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

by Most, Doug

  The report of the commission did not signal the end but the beginning of the debate over subways versus elevated tracks. And nowhere in the report was that more clear than in a brief section titled “Tunnels.” During the summer of 1891, Congressman John Fitzgerald, who was appointed to the commission by Mayor Matthews, and Herald editor Osborne Howes Jr., a state appointee, traveled together to London, Paris, and Berlin, cities that had built or were building rapid transit systems.

  When Fitzgerald visited London, the city had a mix of steam and electric trains running underground, and he went anticipating that the electric underground would prove to be the future for Boston. He left disappointed. “As a piece of engineering I presume it is perfection,” he wrote in his report to the transit commission. “But as a mode of conveying human beings from one part of a great city to another I should much prefer some other method, and some other feeling when travelling than the buried-alive feeling which one experiences in this tunnel.” Most surprising to Fitzgerald was that the underground steam system actually impressed him more than the underground electric trains. “I traveled over this [steam] road several times, and found it did not contain so much smoke as I expected, because not only do they burn smokeless coal, but their engines also consume their own smoke,” Fitzgerald wrote. “In addition to this, they have open spaces wherever it is possible,” which made the journey more enjoyable because of the frequent bursts of light that shined down into the trains. But the electric cars, he said, moved at fifteen miles per hour, not as fast as he expected, and were too loud for his liking. “The noise is like the roaring of the ocean after a storm, and many persons whom I interviewed told me they always experienced a headache for some time after leaving these cars,” Fitzgerald reported. “I must confess I experienced a similar sensation myself.”

  But even Honey Fitz’s skepticism could not dissuade the commission. In its conclusion, the members indirectly pointed at the lack of progress made by the West End Street Railway Company. “The well-worn list of public works which have proved inordinately costly, interminably slow in building, and outrageously inadequate in every way when finished, is brought out and rehearsed once more,” the report said. It also pointed out that public ownership would always mean fending off constant demands and requests for costly extensions and cheaper fares, both of which would be impossible to grant. But despite all of that, the commission recommended that the government should build a new system and then try to lease it to a private company, like the West End Street Railway, for operation. That allowed city and state officials, and not private businessmen, to decide how much a ride should cost, where transit stops should be, what streets should be widened, and what suburban neighborhoods should get their own streetcar lines.

  The commission summarized the other recommendations in just a few short paragraphs. There should be two main railroad stations in the city, one called North Union for passengers coming from the north, at the corner of Causeway and Leverett streets, and a second called South Union, on Kneeland Street, for passengers coming up from the south. The streets, especially in the center of Boston, should be widened and extended in certain places and policed more aggressively to make surface travel more convenient for all vehicles and pedestrians. Two elevated railroads should be constructed, one from South Boston to Charlestown and another from Roxbury to Cambridge.

  And finally, in a nod to what Whitney had first proposed five years earlier, the commission said that the street railway system should be reorganized by removing a large number of tracks from the narrow downtown streets and replacing them with a tunnel about one mile long beneath Boston Common and Tremont Street, “which shall take the greater part of the through cars to the southern and western portions of the city.”

  If they were all adopted, the recommendations would transform Boston, which is probably why the report ended on a somewhat pessimistic note. “If anything is to be undertaken,” it said, “let it be ample and thorough and complete in its kind. Short of that, it were wiser to stand still where we are.”

  That was a position nobody in Boston wanted to consider.

  * * *

  MIDWAY THROUGH THE SUMMER of 1893, the patience of Boston’s mayor expired. He quietly sent off a letter on August 5 to his city engineer, William Jackson:

  Dear Sir,

  You asked me the other day to jot down my ideas as to the matters which require the most pressing attention on the matter of rapid transit. I would suggest investigating with a view to ascertaining the following facts: First, as to Sub-Ways, sketch out a four-track subway under Tremont Street from some point at the North or West end, where it would come out upon the surface, to Boylston Street. Thence two tracks diverging down Boylston Street and adjacent to Park Square, the other two tracks going up Tremont Street and coming out near Shawmut Avenue. Also a subway for the two tracks under the proposed elevated railroad. This would give six tracks, with stopping places at the cross streets, and would enable the city to get rid of all the surface cars between the Common and Atlantic Avenue.

  After laying out more specifics, Matthews wrote that this, of course, was all “a very crude idea.” But it was an idea he saw great promise in. “If it could be worked out and we could get a four-track elevated railroad system through the heart of the city, partly at the same level and partly on two levels, and all the present surface cars were put underground, we should have a system which should be worth a good deal of money to the people of Boston,” he wrote in closing.

  If Boston’s biggest streetcar owner wasn’t going to solve the congestion problem, Boston’s mayor was.

  * * *

  ON THE MORNING OF September 7, 1893, the headline in The Globe reverberated across the city: WHITNEY OUT. RESIGNS AS PRESIDENT OF THE WEST END.

