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

by Most, Doug

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  BOSS TWEED’S VIADUCT PLAN was absurd. It called for forty-foot stone arches to be built throughout the city to carry elevated railroad lines. And the astronomical $80 million tab would not only be footed by New York taxpayers, but Tweed arranged the financing in such a way that he personally stood to reap a fortune from it.

  Both bills passed easily, and they landed in Governor Hoffman’s hands in early 1871. New Yorkers anxiously waited for him to decide between a clever subway that would relieve their city once and for all of the unbearable congestion or one more attempt by their corrupt state senator to hold them hostage. What nobody knew at the time was that three years earlier, in 1868, when Hoffman was running for governor, Tweed had sidled up to him one afternoon at a campaign stop and whispered in his ear that if the governor stuck by his side, he’d be the Democratic nominee for president in 1872.

  It’s likely that promise was still echoing in Hoffman’s ears in March 1871 as he considered both Beach’s bill and Tweed’s proposal. Beach’s bill came first, and he swiftly vetoed it. Legislators tried to override Hoffman’s veto, but Tweed’s influence, along with the opposition of the city’s chief public works engineer, were too much to overcome and the override failed by one vote. To no one’s surprise, Hoffman then signed Tweed’s Viaduct Plan into law.

  It was a devastating blow for Beach. He had stuck to his honest roots. He had persevered. He had succeeded in building a tunnel like nothing anybody had seen before, a subway that people wanted to ride. And he had still lost. Unable to extend his one-block tunnel any further, as each day passed the curiosity around it wore off and the crowds thinned. New ideas were gaining greater interest, like the one Tweed had proposed, only more refined. After all, why tear up the town to bury tracks underground when you can build tracks overhead on pillars with much less disruption and still reduce congestion on the streets? Maybe the elevated rail really was the future, after all.

  As for Beach, he had a subway to nowhere. And he could not keep pouring his own money into it just to keep it going for the sheer novelty. He needed one last break to keep his dream alive, and New Yorkers were pulling for him. At a humdrum town meeting on congestion, a lawyer and respected judge named Sanford E. Church summed up the feelings of the masses. “Next to the air we breathe, or the food we eat,” he said, “no one thing in city life touches so vitally the comfort and interest of every citizen, of every condition, in every calling, every day, as this question of city transit.”

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  ONE DAY EARLY IN July 1871, a young man walked into the offices of George Jones, the publisher of The New York Times. He said his name was Matthew O’Rourke, that he used to work as a bookkeeper in the city’s comptroller office, and that he had tried to tell his story to other newspapers, but none of them seemed interested. He also used to be a former military reporter, which is why when he saw some odd claims that had been filed under “Armories and Drill Rooms” for half a million dollars, he didn’t ignore them. And when he left his job a few months earlier, he copied a few dozen of the suspicious entries. Jones, whose newspaper had spent almost a year looking into Tweed’s Tammany Hall ring, was almost giddy with excitement when he heard O’Rourke’s story.

  The paper’s first story corroborating O’Rourke’s details ran on July 8, under the headline: MORE RING VILLAINY: GIGANTIC FRAUDS IN THE RENTAL OF ARMORIES. And in its coverage, The Times asked the same question New Yorkers were asking: “Who is responsible for these frauds?”

  Of course it was Tweed. Beach had his opening.

  It took him a year and a half to scrape together one last effort to get his subway bill back before lawmakers. It was the same plan as before, except for one dramatic change. After two years of operating his tunnel, Beach finally conceded that pneumatic propulsion was not the future, after all. Blowing such a huge volume of air required tremendous energy that was too costly to sustain, and too hard to control over great distances. Moving packages was one thing. Moving people was another. Reluctantly, Beach embraced the idea he had loathed at the start, and he proposed steam power for his tunnel. The smoke, steam, and sparks London was dealing with were all surmountable with engineering changes, he believed, and he couldn’t deny that steam was a proven power source.

  On April 9, 1873, legislators passed Beach’s subway bill again. But it was too late. He didn’t have investors lined up, and when the economy collapsed on September 18, 1873, triggering the country’s worst depression, far worse than Black Friday in 1869, Beach was done for good. Banks folded. Businesses went under. Millions lost their jobs and all their money in the panic of 1873. And New York, the nation’s financial and cultural capital, became a city full of the homeless and hungry, with more than a quarter of its people suddenly out of work. Even Boss Tweed finally was brought down. After his arrest in 1871, it took almost two years for prosecutors to convict him, but they did, and on November 19, 1873, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison.

