by Most, Doug
* * *
IN A MATTER OF DAYS after Parsons’s first swing, it looked like bombs had exploded all over the city. Downtown, uptown, midtown—swarms of men wearing baggy pants, heavy boots, brimmed hats, shirts with their long sleeves rolled up, and suspenders emerged with their sharp pickaxes and started swinging. In minutes the streets were reduced to rubble. As one group pushed forward inch by inch, another group behind them shoveled the loose rocks and dirt into wooden carriages attached to mules that carted it away. They made remarkable progress considering their primitive tools. In weeks, the streets were obliterated and the men were standing ten or twenty feet deep, often amid a maze of sewer, water, and gas lines that would need to be rerouted or lowered farther into the ground. So nervous were the crews about gas leaks that, instead of working around the pipes, they rerouted them above ground to get them out of harm’s way.
In Columbus Circle, the imposing seventy-foot marble statue of Christopher Columbus, erected in 1892 to honor the four-hundredth anniversary of his landing in America, soon stood amid utter destruction, looking out over an intersection in chaos. The street railway tracks circling the monument were littered with debris and passed between piles of dirt or directly over newly dug trenches. Waiting passengers stood feet away from the work, and women with children stopped and stared at the progress. The deeper the workers went, the bigger the rocks that they loosened. And that’s when the machinery was needed. The arm of a steam-powered crane would hang over the trench and drop a rope down, waiting for it to be tied to a boulder before hoisting it to the surface.
Throughout the city, diggers would discover coin chests and colonial weapons, and a crazy collection of underground brooks, springs, and even a small subterranean pond at Thirty-second and Madison. Giant mastodon bones surfaced near Dyckman Street, and the charred hull of a seventeenth-century Dutch merchant ship was found near the Battery. Fortunately, they would not, like the workers in Boston, stumble upon hundreds of bodies in cemeteries. Once a section of trench was long and deep enough, steel beams were laid in a grid across the top of it to begin the process of building the roof of the tunnel and of rebuilding the surface of the streets.
* * *
BECAUSE THE QUESTION OF how the trains should be powered had been decided, the next critical question Parsons faced was how deep to dig. His choice would affect the way New Yorkers lived and traveled from that day forward. Today, when New Yorkers merely bound down a dozen or two dozen well-lighted steps to most of their stations across New York City, rather than ride elevators much deeper into the dark underground, it’s because Parsons had the foresight in 1900 to make his decision based not on how difficult it might be to build the subway but on how easy and pleasurable it must be to ride the subway day after day, year after year. As with everything he did, Parsons approached the question of how deep to dig practically, thinking like a passenger, and analytically, using the wealth of engineering knowledge he’d accumulated from more than a decade of drilling holes in the island.
There were two ways Parsons could instruct John McDonald to build the subway. He could tunnel through the earth, far beneath the streets, like London, causing little disruption to the streets during construction. Or he could scoop out a shallow trench right through the streets, like Boston had done.
Tunneling the subway meant boring deep through the earth by using giant shields, oversized drills essentially, which pushed forward inch by inch and carved out the path for the trains. But it also required blasting through rock. McDonald could not claim any firsthand experience in underground subway tunneling. Very few contractors around the world could. However, he did work on the Hoosac Tunnel in Western Massachusetts, a five-mile-long railroad tunnel carved through the seventeen-hundred-foot Hoosac Mountain. It was a disastrous job that dragged on for a quarter of a century, claimed nearly two hundred lives, and involved dozens of explosions, subterranean floods, and cave-ins. It came to be called the Bloody Pit. But it was not a complete wasted effort. On the Hoosac Tunnel, workers used dynamite for the first time to set off controlled explosions, a feat that would come in handy for McDonald. Of course, it was one thing to blow up dynamite inside a mountain in rural Western Massachusetts. McDonald would be digging his tunnel beneath four million people living, working, and riding in streetcars overhead in a city built of steel, iron, wood, and concrete.
