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

by Most, Doug

  One week later, the Rapid Transit Commission emerged from another closed-door session prepared to issue a decision. Parsons was there. Steinway, hoping for redemption after his 1891 commission had failed, was there, too. And so were the angry developers. When the commissioner John Inman said, “I am prepared to act understandingly and to vote for an underground system,” cheers erupted from the property owners. When other commissioners echoed Inman, the cheers grew louder. The developers had won. There would be no elevated tracks on the west side.

  Even though the argument over those twenty blocks was resolved quickly, the timing of the dispute stalled the momentum of the subway project. By the time Mayor William L. Strong and the Board of Aldermen approved the transit commission’s new plan, it was too late.

  * * *

  AS IT TURNED OUT, the property owners along the northern portion of the Manhattan route were not the only ones with strong opinions. Just as merchants in Boston along Tremont Street feared that construction of a subway would keep shoppers away during the digging, the same concern surfaced in downtown New York. The difference was that New York’s property owners, unlike Boston’s, had real powers to act. Each one had a vote, and the more valuable their property, the more weight their tally was given.

  When they rejected the Rapid Transit Commission’s new plan, the commissioners desperately turned to the New York Supreme Court to step in once and for all and clear the way for construction to begin. It was not to be. Though a three-man panel appointed by the court did approve the subway, it carried no authority. The final approval was needed by the appellate division of the Supreme Court. In a ruling issued on May 22, 1896, the presiding justice, Charles H. Van Brunt, scoffed at the plan, almost ridiculing it, especially the estimated cost of $30 million.

  Van Brunt said that he failed to understand how the projected cost was not scrutinized more closely, and he took great pleasure in quoting from the Bible, a passage from Luke 14:28, to make his point. “More than 1,800 years ago,” Van Brunt began, “it was said: ‘For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it.’” He was only warming up. “If there is a probability that financial difficulties will be met and the construction of this road will drag its weary length along for a time which no man can compute, and possibly its construction be absolutely abandoned because of the wreck of the city’s finances, and the intervention of Constitutional prohibitions, it is manifest that great injury will result to the property of abutting owners for which they can never be compensated.” He blamed the transit commission for having too much power and said that it could single-handedly destroy the financial credit of New York City. “The motion should be denied,” he said. It was.

  It was a crushing blow.

  * * *

  “IT MEANS THE END,” the transit commission president, Alexander Orr, said bluntly. Eight years after Mayor Abram Hewitt first laid out his vision for how to pay for and build a subway, eighteen months after the citizens of New York had finally voted in favor of a subway, and one year after the transit commission approved a detailed route and plan, it was as if none of those events had ever happened. History was wiped clean, and New York was back at the starting line.

  Nobody was more devastated at falling behind other cities in engineering breakthroughs than the engineer who had devoted the last ten years of his life to trying to build a subway for New York. When a reporter for The New York Times knocked on William Parsons’s door at 51 East Fifty-third Street, he emerged grim and clearly in shock.

  “You must excuse me,” he said, “from making any comment about the decision of the court. The decision was a surprise—a complete surprise—and well, I do not wish to criticize the conclusion of the judges. I—none of us—know now where we are at. We may find out tomorrow. In the meantime I do not wish to say anything about the matter.” But before he could turn and step back inside, the reporter asked him one question. “Will the work of the commission and the expense it involved all go for naught?”

  It was the question Parsons had to be asking himself. “Yes, probably it will. But I cannot say positively. As I said, we are all at sea, and I would rather not say anything more on the subject tonight.” With that, he disappeared, no doubt to wonder what his future held. Despite all the talk about progress, in 1896 New York’s streets were still stuck in the past. The dreams of Alfred Beach, who had died on January 1 of that year, seemed so distant. There were thirty-eight miles of cable road, less than four miles of electric road, and the remaining terrain, hundreds of miles in and around New York, was still covered by horses and elevated trains. The subway remained elusive.

