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

by Most, Doug

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  FOR ALL OF THEIR GRANDEUR, raw power, and beauty, horses were becoming a real nuisance as the chief mode of transportation in American cities. The biggest problem was that horses are useful for only three years of hard work, and the city’s streets were less forgiving on their legs than the soft dirt and grass of farmland. And then there was disease. In 1870, a mild panic erupted when a street railway driver named Michael O’Keefe died of a sickness called glanders. It is a bacterial disease seen in animals and is extremely rare in humans, but those who die from it are almost always found to have obtained it from a horse. The symptoms are obvious, and included rashes, lung infection, diarrhea, and enlargement of the spleen. O’Keefe’s death caused so much worry that he was buried immediately without an autopsy. Two years later, in October 1872, an influenza outbreak among horses in Canada quickly spread south into North America and caused much more widespread panic. Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, all across New England, and as far south as Louisiana and Florida and eventually Cuba all reported similar cases in which horses suddenly were too weak to stand in their stalls, much less pull heavy loads of several hundred pounds. In New York, more than thirty horses died every day during the outbreak. Those that did survive could be heard coughing violently for months. The Great Epizootic Outbreak, as it was called, struck thousands of horses and ground much of the country to a standstill. Streetcars disappeared from city streets or were just abandoned. Coal couldn’t be delivered to locomotives to provide their power. Firefighters could not respond to blazes. Soldiers in the army were forced to pull their own wagons when their horses broke down. It got so bad that in December of 1872 the Mexican government had to supply healthy horses to the United States.

  The horse had served America well for half a century, but its time had come. The piles of manure they left behind—and a big horse could produce as much as fifty pounds of it a day—were no longer tolerated. City residents were tired of the smell. And while there was a time when a stable owner could make a hefty profit by selling horse manure to farmers, who used it for fertilizer, those days were gone, too. Bird excrement, or guano, along with man-made fertilizers, became more readily available, and the value of horse manure plunged. In 1860, the Second Avenue Street Railway in New York City could collect as much as $4.60 per horse for its manure annually. By 1885, that figure had dropped to $1.10, and some stable owners were losing money on manure because it cost them so much to cart away.

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  AS MOST NEW YORKERS SLEPT early on the morning of May 27, 1887, shouts cried out from inside a long building on the city’s west side, startling the night watchman standing guard out front. He recognized the voices of his own men, but he had no idea what was causing their panic. It was the start of an unimaginable tragedy that would essentially be over in six minutes, and it came only a few months after New Yorkers had celebrated one of the most thrilling days in their city’s history, the dedication by President Cleveland of the Statue of Liberty on October 28, 1886.

  Even after the dramatic efforts of men like Alfred Beach and Abraham Brower at improving transportation on the streets of New York, the truth was that by the spring of 1887, fifty years after the first horse-pulled carriages started rolling through the city, very little had changed. Horses still ruled the day.

  Nowhere was that more evident than in the three-story structure that filled the entire block of Tenth Avenue between Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth streets. From the outside, it looked as solid as any block-long building in New York, brown brick stacked upon brown brick from the street to the roof. And it was only fourteen years old, built in 1873. Inside, however, wood beams were attached to the walls and scattered throughout the interior. And hundreds of individual stalls were filled with all the comforts necessary to keep the 1,230 horses that belonged to the Belt Line Street Railway Company happy. Each horse was a valuable piece of property, valued at $130, for a collective total of $154,000. That’s why there were four thousand bales of hay, five thousand bales of straw, and twelve thousand bushels of grain inside the stable. It was one giant inferno just waiting to be lit, and when smoke started pouring out of a first-floor paint locker, it was like taking a match to a cotton ball. In seconds, flames were licking across the floor and up the walls and across the ceiling.

