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

by Most, Doug

  “Run for your life,” Epps screamed. “The powder shanty’s on fire. I can’t put it out!”

  Dynamite was more than thirty years old by now. Contractors knew how it worked. But when there was as much dynamite needed in one city as there was for the New York subway, the odds of an accident increased dramatically.

  On the morning of January 27, at least five hundred pounds of the explosive were crammed into one tiny wooden shanty, far more than the law permitted at one place. As if that was not enough risk, the shanty was being lit by two candles that were fixed to an inside wall to provide light and help warm the hands of the workers. A carriage agent who worked at the nearby Murray Hill Hotel and often peeked into the shanty said a subway worker once told him there was enough dynamite in there to “blow the whole hill to hell.” Moses Epps was standing inside a ticking time bomb in the middle of New York City at noon on a busy workday, and when one of his two candles melted to its bottom, he tossed it to the floor and began to light a new one. All of a sudden, the one that he dropped ignited a piece of paper on the ground. He grabbed a bucket of water and threw it on the flame, but it was too late. A wooden shack with twelve boxes filled with seventy-five sticks of dynamite each was now on fire.

  * * *

  THE SOUND FROM THE EXPLOSION was louder than anything New Yorkers had ever heard. Some thought the city was under attack. “I thought the end of us had come,” one witness said. The ground shook, windows shattered, buildings rocked, and a blinding glare was followed by a plume of white and blue smoke that shot hundreds of feet into the air. Epps was thrown to the ground unconscious, with deep gashes in his scalp and leg. The windows on a northbound Madison Avenue streetcar shattered without warning, covering its passengers in glass. The motorman, Henry Gaines, despite suffering a dislocated shoulder and other injuries, managed to safely bring his car to a halt.

  In seconds, a dense cloud of dirty yellow dust turned a clear day into a foggy one and blanketed a ten-block stretch between Thirty-fifth and Forty-fifth streets with air so thick that it hurt to inhale. As the funnel of smoke rose up, hundreds of people rushed toward the shanty where the explosion occurred and came upon dozens of crying, screaming victims, lying or limping, with blood dripping down their faces from shards of falling glass or wood splinters from the shanty. The Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital was evacuated in minutes, its rooms destroyed and unfit for patients.

  The Murray Hill Hotel suffered the brunt of the blast. Not a single window on its Park Avenue front survived. But the hotel manager, a kindly fellow named Washington L. Jacques, did not hesitate in turning his building into a makeshift hospital. Victims were carried in and laid out, including his son, a bank cashier across the street who was badly hurt by flying glass while eating his lunch. A surgeon who happened to be nearby and was unhurt, Dr. Louis Livingston Seaman, followed the flow of victims into the hotel and began to triage the most severely injured. It was familiar work for him, since he had served as a battlefield doctor during the Spanish-American War.

  Jacques feared that there were victims who did not survive the blast in his hotel, and he organized a search party to enter every single room. On the first floor, in the hotel cigar shop, they found Cyrus Adams, the popular seventy-year-old cashier known for his black velvet skullcap and nicknamed Old Adams, lying dead behind the register. On the parlor level, they found the mining businessman from British Columbia, Roderick Robertson, in his bed with his head crushed in, the furniture in his room shattered to bits. In the basement, Jacques stumbled upon a thirty-two-year-old black waiter from the hotel restaurant named James Carr. By the time a surgeon could reach him, he was gone.

  The instant that the longtime chief of the New York City Fire Department, Edward F. Croker, heard the blast, he didn’t wait for a call. He took off, dashing downtown when the first of four gongs clanged back at headquarters. “I knew that something big was on hand,” Croker said. Within ten minutes, scores of ambulances from Presbyterian Hospital and Bellevue were at the scene, and so were fire vehicles, but the firemen had little work to do. The dynamite didn’t spark an enormous blaze, only a few scattered flames in the basement of the Murray Hill Hotel and the shaft of the subway tunnel. The damage was the wreckage.

