclines at Arlington and Park streets. And the air was clean enough to take in one long deep breath and not notice any difference from above ground. It smelled no different than a crowded church or theater. That was aided by ventilating chambers and large, inconspicuous fans installed along the route.

  The first car in moved slower than it might normally because of its overcrowding, and Reed took the curve smoothly beneath the corner of Boylston and Tremont street
s. But it must have been a bizarre moment when, in a place that once housed thousands of coffins and where hundreds of human skeletons were found only a few years earlier, a passenger on board the first subway car, too joyous to contain himself, broke out in old Irish song. “O, Mister Captain, stop the ship! I want to get out and walk.” Another voice hollered back in tune, “What’s the matter with riding?” to which the first singer replied, “There are 19 elbows planted against my spine, there are two boys on my shoulders, and 14 feet on my pet corns. Do you blame me?” Laughter broke out on the car as it pulled into the Boylston Street station.

  Reed was thankful to see only a few people waiting for him, and they agreed to wait for the next car. He pulled away, with cheers filling the tunnel, and at 6:06 A.M., car number 1752 arrived at the Park Street station, its first voyage complete. More than three hundred were standing and waiting, hats waving in the air. “Bravo, bravo,” the cries rang out. “Bravissimo,” a group of dark-skinned Italians hooted. But when another man hollered out, “Three cheers for the subway!” in an attempt to start a hip-hip-hooray chant, he found himself shouting all by himself, the crowd too distracted to join him.

  Half of the passengers disembarked and quickly filed through the turnstile that led them up to the street again. But the other passengers were too excited to get off, and they remained on board as the car took on more passengers, turned around in the loop, and headed back for Arlington Street. Those who boarded at Park Street were the ones who had purchased the day’s first tickets, with numbers like 000002 and 000240, which they no doubt kept as souvenirs.

  Inevitably, there were some who simply found the bustle too much to take. “Damn me if I’ll go through this again,” one red-faced man blurted out after squeezing off his train and onto the Park Street platform. “I’ll take my regular train the next time,” gasped another. But they were outnumbered. When a young woman hopped off her train smiling, she could not hide her surprise at the whole experience. “I thought it would be cold, damp and dingy,” she said. “But it is so bright and the air seems so pure.”

  Women like her were thought to be the hardest customers to please. They had complained that the subway cars should have settees on them for more comfortable seating after they’d had a long day of shopping. That complaint was all but forgotten on the first rides of the day as women carried on board their babies and their bundles, and their amazement at the tunnel seemed to make them dismiss their worries about their sore bottoms. They were even more enthusiastic than the men, holding their breath in anticipation and letting loose with an “Oh, dear” followed by “Oh, my.”

  They were especially admiring of the subway employees. “Such nice looking men,” was a comment heard often in those first few hours, directed at the manly-looking West End workers in their crisp new blue and gold uniforms. Some women suspected they were a handpicked lot of the most handsome men employed by the West End company, to distract their focus away from the tunnel. As for the children, the subway took some getting used to. The crush of people, the strangeness of the underground, it was too much for the littlest ones at first, and in the early hours and days of the subway, they could be heard wailing whenever the car they were on started moving.

  Car number 1752 was not alone in the tunnel for long. It was followed quickly by a second car, 1743, also from Allston; a third, 2534, from Cypress Street in Brookline; and soon a string of them, one after another, each one stuffed beyond capacity with passengers hanging off the sides and crammed into the rows of seats, cheering and waving like caged wild animals. Of the dignitaries in town, the earliest to ride through the subway was Sam Little, the president of the West End railway, who arrived at seven o’clock, an hour after the opening.

  Within four hours, the typical trip from the entrance at the Public Garden by Arlington Street up to the Boylston Street station, around the corner, and to the end at the Park Street stop was taking between three and four minutes, depending on the volume of passengers or the timid nature of the motorman at the car’s controls. That same trip on a typical weekday on the surface of Tremont and Boylston streets took at least ten minutes and sometimes longer, with cars sometimes sitting perfectly still for two or three minutes at a time while they waited for the one ahead of them to inch forward.

  Even more impressive than the speed at which the subway cars moved was the rapid, machinelike manner in which passengers were able to board and exit the cars. Only seconds passed from the time that a car pulled into Park Street, unloaded its passengers, and took on a new group for the return trip to Arlington Street. It was a most unusual sight to see for anyone who had grown accustomed to the painstaking surface experience of loading and unloading. A hundred and twenty cars an hour pulled out of Park Street during the first day of operation, a shocking number.

