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

by Most, Doug

  As to the question of what would power the subway trains, that debate was no longer in doubt. Steam was ruled out. Cable was too expensive and prone to break down. Electricity was the only sensible choice, and the reason was, once again, Frank Sprague. This time, New York, not Boston, would be the beneficiary of his genius.

  Sprague was on the verge of perfecting a breakthrough even more significant than the one he had achieved in Richmond back in 1888. Sprague’s latest technology was called multiple-unit control. The reason those trolleys had struggled so mightily to climb that hill in Richmond during that dramatic midnight run was because the front car was pulling the dead weight of the passenger cars behind it. But Sprague was never satisfied with that. It seemed so inefficient and sluggish. He spent the 1890s working on something he called multiple-unit control, where each car has its own electric traction system and can be controlled by a single motorman at the front of the train to work with other cars as a unit. So successful was the multiple-unit train that General Electric, which had tried to beat Sprague to the same idea and lost, would buy it from him.

  On January 30, with all the major decisions in place, Belmont announced his involvement in the New York subway with a terse statement.

  “Yes, I am Mr. McDonald’s financial agent,” he said in a brief appearance.

  Three weeks later, on February 24, 1900, a few minutes after 10:30 in the morning, August Belmont walked into the offices of the New York City comptroller. He was soon joined by Mayor Van Wyck, McDonald, Parsons, and the members of the Rapid Transit Commission. Belmont handed over one million dollars in certified checks and the other required securities and bonds. It was precisely 10:49 in the morning when a gold pen was produced and the signing of the subway contracts began. One by one, papers were passed around a long table and signatures were affixed to contracts and receipts. The final man to sign was McDonald, who had been sitting quietly, beaming. When it was his turn, he stepped forward, accepted a round of applause, and turned to Belmont.

  “Here is the gentleman who gives me the privilege of signing this contract,” McDonald said. And then he sat down and signed. A debate that had been raging in New York City for half a century, since the day in 1849 when Scientific American published Alfred Beach’s article proposing a subway beneath Broadway, was put to rest in a proceeding that lasted all of eleven minutes. Or so it seemed. Belmont, it turned out, still had one last problem to resolve.

  * * *

  TO FULFILL ALL THE OBLIGATIONS required by the Rapid Transit Commission, the owner of the subway also had to operate it for fifty years. Belmont was a banker. He did not own an actual transit company. McDonald was a builder. He had no interest in running a subway. “I am a contractor, not a railroad man,” he told the commission. “And I guess I had better stick to my business.”

  The only way to start a transit company was to apply for a charter from the New York State legislature. It should have been an easy process for Belmont, considering that by this point there was near-unanimous support for the subway. But when Belmont began the paperwork to apply for a charter, he discovered that the men who owned the street railway companies, powerful and influential businessmen themselves who had forged deep relationships with the right politicians in Albany and the biggest banks in New York, were not exactly thrilled with the idea of a subway. To them it was competition. It would eat into their profits, and if it expanded into the suburbs, as was expected, it would probably destroy them in the end. When Belmont turned to the bonding companies and banks to support his financial commitment to the subway, institutions that had shown great willingness to work with him in the past, this time he could not find a single one to back him. The banks were either completely uninterested, or they demanded conditions he was unwilling to meet. At every turn, Belmont recalled later, “I found the door closed.”

  Belmont knew that he needed a friend who, like him, recognized that this charter was too important to be quashed by petty businessmen who were too small-minded to realize that a revolution was at hand for their city. He needed someone who could quickly and quietly push his charter through the legislature and did not need to be credited. He needed someone who took pleasure in helping others get what they wanted, as long as he believed it was for the public’s good. But what he really needed was someone who knew how the street railways of New York operated, so that he could maneuver around them and get the charter to fulfill the subway contract. “I resolved to go straight to a man who was all powerful, or at least most influential with the powers that were, and I did,” Belmont reflected years later. “I went to that man, told him just what I was trying to do, what the project meant for New York and how certain influences were trying to prevent me from carrying it out. He promised his help and gave it.”

