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

by Most, Doug

  “It’s a shame to have such incompetents doing such work,” the complainer muttered. “Of course they’re new, but that’s no reason patrons should be made to put up with such annoyance … You can just bet they would stand no such nuisance in New York. They have men there who know…” His voice stopped without warning as he looked out toward the tracks. “There’s my car!” he hollered without finishing his thought, and off he dashed excitedly.

  * * *

  WHILE THE SUBWAY’S FIRST DAY progressed smoothly underground, the real measure of its success was on the streets. The transformation on the morning of September 1 was astounding. Tremont Street looked deserted, with greater distances separating the cars than had been seen in years, or at least since motormen went on a brief strike over Christmas the previous year. Standing at the corner of Boylston and Tremont streets, looking in both directions, it was sometimes two or three minutes before a single car would pass. Only one week earlier, fifty cars might have passed in the same period. Pedestrians didn’t quite know what to make of this empty feeling, and some of them stood on the sidewalk, by force of habit, waiting for the crush of cars to come, only to realize how foolish they looked and to finally cross the empty street at a leisurely pace they hadn’t tried for years. As they looked out at the streets, pedestrians began to wonder when the annoying tracks along Tremont and Boylston could be ripped out so the streets could become more friendly to cross. It would not be long.

  On the concrete plaza at the corner of Park Street and Tremont, across from the Park Street Church, long lines formed outside the two stairway buildings leading down to the tracks. The buildings for the staircases, and there were eight of them now on Boston Common, were modeled after the subway buildings in Budapest, fortress-like with granite walls, white enameled brick, and glass and copper roofs. Including the staircase, each building cost $11,000. The crowd outside the stairways was overwhelmingly men, as they mingled in their bowler hats and dark suits. The women stood out because of the umbrellas they carried to shield them from the sunlight.

  Because of how overcrowded the cars were on the first day, tracking how many people actually rode the subway on September 1 was impossible. But it was estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 made the trip, and, in the words of The Globe, “Nearly everything went as smooth as the proverbial clockwork, and the opinion heard on all sides was that, as far as it goes, the subway is an unqualified success.”

  * * *

  IT TOOK FOUR HOURS for the first delay to register a complaint. The transit commissioner, Horace G. Allen, a mutton-chopped man with wavy dark hair and wire-rimmed spectacles, wandered down into the Park Street station at 10:30 and announced how pleased he was at the morning, especially the lack of any injuries. “If a woman should fall,” he said, “or somebody get thrown by a sudden start there would be a chorus of, ‘Subway! I told you so!’” His smile disappeared, however, when he noticed passengers waiting on the platform and no car in sight. They had only been there for one minute, but for Allen that was too long. He wanted perfection, which is why he had even hired janitors, all of them black men attired in sharp white uniforms, to comb the stations and tracks with dustpans and brooms to keep things looking spotless for as long as possible. Allen asked for emergency rooms to be built into the first few stations, so that a sick or injured passenger could be tended to without hesitation in a room supplied with a cot, chair, table, and electric heater.

  The longer that Allen saw passengers waiting, the more he fretted. He wanted their first trips to be memorable, so they would be sure and come back again and again. “Hmmm,” he murmured out loud, “I wonder what’s the trouble. There should be more cars along.”

  But before he could inquire, the rumbling of a car was heard and then a second and a third, and all three came into the station at the same time, discharged their loads, and carried off the next crowd. Relieved, Allen himself decided to join them. “I think Boston is going to like it and like it a great deal,” he said smiling, as he stepped on board his subway car. “It will surprise them. Most people imagined that the subway was going to be a close hole in the ground. The sunlight and gas light, the white walls, general cleanliness and the facilities for handling any crowd will surprise and please them.” And with that he vanished into the darkness of America’s first subway tunnel.

  14

  THE BRAINS, THE BUILDER, AND THE BANKER

  IT WAS TITLED “REPORT ON RAPID TRANSIT in Foreign Cities.” And befitting its author, its sixty-six typed pages were crammed full of meticulous details, drawings, photographs, and charts. When William Parsons delivered it to his commissioners on November 20, 1894, two weeks after New Yorkers had voted in favor of a subway, it immediately became the research paper that would shape the course of New York’s transit efforts for the next decade. From each city he’d visited, he drew lessons about the best methods for digging beneath a city’s streets, for ventilating subway cars and tunnels of stale air, and for where to best place the doors on a subway car.

  Of London, Parsons wrote about both the Metropolitan line, which was the first tunnel dug back in the early 1860s and was still using steam locomotives, and the City and South London Railway, which opened in 1890 and was dug using a different tunneling method and powered with electric trains. The steam locomotives used a high-quality coal that was free of foul-smelling sulfur and produced little smoke. And Metropolitan engineers were told to not push their engines too hard in the tunnels. But Parsons called the efforts a waste. “In spite of these precautions, however, the air in the tunnel is extremely offensive,” he wrote. The City and South London line, on the other hand, impressed him greatly. “Inasmuch as the motors are electric, and the only fouling of the air is that due to the passengers, the amount [of air] required to be changed per minute is small,” he wrote. “The air in the stations is quite fair, although susceptible of further improvement.” However, there were other flaws. He described the cars as “small, badly ventilated and lighted, hard riding and noisy,” defects he blamed on the construction. With a diameter of only ten feet, two inches, the tunnels were too narrow and small, forcing the use of small, four-car trains that could seat ninety-six passengers and move at an average speed of thirteen miles per hour. Building bigger tunnels lined with brick or concrete would make for a quieter, more comfortable ride, he said. He was especially excited about the reliability of the electric trains. He noted that the average repair cost per mile of one of London’s electric trains was one and a half cents, whereas the Manhattan Elevated Railway was paying more than three cents per mile to repair its steam locomotives.

