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

by Most, Doug

  It started as a gentle and mild rain during the day, hardly ominous. But it picked up Saturday evening, and the wind started to whistle through the streets, and the temperature plummeted. Only then did New Yorkers begin to suspect that this was no ordinary late-winter storm approaching. In fact, it was two storms, one coming north from the Gulf of Mexico, a second moving east from the Great Lakes. As his Saturday night shift ended, Francis Long put out to the newspapers his weather forecast for the following day. “For Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, eastern New York, eastern Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, fresh to brisk southerly winds, slightly warmer, fair weather, followed by rain. For the District of Columbia, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia, fresh to brisk southeasterly winds, slightly warmer, threatening weather and rain.” His work done, he headed down for the streets. The weather center would close for the Sabbath at midnight, and nobody was scheduled to return until five o’clock in the afternoon the following day. During those seventeen hours, the mildly unsettling weather that Long predicted turned into a beast. Those seventeen hours would have several lasting effects. One of them was the Weather Bureau’s decision years later to begin staying open on Sundays, to avoid missing any unpredictable and dramatic shifts in a weather pattern like the one that happened in the early morning hours of Sunday, March 11.

  By Sunday morning, the entire East Coast was getting soaked, from Roanoke to Washington to Pittsburgh to Buffalo. In New Jersey, one minister awoke, took in the ominous sky, and tweaked his morning sermon he was about to deliver. “I had the strangest of feelings,” he told his parishioners. “It was as if the unholy one himself was riding in those clouds.” New England was under a dark shadow, and when a freezing gale from out over the Atlantic Ocean moved back inland and picked up the moisture coming up from the south, the rain turned to snow. Baltimore was one of the first cities to feel the impact, and by dinnertime its streets were covered with six inches, and twenty-five-mile-per-hour winds were whistling past the homes. As midnight approached, Philadelphians saw their trees coated in ice and then watched as branches snapped from the weight. By Monday morning, roofs would blow clear off houses in Philadelphia and southern and central New Jersey, powerful wind gusts of more than seventy miles per hour would shatter windows, and snowdrifts six feet tall would line the streets. The storm only got stronger as it moved north, and by the time it reached New York it was at its peak of fury. The Brooklyn Bridge, only five years old, was ordered closed, so that nobody would be blown off the side by a seventy-five-mile-per-hour gust or get stranded on the walkway and die from the cold. Like most cities, New York did not have an antilittering law, and the newspapers, stray pieces of household trash, tin cans, and shards of broken glass all swirled up into minitornadoes that made walking around treacherous. Worst of all was the stench from the wind blowing up the frozen bits of manure and urine that more than sixty thousand horses had left behind on the streets.

  * * *

  THE GIANT HAND REACHED OUT and pulled Sam Strong up from the drift.

  “You hadn’t ought to be out in this, Sonny,” the policeman hollered to him. “You go straight home.”

  But Sam had his aunt’s list to fulfill, and he continued past more abandoned streetcars on 125th Street, shocked to see a team of horses trying mightily to pull a carriage. He finally reached his destination, Brady’s Notion Store, only to find that the snow was piled so high it blocked the door and the window and that it was obviously not open for business. Determined not to disappoint his aunt, even though he knew he was already late, he trekked on for another half mile in search of another store before finally giving up hope and turning around. His aunt and uncle were watching for him out the window, and when he finally appeared and slowly trudged up the front stoop, fighting with every step, they met him at the door and hustled him out of his clothes. He had lost all track of time and was bordering on delirious. The errand he had expected might require just thirty minutes had taken the entire morning.

  “Although I had fought the snow for more than four hours,” the boy recalled later, “I had failed in my mission. There were many tears.” His aunt warmed him up and tucked him back into his sheets. “I was in bed with glass bottles filled with hot water, a big slug of raw whiskey and some food, and I was asleep, not waking until night and then only for more food and drink. I was exhausted.” Sam Strong’s determination that day was no fluke. Later, after studying at Columbia, he was Dr. Samuel Meredith Strong, and he went on to become the first flight surgeon in the United States Army, and, as a surgeon living in Queens and practicing in Brooklyn, he built and used the first airplane ambulance.

