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

by Most, Doug

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  For MIMI, JULIA, AND BEN

  Constructing the tunnel will be simple, just like cellar digging.

  —JOHN B. MCDONALD, THE FIRST CONTRACTOR HIRED TO BUILD THE NEW YORK CITY SUBWAY, JANUARY 18, 1900

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction: Two Cities, One Crisis

  Part One: The Visionaries

  1. A Secret Subway

  2. Where Spirits, the Devil, and the Dead Live

  3. A Family for the Ages

  4. History Made in Richmond

  Part Two: The Blizzard and the Billionaires

  5. The Blizzard That Changed Everything

  6. New York City’s Moses

  7. William Whitney’s Missed Opportunity

  8. The Engineer and the Piano Maker

  9. The Rise and Fall of Henry Whitney

  Part Three: Tragedies, Triumphs

  10. Bidding to Build History

  11. Meehanville

  12. Boom!

  13. “First Car off the Earth!”

  14. The Brains, the Builder, and the Banker

  15. Playing with Dynamite

  16. October 27, 1904

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Photographs

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  TWO CITIES, ONE CRISIS

  IN THE SECOND HALF OF the nineteenth century, the horse-pulled streetcar, clip-clopping along at five miles per hour and filled with an unbearable stench, slowly began to cripple two great American cities. In Boston and New York, there were too many people and no safe, fast, reliable way for them to move from one neighborhood to the next. In the summer heat, carriages inched forward until the animals reared up their legs in frustration, and police had to come out swinging their clubs to restore peace. During the winter it was no better. Horses struggled to get their footing in the snow and ice and were driven to exhaustion or sometimes death. When a solution to the problem finally emerged—a subway—it was rejected time and again, either by corrupt politicians, selfish businessmen, or terrified citizens. “A menace to the health of the public,” a man of the times said. A newspaper article went even further, describing a subway ride like “living in a tomb.”

  This is a story about fabulously wealthy Gilded Age industrialists and dirt-poor immigrants during a period when Fifth Avenue mansions and Beacon Hill brownstones stood blocks from sheet-covered shanties and rat-infested tenements. But it’s also about an age of innovation, an exhilarating time after the Civil War when the telephone, lightbulb, typewriter, cash register, dishwasher, sewing machine, electric motor, and even dynamite were born of a need to make life simpler.

  As the pressure mounted on Boston and New York in the final decade of the nineteenth century to reduce the congestion on their streets and expand their livable boundaries, it was an unlikely pair of brothers from a tiny town in central Massachusetts who rose up to help. They were powerful men. Respected, ambitious, and rich, they were willing to bribe whomever they needed and able to buy whatever they wanted. Two years and two hundred miles apart, they would lean on each other, learn from each other, love each other, and, in one particular moment of desperation, they would even share their most important employee, a brilliant young engineer, with each other. But they could not have been more different.

  The older brother was a late bloomer who lived near Boston. He was short, stocky, nearly deaf after a childhood bout with scarlet fever, and walked with a stoop. He might have amounted to nothing if not for his father’s help. The younger brother, living in New York City, was the family star. Athletic and lean, he attended Yale and Harvard, married into a fortune, rescued the United States Navy, and was recruited to run for president. Together they came from a long line of Puritans, a family that over four centuries would claim ties to the Revolutionary War, the cotton gin, the color motion picture, a world-famous museum, and even a baseball team called the Mets. Of their family’s many achievements, these brothers would notch the most significant one of all. They helped launch the birth of the subway in America and, with it, a new era of rapid urban transit.

  This is as much a tale of American ingenuity and the perseverance of man as it is about two powerful siblings and two rival cities. Boston and New York, in their pursuit to move their people faster, safer, and farther, would each experience death and destruction, breakthroughs and breakdowns, thrilling firsts and embarrassing failures, all while keeping a close eye on the other’s progress. The stories of their two subways would captivate and galvanize their citizens and drag out for decades, straddling the end of one century and the start of another. In one of these cities, the race underground actually started twenty-five years before it did in the other, on a mild fall afternoon not long after the final shot of the Civil War had been fired.

  That was the day an odd-looking, churchgoing, opera-loving skinny young inventor looked out onto his city’s streets and decided he could no longer tolerate the mayhem.

  Part One

  THE VISIONARIES

  1

  A SECRET SUBWAY

  THEY CAME ON FOOT, AND BY CARRIAGE, and from the city and around the country. On September 12, 1867, thousands of people lined up outside the Fourteenth Street armory, a hulking gray building in downtown New York, to see what the future held for them. The women wore hoop skirts and their finest bonnets, the men came in their dark suits and perfectly knotted ties. The American Institute Fair was more than an event. It was a monument to the times, the place to come and see the latest crazy ideas that the inventors of the day had dreamed up and to get a glimpse of the fantastic future. This year one particular innovation, which a reporter for The New York Times had seen during a sneak preview and raved about in an article, was turning the thirty-seventh year of the fair into a spectacle before it even opened.