  And when The New York Times ran a front-page story a few months later, announcing BOSTON’S SUBWAY FINISHED, it had to gall the competitive Parsons. It certainly seemed to gall The Times. The article carried a jealous tone, calling the project “exceedingly expensive” but difficult as well. It was the last line of the article that seemed particularly petty: “It is therefore not unlikely that within a couple of years Boston need not be ashamed of her transit facilities.”

  Parsons wondered if a subway for New York was not meant to be, and he began to explore new opportunities for himself. “We have the worst transit problem in the world,” he said to a fellow engineer one day. “Are we to be the last to act?” It seemed that way.

  * * *

  IF ANYONE HAD MORE EMOTION invested in New York’s subway than Parsons, it was the broad-shouldered piano manufacturer who came to America from Germany to start a new life half a century before. William Steinway was sixty-one. His health was declining and his battles with gout often left him bedridden. His longtime wife had recently died. And the transit commission that had been named in his honor in 1891 had failed in its attempt to get a subway passed. The 1894 commission was supposed to be his second chance, but now it, too, had failed. Steinway, in his final act, set out to make sure that the beauty of New York, something he cherished as dearly as the elegant curves on one of his grand pianos, was not ruined by the court’s ruling and by the construction of more enormous concrete pillars and ugly elevated tracks.

  * * *

  TOGETHER STEINWAY AND PARSONS drafted a new plan for a subway, both men determined to finish what they had started. They mapped out a route that covered enough of the island to satisfy enough of its citizens, yet steered clear of spots where opposition to a subway was the most vocal or where construction would be most troublesome and thus expensive because of the makeup of the ground beneath the surface.

  Wall Street was avoided. So was the Upper East Side and the stretch of Sixth Avenue between Tenth Street and Twenty-third Street. It was known as Ladies’ Mile. Private carriages would line up three and four deep off the curb so that the most elegant ladies of the Gilded Age could shop. President Cleveland’s wife used to come up from Washington to join Flora Whitney to look for new dresses at Arnold Constable on Broadway at Nineteenth Street or nearby at Lord & Taylor or B. Altman. And when Boston’s grand dame, Isabella Stewart Gardner, needed new diamonds, she waltzed into Tiffany’s on Union Square. Those were the exact customers that the merchants feared losing during the construction of a subway, and for that reason the route Steinway and Parsons mapped out avoided Ladies’ Mile entirely.

  The route was shaped like the letter Y. The stem covered the lower east side, and the two branches were above Central Park. Subway trains would start by New York City Hall and travel north to Grand Central Terminal at Forty-second Street on the east side. But there, trains would cross to the west side beneath Forty-second to Longacre Square at Seventh Avenue, what is now Times Square. The tracks would then curve north beneath Broadway and go all the way up to Ninety-sixth Street, at which point two branches would emerge. One would continue under Broadway up into Harlem, Washington Heights, and eventually what would become the Bronx. The second line would cross back to the east side at the northern tip of Central Park and run up Lenox Avenue and across the Harlem R
iver and all the way out to Bronx Park. Under the plan, the east side north of Forty-second Street and the west side south of Longacre Square would continue to be served by the elevated trains of the Manhattan Railway Company.

  It was a limited, imperfect subway route aimed at getting a shovel into the ground as soon as possible and sacrificed reaching all parts of the city. Express trains could run all the way from City Hall to 135th Street on the west side in twenty minutes or less, Parsons predicted.

  This one seemed all but certain to pass. It even won the approval of an important figure from Boston. When Howard Carson, the chief engineer of the Boston Rapid Transit Commission, was invited to a hearing in New York to see what Parsons was proposing, he first walked a portion of the route between the post office downtown and Grand Central Terminal. He then described Parsons’s plans as meticulous and perfectly accurate, though slightly more expensive than what the actual cost would probably be. Carson singled out the amounts Parsons estimated to pay for steel and for rock excavation as being too high, but they were not criticisms, merely suggestions. “They are very similar to our Boston plans,” Carson said. “And I cannot condemn our own plans. I consider Mr. Parsons’ plans and estimates as thoroughly practicable and within just limits.” Before he left, Carson tried to assure New Yorkers of the greatest fear Bostonians had about a subway. “The air in the subway will be purer than the air you have in your churches, your theaters, your schoolrooms,” he said. “Of course, if you want ideal conditions you would have to make use of some appliances as fans, but this will not be necessary.”