  By then, Tweed’s most stubborn foe was bankrupt and exhausted. After operating his one-car, one-station subway for almost three years, Alfred Ely Beach, still only forty-eight years old, abandoned the dream he had pursued for a quarter century and began to rent out his tunnel to anyone who would pay him. It was a pathetic end to what was once a promising vision. The pneumatic subway tunnel was converted into a shooting gallery and then eventually into a vault to store wines. Unable to continue affording the upkeep of his tunnel, Beach sealed it up for good in 1874 and returned to his roots as the editor of Scientific American.

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  YEARS LATER, A SOLITARY FIGURE with white hair, sitting on a wine crate, could sometimes be seen staring off into the darkness. He had failed in his promise to deliver New Yorkers a subway. But that would not be Alfred Beach’s legacy. Until he came along, the idea of walking down a staircase beneath their streets, standing on a concrete platform, and waiting for a train to whisk them away through a dark and mysterious tunnel sounded like some sort of fantastical science fiction tale to New Yorkers. Now, when you peel back the modern layer of any big American city and look beneath its skin, below the steel and glass skyscrapers, below the cars, trucks, taxis, bikes, and pedestrians, that’s where Alfred Beach’s legacy endures. In the subway tunnels beneath the streets.

  Embracing that world underground did not come easily for man.

  2

  WHERE SPIRITS, THE DEVIL, AND THE DEAD LIVE

  FEAR OF THE UNDERGROUND HAD BEEN INGRAINED in humans for thousands of years. Long before Beach published his dream on the pages of Scientific American, the underground was seen as an underworld, a terrifying place inhabited by Lucifer himself, deadly spirits, and any number of angry, evil devils. That belief began to weaken with the age of the great explorers in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, but people remained uneasy with the mystery of what might be down there, living or dead. And literary novels of the times provided little comfort. They were crafted in such a way as to be so eerily close to what peoples’ forebears had believed that the public struggled to separate truth from fiction. In 1787, the English author William Beckford published a popular gothic work called Vathek, in which a powerful heroic figure strikes a pact with the oriental Satan and enters a subterranean palace by way of a secret opening in a rock. Deep inside the earth, Caliph Vathek encounters a pale species with glimmering eyes and burning hearts. He is consumed by their evil and filled with hatred. This, the Argentine essayist Jorge Luis Borges, would write years later, was “the first truly atrocious Hell in literature.” Vathek’s journey influenced not only the reading public but also future writers, including Keats, Byron, and Edgar Allan Poe, who took a particular interest in the idea of a world underground. In 1838 Poe wrote about a young stowaway on a whaling ship in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Though it was a work of fiction, Poe drew his plot from credible theories that the earth was as hollow as a balloon and that deep inside its core breathed any number of undiscovered civilizations. Only as scientists lea
rned more about the earth and technology got better did people begin to finally accept that the hidden worlds and sea creatures described by Poe and later by nineteenth-century science fiction writers like Jules Verne in Journey to the Center of the Earth and H. G. Wells in The War of the Worlds really were fiction.

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  STICKS, ROCKS, PICKS, SHOVELS, even fingers. These were the first tools of tunnel digging. Tunneling is older than Rome and the Egyptian pyramids. The earliest tunnels were typically the work of slaves, whose only choice to avoid torture and beatings was to descend into the underground and to dig for their lives. Freezing water seeping out of the ground numbed their feet and helped them work since they could no longer feel the cuts the jagged edges were inflicting on their soles. There were no helmets to protect their skulls or gloves to protect their skin. There were no wheelbarrows to cart out the rocks and dirt they loosened. They carried out backbreaking loads in sacks made of animal skin. Catastrophes struck without warning, from floods to cave-ins to rickety ladders collapsing. And with no explosives to blast through the earth, the workers lit huge fires right up against the face of the tunnel. Once the rock was glowing hot, they splashed it with cold water, sometimes mixed with vinegar. The primitive combination of heat and then a cold chemical reaction helped crack and chip the rock. Not surprisingly, death by scalding was common. But even worse, the fires sucked up what little oxygen there was underground, suffocating the slaves. If the fire didn’t work, another method used was to spin metal tubes into a rock until a hole was just big enough to drive a wooden wedge into it. The wedge was drenched with water, which caused it to expand and split the rock and push the tunnel forward. Both methods were crude and dangerous and slow. It was only because human life had such little value that hundreds of deaths in a single mishap could be dismissed so lightly.

