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

by Most, Doug

  It had taken Boston seven years to get to this day—seven years from Henry Whitney’s 1887 speech first suggesting the city tunnel under its congested downtown to build an electric-powered subway. Whitney had since moved on. Three mayors had been in charge. Blizzards and fires had leveled portions of the city. Tracks had been electrified and extended the city’s limits six miles out of downtown. A bizarre elevated monorail had briefly made an appearance. And finally a compromise had been reached. But would it pass?

  The same debate had been raging in New York, launched by Mayor Hewitt after the blizzard of 1888. Almost seven years later, New York was also nearing a vote. The Rapid Transit Commission had finally approved a recommendation from its chief engineer, William Parsons, to build a subway and set a tentative date, November 1894, for the public to vote on it.

  Incredibly, half a century after the Thames Tunnel opened and a quarter century after Alfred Beach’s secretly built one-block subway opened, years that were filled with rancor and debate over how to build a safe and comfortable subway that American cities could rely on, Bostonians and New Yorkers were now going to vote on that issue just four months apart.

  * * *

  IT WAS WET AND WARM on July 24 in Boston. A steady rain fell from morning to night, and the temperature hovered in the seventies. Maybe that’s why not even thirty thousand people turned out to vote. Or maybe they were tired of all the talking. Or perhaps they just assumed there was no possible way, with the addition of the elevated line to be built by Meigs, that the final bill would be passed. They were wrong. The final vote, counted by hand, was reported differently in nearly every newspaper in town, perhaps because the clerk who had been in charge of the “No” column miscounted the tally at first by more than one thousand votes. But in the end, the result was the same. The referendum was passed. The Globe reported the final result as 15,458 in favor, and 14,209 opposed, meaning that, by a slim margin of 1,249 votes, the citizens of Boston said they were ready for a subway. It was hardly overwhelming support.

  Sam Little, who had replaced Whitney as president of the West End Street Railway Company, said on the evening after the results had been announced that he was surprised at the total number of people who voted and at the closeness of the vote. “I really thought a large number of people demanded an elevated road, from all the talk to that effect in the newspapers and one way and another, but the result doesn’t seem to indicate it.”

  That was one way to look at the results. But another was that fears about the subway, despite assurances from respected doctors from Massachusetts General Hospital that the subway’s air would be just as clean as the air above it, still had not been put to rest in the minds of many. “I don’t believe in a tunnel or a subway,” a local undertaker said after voting no. “I expect to be a long time underground after I am dead, but while I live I want to travel on earth, not under it.”

  Over in room 12 at Young’s Hotel, the celebration was loud, and Joe Meigs could not stand still. His attorney told the throng of reporters that his client was not available to speak but that he was elated that his proposal for an elevated railway had been approved after so many years. “The people have spoken,” George V. Towle said. “The citizens of Boston have pronounced in favor of our system and there is nothing more to be said.” As seven o’clock in the evening passed, the chamber room at City Hall was so packed that there was no room to move. Aldermen, department chiefs, city and state politicians, and citizens fascinated with the project all gathered to mingle and discuss the results. Surrounded by well-wishers, Nathan Matthews answered questions from reporters.

  For Boston’s mayor, the vote was the victory he had pledged to achieve in his first inauguration speech in 1891. It had taken more than three years and created sharp divisions in the city, but the mayor was convinced that there was no other option. “The election shows that however the citizens may differ upon the merits of elevated railroads, subway routes, etcetera, a majority of them voting at a special election are in favor of a system of subways to be constructed and leased on public account,” Matthews said. “The verdict should be accepted as final and as a reasonably satisfactory conclusion to the rapid transit agitation.”

  “What is to be done next?” a reporter shouted at him.

  “I should assume that the main plans can be prepared,” the mayor answered, “and the work of construction begun and possibly well advanced before the close of the year.”