  * * *

  FOR ONE WEEK IN MARCH, bad weather brought the entire northeast to a standstill. A train that left Bridgeport, Connecticut, at 5:41 A.M. on Monday morning went two miles in an hour before it was trapped in a drift. At least it was close enough for the passengers to get off and walk back. Others were not so lucky. Steam trains from Baltimore to Montreal were buried beneath piles of snow, literally stopped in their tracks or derailed, often great distances from any population hub. Once a train stopped, it was over. The snow was falling so fast and accumulating so quickly that anything that wasn’t moving was covered over in minutes. If animals were on board, there was little effort made to save them. If it was a passenger train, the best hope was that there was enough food on board to feed folks until help arrived or that they were near enough to a farmer who could supply them with enough water, milk, and food to ration among themselves. Staying warm was a different problem. Steam trains had small coal or wood stoves, and to keep the fires burning passengers stuffed into them seats, card tables, luggage, bags full of U.S. mail, and anything else flammable they could find. And because power and telephone lines all came down in the storm, the crews at the stations had no way of knowing where a train was stopped.

  * * *

  AS BAD AS IT WAS for the street railways, it was worse for New York’s four elevated lines. In the early hours of the storm, it appeared as if the Els might be immune from the conditions. It was harder for the snow to accumulate on the narrow overhead tracks. But what quickly became apparent was that it was easier for the tracks to freeze. By Monday afternoon, icicles were hanging off the tracks and the trains were slowing down to carefully navigate the sharp curves and stop within the required boundaries of the stations.

  A Third Avenue elevated train heading downtown carrying five hundred passengers struggled to climb the icy grade near the Seventy-sixth Street station and came to a stop on the slight hill. As it sat on the tracks and its crew tried to strategize a plan to keep moving forward, twenty minutes passed. Suddenly, the passengers heard the shrill of another train’s whistle barreling toward them from behind. While the first train could not move, the second train could not stop, and a massive tragedy seemed all but certain. Just before his train smashed into the one ahead, the fireman on board the second engine leapt off onto the platform, where hundreds of waiting passengers were watching in horror. As he turned to watch the collision, the fireman yelled to the engineer on the first train.

  “Jump, for God’s sake, jump!” he screamed.

  It was too late. The enormous boom and passenger screams from the collision were followed by a plume of smoke into the snowy air. The two trains slid forward a few more feet, and the tracks shook, but somehow the trains wobbled and did not fall. No car fell off the track, and what seemed like a sure disaster that would cause hundreds of deaths was, incredibly, a minor accident. Passengers smashed windows to free themselves and walked back along the track to the platform or made their way to the ladders that the quickly arriving firemen were leaning up for them. Though the engineer on board the struck train who had not jumped survived, the engineer who had been unable to stop the second train did not. Samuel Towe was still breathing when he was yanked from the wreckage, but his bones were broken and his skin was burned, and he died before he could be taken to a hospital.

  Before the day
was over, the transportation system in New York that had seemed the safest and most immune from the snow and ice had proved to be no better than the omnibuses, the street railways, and the steam-powered railroads. By the end of the day on Monday, fifteen thousand commuters would be stranded at various points along the elevated tracks, high above the city streets, scared, angry, frustrated, and cold.

  * * *

  ON WEDNESDAY THE WEATHER turned again. This time for the better. A few more inches of snow fell to the north, but Philadelphia, New York, and Boston all saw temperatures climb back to forty degrees. Tracks began to thaw, roads began to clear, and when a hundred Italian shovelers finally dug out the Boston Express at Fifty-ninth Street, trains began to move again.

  THE FIRST TRAIN THROUGH, read the headline in The Times on Thursday, March 15.

  As for the nightmarish prediction of a widespread famine, it never happened, though there were some disastrous, long-term effects from the storm. Horses and cows froze to death. Thousands of pounds of butter and thousands of gallons of milk had to be destroyed after going too long with no refrigeration, valuable losses for farmers, who would need months to recover. Ten thousand coal and iron miners in Pennsylvania were laid off when the railroads lost so much revenue.