  The financial cost was staggering, estimated at $300,000. The loss of life was devastating, but it was shocking that it was not worse. Six people died and 125 were hurt, most of them suffering cuts from flying glass and bruises from falling debris. Within days, Epps was arrested on murder charges, and so were his bosses, John McDonald and Major Ira Shaler. They were accused of manslaughter and violating city ordinances on the storage of explosives. For Epps, his troubles would be brief, once it was learned that he was more of a hero for warning people to run. McDonald, too, would escape without much penalty, claiming the amount of dynamite stored was exaggerated. But Shaler would not get off so easily.

  While the case against Shaler moved forward and victims filed lawsuits against him, he went right back to work. Two months after the fatal blast, on the morning of March 21, 1902, a group of Shaler’s workmen came running out of the Murray Hill tunnel screaming that it was about to collapse. Seconds later it did. They narrowly survived the avalanche of loose rocks and dirt, and as they stood on the street and looked down, they saw months of their work gone in a flash. The roof of the tunnel along Park Avenue between Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth streets had caved in, and, with it, the home of a lawyer who lived in a brownstone at 55 Park Avenue sagged forward so much that the front door could not be opened. Shaler stood with his workers, stunned at the sight of the cave-in and relieved no one had been killed. “This accident,” he said while standing over the scene, “was one which could not be foreseen.”

  For the second time in two months, McDonald and Parsons rushed to a chaotic site on the subway route that was under the watch of Ira Shaler, who by now was being nicknamed the “Hoodoo Contractor” for his troubles on the job. The first time six bystanders died and several of the city’s grandest hotels were nearly destroyed. This time, a beautiful block of Park Avenue was blighted. The Murray Hill tunnel was proving to be a disaster, just as the contractor and engineer feared when they studied the topography and learned how porous the ground was.

  Parsons and McDonald stepped off a Madison Avenue electric streetcar at Thirty-eighth Street at four thirty in the afternoon of the collapse, and, after a brief glance down the damaged block, they trudged down into the tunnel to look over the wreckage. They estimated the damage to three homes at more than $250,000, but rather than question Shaler’s competence, both men stood by him. Parsons agreed that the collapse could not have been predicted, and he said the tunnel would proceed on schedule. The damage, he said, was trifling. Parsons’s leniency with Shaler after two disasters was puzzling given his demand for perfection, especially since Shaler was now facing a pile of legal bills and criminal charges that threatened to ruin him financially and emotionally. But Shaler was his friend, and Parsons, unlike McDonald, had expected the subway to pose engineering nightmares. Still, given the chance to turn over the work to someone else, Parsons declined. A few months later, his affection for his friend nearly got Parsons killed.

  * * *

  DESPITE ALL OF HIS TROUBLES in Murray Hill, by early June Shaler’s work was almost done. His crew had finished building two separate tunnels extending from Thirty-fourth Street to Forty-first Street, and he invited Parsons and his assistant chief engineer for the Rapid Transit Commission, George Rice, to visit for an inspection. They arrived on June 17, a few minutes before eight o’clock, and all three men walked down into the ground. The easterly tunnel was the one damaged by the collapse, and Parsons was impressed by its rebuilding. The walls had been grouted, and the only step remaining was a concrete lining. It was a few weeks from completion.

  The trio emerged from the first tunnel at Forty-first Street and walked over to the westerly one. This one caused more concern because the rock through which it was dug was less secure than the first. Sh
aler wanted advice on the best way to prop up the roof of the tunnel and avoid another collapse. As they neared the end of the tunnel, passing under Thirty-ninth Street, Parsons noticed a boulder overhead that looked precarious. His engineering mind told him that it was a soft rock, and, sure enough, when he stuck a long pole out to touch it, a piece dislodged and fell to the ground. That was a dangerous sign. If a simple poke could cause it to crumble, serious tunneling would no doubt bring it crashing down.