  Part Three

  TRAGEDIES, TRIUMPHS

  10

  BIDDING TO BUILD HISTORY

  THEY GATHERED AT 11:30 IN THE MORNING on March 20, 1895, a group of about twenty men in the small downtown office of the Boston Transit Commission. Eight months had passed since the rainy day in July when voters approved the combined subway and elevated plan. Now it was a sunny Wednesday with spring just around the corner. When the door to the room opened, all eyes turned to the large tin box being carried into the room by B. Leighton Beal, a former newspaper editor who had recently left the business to become the transit commission’s secretary. With one swoop, Beal hoisted the box up and turned it over, and in dramatic fashion twelve large envelopes flew out onto the table at the front of the room. Beal neatly stacked up the envelopes right next to another stack, this one of twelve smaller envelopes. The smaller ones each contained a $5,000 certified check, for a total of $60,000. The larger ones contained the figures that would decide in whose hands the citizens of Boston would place the building of the first section of their subway.

  Sitting at the front table were the commission’s five members, led by George G. Crocker, a likable gray-haired, clean-shaven lawyer and former president of the Massachusetts State Senate. Of all the commissioners, Charles H. Dalton had the most important role. A former parks commissioner, his presence was supposed to reassure those who feared that the subway would destroy trees all over the Common. There were 150 trees in the park standing over portions of the subway route, and 57 of those were too tall to be uprooted and transplanted, while many others were young and just taking hold. It was always assumed that many trees would have to be sacrificed for the subway, but Dalton’s hope was to restore the Common to its full beauty.

  The other men in the room with the commissioners were strangers to one another, but they were all too familiar with this process. They had come to find out if their bid, which required a $5,000 check just to be eligible, might win them the contract to build the first section of the Boston subway. These were not the twenty- and thirty-year-old tough Boston Irish laborers who would soon be putting in nine or ten hours a day and taking home $1.70 per shift for their sweat. These were businessmen, the contractors who would hire the laborers, and they were some of the most respected contractors from the East Coast.

  All of them were well aware of the stakes as the meeting got under way. This was no $10,000 sewer job. The subway was projected to cost $5 million, a figure that included $3.5 million for constructing approximately 10,000 feet, or 1.8 miles, of tracks, plus $1.5 million to purchase the land needed for the stations. The most expensive purchase by far was the old Haymarket Square railroad station, which was no longer being used by the Boston & Maine Railroad and which cost the city $750,000. If the subway opened on time and close to budget and proved to be successful and safe, the lead contractor was sure to be in demand for years. But if it failed, or worse, if there was a construction disaster, it might be impossible for a contractor to ever recover, especially if there were multiple and preventable work-related deaths on the job.

  * * *

  ON THE DAY OF the hearing, Boston was still rejoicing from another momentous moment only nine days earlier. On March 11, the Boston Public Library, which since 1848 had been housed near the Common on Boylston Street, unveiled an Italian Renaissance–style building in Copley Square designed by the famous New York firm of McKim, Mead and White. With thirteen arched windows facing the square, it felt more Roman than Bostonian. The public was dazzled and proud to host the first publicly suppor
ted lending library in the United States and to reinforce Boston’s reputation as the country’s scholarly and literary capital. With enormous bronze doors; two lion statues out front by Augustus Saint-Gaudens; sculptures by Daniel Chester French; murals by Sargent, Whistler, and Edwin A. Abbey; and a cavernous reading room with vaulted ceilings, the books felt almost like an afterthought.

  Meanwhile, despite the urgings of former mayor Nathan Matthews, who insisted that Boston must begin acting like a major city rather than a large New England town, the city retained a small-town feel. Its entire downtown district could be walked across in twenty minutes, since it was about the same size as the Mount Auburn Cemetery across the river near the line of Watertown and Cambridge. Because it was surrounded on three sides by water, Boston’s downtown was like a balloon blowing up while trapped inside a box. Each new surge of immigrants arriving to live or work downtown swelled up the balloon to its bursting point, and that bursting point seemed to be here.

  In 1790, Boston was the third largest city in the United States behind New York and Philadelphia, with 18,320 residents. Fifty years later, it was still the third largest, but with 136,881 residents. And fifty years after that, in 1890, while its ranking had dropped to sixth, its population had more than tripled to 448,477. In describing life in Boston, American Architect and Building News said in the early 1890s that people were “elbowing each other off the sidewalk into the gutter” and the city’s sidewalks were “jammed to suffocation with pedestrians.” Since the sidewalks were suffocating, the subway was supposed to provide the burst of fresh air to keep everyone breathing.