  The night depot master at the stable pulled the fire alarm, while other workers rushed up to the stables on the second and third floors and tried to shoo the horses downstairs into the streets. But when the flames spread, fueled by a brisk wind off the river, and it became obvious there would be no stopping them, the men fled and left their frightened animals behind, along with more than one hundred and fifty streetcars. Two of the stable workers couldn’t make it to the stairs in time and jumped out of the second story. By the time firefighters arrived, the scene was too hot and the flames too high for them to get near the building. The sounds from inside, of horses neighing and crying and bucking against their stalls, was agonizing for those on the streets. Meanwhile, the fire was growing out of control.

  The firemen could not prevent the flames from leaping across Fifty-fourth Street and setting fire to the new six-story silk factory at the corner. From there, the fire kept on spreading, rustling awake the residents inside a row of tenement houses and flats east of the silk factory and forcing them to flee for their lives out onto the sidewalk. Because the fire quickly blocked their front door, many of them raced out the back, where firemen tore down fences to help them escape. Adolph Kruger’s liquor saloon, at the northwest corner of Tenth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, was next to go, and soon two entire blocks along Tenth Avenue were ablaze. When the fire threatened a shanty and some tiny wooden sheds filled by poor families along with their cows and horses on the north side of Fifty-third Street, firemen rushed over to get them out, too.

  When the sun finally came up, Tenth Avenue looked like a Civil War battlefield, with dead horses strewn over three acres, charred streetcars, and arching streams from the fire hoses spraying into the ashes. The stench of burned animal flesh still wafted over the neighborhood when officials from the Belt Line Street Railway Company arrived to tally their losses. The catastrophe was staggering. Just 45 of their 1,230 horses made it out to safety. Of their 156 cars, 145 were destroyed, along with 3 track sweepers and 4 snow plows. The valuable straw, hay, and grain were all gone, not to mention five safes that contained more than six thousand dollars. The total loss just from the stable was calculated at $504,450, and when the neighborhood’s losses were added to that, the overall figure was well beyond a million dollars. The only brief moment of joy on the day after the fire came when the stable’s five pet cats crawled out of the rubble.

  It rained the day after the fire, helping to douse any remaining cinders in the ashes of the stable. Also that day, the members of the executive committee of the Belt Line railroad met. Their purpose was not to bemoan what had happened but to look toward the future. They had quickly begun to buy more horses to keep their business operating, but, as The Times reported two days after the tragedy, the Belt Line officials recognized that horses were no longer a worthy investment. “There is growing public sentiment that big stables in a crowded city are dangerous nuisances,” The Times wrote. “Three kinds of propelling power will be tested by the Belt Line company if possible. They are the cable, the electric station, and independent electric motor systems. The promoters of all of these methods have been in contact with the company since the fire.”

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  IT WAS PRECISELY THIS SORT of problem that Whitney and his Philadelphia cohorts hoped to solve. While Whitney was in Washington, Ryan and the others incorporated a new operation they called the Metropolitan Traction Company. It served as an umbrella over the group’s assets, of which they soon had an abundance. Spending millions of dollars in only a few short months, the company bought out the Houston Street, West Street & Pavonia Ferry Railroad Company, the Chambers & Grand Street Ferry Railroad Company, the South Ferry Railroad Company, and others, all of which
became one called the Metropolitan Street Railway Company. The Metropolitan Traction Company was not in the business of building or operating roads itself, but rather it served as a “holding company,” the first one in the United States, and it would become a model for the future of big business and financial empires.

  Finally, with all the roads and real estate that they had amassed came the responsibility to do what Jake Sharp had not done for years: make getting around New York easier. One of the first changes they made was to reroute the lines, so that passengers could stay on a single car longer to get to their destination faster. But for those passengers who did have to switch from one line to another, the group implemented a second change to the system. They began to allow passengers to transfer from one car to another, one route to another, for free, something Sharp had long resisted because of how much he believed it would have cost him. The new owners believed otherwise. They saw free transfers as a moneymaker. Under the new system, a single fare of five cents was all it cost to ride New York’s transit system anywhere, for any distance. It reduced the cost for riders, essentially charging them one fare for two rides, while at the same time encouraging more people to ride. And it worked. In less than a year the Metropolitan issued more than a million transfers, a huge portion of which it learned were from passengers who otherwise would never have boarded a car at all. The free transfer would be one of Whitney’s greatest gifts to his city.