  As advanced as London was, Glasgow proved to be more interesting and enlightening for Parsons. Glasgow already had one subway operating and two more under construction when he visited. The tunnel was plenty big, twenty-six feet in diameter, and it was dug through solid rock, shale, clay, sand, and mud. Because of how varied he knew the ground to be under New York’s streets, the Glasgow tunnel was especially interesting to him. Some portions were tunneled while others were dug as a trench through the street, which is how he suspected New York’s subway might be built. And one of the most important nuggets he took away from his trip was that it cost roughly eight times more to tunnel using a shield than it did to dig a trench in the street and cover it over. He praised Glasgow’s engineers by noting that the only places where there appeared to be some settling of the street surface was where the subway was built, and no place else, meaning they had successfully secured the areas on the edges of the tunnel. But he seemed less pleased with their decision to light the trains using electricity yet to power them using cables. Parsons was coming to believe that cable streetcars were yesterday’s technology.

  In Paris, which was only just beginning to build its tunnel, he summarized conversations he had with their engineers and seemed energized by what they told him. Use masonry instead of iron, they explained. Avoid using any special stones that might prove difficult to cut. Remove by train the enormous amounts of dirt
and rocks that are dug up, instead of putting the materials on carriages to be pulled through the streets. That will only worsen congestion. And last, dig the tunnel as close as possible to the surface. Every inch you go down, they told him, the cost rises significantly.

  Toward the end of his lengthy report, Parsons devoted space to two American examples that he said possessed “decidedly novel features.” One was the elevated Intramural Railway that ran on electricity during the Chicago World’s Fair. The other was the Baltimore Belt Railroad, which was built to allow passenger and freight trains to pass between New York and Washington through Baltimore without disruption. A tunnel beneath Baltimore’s busiest thoroughfare, Howard Street, impressed Parsons, who wrote about the ease with which the trains passed through the hilly tunnel with engines built by the General Electric Company: “These motors are designed to attain a speed of fifty miles per hour, and do everything that a steam locomotive can do. These machines are far beyond anything before attempted in the electrical line, and will put it, as far as power is concerned, on the same footing with steam.”

  Where to place the doors on a subway car was a question that especially intrigued Parsons and also confused him. It was one of those details a less meticulous engineer might overlook, but for him it was essential to the passenger experience, and in every city he visited he saw that there was no consistent answer. In Berlin and in London, where side doors were in use on some lines, stops averaged between thirty and fifty-five seconds. On the elevated Liverpool line, side doors resulted in twenty-second stops, while the end doors on the City and South London line made for fourteen-second stops. He recommended end doors in his report, believing they allowed passengers to step on and off faster. “This is due largely to the confusion resulting from compartments, classes and many doors,” he wrote. “Passengers run along platforms looking for good seats, while with the end door arrangement they enter the car at once and distribute afterwards.”

  His section on the doors was one of the few places were Parsons inserted a touch of humor into his report, even if it was unintentional. He explained how stops in New York were unusually fast, from a speedy four seconds to thirty depending on the time of day. Because they were so quick, he did not bother comparing them to the European cities, where it seemed passengers were less hurried to get on their way. He blamed (or credited?) the fast stops in New York on “the nervous and active temperament of the people.” New Yorkers? A “nervous and active temperament”? Imagine that.

  * * *

  PARSONS WAITED UNTIL THE FINAL section of his report to tackle the one issue that was most responsible for the thirty years that passed between London’s inaugural subway in 1863 and another city following its lead. “There is a wide-spread popular idea,” he wrote, “that electricity has some mysterious properties which render vastly superior and more economical than steam as a motive power.” He called that thinking “fallacious in the extreme.” He went on to explain that while there was no debating that an electric subway would be cleaner than a steam-powered subway, it was important to look at the costs of the two. In great detail, he explained how coal was required for both, with one critical difference. The coal in a steam-powered train was needed on the train itself, where it was burned in its own boiler in the locomotive to help convert water into steam that powered the cylinder and piston rods that made the wheels turn. It was an entirely self-contained process. Not so with an electric train.

  For an electric railroad, coal was still required, but it was used in a stationary boiler at a central location, where engines drove dynamos that created the electricity. Only when that electricity was conducted from the powerhouse miles away through the railway tracks and into the trains and the motors converted it back into power did the wheels of the electric train turn. Although both systems required coal, they could use a different type of coal, and that, Parsons explained, was a point that could not be ignored. “On [steam] locomotives it is necessary to carry the best quality of coal,” he wrote, and it had to be lump size, not a powder, or else it would sift right through the grate bars of the boiler. “Coal of that quality commands an extra price. Under stationary boilers, however, the grate bars can be adapted to burn the cheap fine coal of an inferior quality.”