  The man who delivered Belmont his charter, the man who cleared the final hurdle that allowed New York to finally get the financing for its subway, was William Collins Whitney.

  Even though Whitney had briefly made his own play for the subway contract before it was awarded to McDonald, Belmont had a hunch. He reached out to Whitney for help. And he got it. It was a secret that Whitney took to his grave and was only revealed reluctantly by Belmont a decade later, when, under a courtroom oath, he was asked to tell the story about how he had finally received his charter.

  * * *

  ON THE FEBRUARY DAY in 1900 when Belmont signed the contract, he had one employee, John Bart McDonald. They made an odd couple, the bald, belly-bulging Irishman who had worked hard labor his whole life and the trim, snobbish, spoiled German Jew born into a life of privilege. They, along with William Barclay Parsons, the young engineer who had the entire route mapped out on his blueprints and knew the formation of the island of New York down to every last pebble, were now being hailed as saviors and protectors of a project that seemed doomed time and time again. And they had thirty days to hire a crew and start digging. They would not have to look far.

  The news that New York was about to build a subway spread fast. Two dollars a day for eight hours of work was good money for a laborer. Engineers, axmen, levelers, steelworkers, inspectors, cement mixers, masonry men, accountants, stenographers, diggers, and even messengers were all suddenly needed. At the Municipal Lodging House on First Avenue at Twenty-third Street, skilled and unskilled laborers from around the country began to flock in day after day in search of a cot to sleep on and a penny to earn. There would be thousands of men within a few days.

  A three-room apartment in New York, which rented for eight dollars a month, could be divided among three, four, or as many as six workers to reduce the cost. A dozen eggs was going for twenty-five cents, about the same for three tins of sardines, while a dozen pints of beer could be had for a dollar fifty. At the saloons, drafts were five cents, whisky shots ten cents. With those basics, a group of immigrant workers could be quite content, as long as they had paychecks to purchase them.

  As for McDonald, arrogant as always, he vowed that digging twenty-one miles of tunnel through the schist of New York would be no more challenging than any other routine job he had handled.

  “Constructing the tunnel will be simple,” he boasted. “Just like cellar digging.”

  15

  PLAYING WITH DYNAMITE

  MOSES EPPS AND EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON came from two different worlds at the dawn of a new century. Epps was a strong, twenty-five-year-old uneducated black man trying to support himself and to stay out of trouble in a time when racism was still very much a part of life in America. Robinson was a thirty-one-year-old white man with round glasses and a neatly trimmed mustache. He came from wealthy old English stock, studied at Harvard, and was on his way to becoming one of the country’s most distinguished poets with a letter of praise from President Theodore Roosevelt and a shelf full of Pulitzer prizes. His poems, The New York Times glowed, “stood out like poppies in a dandelion field.” In contrast, when given repeated chances to explore Epps’s life, The Times had little to say, describing him over and over as simpl
y a “colored man.”

  In the first year of the 1900s, Moses Epps and Edwin Robinson found themselves in the same city, on the same job, two struggling men looking for work who found it, of all places, in the bowels of New York City. One of them took work as a timekeeper, his only tools paper and pencil. The other worked as a powderman, handling the dynamite that was used to blow up the ground beneath the streets. The New York City subway project brought together men from all walks of life, like Epps and Robinson. It also brought together men from all parts of the world, from the rolling hills of Ireland to the small villages of Italy to the diamond fields of South Africa and the coal mines of Pennsylvania.

  * * *

  ON THE CRISP AND SUNNY morning of March 24, 1900, inside a tiny courtroom in Mount Vernon, New York, the county judge, Smith Lent, faced an unusually large crowd. More than two hundred people had packed themselves in, almost all of them young men. It should have been a Saturday of smiles and cheer, since they were all there for the same reason, to receive their naturalization papers to become citizens of the United States. But as the day’s proceedings began, and each man came before Justice Lent, he grew more visibly annoyed. They were filthy, their hands and faces caked with dirt and their clothes like rags. They looked as if they hadn’t bathed in days, and they reeked of body odor and pipe smoke. Smith found it disrespectful that they would come into his courtroom in such a filthy state. By the time a young Italian man from Yonkers stepped before Lent, he’d had enough.