  Henry Melville Whitney was fifty-three years old. He was the definition of an American capitalist, a man who grabbed opportunity when he saw it without fear of whether it would shower him with riches or wipe out his very last penny. When an entrepreneur had come to him with samples of bottled orange juice, he didn’t laugh. He brought them home for his children to taste and imagined the fortunes that could be made. It was not to be. “They were uniformly horrible,” his daughter Josie recalled.

  In his official capacities, Whitney was serving as president of the West End Street Railway Company and of the Metropolitan Steamship Company, and, most recently, he had taken on the leadership role at the Dominion Coal Company in Nova Scotia. He was also the father of five who enjoyed spending more and more time riding horses with his children at their summer estate in Cohasset. He had built a half-mile track nearby, and soon, when Josephine was a few years older, he would spend hours there, standing with a stopwatch and timing his colts on their laps. He gave Josephine a strawberry-colored pony she named Merry Legs, and he rode alongside her through nearby wooded trails. Their favorite spot was a peak called Turkey Hill, where they could gaze out over the towns of Nantasket and Hingham and relax in the breeze.

  By late 1893, six years had passed since he had first proposed building a subway tunnel under Boston Common. His biggest achievements had been to consolidate all of the competing streetcar companies into one giant monopoly, to electrify the tracks, and to expand routes farther into the suburbs. He had built the West End Street Railway Company into a hugely profitable operation, taking a business that functioned mainly in a two-square-mile area and expanding it to run almost ten miles out of downtown. The company finished 1892 with $6.3 million in gross earnings and $1.8 million in profit. Almost two-thirds of its tracks were being powered by electricity. After starting with 8,000 horses in 1887, the company had whittled that total in half, down to 3,754 in five years, providing a huge cost savings as it operated more than 260 miles of track. These were enormous accomplishments. But they could not overshadow how Whitney had never addressed the most critical issue of all, downtown congestion, a point he hinted at in his September 6 letter of resignation to the West End board.

  “The time has come wh
en I feel that I have not the strength to manage so many important interests in justice either to those interests or to myself,” he wrote. “It seems to me that it is on the whole a propitious time to give up the presidency of the railway company … I admit that I give up the care of the office with a strong feeling of regret, because the relations between myself and community, as well as with the officers and employees of the road, have been pleasant and a source of gratification to me under the many trying circumstances which have occurred during my administration; and while I am aware that we have been criticized more or less, yet on the whole I feel that the public have appreciated the work in which we have together been engaged.”

  That may have been true at first, as Whitney insisted on a flat five-cent fare for all rides and pledged to lessen the reliance on horses and speed up the streetcars. But by the time of his resignation, there was little sadness to see him go. In a letter that Matthews wrote to Whitney just a few months earlier, the mayor referred to the “pleasant, personal relations” the two men shared, but then questioned why Whitney never came forward with a realistic, detailed proposal for the legislature to consider. No response to his letter came. And a few months later, it was clear why. Henry Whitney was ready to move on. So were most Bostonians.

  * * *

  THE MOST IMPORTANT TASKS of the transit commission were to assess how long it would take to build a subway and how much it would cost. Very quickly it was realized an initial estimate of $2 million was wishful thinking and that a more realistic number was $5 million because of how many buildings and how much land the city would have to acquire. City bonds would pay for the work, and the city would lease the tracks to a transit company to operate it and earn back the cost. It all seemed quite logical, and, as the weeks passed, one question after another was put to rest. Yes, travel would be faster, perhaps shortening some trips by one-third the time. Yes, Tremont Street would be blessedly free of tracks. Yes, the damage to Boston Common would be minimal, and the only new visible structures would be the stations on the surface for people to walk down into the subway. Yes, as doctors from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital explained, proper drainage of water and ventilation of stale air would make the subway perfectly sanitary and safe. For the supporters of the subway, it was difficult to imagine why anyone could oppose the plan if they took one look around downtown, and yet, sure enough, any time a hearing was held, there was at least one outraged voice and oftentimes many.

  * * *

  THOSE VOICES WERE HEARD at a hearing on Monday morning, March 26, 1894. Beginning at ten o’clock, one by one, people stood up before the commissioners, some of them reading statements from a piece of paper, others just spouting venom. Samuel J. Byrne, who ran a small dry-goods store on Tremont Street, claimed to represent two dozen other merchants, from theater owners to bankers to lawyers and accountants. He said they all feared that the construction would destroy their businesses by making it impossible for shoppers to access their storefronts. In the end, Byrne would prove to be the most successful organizer of opposition, sending three hundred signatures to the legislature and promising that he had twelve thousand in total. “Construction would seriously interfere with travel and traffic,” the petition read, “proving ruinous to hundreds of merchants and in the end failing to relieve the congestion or promote rapid transit.” Henry A. G. Pomeroy had a much briefer argument than Byrne. He told the commissioners he was convinced the temperature underground would be much colder than above ground and could not possibly be safe. John Stone, a seventy-one-year-old former mayor of Charlestown who owned a grocery store, said he had no desire to dump his money into a hole and he’d just as soon have “pirates and misers” take it instead. And still others trotted out the same arguments that had been heard a few years earlier during the public hearings that led to the 1892 report. One man said he was terrified for his mother going “down in that tunnel with her grey hairs, not knowing where she is going.” Half a century after Marc Brunel’s Thames Tunnel opened, fear of the underground still lingered.