  “That stone doesn’t look right to me,” Parsons said to Shaler. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to turn back.”

  “With all due respect, General,” Shaler answered, “the tunnel is perfectly safe.” He even stepped out from beneath the wooden bracing in a show of bravado.

  As the three men were discussing how to deal with the problem of propping up the roof, the exact boulder Parsons had poked suddenly broke apart, and a thousand pounds of rubble crushed Shaler to the ground, striking his head first, then his body, burying him alive. Parsons and Rice miraculously felt only a few pebbles land at their feet, and they rushed to dig Shaler out. They called for help, but when the laborers had heard the sound of falling rock, they ran up to safety and refused to come back in. Unable to move, but still conscious, Shaler looked up at McDonald and Parsons without any wincing or crying and said, “I think my back is broken.”

  By the time he’d been freed, hoisted out of the tunnel, and rushed to Presbyterian Hospital, his injuries included a broken spine, a severe scalp wound, and a badly injured leg. “It was simply Major Shaler’s ill fortune that he happened to be in the wrong spot,” Parsons said. “I might have been standing there.” Shaler’s wife, mother, and father rushed to be with him. Two weeks later, on June 29, his injuries were too much to overcome. Major Ira Shaler was not even forty years old. The next day’s headline in The Times summarized the life of the engineer sadly: MURRAY HILL DYNAMITE EXPLOSION, ARMORY FIRE, AND A CAVE-IN RUINED HIM FINANCIALLY—THEN A BOULDER STRUCK HIM IN THE TUNNEL.

  Shaler’s death shook Parsons, and he briefly considered quitting, telling Belmont, “I’ve lost my best friend down there. I can’t stomach this business anymore.” Belmont convinced him to stay on, and in a rare moment of public emotion, Parsons called Shaler a man of integrity and charm. “His sense of justice towards his employees won the regard of all with whom he came in contact,” Parsons said. “Therefore his sudden and sad death was felt as a personal loss by everyone connected with the work.” True to his being, Parsons never let Shaler’s demise slow down the subway’s progress. He ordered the work in Murray Hill to continue without Shaler. And it was finished on time only a few weeks later.

  * * *

  THREE AND A HALF YEARS after Parsons slammed his ceremonial pickax into the ground at the corner of Bleecker and Greene, New York was looking like its old self again. McDonald and Parsons worked well together; even when they argued, it passed quickly. Their most public spat happened at a board meeting of the transit commission in September 1903, when McDonald griped that Parsons was holding up his work on lower Broadway by not issuing permits fast enough. “We have the tools and machinery but we are not allowed to work,” McDonald complained to the commissioners. Parsons did not back down, and afterward he joked about the confrontation with a reporter who asked about the clash. “Clash?” Parsons answered. “I know of no clash, it is just a difference of opinion.”

  By the fall of 1903, there were still more than five thousand workers on the job, but nearly all of them were invisible to pedestrians. They were underground. The streets had been scooped up, the tunnels had been built, and the repaving was mostly complete. A stranger walking through the city for the first time would have no idea that only a dozen or so feet beneath them lay one of the most complex and impressive engineering feats man had achieved. Bright green strips of turf intersecting with gravel paths began to appear in the median of upper Broadway. New street lamps were installed. The scars of Major Ira Shaler faded away, and Murray Hill finally looked like Murray Hill again, as massive derricks and small toolsheds were taken apart and taken away. The pieces of white canvas in the windows were gone, and new glass filled the windows that had been damaged in the dynamite blast. For the first time in two years, a visitor to the Park Avenue Hotel would not look out a window at a neighborhood that appeared ravaged by a cyclone. Streets were smooth again, thanks to three separate repaving efforts and workers who got down on their hands and knees to smooth over the gaps between the cobblestones.

  By the fall of 1903, if a curious sightseer managed to wander down into the tunnel at Columbus Circle, they would have seen a completely finished underground subway station, with walls painted bright white, lights turned on, and shiny reflectors gleaming to help guide the motormen through every inch of the finished tracks. The only thing missing were the trains.