  The American Institute Fair, started in 1829 as a way to encourage innovation in the country, showcased a collection of novelties, some practical, some bizarre. For a number of years the fair had no permanent home, until it grew so big that organizers decided it deserved its own space. A group of financiers, including August Belmont and William Cullen Bryant, two of New York’s richest men, imagined a warehouse-sized building more grand than London’s glittering Crystal Palace. And on Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue, in the same place where George Washington’s troops had once been chased across a field by redcoats, that’s what they built. Their own Crystal Palace was shaped like a Greek cross and topped by an enormous 123-foot-high dome, the tallest in America. With eighteen hundred tons of iron and fifteen thousand panes of clear enameled glass, there was nothing else like it. When it opened on July 14, 1853, President Franklin Pierce was there to welcome in a new era when dazzling advances in technology and science would define the country’s direction.

  One year later at the fair, a clever mechanic named Elisha Graves Otis showed how climbing hundreds of stairs no longer had to be an obsta
cle for cities to grow upward. His elevator, a new invention that was pulled up by ropes, was not only safe but heralded the age of buildings much taller than eight, ten, or twelve stories. With a crowd standing around his elevator, Otis rode it to its highest level and, for the riveted audience below, reached out and cut the elevator’s only rope. Instead of plummeting down, he fell only a few inches and then stopped, showing everybody how the safety catch he had installed worked.

  A few years after that, in 1856, another promising inventor and entrepreneur brought a typewriter he’d been tinkering with to the fair. A short and skinny thirty-year-old man with slicked-back black hair and a razor-thin mustache, Alfred Beach was a devoted churchgoer and opera lover who rose early and went to bed early. When he was awake, he was in perpetual motion, exercising regularly and working with one thing or another. He despised vacations. Any spare time that he had, he spent toying with wires, cables, or any contraption he could get his hands on, always with the hope of understanding how it worked and how it could be improved.

  In 1848, after Beach had spent almost an entire year exploring the inner workings of the typewriter, he discovered that by having the keys strike both sides of the paper rather than one side, embossed, or raised, letters would be created that could be felt. He knew that if the letters could be felt with the fingertips, then the blind would be able to read. The device worked, and it won him praise from fellow inventors and affirmed in his own mind a desire to do something even greater. It took him years to refine his idea enough to where he was comfortable showing it to the world. And when he finally brought it to the American Institute Fair in 1856, it was a hit. It was recognized as the most advanced typewriting machine yet and won first prize and a gold medal.

  Those were the sorts of inventions that drew people, sometimes more than five thousand a day, to the fair every year. And Crystal Palace was as much of an attraction as the inventions inside. The palace was described as “beautiful beyond description.” It was also thought to be indestructible thanks to its cast-iron beams. But on October 5, 1858, with two thousand people roaming the exhibitions, one of the storage rooms caught on fire. In minutes the flames had shot through the wood flooring and began melting the walls and roof. As the crowd raced outside to safety, Crystal Palace was swallowed up by sparks, smoke, and flames until it collapsed into a heap. Days later, just five years after its celebrated opening, it was nothing but a pile of rubble. Scavengers came to sift through the remains in hopes of finding a souvenir from the building that was supposed to signal America’s new dawn of invention.

  Erecting a new permanent home for the fair was out of the question. In 1867, its home was the Fourteenth Street armory, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, a building as plain as Crystal Palace was extravagant. Inside, there were tables and booths showing off the dreams of hundreds of inventors: medical instruments, pianos, sewing machines, steam engines, wagons, sleighs, electric telegraphs, boots, hats, gloves, kitchen utensils, furniture, artificial limbs, wigs, fishing tackle, pocket knives, umbrellas, and toys. There were inventions that rolled along the floor and others that lined the walls. But it was the latest idea from Beach, this one suspended from the ceiling, that crowds flocked to see.

  * * *

  ALFRED ELY BEACH WAS BORN into a prestigious family on September 1, 1826, in Springfield, Massachusetts, an hour west of Boston. His father, Moses Yale Beach, owned The New York Sun, a popular daily newspaper that sold for a penny, mostly to the city’s working class. He sent his boy to Monson Academy, one of the very best private schools, near Springfield. Alfred Beach learned from his father at an early age that it was fine to dream big but more important to respect an honest day’s work. His first taste of labor was as a newsboy, hawking The Sun on the streets of New York. From there he moved on to work in the press room, where he set type and left each day covered in ink and sweat. And after that he moved up to the newsroom, first to do menial accounting work, and then to work as a reporter.

  He loved working with his father. But he dreamed of striking out on his own. In 1845, another young man from Massachusetts named Rufus Porter presented him with that chance. Porter had just published the very first issue of a weekly magazine he created, called Scientific American. Four pages long, it sold for a subscription rate of two dollars a year. The first edition included a note from Porter explaining how useful he believed his publication could be. “As a family newspaper,” Porter wrote, “it will convey more useful intelligence to children and young people, than five times its cost in school instruction.”