  * * *

  HAD THERE BEEN A New York subway operating on August 5, 1896, that claim by Carson would have been tested. Temperatures soared to eighty-five during the day. The following afternoon, the Rapid Transit Commission was to vote on the route Steinway and Parsons drafted. Steinway’s gout was not bothering him too much on this night, and he was able to walk with little pain, though he was anxious about the meeting. To help cool himself down, he drank a glass of pilsner at ten thirty before going off to bed.

  The following day, shortly after three o’clock in the afternoon, the commission approved the plan, with Parsons again in attendance and Steinway voting in favor. This time, not only did Mayor Strong and the Board of Aldermen voice their approval, but so did the necessary group of citizens and merchants and, finally, the appellate division of the Supreme Court. The justices even praised the commission for accurately estimating the cost, a far cry from the first time around.

  Not even three months after he cast his final vote, with his legacy secure as both a piano manufacturer and, finally, as a transit pioneer, William Steinway, a frail sixty-one-year-old, died at his home on November 30, 1896. He did not live to see the subway open, but he lived to make sure that it would.

  * * *

  WILLIAM WHITNEY, ANOTHER MAN who had brought about great change for New York, did little to quash speculation with his repeated assertions that politics did not interest him. The World newspaper polled thirty editors in the state of New York and reported that twenty-six backed Whitney. While visiting his mother and his brother, Henry, in Brookline, Massachusetts, Whitney granted an interview to The Globe and left his intentions clear.

  “I am not and will not be a presidential candidate,” he said. And yet it appeared unavoidable. On the same page in which its interview with Whitney appeared, a small article ran at the bottom with a dateline of Chicago, where the Democratic National Convention was to be held. WHITNEY FOR THE CANDIDATE WHETHER HE WANTS IT OR NOT, read the headline. At the convention a month later, delegates were spotted wearing WHITNEY FOR PRESIDENT buttons. Whitney ignored it all and watched as McKinley, a former Republican governor from Ohio, defeated Nebraskan Democrat William Jennings Bryan.

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, WILLIAM’S SON, Harry Payne Whitney, traded vows with young Gertrude Vanderbilt, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, putting in motion a blending of two of the most important families of the late nineteenth century. Over the years, William Whitney and Cornelius Vanderbilt had been more than neighbors. They had vacationed together in Newport, Rhode Island, at the Vanderbilt mansion, the Breakers; in Bar Harbor, Maine; and upstate New York. They had shared a love of the opera, attending hundreds of performances together. And they had, on occasion, seen their business interests align. Now their families were merging. With the combined wealth of their families, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a sculptor and art collector, went on to become one of America’s greatest patrons of the arts.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME OF HIS son’s wedding, Whitney was no longer a single man. In September 1896 he married for the second time. His bride, Edith S. Randolph, was the widow of a British soldier. Their engagement had been brief and caught his family and friends by surprise, and it especially angered the Payne family, who had long questioned whether Whitney had been faithful to Flora before her death. But Whitney, who was now fifty-five, had been lonely, and that was only reinforced as he watched Harry walk down the aisle.

  His children were happy for him, but his own joy would not last. Not even two years into the marriage, the Whitneys boarded a private railroad car and headed south to their estate in Aiken, South Carolina. On a February morning while riding with friends, they were chasing after a deer when the group began to spread out. Some of the riders came upon a low rustic bridge that required anyone on a horse to bend sideways to pass beneath it. Edith, who was riding a horse taller than what she was used to, thought that she had bent low enough under the bridge, but she had not. Her head slammed with a sickening thud against the overpass, and she was thrown to the ground unconscious and bleeding from the head.