* * *
PARSONS WAS NERVOUS ABOUT how a deep tunnel would be received by the public, and he worried about the long-term cost of maintaining dozens if not hundreds of elevators for the entire system. He imagined a station during evening rush hour, with hundreds of passengers waiting for a train to get home, having to stand on the street level for the next elevator car to rise up so that it could carry only a few dozen people down at a time. Passengers would have to wait twice, once for the elevator and again for the subway, an inconvenience Parsons could not ignore.
The inconvenience with the cut-and-cover method, he believed, was “confined solely to the period of construction.” Life might be miserable for a few years, he knew, but if the trade-off was a more enjoyable subway experience for the next hundred years, then it made sense to sacrifice the short-term pain for the long-term gain. “When that is finished,” he said of the cut-and-cover approach, “there will be the maximum of convenience.” It would be close to the surface, approximately fifteen feet from street level, and therefore could be lighted not only by electricity in the stations but by natural sunlight peeking through down the staircases and grates.
“I am no prophet, but the great cities of the Old World show no signs of standing still,” Parsons said in an interview with The New York World. “London, twice the size of New York, is still growing. We have no means of foretelling the ultimate fate of a modern city or assigning a limit to its growth. We only know that the great cities of ancient times—Babylon, Carthage, Athens, Rome—grew to the point of decay.” He would not let that happen on his watch.
* * *
CONSTRUCTION WAS NOW IN the hands of McDonald and the subcontractors he hired and the thousands of laborers who had swarmed into the city from around the world. So desperate were men for work that hundreds of them gathered in front of City Hall on that first morning because they assumed that construction would begin there, but they would walk away disappointed when no contractors showed up.
James Pilkington didn’t make that mistake. He was the first subcontractor on the job, and on March 26, 1900, he arrived at the intersection of Greene and Bleecker even before Parsons. He knew the sewer system of New York as well as any man, and that’s why McDonald hired him. Pilkington was handsome and muscular, a former boxing and wrestling champion who was also an expert sculler. On the day construction began, he wasted no time in pleasing his bosses. His task was a routine and essential one—to lower nine hundred feet of sewer line from fourteen feet beneath the street surface to twenty-one feet below, putting it deep enough into the ground so that the tracks of the subway could pass above it. It was more complicated than it should have been only because all the old sewer and water pipes were laid in the ground in such a mess over the years that untangling them was like untying a double knot. Pilkington tried to take some measurements of the ground himself, but he was besieged from the instant he began.
Dozens of laborers, armed with their own picks and shovels, had gathered at the intersection and filled up an entire two-block area, an army of the unemployed. A mixture of Italians, Swedes, blacks, and Irish, they converged on Pilkington, many of them so skinny it looked like they hadn’t eaten in weeks. They were desperate to catch his attention. Pilkington begged police to clear him a space, which they did, and he pointed at twelve men he recognized from previous jobs and told the rest to come back another day because he’d need about fifty in total for his contract. In minutes, the neighborhood had filled with the sounds of swinging pickaxes and the grunting of labor. The workers ripped up paving stones from the street, working inward from the curb. Others unloaded timber that would be used to
brace the walls of the trench they’d be digging. Parsons and McDonald both stood by and watched, thrilled to finally see work begin, knowing that London, Boston, and Budapest all had subways operating and that in four months Paris would be opening its Metro.
Their smiles did not last. The agreed-upon fee for unskilled workers was two dollars a day. But skilled workers commanded more, $2.50 a day and $3.50 for overtime hours. One of the men Pilkington hired, Henry Russell, had been working the hoisting engine at the side of the trench, scooping up the dirt that was loosened by the Italians working in the ground and dropping it into the waiting wagons. After several weeks, Russell demanded that his pay be increased to at least $2.75 and up to $3.50, and his union, the Safety Association of Steam Engineers, ordered him to quit working until it was. On April 2 at ten o’clock, Pilkington showed up at Bleecker Street and saw Russell’s engine idling and Russell smoking a cigar while standing nearby. He angrily confronted Russell about the delay.
“I’m on strike,” Russell said to his boss. “And I want $3.50 a day.”