  Only one of them did not make it out unscathed. The tunnel was barely four hours old when it was the scene of the first subway accident in America. At 10:20 in the morning, car number 2022, bound for Jamaica Plain and marked with the sign HUNTINGTON AVE. CROSS-TOWN was emerging from the tunnel at the Public Garden when its roof nicked the crossbeam at the end of the covered portion. The motorman stopped the car immediately and joined his conductor in a quick climb on top of the car, where they assessed the damage, hopped back down, and had their trolley moving again in minutes.

  * * *

  THOUGH PUBLIC OFFICIALS DID NOT deem the day worthy of a special event, the city’s biggest paper certainly did. Within a few hours of the first trip underground, paper boys were hawking The Globe’s special edition on the streets. FIRST CAR OFF THE EARTH! the headline blared. ALLSTON ELECTRIC GOES INTO THE SUBWAY ON SCHEDULE TIME.

  “Out of the sunlight of the morning into the white light of the subway rolled the first regular passenger-carrying car at 6:01,” the paper wrote. “The car was from Allston and it approached the immense yawn in the earth by way of Pearl St Cambridgeport and the Harvard bridge.” In colorful language, the paper described how Reed’s trolley car “hissed along like a brood of vipers.”

  Of all the new habits passengers had to get used to with their subway, there were two that caused great consternation from the very first trip through the stations. At the stairways, to control the flow of traffic out of the stations and back to the streets, eight-foot-tall wooden turnstiles were installed. Above each one, a sign read, LOITERING ON THIS STAIRWAY PROHIBITED, to prevent the platforms from becoming a place where people on the street came for shelter from rain or snow or the homeless came to loaf, panhandle, or sleep.

  The turnstile was a new contraption for the times, and they were immediately deemed everything from an “irredeemable nuisance” to “clumsy, complicated things.” People getting off their trains would stand and stare at the turnstile, unsure how to navigate it and wanting to see others go first or receive assistance from the handsome West End workers. Couples got scared at the thought of being separated even for an instant, and friends who insisted on going through together inevitably got jammed or bumped in the face or the rear by the swinging bar. Little old ladies cringed and closed their eyes as they passed through while men carrying baskets filled with groceries caught glares from those behind them as it took them an extra few seconds. The heavyset crowd especially loathed the turnstiles, as they found it embarrassing to squeeze through the turnstiles and draw attention to their girth. When one exceptionally overweight gentleman got stuck, he required a shove from behind by an alert, if sheepish, West End employee. But as annoying as the turnstiles were, they were effective. Sixty passengers could melt through the turnstile in sixty seconds if prodded. And they usually were.

  The other source of immediate complaining was the ticketing system. Sam Little wanted the ticketing process for his West End company to be handled on the streets, in kiosks at the top of the stairs, rather than at the bottom inside the stations. But an old concern reared up again at that request—marring the appearance of Boston Common with ugly architecture. And so the battle was lost and the ticketing w
as handled underground. Passengers who came down the stairs had no choice but to stand in line and wait to be next up to the window to purchase a ticket for a nickel. Even though Park Street was equipped with four ticket offices, each with a roll of tickets to sell, the workers could not keep up with demand, as most people came in to purchase tickets for a ride, but plenty more simply wanted a ticket to keep as a souvenir and never used it. By 11:15 A.M., one office had sold 2,500 tickets, another 2,100, the third 1,500, and the last 1,250. As the day proved, a slow ticket agent was disastrous, since the time it took to count out the correct change and hand over a ticket caused lines to grow, passengers to fret, and the boarding system to grind to a standstill.

  “Why can’t the conductors take cash fares on the cars as before,” one gentleman standing in line was heard saying on the morning of the first day.

  A nearby West End worker heard the gripe and came over with his answer. He explained that the ticketing space was meant to keep people out of the subway who had no intention of riding and to allow the conductors to collect all the fares before the car leaves rather than try to hunt down passengers on board. Because the cars were moving much faster now, conductors would miss collecting fares from passengers before they exited. But those answers were not sufficient for one man, who suggested bluntly that if this were another certain city, the people would not stand for such foolishness.