  But there was an even more pressing decision that needed to be made by the new leaders of New York’s street railways: what would replace the horse as the source of power for New York’s street railways as they entered the twentieth century?

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  IT HAD BEEN ALMOST six years since September 4, 1882, the day Thomas Edison, sporting a new Prince Albert coat, stood inside the Drexel, Morgan building at 23 Wall Street in downtown New York, flipped a switch, and watched as a direct current of electricity fed into his system and eight hundred lamps in the Drexel building and over at the New York Times offices flickered on. J. P. Morgan’s Madison Avenue mansion was the first private home in the city to convert to incandescent lighting, though the first attempt saw an explosion that scorched Morgan’s carpets and walls. Within a year, more than five hundred of the city’s wealthiest homes were glowing brighter than they ever had.

  Almost overnight, Manhattan came alive. Daytime businesses like printing and machine shops, piano factories, and lawyers’ offices switched over and found the lightbulb to be so much more pleasant to work under than the gas lamp. But it was the change in nightlife that most excited New Yorkers. The formerly dark, nighttime storefronts of department stores lit up, and window browsing became a popular after-dinner activity. Theaters and restaurants were brighter, and so was the Statue of Liberty, the torch in her hand suddenly shining more brightly for ship captains to see her easily. More than fifteen hundred street lamps were alive in the city by 1886, and the number was growing by the week.

  By 1888, a sea of wires that stretched from pole to pole, rooftop to rooftop, filled the air over New York’s streets. The idea of burying lines in the ground had not yet been embraced, and so when New Yorkers gazed upward, their view was blocked by a dizzying collection of ugly black lines. In addition to Edison’s, there were wires from Bell Telephone, the Gold and Stock Ticker Company, the fire and police departments, private alarm companies, Western Union, and more. There was little incentive to share a power line, and so a single fifty-foot pole might carry a dozen or more wires. To no one’s surprise, the weight was often too much for the poles to hold, and they might snap and bring down dangerous live wires to the street. An attempt to legislate the crisis failed when the biggest companies simply ignored an order to put their lines underground and received no punishment.

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  FROM THE CITIES TO THE heartland, innovation was thriving in America. Out on the farms, a new combine harvester called the Sunshine was making farmers more productive, allowing them to move greater amounts of wheat, oat, barley, rice, and corn and increase their profits. In the big cities, electricity was generating an exciting nightlife scene, and Edison was already working on his next idea, combining sound with motion pictures in a device he called the kinetoscope. An electric-trolley experiment in Cleveland had worked successfully, and now other cities, most aggressively Richmond and now Boston, were implementing the idea. In Washington, the finishing touches were being put on the world’s tallest stone structure, the 555-foot obelisk known as the Washington Monument. In New York, the waters surrounding the island had seen two exciting symbols of progress open in the past five years, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty.

  As fast as New York was growing, Chicago was growing faster. It was expanding its boundaries and growing its population through the annexation of more than a hundred square miles of suburban neighborhoods. The 1890 census would find that Manhattan was not as dominant as it once was and that Chicago, with 1.1 million people, was gaining on New York’s 1.5 million. It was more than a number. If Chicago overtook New York in population, there was no telling the impact it would have on the cultural, political, and economic worlds of Gotham. Would banks see New York as weakening and the heartland as the new strength of America and shift their headquarters there? “New York would undoubtedly lose a great deal in prestige the world over—and in actual dollars and cents too—should Chicago or any other city on the continent count a larger population,” The Real Estate Record wrote. When Congress soon awarded Chicago, and not New York, the right to host what would be the grandest World’s Fair in celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s famous voyage, it was a shove for New York to grow or be passed by.