  That Parsons had gone so far as to study what grade of coal might make the difference for a New York subway showed just how deeply he cared about the project. In the end, on the subject of how the subway should be powered, he wrote plainly that “the balance of economy is in favor of electricity.”

  It was one of the most boring and, at the same time, most important sentences in his entire sixty-six-page report. But in reaching his conclusion, Parsons was not alone.

  William Whitney had finally come around as well. With Chicago embracing electricity to power its trains in the early 1890s; London expanding its Underground; Glasgow, Budapest, and Paris all moving forward with subway tunnels; and even Whitney’s brother, Henry, electrifying Boston’s streetcars in the late 1880s, New York found itself in the strange position of falling behind other cities as the century came to a close. The Metropolitan Street Railway Company’s horse-pulled carriages were old and slow, expansion of the city’s elevated lines had been abandoned, and the flaws in the cable lines on Columbus and Lexington avenues were too many to count, from the snapped lines to the cost of maintenance to the congestion they continued to cause on the streets.

  When city leaders ruled in 1893 that any future wires would have to be placed underground instead of overhead, Whitney grew desperate. He offered a $50,000 prize to anyone, presumably an engineer, who could show him a way to successfully place wires underground to power his trolleys. And when no one came forward, he wrote to his brother, Henry, in Boston. William hoped that Henry might have a recommendation for an engineer, and as it so happened he did. Henry wrote back to William that Fred Pearson, still only thirty-three years old, was as brilliant as any man and that William should grab him without hesitation. Will Whitney did hire the former Tufts University prodigy, first as a consultant and then as the chief engineer of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company. New York was a huge job that would earn Pearson a salary of $75,000, a long way from the $2,500 that Henry Whitney paid him back in 1888 to be chief engineer of the West End Street Railway Company.

  Fifteen years had passed since their father died and the Whitney brothers went their separate ways. One of them used real estate to earn his fortune while the other married into money before finding success through politics and deal making. But eventually both men found themselves as the streetcar kings of Boston and New York, and their shared use of Fred Pearson was an unusual moment when their business interests and their brotherhood aligned. Over the course of the next decade, with Pearson’s guidance, New York would gradually eliminate its cable and horse-pulled lines and see more than a hundred miles of streetcar tracks electrified, including some crosstown streets and nearly all of its long and straight north-south boulevards.

  * * *

  THE SUBWAY ROUTE THAT WAS mapped out by the 1894 transit commission mirrored the one passed by Steinway’s 1891 commission, with one route up the east side from Union Square under Park Avenue to the Bronx and a second from South Ferry all the way up Broadway. But there was a wrinkle this time. The 1894 act insisted that the subway cost less than $50 million, and in an effort to save wherever possible the commissioners tweaked their plan in such a way that they hoped to trim $2 million without raising any opposition. They should have known better. That change proposed building cheaper elevated tracks instead of a subway tunnel on a one-mile, mostly vacant stretch between 92nd Street and 112th Street. Though virtually nobody lived in those twenty-two blocks on the Upper West Side, it was valuable land, with 320 individual plots worth between $20,000 and $50,000.

  On March 12, 1895, fifty angry developers stampeded into a meeting of the Rapid Transit Commission. Leading the charge was a financier named Francis M. Jencks, who years earlier had joined with William Whitney and others in forming th
e New York Loan and Improvement Company to develop land on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and Washington Heights neighborhoods. Jencks estimated that an elevated line up the west side would reduce the properties there in value by at least five thousand dollars, an enormous sum, and that instead of the land developing into hotels and restaurants and shops and beautiful homes, it would be used for nothing more than five-story flats and tenement housing.

  “I feel that an elevated railroad would be ruinous to this property,” he said. “The entire West Side from 72nd Street to the Columbia College property is one of the most important and beautiful residential neighborhoods in New York. The city expended millions of dollars in laying out Riverside Park and other places, and the only way for the city to justify this outlay is to preserve the character of the district.” The president of the Chamber of Commerce, Alexander E. Orr, seemed interested in hearing Jencks, even if he was frustrated at the lateness of the argument.

  “What character of construction other than a viaduct would you advise?” Orr asked.

  “Either a tunnel or a depressed road,” Jencks answered.

  “You have spoken as a property owner,” Orr countered. “As a citizen which would you prefer?”

  “Why, an elevated road, which has more air, more light,” Jencks said. “But as I understand, this viaduct is for but one mile and to save expense.”

  So strongly did Jencks feel that, a few minutes later, when Jencks was questioned by another commission member, Seth Low, he said that the property owners would be satisfied with no change at all to the transportation in their future neighborhood.

  “How do you feel between no road and the road proposed?” Low asked Jencks.

  “We would much prefer to see no road built,” Jencks replied. His answer prompted loud applause from the other speculators in the room.