  Scientific American was published every Thursday morning and was filled with original engravings of new inventions, improvements, or ideas, along with scientific essays, poems, and even things completely unrelated to science, like moral and religious musings. But Porter saw himself as more than an inventor or editor. He was also an artist who enjoyed painting portraits. Not surprisingly, he quickly lost interest in a magazine devoted to science, and, barely ten months after he founded Scientific American, Porter went looking for a buyer.

  Beach was twenty years old and because of his father’s newspaper saw the value of the printed word. But he didn’t have the money to go it alone. He needed a partner. Thinking back to his days at his private school in Massachusetts, he reached out to a good friend that he thought might make the perfect business partner. Orson Desaix Munn moved to New York, and in July 1846 the two of them paid $800 for the tiny, obscure technical magazine and its subscription list of two hundred names. It marked the beginning of a friendship and partnership that would last nearly fifty years.

  Scientific American had only a few hundred subscribers under Rufus Porter. But as Alfred Beach and Orson Munn learned once they took it over, inventors of the day saw real value in the magazine. The inventors wanted help from like-minded dreamers who saw the potential in their ideas. Beach and Munn had barely settled into their offices in 1846 when they were besieged with letters from inventors, or sometimes with unannounced visits. The requests were always the same: Help me apply for a patent and secure it, and I’ll pay whatever it takes. Beach and Munn realized that Scientific American was more than a magazine. It was a trusted brand.

  Late in 1846, the two launched a new business. If an inventor had an idea, the owners of the Scientific American Patent Agency would happily take their money, help them write the perfect patent application, and track the progress of it once it reached the U.S. Patent Office in Washington. There was no other business like it in the country, and before long Beach was traveling to Washington every two weeks to monitor the hundreds of patents he or Munn helped write. Eventually the business was filing three thousand patents a year and Beach was forced to split his time between New York and a branch office in Washington, directly across the street from the patent office. The patent business earned Beach a fortune and some measure of fame. He became a pied piper of sorts for the American inventor, the one they all sought out for advice, opinions, or help with a patent. Thomas Edison walked in one day to show Beach a device he called the phonograph. Beach turned a crank on Edison’s small machine and a voice piped up, “Good morning, sir. How are you? How do you like the talking box?” He liked it, and he helped Edison file a patent. He also would help Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel F. B. Morse, and thousands more.

  But it was Scientific American that gave Beach the platform he craved to promote his own personal interests and inventions. Beach and Munn were able to quickly resurrect the magazine by focusing its content less on the highly technical science stories and more on what they knew best: curious inventions and practical, interesting patents. Simply by printing a weekly list of patents given to them directly from the U.S. Patent Office, Beach and Munn increased the number of subscriptions to Scientific American, and it took off: by 1848, not even two years after they bought it, the circulation exceeded ten thousand readers.

  Beach was becoming a man of real importance. When his father decided in 1848 to hand over management of his newspaper to his two sons, Moses
and Alfred, Alfred’s prominence reached even greater heights. He owned the most respected and lucrative science magazine in the country. He had the attention of every serious and not-so-serious inventor across the land. And now he was running a daily newspaper with more than fifty thousand readers in the nation’s largest city. He had a vast and growing audience riveted on his every opinion. And he was only twenty-two years old.

  * * *

  THE MID–NINETEENTH CENTURY WAS a magical time for anybody who loved to tinker and had good ideas and good hands. Inventors were changing the way people lived their lives and ran their businesses. Elias Howe, not yet thirty years old, introduced his sewing machine in 1846, and within a few years the garment-making industry was revolutionized and clothes became more affordable. In 1847, a middle-aged inventor from Charlestown, Massachusetts, named Samuel Morse, who had been working for more than a decade to perfect his idea of speeding up long-distance, person-to-person communications, received a patent for an invention called the telegraph. A year later, a blacksmith from New Bedford, Massachusetts, changed the whaling industry with a new type of harpoon. And farming was in the midst of huge change. The American economy relied heavily on the success of the farmer, who might spend an entire day doing backbreaking work in the fields to plow or harvest only a single acre. But as 1850 approached, each passing year brought farmers more relief. A grain elevator invented in Buffalo dramatically sped up the hoisting of grain from ships into bins. The production of artificial manure to help crops grow began to take off, and the artificial-fertilizer industry was born. New inventions allowed farmers who were previously able to manage only a dozen acres to handle a hundred or more. Amid all this upheaval, no industry underwent more dramatic change than the transportation industry.

  In 1825, most commuters who lived in cities got to work the same way. They walked. Only the rich could afford to own or hire a private carriage, and the idea of multiple people riding together in the same vehicle seemed farfetched. New York City had nearly two hundred thousand residents, most of whom were crowded into a small portion of the island. Only as more immigrants arrived and the population grew did the footprint of the livable parts of New York expand. That’s when Abraham Brower saw an opportunity.