  “The elevated roads may be able to cram more people into their cars but they have long since passed the limit at which they can comfortably provide for their passengers during the busy hours of travel,” The New York Times wrote in a blistering editorial in the spring of 1888. “Moreover they do not afford rapid transit at all. What electricity may do on the surface is yet to be proved, but rapid transit cannot be furnished on the surface, and as for cables they will only obstruct and delay the solution of the question. There is urgent need of underground rapid transit roads.”

  There was just one problem with electricity and the electric streetcar, and a few minutes after one o’clock in the afternoon on October 12, 1889, New Yorkers witnessed it firsthand in a horrifying way. A sturdy, thirty-year-old lineman for the Western Union Telegraph Company climbed up a pole at the southwest corner of Centre and Chambers streets right in front of Fire Engine Company number 7. His task was to cut out the dead wires of the company.

  Like most of the tall poles in the city, the top was a confusing maze of live and dead wires. There were lines for the police and fire, telephone wires, and multiple Western Union telegraph wires. The worker had one foot resting on one of the half dozen crossbars atop the pole when he reached out for a wire he intended to cut and suddenly his body began to shiver and tremble. With pedestrians watching from below, and screams bringing people to their windows, a flash of bright sparks and blue flame shot out from beneath his hand. His body slumped and fell forward onto a network of wires that caught him and suspended him in a ghastly image forty feet over the street, with flames and blood shooting out of his mouth and nostrils. It took his fellow workmen more than an hour to carefully climb up, cut him loose, and lower him without receiving a deadly shock themselves. But once his lifeless body was removed, it was as if New York City itself had received a jolt.

  There was genuine anger about the public death, and there would be an investigation and weeks of public hearings that followed. Mayor Hugh Grant, who only a few months earlier had personally taken an ax to a pole in a symbolic gesture of his desire to put wires underground, now had a horrific exhibit to bolster his case. If horses were the past and electricity was the future of street transportation, those wires would have to be underground.

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  OR SO IT SEEMED. The co
ntingent of men controlling New York’s streets had other ideas. Kemble, Ryan, and Widener had a vested interest in cable car systems because they had installed one in Philadelphia. They could not go one way in Philadelphia and another in New York City without raising questions. In the late winter of 1889, the men exchanged letters in which they debated the merits of cable versus other modes of transit power, including electric. Finally, on March 4, 1889, Widener penned a strongly worded letter to his partner William Whitney that took note of what Henry Whitney was building in Boston and urged the younger Whitney brother to look the other way.

  “The work your Brother is doing in Boston whilst good would sink into insignificance when compared with it as I am satisfied it would solve the question of local transportation in New York,” Widener wrote. “I say without fear of successful contradiction that if you place such a cable road on Broadway as we would build, it would be the greatest work of your life and one which you could always point to with pride.”

  Though Henry and William had remained close into their forties, exchanging letters and visiting frequently with their widowed mother in Brookline, they were also fiercely independent. They were enjoying their increasing clout in their respective cities. And Widener’s letter reflected how they went about their business independently of each other, while at the same time paying attention out of the corner of one eye. Boston was small enough that one powerful businessman could have enormous influence over the streets; as the owner of the world’s largest streetcar operation there, Henry Whitney was that man.

  New York was much bigger, and it was harder there for one man to wield as much influence, but if William Whitney and his group could successfully transform the streets and make life more pleasant for the one and a half million residents, he would be close to the equivalent of his brother in a much larger metropolis. But to do that, the younger brother would have to suddenly change his stripes. Throughout their lives, William had been the smart, safe, and conservative brother, preferring to stay in the background while leaving his mark, while Henry had been the risk taker, unafraid to fail. Proposing to dig a subway tunnel beneath the cherished Boston Common was daring. So was switching his streetcar operation from horses to electricity before the electric streetcar had truly shown itself to be a worthy alternative.