  Monte Salviano was tunneling in its infancy. It took thirty thousand Roman laborers thirteen years, from 54 B.C. to 41 B.C., to build the three-mile rock tunnel for moving water through the Italian peak. A long and narrow tunnel runs near Jerusalem, between the Pool of the Virgins and the Pool of Siloam, which is believed to have been dug before Christ’s birth to carry water into Jerusalem in the event of an attack by the Assyrians. Aztecs built tunnels to mine for gold, silver, and copper; the Incas dug them to drain large lakes; and the Babylonians dug a tunnel to divert the Euphrates River. War was another primary reason for building the earliest tunnels, allowing fighters to sneak up on their enemy and attack with no warning, burning their tunnel behind them as they stormed forward so nobody could escape.

  The English led the modern tunneling revolution, digging underground not because they had to, but because they dared to. In 1766, work began on the Harecastle canal tunnel in Staffordshire, England. It was a mile and a half long, nine feet wide, and twelve feet high, just large enough to allow a seven-foot barge to pass through. But so tight was the fit that the only way to propel the boat forward was for the crewmen to lie flat on the deck on their backs and stretch out their legs to touch the roof and sides of the tunnel to push the barge along. It must have been a terrifying experience for these leggers, as they were called. Their barge would slide into blackness, with no light to see up, down, behind, or ahead. Reaching out with a hand or leg would find the wall, but it also might encounter a sharp rock jutting out. The sounds of rippling water, the creaking barge, the heavy breathing of the men next to you, or maybe screeching bats echoing loudly in the tunnel all enhanced the fears. Those fears persisted for decades as more tunnels were built. At the Saint-Quentin Canal in France in the early 1800s, barges stacked up at the entrance with no captain willing to go first. Authorities had to offer free canal trips for life before the first man would finally agree to take his boat through and break up the logjam.

  Americans were determined to prove that they were no less bold than the Europeans. Between 1818 and 1821, the men who owned the Schuylkill and Susquehanna Canal in Pennsylvania went out of their way to create a right angle through a hill in the path of their canal, just to show that it could be done. The Auburn Tunnel was the first transportation tunnel built in the United States, used to move coal down the Schuylkill. But at just 450 feet it was a novelty more than a practicality, and it was soon shortened and eliminated.

  Canal tunnels were an efficient way for commercial transportation to go through hills and mountains, since laborers did not have to rely on horses and donkeys to trudge slowly over and around them. There was no greater proof of the value of a well-placed canal than the opening of the Erie Canal. New York in 1825 was a city of 170,000 residents, an insignificant blip on the world’s map when Tokyo, London, and Paris had all surpassed one million people. Nearly all of those New Yorkers were squeezed into the southernmost portion of Manhattan, getting around mostly by horseback or on foot. Only the wealthy had the means to venture north if they desired, traveling by horse up the narrow, unpaved Post Road to explore brooks and ponds, see deer and rabbits, and even pick wildflowers and tulips in the largely desolate northern half of the island. If someone really wanted countryside, they could take Post Road all the way through the village of Harlem and ride a ferry at Kingsbridge across the Harlem River.

  But when the Erie Canal opened for business on October 25, 1825, all of that began to change. It connected New York’s Hudson Valley to the Great Lakes region, reducing the time to move freight from the city to the upper Mississippi Valley from twenty-six days to six days and transforming Gotham into the hub of the nation’s imports and exports. Between 1820 and 1870, three out of every four immigrants who came into the United States entered through New York, and by 1880 New York City’s population had exploded to 1.2 million. The canal also drove an emotional wedge between New York City and Boston, at the time the first and fourth largest cities in the country. When Massachusetts decided that instead of following New York’s lead in building waterways, it would focus on building railroads, it was like the small brother telling the big brother it was time they went their separate ways. And the big brother built up some resentment. When Massachusetts invited New York’s governor to the opening of yet another railroad in 1851, the invitation was declined in a threatening tone. “We have seen you invading our soil, filling our valleys, boring our mountains at some points, leveling them at others, and turning your steam engines loose upon us to run up and down, roaming at large throughout our borders,” New York’s governor wrote back. “I must warn you to pause and take breath before making fresh tracks upon our territory.” Massachusetts and its capital city would not listen. And decades later, when it came time to resolve their urban congestion woes, Boston would again follow its own instincts rather than mimic what New York had done.