  “Haven’t you any water or soap in Yonkers?” Lent asked him.

  “Not much,” the Italian answered.

  Lent looked out to the room, incredulous. “You foreigners must wash your hands before you come before me,” he shouted to the men, most of them Italians, Germans, Poles, and Scandinavians who spoke in their own slangs and jargons and understood little, if any, English. “Water costs nothing and soap is cheap. I would grant your application for citizenship with great pleasure if you were clean.”

  The men in the room nodded their heads and promised the judge they would keep clean from that day forward. It was a promise they should not have made. The reason they needed their immigration papers to be official was that they had come to America for one reason: to get hired to work on the rapid transit tunnel that New York was about to begin digging. In fact, at the same moment they were sitting in Lent’s courtroom, a much larger crowd was beginning to gather at City Hall Park, where the final touches were being put on the subway’s groundbreaking celebration, scheduled to begin in a few hours. If they were lucky enough to be among the thousands hired for the job, they would earn two dollars a day for ten hours of work, gouging a trench into the ground by swinging axes, picks, shovels, and hammers, hard labor that was sure to cover them head to toe in dirt and grime and sweat and blood. It was not exactly ideal work for men who had just promised a judge they would smell fresh and keep their hands clean.

  * * *

  IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE a miserable day of rain. Instead, clouds gave way to a blue sky and bright sunshine. For an event that had been talked about for half a century, no detail was overlooked in planning the celebration to build a subway. For Boston’s groundbreaking five years earlier, half a dozen officials just showed up and, with a small crowd looking on, stuck a shovel in the ground. So understated was it that the mayor didn’t see a reason to attend. New York was not about to let its moment pass so quietly.

  John Philip Sousa, the forty-four-year-old composer and conductor who had played for presidents, led his band in entertaining the crowd, drowning out the clanging church bells from the neighborhood. Pulitzer’s World newspaper hired the Pain Fireworks Company of New Jersey to set off explosions of dynamite, and a twenty-one-gun cannon salute was planned. Out in the harbor, horns and whistles blew and fog bells rang. It was a cacophony of sound that was matched by the majestic appearance of City Hall. Half-moon American flags hung off the roof and outside windows.

  The crowd began arriving as early as seven o’clock in the morning, with the throngs showing up two hours later and lining up behind the thousand police officers on hand to maintain order. But there almost weren’t enough police as the pushing and shoving led to a crushing scene. One woman fainted and cut her head when she fell, and several small children had to be plucked from the crowd before they were trampled. The early birds watched excitedly as a few workers came out before noon and chipped a small hole into the ground with pickaxes, marking the spot where city officials would do the more official deed in a few minutes. A few stones from the broken pavement flew into the crowd and were pocketed as souvenirs. As noon approached, dignitaries gathered on the balcony, while thousands of citizens crammed their necks from the windows in nearby buildings and from the sidewalks below, stretching in a solid wall from Broadway through the entire length of City Hall Park. Boston broke ground on its subway with no fanfare or celebration. But there was no chance of New Yorkers overlooking their own moment. It was estimated that 25,000 people turned out.

  Nineteen hundred was a year when New York’s biggest names were at, or near, their height of power, and right behind them stood a generation itching to seize their own day. Fiorello La Guardia, Jimmy Walker, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were all teenagers growing up in the city. John Singer Sargent, Alfred E. Smith, William Randolph Hearst, and Teddy Roosevelt were the power brokers as the new century began, still in their thirties and forties. None was more powerful than J. P. Morgan, who was Wall Street’s king after rebuilding the city’s financial strength in the wake of the panic of 1893 by investing in steel and copper at outrageous profits. In his remarks on that March morning, New York’s mayor spared no hyperbole about the significance of the moment.