  Arguments were also heard from a group calling itself the Merchant’s Anti-Subway League. Led by a jeweler named John W. Wilson, the group bombarded the newspapers with letters to the editor, and the papers responded in kind with headlines like SUBWAY SCARE: MERCHANTS FEAR INJURY TO THEIR TRADE. Wilson and his brother, Ed, had started out in business together early, selling newspapers in the city’s West End neighborhood as young boys. They were known on their corner for being the most aggressive newsboys around, and it worked, as they saved enough to open Wilson Brothers jewelers on Tremont Street. They may have been good businessmen, but in the subway fight, they were disorganized. Wilson showed up at one hearing just to complain that the voice of the merchants was being ignored, only to be calmly told that every hearing had been advertised well in advance.

  One surprising voice against the subway was Michael Meehan, a resident of Jamaica Plain and one of the hardest-working contractors in the city. When some merchants asked Meehan to give his expert opinion on the project, to be attached to the petition they were submitting to the legislature, Meehan happily obliged. He looked at the subway proposal and saw a complicated network of water, sewer, and gas lines that would all have to be rerouted to make room for the tunnel. The subway, he believed, would provide only minimal relief, and it would hardly be enough to justify the exorbitant cost of building it. “I think that it is a very expensive method of solving that problem, and I think we are not going to get proper results for the expenditure,” Meehan wrote in his statement. It was a curious position for a local contractor to take. If a subway bill eventually was passed, and the city sought bids to build the multimillion-dollar project, would Meehan throw his hat in after voicing such a negative opinion of it? And if he did, would the city officials care that he had criticized them for moving forward with it?

  * * *

  IT SEEMED AS IF THE arguing was done and as if lawmakers were ready to pass a bill, proposed by Matthews, that called for building a subway and for purchasing the necessary land to begin planning an elevated route outside downtown for a private company to control. It was a savvy compromise by Matthews that seemed sure to pass since both elevated and subway supporters could claim victory. But it was not to be. An old challenger resurfaced at the last possible moment, determined to stir up trouble.

  Joe Meigs, or Captain Joe to those who knew him well, had managed to build a short, experimental, steam-powered monorail between Boston and Cambridge a few years earlier and had even written to Abram Hewitt in New York about considering a monorail for his city. Meigs had been given permission twice to build a longer elevated rail and failed to raise the money or start construction, so it was hard to imagine legislators trusting him a third time, especially since the panic of 1893 had bankrupted so many potential investors. But Meigs had a new strategy. He sensed there was growing interest in an elevated line outside downtown, to connect with a possible subway tunnel, and so he smartly lobbied suburbanites for his downtown monorail, knowing they carried a growing influence with legislators. He requested yet another charter, this one to build an elevated line clear across Boston, from Charlestown out to Roxbury, covering a total of thirty-six miles of streets. It was an outlandish plan that would have ripped downtown Boston in half and shut down the business district for months or maybe years during construction. And yet, to the astonishment of nearly everyone in town, Meigs got his wish.

  On April 30, 1894, the legislature chose to ignore Matthews’s reasoned bill and instead to look more closely into the proposal from Meigs. The outrage was immediate. Accusations flew that he had bribed his way back onto the scene and that nowhere in his charter was there an explanation of how it would be paid for and who would reimburse the businesses that would undoubtedly be damaged during the construction. For three months, the city was in a confused uproar, and nobody was angrier than its mayor. Finally, some level of sanity was restored on June 28. Lawmakers hastily added a measure to the bil
l giving voters the final say and restoring the important pieces of Matthews’s proposal, namely a subway in the business district and a clause banning any elevated tracks downtown.

  But instead of the final bill being seen as a compromise, it was now viewed as a weak attempt to merely placate all sides. Nobody was pleased. The elevated supporters loathed seeing the subway plan in the bill. And the subway backers could not believe Meigs had wormed his way back in to get an elevated charter approved. Even the Citizens Association, which all along had favored the subway proposal, backed off its support because of what Meigs had achieved. On July 2, well after midnight, both the House and the Senate passed the new bill and sent it to Governor Frederic Thomas Greenhalge. He signed it immediately, and Mayor Matthews set July 24 as the date for the citizens to vote on their future.

  * * *

  ON JULY 23, 1894, the New York Giants visited Boston to play a game of baseball. It had been a big year of change for the game, and for the Boston Beaneaters. Two months earlier, an enormous fire in Roxbury destroyed South End Grounds, the Beaneaters’ home field, along with more than two hundred other buildings. It left two thousand people homeless and leveled almost twelve acres of the city. The team was forced to move their home games to the Congress Street Grounds, and that’s where the Beaneaters hosted the Giants the day before Bostonians voted on their subway. No doubt tired of all the transit talk, 3,333 people came out on the warm summer day for the game. The polls opened the next day at six o’clock. They would stay open for ten hours, closing at four in the afternoon.