  A week after the library opened, the city was poised to start its next historic chapter by moving forward with building the first subway system in America.

  There would be eleven sections to the subway, each one built by a different contractor with their own contract. It would stretch just 1.8 miles in total. And it would open in two stages. The first phase resembled an L shape, running from the entrance of the Public Garden, near Boylston and Arlington streets, up to the corner of Boylston and Tremont streets and then turning left to the corner of Park Street across from the Park Street Church. The second phase would run from Park Street along Tremont through Scollay, Adams, and Haymarket squares and ending at North Station.

  For the contractors bidding, it was an enormous opportunity. Not since John Roebling designed the Brooklyn Bridge two decades earlier had there been such a prestigious, high-profile, and complicated public works project as the one Boston was about to embark on. Their job was to dig the city a safe and secure subway tunnel, not to design it.

  In fact, the wording for the job was quite specific: “An inclined open entrance to subway in the public garden, between Church Street and Charles Street, subway under Charles Street and Boylston Street mall of Boston Common to a point about 160 feet from Tremont Street and under Tremont at mall of Boston Common from a point about 110 feet north of Mason Street to a point near the southerly line of West Street.” Among the expectations listed for the project were that 6,870 cubic yards of dirt would have to be dug up just for the inclined entrance to the subway, 1,150 additional cubic yards outside of the subway trench would have to be excavated, and 1,020 tons of iron and steel would have to be set and secured in the earth, along with hundreds of tons of brick and stone masonry, concrete, and spruce lumber.

  It was a big job, but it was nothing like what London had achieved with its Underground. The London subway was a true tunnel that required boring through the earth without tearing up the surface. Boston’s was not even as challenging as Alfred Beach’s one-block pneumatic experiment in New York, which had been dug deep beneath New York’s streets in secret. Boston had neither the ambition to dig so deep as London, nor the desire to be secretive like Beach. Its plans were quite simple.

  The Boston subway would be built just beneath the surface of the streets, so that passengers would merely have to step down a few dozen stairs to reach the tracks. Workers would use what engineers called the cut-and-cover method, which described the work perfectly. Cut a trench in the ground. Install the necessary tracks and lighting to run the trolleys from station to station. And make sure the tunnel is sealed off from water and protected from collapse. Cover the trench. It sounded simple enough, and it would soon be a method that cities around the world adopted, but in an era before there were steam shovels to do the digging, the subway trench would be backbreaking work for men wielding picks and shovels, who would fill up wagons with dirt that horses dragged away.

  The contractors who showed up at the Boston Transit Commission meeting to see their bids unsealed knew all of this. They came from Brooklyn; Manhattan; Westchester County; New York; Franklin, Massachusetts; the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain; Providence; and downtown Boston. Just before noon, the chairman, George Crocker, welcomed everybody and began to unseal the envelopes one by one.

  J. W. Hoffman and Co. from Philadelphia bid $181,206. John McNamee from Brooklyn bid $138,484.10. Washburn and Washburn from Westchester County, New York, bid $189,787.50. McCarthy Bros. and Co. from Franklin, Massachusetts, bid $191,910. Wearing Booth and Company from Boston bid $182,135.90. Crawford and Company from Brooklyn bid $173,423.25. R. A. Malone from Boston bid a competitive $146,604.50. F. C. O’Reilly and Company from New York bid $183,057.90. H. P. Nawn from Boston bid $212,602. Everson and Liddle from Providence bid $230,765. Woodbury and Leighton from Boston bid the highest, at $231,625.50, almost a full $100,000 higher than the lowest bid. And Jones and Meehan bid $139,602, right behind McNamee’s lowest bid. Jones and Meehan was a local contracting firm, and its bid was noteworthy because Michael Meehan had spoken out against the subway during the debate. Now here he was bidding for the right to build it.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, WHILE THE other contractors anxiously awaited word, J. Edwin Jones and Michael Meehan decided they were too close to sit by without putting up a fight. Their bid was only $1,118 more than the lowest one submitted by John McNamee of Brooklyn. Losing by such a paltry dollar amount, especially to a New York contractor for a historic job that would completely reshape their hometown, was too much for the Jamaica Plain businessmen to bear. They requested an immediate hearing with the transit commissioners, before a decision had been reached on the bids.