  “The completion of this undertaking,” Van Wyck said shortly after one o’clock, “will be second only in importance to that of the Erie Canal, celebrated in this city seventy-five years ago.” A few other perfunctory speeches followed, at which point the mayor was handed a spade. August Belmont, a man who spared no expense in life, was not about to let this moment pass without putting his personal stamp on it. He had asked Tiffany & Co. to make him a special silver spade for the occasion, with a wooden handle crafted out of one of the thirteen trees that Alexander Hamilton planted in Washington Heights in 1803 to recognize the original thirteen states. The coat of arms of New York was etched into the blade. It was more jewelry than tool. Taking a shovelful of dirt from the pile neatly prepared for the ceremony, Van Wyck deposited it into his hat, which he had removed from his head, a souvenir for his office.

  “Bravo, old man,” a voice shouted out, and a roar of cheers erupted from the crowd as fireworks boomed into the sky.

  When John McDonald’s turn came, he was surprisingly timid in the way he reached for some dirt and gently placed it to the side, acting more like a stiff politician than a burly contractor. Parsons, knowing that he’d be monitoring McDonald’s work for the next few years, could not let the incident pass. “If your laborers shirk work like that, there will be trouble,” Parsons joked.

  * * *

  TWO DAYS LATER, ON March 26, 1900, at the corner of Bleecker and Greene streets, the chief engineer himself took hold of an ordinary pickax. It was only a few blocks from where Parsons grew up. Chatting with those who had gathered, he said it was a poignant event for him to be able to strike the blow that broke ground on such a historic event, so close to his boyhood home. Just after eight o’clock in the morning, Parsons held the pickax low between two cobblestones in the street long enough for photographers to get their posed pictures. He then raised the tool high and slammed it into the earth with such force that it must have felt like letting ten years of frustration out with one single violent swing. The subway was officially under construction. Other cities had beaten New York. But their subways, with the exception of London’s, were toy train sets compared with what New York was set to embark upon. The city’s timing was perfect.

  Trapped between its two rivers, New York trailed London in population b
ut little else. With a century of enormous growth and the 1898 consolidation, it had blossomed from a village to a town and from a town to a city to a megalopolis. The Belmonts, Astors, Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Carnegies, and Morgans gathered for costumed galas at their Fifth Avenue mansions, sat in their private boxes to hear Italian arias at the Metropolitan Opera, and began to recognize that the Metropolitan Museum of Art was on its way toward becoming one of the world’s great museums. It was already a home to classical antiquities, and its purchase of two pieces by Édouard Manet in 1889 had signaled that it was serious about building its collection of famous canvas paintings. Broadway was vibrant and repetitive, as the same plays often monopolized theaters for months or years. A single actor named Joseph Jefferson played Rip Van Winkle more than 2,500 times, and in Monte Cristo an older actor named James O’Neill, the father of Eugene O’Neill, starred almost as often. Sherlock Holmes was popular, and so were the plump ladies of vaudeville dressed in short frilly skirts in Billy Watson’s Beef Trust. The most popular organized sports were not college football or professional baseball, which were growing but still in their early days, but more brutal activities suitable for small crowds, from dog fights to prize fights. Jazz was only taking shape in New Orleans and had not yet migrated north, but one area where New York shined was fine dining. Delmonico’s, the Claremont, Shanley’s, and the dining room of the Waldorf, for those who could afford the meals, served thick steaks and rich crepes drowned in brandy. At Sherry’s on Forty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, the Carte du Jour offered Little Neck clams for twenty-five cents, filet of sole for forty cents, filet mignon for sixty-five cents, roast lamb for seventy, venison in a port-wine sauce for a dollar, and, the real splurge, chicken partridge for two dollars and fifty cents. For the working class, a meal for two at those prices was equal to a day’s pay or more. For a Carnegie, it was pocket change.