  Meanwhile, with each new wave of immigrants arriving in the second half of the nineteenth century, squeezing everyone into the fingernail of the island of Manhattan became impossible, and the city’s newest arrivals pushed their way north. Walking was soon no longer an option to get everywhere. The horses would feel the strain, too. And those rivers and bays that surrounded Manhattan, separating it from New Jersey, Brooklyn, and the bucolic Hudson Valley, were suddenly obstacles that needed to be bypassed so the growth could continue. Ferries were too slow. Suspension bridges were just beginning to be built. New Yorkers were about to learn that there was only one direction to look to ease their city’s congestion. Down.

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  IT HAD TO BE the strangest dinner party ever thrown. Beneath the streets of London on Saturday evening, November 10, 1827, crimson velvet drapes covered the brick arches; two long tables covered in white tablecloths filled the floor space; large, handsome candelabras lighted with portable gas provided the light; and the British army’s uniformed Band of the Coldstream Guards supplied the music, playing their favorite sounds from the romantic German opera Der Freischütz. More than a hundred men came together for a banquet beneath the streets of London, not so they could celebrate the unusual tunnel they were digging, but to try to reassure the skeptical public that it wo
uld be safe to come down there once it was finished. At one of the tables sat British royalty. At the other table sat a hundred anonymous bricklayers and miners, or navvies as they were known. They were not the bottom of the working class, but rather the top of it, honest, independent, well-compensated men who wore tall and sturdy laced boots and kerchiefs in their shirts. They were also not ones to miss an opportunity to get drunk at someone else’s expense, and so on this night they bent their sore and bandaged fingers around glasses of warm beer mixed with gin and allowed themselves a rare evening of merriment away from the daily grind and grime. When the festivities wound down, the workers raised a special pickax and spade, along with their glasses, and shouted out a toast to the man who had dared to construct the tunnel.

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  ALMOST FROM THE DAY he was born in 1769 in Normandy, Marc Isambard Brunel’s life was one adventure after another, filled with rebellion, bankruptcy, jail, and inventions. When his father pushed him to become a priest, Brunel refused and spent his teens sketching and earning a measly living painting. After just three lessons in trigonometry as a teenager, Brunel astonished his teacher by vowing to determine the height of the church spire in their town. His mind worked faster than others’, and he began to show the same prodigy-like qualities as a European peer of his born a decade earlier. Sadly, their lives and accomplishments did not overlap for long. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died at age thirty-five, leaving the world to wonder how much more he might have achieved in a full life. Perhaps he would have found the same success in his later years as Brunel did. Brunel drifted from Paris north to the city of Rouen in his twenties, and then one summer’s day in 1793 he hurried to catch an American ship bound for New York, only to discover on board that he had lost his passport. No matter, for when the authorities asked for his papers, his calligraphy and architectural skills saved him. “Having borrowed a passport from one of his fellow passengers,” Brunel’s biographer wrote, “he soon produced a copy, so admirably executed in every minute detail, even to the seal, that it was deemed proof against all scrutiny.” His forged passport worked, and Brunel soon found work in upstate New York as a land surveyor. It was there that he had the fortune to meet the recently resigned U.S. treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton. Brunel flourished with Hamilton’s assistance, and before long he had been hired as the chief engineer for New York City. During this time he designed a two-thousand-seat playhouse on Chatham Street in New York and he very nearly designed one of the most important buildings in American history. Brunel’s drawings for a new capitol building to be constructed in Washington impressed the judges of a $500 prize offered by Thomas Jefferson, but his design was deemed too expensive to build and the winner was a late entry by a little-known physician, painter, and amateur architect. Brunel stayed on as New York’s chief engineer until he felt the pull of home, and on January 20, 1799, he set sail for England.