  Jones and Meehan made for a good team despite their many differences. Meehan, who was self-taught and had minimal schooling, was a battle-tested mechanic. Jones was an educated, experienced engineer. What they shared was an intimate knowledge of the streets and topography of Boston and its surrounding suburbs, and they were both savvy to the ways of how local politics worked.

  Meehan was born in Ireland in 1840 and moved to Boston when he was fifteen. As a young man he served in the Union navy during the Civil War for three years, surviving an attack on the frigate Minnesota and swimming to shore. Back home, he briefly worked as a reporter for The Globe before becoming active in politics, being named as secretary of the state Democratic committee. In the mid-1880s, he and Jones first worked together. Jones was the superintendent of streets for Boston, a job that paid $4,000 and came with the use of a horse and vehicle, and Meehan was his deputy. Jones studied engineering at Harvard and worked as a civil engineer at the U.S. Navy Yard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, before leaving to run a Maine railroad line for two years and the enormous Croton aqueduct sewer system in New York. He arrived in Boston to work as the assistant to the city surveyor and worked his way up to run the streets department. When his city work was completed, he joined with Meehan to open a civil engineering office.

  In a small office on Rockview Street in Jamaica Plain, the two men soon built a formidable contracting business that would land some of the biggest sewer and bridge jobs in Boston and Cambridge. Meehan’s brother, Patrick, a banker and one of the richest men in Jamaica Plain, helped them get their business off the ground. Once they did, they gained experience and confidence. Both of these qualities were on display when they sought out the transit commissioner
s the day after the bids were unsealed and argued that as residents and taxpayers of Boston, they should be given preference over a contractor from outside the state.

  There was no legitimate reason to award them the bid. They were not the lowest bidders. And their chief competitor had built the foundations for elevated trains in Brooklyn and would go on to help build the Interborough subway in the same city. He was well deserving of the Boston job. But he was not local. And the commissioners were warm to the idea of having local men build the Boston subway. They took a second look at the bids and decided that Meehan’s bid more accurately reflected how much dirt would be dug up for the tunnel. Three days after they opened the bids, the commissioners curiously adjusted Meehan’s bid to be $782.10 below McNamee’s. Just like that, the job belonged to Jones and Meehan.

  And less than a week later, on the morning of March 27, 1895, the two contractors from Jamaica Plain took their first walk along the subway route and over the Common. They took particular note of all the trees and burial grounds they would have to contend with.

  * * *

  THE TEMPERATURE ON MARCH 28, 1895, never got above 35 degrees. The skies were dark, the ground a soft and sticky mud, and light flurries were starting to fall. A Harvard student was rescued from the freezing water of the Charles River after his rowboat capsized. Hamlet continued its run at the Tremont Theater across the street from the Common while, down by the harbor, a number of boats remained washed up after the previous day’s snow squalls. Warm coats were on sale down on Washington Street for as little as three dollars. It would have passed as an entirely uneventful day if not for the brief and quiet proceedings that occurred in the morning on Boston Common.

  A dozen men gathered by a collection of wheelbarrows, all of them bundled up tightly in long dark coats and wearing winter hats. Governor Greenhalge, a bald, mustachioed Englishman who first came to the States as a boy, walked down from the statehouse a few minutes before nine o’clock and watched as a stake was driven into the ground to signal where the first shovel of dirt should come from. The governor’s opinion on the subway had been a thing of mystery from the day he took office in January 1894. During his inaugural address, he barely mentioned rapid transit other than to say it was an important issue facing the city and the state, and he left his citizens to wonder exactly where he stood. Soon the governor was joined by all the members of the Boston Transit Commission; the winning contractors, Jones and Meehan; and two Boston city councilors. A few citizens stopped outside the fence and gazed in, drawn by the sight of their portly governor but unsure what they were witnessing. Within minutes the watchers numbered close to a hundred. The plan had been to put the ceremonial shovels in the ground at nine o’clock, but when the bell tower of the Park Street Church began to ring on the hour, it occurred to George Crocker that the Boston mayor, Edwin Curtis, was absent. Crocker sent an aide to rush to the nearest telephone and call the mayor’s office.