Pilkington paused and figured this was a battle not worth fighting. “All right, go ahead with your work,” he said. He would quickly regret giving in so easily. As soon as Russell moved toward his machine, the delegate for the union, a man named William Cheatham, shouted at Russell to stop.
“Don’t you touch that engine until I tell you,” Cheatham said, and then he turned to Pilkington. He told him there were fifteen other workers just like Russell who deserved the same pay. Pilkington had dug himself a hole, and now he had no choice but to agree to pay all of them the increased rate. Cheatham told Russell he could get back to work, and with the strike averted, Pilkington relaxed as he watched scoops of dirt once again fly out of the ground and into the carts.
* * *
THE CUT-AND-COVER WORK MOVED QUICKLY below Tenth Street for one reason: The ground in lower New York was a soft, granular soil, almost like sand. Those pipes that were pounded into the ground downtown went sixty, seventy, and more than a hundred feet deep in some places, making excavation a breeze. But the soft soil was also more challenging because of the danger of the hole collapsing.
Even as the guts of the city’s streets were being torn up, the street railway tracks rerouted around the trenches, the sidewalks rendered almost impassable, and businesses along the route suffered exactly the sort of losses that they feared, the work progressed smoothly. New Yorkers proved to be a hardy bunch. At the northern end of Central Park, a mess of scaffolding and sewer pipes and steaming derricks turned the carriage road at 110th Street into something resembling a war zone. But there were also a dozen swinging steel buckets methodically dropping the dug-up dirt into carriages so that it could be carted away. Parsons and McDonald had decreed together that towering piles of dirt should not be left to linger across the city.
After a section of trench was finished, the next phase began, building the secure, leak-proof box to hold the actual subway. Solidifying the base was done with a four-inch sheet of poured concrete. The sides were also concrete, but they were additionally supported with steel I beams erected every five feet. The combination of the two—steel beams and concrete—was essential to supporting the weight of the street and traffic overhead. The final key step was waterproofing, which was achieved before the concrete was poured by applying a thick layer of felt and asphalt paper to the floor, walls, and roof.
If the entire subway could have been built using cut and cover, it would surely have been completed much faster. Parsons knew the truth. The island’s topography required more rock tunneling than he anticipated, as north of Tenth Street it became apparent in many portions of the route that simple excavation was not going to work. It was too difficult to dig through rock and still keep the tracks on a flat level. The only way to keep the tracks from resembling the peaks and valleys of the Adirondacks was to tunnel. Tunneling meant dynamite. In the end, of the original twenty-one miles of subway tracks that were laid, only eleven of those miles were in tunnels built with the safe cut-and-cover method.
Just because the Manhattan schist was a rock did not mean it had any consistency to it. Soft enough in some places for a worker to easily chip away big chunks but so hard in other places that it was like pounding steel, the schist was McDonald’s greatest challenge. If he worked too aggressively through it, he risked his crew being buried in a rock slide. If he worked too timidly, Parsons would be breathing down his neck, demanding that he pick up the pace. One thing McDonald knew. He couldn’t just blast away like he had done at Hoosac Mountain. In New York, he had people walking on the streets and sidewalks directly overhead and electric streetcars riding over rails that could easily be bent or broken in a blast, which might send a car tumbling onto its side. This work required more care, and so it was no surprise when, late in 1901, McDonald began to worry. He discovered that he would need to use a huge amount of dynamite to bore through the earth beneath one of New York’s most upscale, fashionable, and densely populated neighborhoods.
* * *
MURRAY HILL ON MANHATTAN’S east side was named in honor of the merchant Robert Murray, who in the late eighteenth century owned a wedge-shaped farm on a tract that became the area between Thirty-third Street and Thirty-eighth Street. Most of its development happened in the late 1860s and early 1870s, boosted by a series of mansions built there by men who made fortunes from the Civil War. The emergence of the posh Ladies’ Mile shopping stretch in Murray Hill forced faster growth, and by the end of the 1800s Murray Hill was as built out as any neighborhood in the city.