  There was, however, one visible sign on the surface of Manhattan that something was amiss. When the first subway contracts were signed back in 1900, William Whitney’s Fifth Avenue neighbor, the sixty-five-year-old silver-haired Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie, was awarded the bid to supply the steel for the job, 72,945 tons. The $10 million bid was believed to be the largest single steel contract in history for one steelmaker to supply for one project. That one behemoth, the Carnegie Steel Company, was able to manufacture the entire subway’s supply of steel was a sign of just how enormous the steel industry had become at the turn of the century, thanks to the fortunes of the Gilded Age robber barons. Though Carnegie had half a dozen steel-manufacturing rivals in the 1890s, none were serious competitors. During the decade, Carnegie’s production exploded from 322,000 tons in 1890 to almost four million tons by 1900, a pace that was impossible to match. The subway project required enough steel to lay down tracks from New York to Cincinnati, about six hundred miles. The vast majority of it was to be used in the construction of the actual tunnels, where steel beams were placed to keep the streets from collapsing. But plenty was left over for the final critical part of the project: the tracks.

  From the bottom of the island to the top, in one nearly continuous chain, four thousand tons of steel rails lay end to end wherever there was a tunnel underground. A passerby might walk down a street one day and see ten rails, return the next day and see six, see two the following day, and then see none. It was as if a monster from beneath the surface was gobbling them up one by one. The work could be heard but not seen, as the hundred-pound rails were slid into the tunnels on mule-pulled carts, hammered into the ground with spikes, and secured with closely placed hard pine cross-ties. Tracks in a tunnel were the best indication that the end was in sight.

  * * *

  THE REASON THE WORK HAD gone so quickly was the cut-and-cover method Parsons had chosen. New Yorkers became so accustomed to it that they began to sarcastically call the tunnels Parsons’s Ditch. But up at 158th Street, from the first day construction began in the spring of 1901, it was apparent that no trench could be dug there. The ground was too hard, the schist too close to the surface. The tunnel needed to be dug through the schist so deep that Parsons planned for elevators big enough to carry dozens of passengers at once down to stations at 168th Street, 181st Street, and 191st Street, where the tracks would run 180 feet below the streets, to this day still the system’s deepest station. Two miles of tunnel between Washington Heights and Hillside Avenue in the Bronx needed to be built, and the only way it could happen was by blasting through the earth with dynamite. This was where McDonald’s experience might help. The only tunnel in the world that could compare to the Washington Heights work was the same long tunnel where dynamite was first used for controlled blasting, the Hoosac Tunnel.

  Because working on the Washington Heights tunnel was different and more dangerous than creating a cut-and-cover trench, McDonald wanted more-experienced men on the job. It was more like mining. The moment the Miners’ Union got word about the two-mile subway tunnel, its members came running from around the world, from Colorado, Pennsylvania, Ireland, Scotl
and, Canada, and Italy. They knew nothing about “subways” or “nickel fares” or “transfers,” words that were meaningless to them. They were pugnacious and jolly, solid men who smoked pipes, told long yarns, and followed orders to the letter. They crossed continents and oceans for work with nothing but a bag on their back, and they put down a bed wherever it was cheapest and closest to their daily job. The drillers made the most, $3.75 a day, the ordinary miners the least, $2 a day. Their routine rarely changed. They climbed into the earth, grunted and sweated for eight or ten hours a day, and then emerged back into civilization coated in filth, blinking and squinting as they readjusted to the sunlight.

  But for men who were used to working deep inside mountains, in isolated rural lands where the only company they could find were other miners, the chance to work in a big city surrounded by pubs and brothels and restaurants was irresistible. It’s no wonder they came by the thousands and, almost overnight, transformed New York City into, of all things, a mecca for miners. Who needed sleep when a day of tunneling could be followed by a night of carousing or whoring or whatever else their few dollars a day could buy them?