  Her daughter Adelaide, stepdaughter Dorothy, and William all rushed to her. When they were eventually able to take her back to a hospital in New York, doctors were less concerned with her six-inch scalp wound than they were with her limp arms. They feared she had fractured her cervical vertebra. Whitney himself was paralyzed with grief at the thought of losing a second wife so quickly after his first, and though Edith regained consciousness a few days later her prognosis was grim. In a touching display, when she was ready to go home, still in a cast and with her head supported by a metal frame, Whitney arranged for a special carriage with deep springs to soften her trip. As Edith’s carriage moved slowly over the cobblestone streets of the city, her husband walked beside it, resting his hand on the window of the vehicle while she lay prone in a cot, and cleared the streets of any obstacles that might cause her pain. She lingered for more than a year before dying at home in the spring of 1899. Whitney never fully recovered, growing grayer and frailer at a faster rate than before from that day forward.

  * * *

  THERE WAS ONE LAST QUESTION New York needed to answer in order to start digging. Who was going to step forward to build the subway? Anyone interested in bidding had to invest at least $7 million of his own money, a sum that ruled out a huge number of potential contractors. They had to not only build the twenty-one miles of subway and elevated tracks but also agree to operate the system, another hurdle for many contractors.

  The Times projected that if the new route carried two hundred thousand passengers a day, as some estimated, and each person paid the five-cent fare, that would bring in $10,000 in revenue daily. That was enough, The Times wrote, to one day yield a net of about eight percent for whoever won the job. “The contract,” The Times summarized, “offers an attractive profit.”

  But profit was not the appeal of a subway, as one of New York’s most famous lawyers, Wheeler H. Peckham, learned during a visit to Boston in October 1897. Boston’s subway had only been open for a month, but Peckham found it to be perfect in every sense. “I rode wherever the cars went,” he told New York’s transit commissioners upon his return home. “I entered the car on a street corner, going down a short stairway. I found everything charming and delightful. The method of transit was as admirable as can be imagined. The cars were well-lighted, air
y and comfortable. There was no feeling of being underground or oppressed by bad or close air.” When Peckham was asked about the speed of the trains, he said it seemed like they went about eight miles per hour, but they were capable of going twice that fast. “Would you object to going forty miles an hour?” he was asked. “No; if I have forty miles to go, I want to go as quickly as possible.” The commissioners all laughed at his reply, relieved to hear that at least one New Yorker had emerged from his subway adventure unscathed and unafraid.

  Peckham had been so eager to ride on a subway that he had beaten New York’s transit commissioners up to Boston. But three weeks after his visit, the commissioners journeyed north to see it for themselves. Even though Boston only had three stations open and a short distance of tracks, Carson, Boston’s chief engineer, told the commissioners the subway had taken one hundred trolley cars per hour off Tremont Street. He added that the method of construction, digging a trench, covering it over so traffic could continue, and then finishing the tunnel, had been done with little disruption on the surface. New York’s commissioners left Boston impressed and more determined than ever to find the right man to build their own subway.

  * * *

  EVEN THE STEADY RAIN and soggy snow falling on the night of December 31, 1897, could not dampen the mood of raucous New Yorkers flooding into the brightly lit City Hall Park. Their city was in the midst of a cultural building boom; there was good reason it was a period that came to be called the gay nineties. New York was already calling itself America’s capital of entertainment, a place where dozens of kinetoscope parlors showed Edison’s movies and vaudeville shows were a nightly happening. In various stages of construction were the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and Columbia University. The recovery from the 1893 recession was complete, and an era of decadence was in full swing. Even the subway project had been approved, and the final details about the financing were all but worked out. This particular New Year’s Eve was truly the dawn of a new New York. Bands played, choruses sang, bells chimed, and a hundred-gun salute shattered the night air while ferries and tugs parked in the harbor blew their whistles. The big moment came during the singing of “Auld Lang Syne” when a blue and white flag unfurled atop City Hall, and, just like that, Brooklyn and Manhattan were no longer two giant cities on opposite sides of the East River. A decade after the New York Chamber of Commerce had first urged Manhattan to swallow up Brooklyn, it was done. The threat of another American metropolis like Chicago surpassing New York in size was vanquished. The boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx, and Manhattan were now one giant New York City.