It was home to Grand Central Terminal, and the Murray Hill Hotel, which hosted President Cleveland and Mark Twain in its early years. It was also a neighborhood that attracted the city’s distinguished residents. Civil War hero Rear Admiral David Farragut lived there. So did James Fargo, president of American Express, and Marshall Clifford Lefferts, whose collection of rare antique books was among the finest in the world. And the city’s greatest architects rebuilt brownstones in Murray Hill with beautiful touches, from wrought iron balconies to oval dormer windows to arched main entrances. The arrival of Charles L. Tiffany, the son of the founder of Tiffany & Co., into a Murray Hill mansion in the early 1900s was the capstone to the neighborhood’s fifty-year rise and marked it as the single most desirable place to live in all of New York. As it turned out, however, Murray Hill was like a glimmering diamond with an almost imperceptible flaw.
The area between Twenty-seventh Street and Forty-second Street and between Third Avenue and Sixth Avenue, essentially the boundaries of Murray Hill, sat on a portion of the schist that was particularly unstable. It sat on a rock at such a steep angle that it was impossible to imagine a dynamite blast not causing a rock slide underground. But there was no way around it. All of the back and forth in laying out a subway route and avoiding sections of the city where opposition was fiercest had forced Parsons to call for a tunnel right through the heart of Murray Hill.
There was little to do to make the blasting more tolerable. It was loud, and the ground shook with terrifying vibrations each time there was a detonation. The only attempt to ease the annoyance was to blast first thing in the morning, at the end of the overnight shift, so that the daytime crews could pile the rubble into carts and get it out of the trench. Digging the Murray Hill tunnel would be one of McDonald’s greatest challenges, which he placed in the hands of a thirty-nine–year-old civil engineer and Spanish-American War leader.
* * *
IRA SHALER WAS THE only child of Alexander Shaler, a general for the Union army in the Civil War who received the Medal of Honor for his brave act of grabbing a flag and leading his men into the teeth of the Confederates at the second battle of Fredericksburg. Ira Shaler was never the war hero like his father, but he was called Major Shaler out of respect for the rank that he achieved while serving in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War. He was a star student at Cornell, and through the 1890s he became one of the most respected engineers in New York, which i
s how he caught the attention of McDonald.
Shaler was one of the dozens of subcontractors McDonald hired. They were the middle men, the bridges connecting the lowly laborers who earned twenty cents an hour shoveling, digging, hoisting, and blasting their way through the island and their buttoned-up bosses, from McDonald to Parsons to Belmont to Mayor Van Wyck and his successor in 1902, the Brooklyn-born Seth Low. The subcontractors were the day-to-day leaders, following the orders of the lead contractor and the chief engineer to make sure the work stayed on course. They each got pieces of the job. There was the Canadian-born Duncan McBean, a silver-haired genius engineer whose $1.5 million bid won him the right to solve the problem of tunneling under the Harlem River. There were the McCabe brothers, assigned to dig the deepest tunnel in the schist, under Washington Heights north of 157th Street. There was Holbrook, Cabot & Rollins, the construction company McDonald hired to tunnel beneath Fourth Avenue because of its experience five years earlier digging a section of the Boston subway tunnel. And there was Major Ira Shaler. His job was to not blow up Murray Hill.
* * *
“RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!”
A few minutes after noon on January 27, 1902, the clamor from the digging along Forty-first Street near Park Avenue was suddenly drowned out by the frantic shouts of Moses Epps. The country was in a sad place, still recovering from the shock of President McKinley’s assassination in Buffalo four months earlier, which gave way to the rise of his vice president and New York’s former governor, Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt. But even as the chaos of the subway construction had been a welcome distraction for New Yorkers, the sight of a black worker wearing overalls and yelling with frantic wide eyes must have been terrifying. Epps came tearing out of a rickety wooden shack, trying to warn anyone within earshot to run fast and to run far. There were a dozen people who heard him, and flee they did. Most got only a few feet. Those who did not hear him, like the cashier at the cigar counter at the Murray Hill Hotel, a young waiter, and a wealthy Canadian businessman who was visiting New York with his wife and four children, simply went about their day oblivious to the sudden panic on the street.