  There was one bright moment to emerge from the storm. At the New York Infant Asylum north of the city in Westchester County, four hundred children between the ages of two weeks and six years old, along with two hundred unwed pregnant women, normally went through about eight cans of milk a day, supplied by a nearby dairy. With local roads closed, the blizzard cut them off from the dairy, and without their milk for a week or more they could have been at risk. But a few days before the storm hit, instead of the typical order of twelve dozen cans of Borden’s canned condensed milk, the asylum was left with twelve gross, or 1,728 cans. The cans were usually for the older children, but now the infants had to drink them, too, and that concerned the physician in charge, Dr. Charles Gilmore Kerley. Cautiously, the staff diluted the condensed milk with barley water to see if the infants could tolerate it. Not only did they like it, but the babies who had been struggling to gain weight suddenly started to fill out. Because of a simple paperwork error, and one forced experiment, canned evaporated milk for infants, with Dr. Kerley’s urging for the next fifty years, went from being shunned to being embraced.

  The three-day storm cost businesses in New York about three million dollars in sales, though one store that had no problem moving product was E. Ridley and Sons, where John Meisinger’s foolhardy Friday purchase of three thousand wooden shovels paid off handsomely when every one of them disappeared in a few hours on Monday. The “blizzard sale,” as he called it, netted him $1,800 in less than twenty-four hours. Those Italian laborers also capitalized. The day after the snow stopped falling, they stopped shoveling and went on strike to demand a raise to two dollars a day. The rich railroad magnates wasted no time agreeing. And, finally, there were the deaths. Four hundred was the number estimated by officials in the days after the storm, but it was clearly much more than that. Almost a thousand bodies arrived at cemeteries around New York in the weeks after the blizzard, and the final tally did not include the deaths in other cities and towns up and down the East Coast.

  The blizzard of 1888 was the trigger that cities needed to finally acknowledge that the horse-pulled carriages, the steam-powered elevated trains, the cable-pulled trolleys, and even the electrified street railways all suffered from the same flaw that could no longer be ignored. They were at the mercy of the skies. Rain, snow, ice, and scorching heat had shown they were capable of crippling a city or, at the least, making its streets miserable. And too many people needed the trains to get them where they had to go. From 1887 to 1888, the elevated rails saw an increase of thirteen million passengers. And down on the streets, where William Whitney was showing a greater interest in controlling the street railways, that same period saw five million more people take a trip. Ridership was exploding, and there was no room above ground to put more cars. “Who will be the Moses to lead us through this wilderness of uncertainty?” asked The New York World.

  6

  NEW YORK CITY’S MOSES

  TWO YEARS. THAT WAS HOW LONG Abram Hewitt ran the city. The streets of New York were filled with the stench of manure and uncovered, overflowing trash bins, and they were overcrowded with streetcars and street railways. Prostitutes had their own avenues, and saloons defied every attempt to shut them down at night in accordance with the laws. Change would not come overnight, but those streets would never be the same after Hewitt was through with them.

  It was his fortuitous timing that his brief tenure was sandwiched around the three days of the blizzard of 1888. But it was his savvy politics, brilliant scheming, engineering know-how, and dogged persistence that helped ensure that those two years would go down as two of the most important in the city’s history and would become a time when Gotham started to clean up its act and when the first seed for the New York City subway was finally, and firmly, planted. “The Father of Rapid Transit,” they would call him. He also fathered six children. And when any of them asked for a toy, he had a ready response. “I won’t buy them, but I’ll give you materials to make them.” Oh, he wanted his children to succeed in life, just not by taking. By building.

  * * *

  ABRAM STEVENS HEWITT WAS BORN in a log house forty miles north of New York City on July 31, 1822, in the village of Haverstraw. His family was poor. His father, John, was a skilled mechanic whose cabinet-making business had gone bankrupt, and his mother, Ann, a pretty, sweet-faced daughter of a farmer. What he lacked in resources at home, where he ate mostly porridge and almost no meat, Hewitt made up for in his studies.

  After beating out twenty thousand other boys to earn a scholarship to Columbia College, young Hewitt moved to New York. He supported himself by teaching and excelled in his math and science studies, so much so that when he graduated in 1842 he was at the top of his class. After graduating, he tutored grammar school children, sometimes earning as much as $150 in a term from a single pupil. It was this work that introduced him to a young man named Edward Cooper. The two had actually been Columbia classmates, but when Cooper got sick and fell two years behind Hewitt in his studies, he needed assistance, and Cooper’s father, Peter, agreed to pay Hewitt to tutor his son. Edward Cooper and Abram Hewitt would be linked for life from that day forward and would launch a formidable business partnership. There was only one point of sadness to Hewitt’s time at Columbia. So immersed was he in his books day and night that his vision began to fail him, and by the time he graduated he was, in his own words, “nearly blind.”

  From his poor upbringing to his studies at Columbia to his fading vision to a near-death experience at sea while returning from an adventure in Europe, Hewitt emerged into adulthood as a wizened twenty-two-year-old young man. “It taught me for the first time that I could stand in the face of death without fear and without flinching,” he said. “It taught me another thing—that my life, which had been miraculously rescued, belonged not to me, and from that hour I gave it to the work which from that time has been in my thoughts—the welfare of my fellow citizens.”

  Hewitt flirted with becoming a lawyer, but when his eyesight continued to fail him, he and Edward Cooper decided to go into business together. Not only would their relationship net Hewitt his wife, since he married Cooper’s sister in 1855, but their partnership turned into an American industrial force. They got their start when Peter Cooper, one of the richest men in New York, a distinction he owed to his success in business manufacturing and some savvy real estate investments, with no hesitation gave to his son and his son’s friend the iron manufacturing branch of his business. Cooper, Hewitt & Co. was born. The two friends started slowly, making rails for the railroads, but it was also the age of telegraphs, and strong, sturdy, unbreakable wires were becoming the most desired commodity. That’s where Hewitt turned next.

  * * *

  A CABLE DISPATCH ON January 23
, 1862, changed Hewitt’s life. In fact, he might have decided against ever entering a career in politics later in his life were it not for the message it contained. He was at the home of Peter Cooper on a Sunday evening in the early days of the Civil War. Dispatches at the time typically arrived by messenger and were printed on slips of paper, but this one addressed to Cooper, Hewitt & Co. was unusually long.

  “I am told that you can do things which other men declare to be impossible,” the telegraph said. “General Grant is at Cairo [Illinois], ready to start on his movement to capture Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. He has the necessary troops and equipment, including thirty mortars, but the mortar-beds are lacking. The Chief of Ordnance informs me that nine months will be required to build the mortar beds, which must be very heavy in order to carry 13-inch mortars now used for the first time. I appeal to you to have these mortar-beds built within thirty days … Telegraph what you can do. A. Lincoln.”

  President Lincoln had never met Hewitt. But Lincoln knew of Hewitt’s reputation as an honest, hardworking manufacturer of iron, and Hewitt felt obliged to help his president in time of war, even if his own Democratic politics did not always align with Lincoln’s Republican values. A mortar bed was the foundation on which mortars were mounted and elevated into firing position, and they were critical at ensuring accurate firing. If General Ulysses S. Grant could successfully take Forts Henry and Donelson, it would be a crippling blow to the railroad bridges and shipping abilities of the Confederate army, which Hewitt, who had followed the war closely, knew.

  Grant was building momentum, and Lincoln did not want it stalled for months by military manufacturing delays, which is why he reached out to Cooper, Hewitt & Co. After reading the dispatch, Hewitt rushed from Cooper’s house to the nearest Western Union office and had a cable sent back to the White House. If he could find a bomb carriage quickly that he could use, he would let the president know within a day if the task was possible. The War Department located a bomb carriage in Newport and, at the president’s order, had it sent to Hewitt. It arrived by boat in New York Harbor on Tuesday morning, just two days after Hewitt first heard from the president, and Hewitt took one look and believed the request was doable. He cabled Lincoln, and not even two weeks later, after a furious, round-the-clock production schedule, on February 8 the first four mortar beds were put on a train and sent westward. The remaining twenty-six were sent out within the week, and on each box, Hewitt painted in big black letters, U.S. GRANT, CAIRO. NOT TO BE SWITCHED UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH.