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

by Most, Doug

  As work began, they called their tunnel “the mine” to help them feel right at home. When they first flooded into New York, oblivious to where their piece of the job was, they crowded Bowery lodging houses on the Lower East Side. Once they realized their work was uptown, they found shelter in boardinghouses in a southern section of what is now Riverdale called Spuyten Duyvil.

  Their presence at nighttime served to liven up the neighborhood, even if it was with more noise than their neighbors were accustomed to. But it was the racket of the tunneling that was the real bother. Because the work was happening so deep, compressed air was pumped into the ground. The monotonous “chug-chug-chug” of the machine was torture for the residents who, after weeks and months of it, were being driven out of their minds. Adding to the din was the dynamite blasting. Even though it was happening so far underground, each explosion caused a dull thud to ricochet toward the streets and a puff of smoke to follow it, evidence of yet another blast. What could not be heard on the streets was the sound of the men singing and laughing from below. It was, The Times wrote in the early days of the tunneling, as if “they are in love with life in the bowels of the earth.”

  * * *

  THE MINE HAD TAKEN SHAPE nicely by the fall of 1903, and McDonald was so impressed that he visited the site and congratulated the men on winding up such a dangerous job with no accidents. The progress of the tunnel at the time was captured in a photograph that showed the enormity of the challenge. A dozen stern-faced men stand inside of a half-moon tunnel, its cavernous rounded ceiling lined with concrete. The floor is unfinished, a collection of boulders, smaller rocks, and towering piles of dirt on which the workers stand and climb. The men are grimy, all of them wearing hats, their hands by their side or tucked into their pockets or suspenders. A cart filled with debris sits, waiting to be pulled away. What little light there is comes from a row of bright bulbs fixed to the sidewall.

  For two years, most of the rock that was blasted was solid mica schist. The explosions were clean, and there was little chance that they would cause the schist to become unstable. But when the miners encountered short stretches of soft rock, like they did at 155th Street or 193rd Street, they knew they had to be more careful and that they had to wedge timbers between gaps in the schist and the concrete lining.

  Only a few hundred feet left of tunneling was needed to connect the tunnel the entire way through. The McCabe brothers, the subcontractors on the deep tunneling job, were eager to finish, knowing it was such a monumental feat. Rather than blast twice a day, they ordered three dynamite explosions daily. The remaining blasts were needed to widen the tunnel to its required twenty-five feet. It was about ten thirty at night on October 24 when the last blast of the day went off, 110 feet below the streets in the area near Fort George and 193rd Street. It was customary to wait a few minutes after a blast to let any loose debris fall, and so when the foreman on the job, Timothy Sullivan, went in after ten minutes to see if the walls were secure, he had little reason to be nervous. He looked around, saw no problems, and shouted back to his workers.

  “Come on boys,” he said, “let’s get to work.”

  What Sullivan could not see were two veins running through an enormous boulder in the ceiling that weakened it to the point where the slightest quake, never mind a dynamite blast, could cause it to split.

  A young German electrician named William Scheutte was the first in so he could string up the lights to brighten the way for the others. A pair of black miners, Michael Hargraves and Charles Crocker, followed, pushing in a tramcar to load up with rocks, and along with them came a line of Italians. The large group had barely set foot into the tunnel when they heard three separate blasts, followed by a loud, horrifying rumbling. The men at the back of the line who had not yet entered the cave turned around and sprinted back up toward the street. The others ahead of them never had a chance.

  That three-hundred-ton rock, which measured almost five feet wide and forty-four feet long, came crashing down right on top of the workmen who had just arrived. Men were crushed, pinned, and buried. Small rivulets of blood began to drip down the side of the boulder. Six died instantly, and eight others were seriously hurt, including an Italian named Alfonzo Annetello, who had to have his crushed leg amputated in order to be freed. From the street, the cries of agony could be heard. Father Thomas Lynch, the sixty-year-old priest with a ruddy face and kindly blue eyes from nearby St. Elizabeth’s Roman Catholic Church, rushed into the ghastly tunnel in his black robe, ignoring warnings shouted at him so that he could tend to the injured and dying. Kneeling in puddles of blood and water, with a red-shirted Italian by his side as an interpreter, Father Lynch gave the last rites to the most gravely injured, touching his crucifix to a dying man’s lips. “Kyrie, eleison,” or “Lord have mercy,” Lynch said, and the others in the tunnel bowed their heads.

  When other rescuers reached the tunnel, three men were found to be in such pain that doctors injected them quickly with morphine, but it mattered little as they died minutes later. And Alfonzo Annetello also died a few hours later. It took all night to get the bodies of the injured and the dead out, the last one emerging at ten in the morning. The ten who died were Italians, except for Scheutte and Sullivan.

  The removal of Sullivan’s body brought onlookers to their knees. His young son, Sammy, stood outside the tunnel all night long, waiting and watching. When a tramcar came to the surface carrying Sullivan’s body, his face bloodied and disfigured, Sullivan’s son walked beside the car, climbed into the patrol wagon with it, and left without shedding a tear, even when a police officer put his arm around the boy. “Sorry for you, little man,” the officer said as they left.

  Parsons was out of town when he got word by telegram the morning after the accident, and he ordered his deputy, George Rice, to rush to the scene. Hours after the bodies were removed, Rice compared the accident to the one that nearly struck Parsons down in Murray Hill. “Whether the falling in of the mass of rock was due to moisture or to fissures, or what, nobody will know,” Rice said. “It is one of those things that happen every day in tunnel construction and the workmen all know what risks they are incurring. The accident by which Major Ira Shaler lost his life on June 17, 1902, was precisely the same as that which happened last night.”

  When Parsons arrived two days after the accident, he repeated in cold, almost robotic terms similar sentiments to what he had said at all the other accidents on his project. The proper precautions had been taken. The deaths were unavoidable, in this case caused by “a seam that could not have been detected.”

  Walking out of the tunnel, Parsons looked down at his hands, moist from a mixture of blood and water after he had rubbed them up against the fallen rocks underground. He refused to wipe them clean, however. And when a reporter tried to pry a reaction to the tragedy from him, Parsons could only muster a few soft words. “The rock was weaker than any of us knew.”

  * * *

  THE ELECTRIC SUBWAY WAS GOING to speed up life in cities and expand their boundaries for miles beyond the crowded downtowns. That much was now clear. But as 1903 came to an end, another transportation marvel, this one targeted at making long-distance travel faster and easier, quietly made its debut trip a thousand miles away. On December 17, above a windy beach on the coast of North Carolina, Wilbur Wright piloted the first powered airplane for a record fifty-nine seconds, covering 852 feet. If the mission of the subway was for cities to feel a little bit smaller by quickening the way people could move from one neighborhood to the next, then Orville and Wilbur Wright had a similar goal. They were determined to make the whole world feel a little bit smaller. Their rickety 605-pound double-winged plane with a wingspan of forty feet and a twelve-horsepower engine was going to make the transcontinental railroad feel like a horse-drawn buggy and the steamship feel like a rowboat.

  The following year was shaping up to herald the future of travel. And the New York City subway was not even the most exciting transportation innovation. As the Wright
brothers perfected their airplane to make it fly farther and faster, a hundred thousand people crowded into Madison Square Garden in January 1904 to see how much the automobile had advanced since the turn of the century. They saw new rubber tires, powerful engines, and more comfortable seats, and they heard boasts about cars that could cover a mile in forty seconds, not quite as fast as steam locomotives but not far behind. Only the rich could afford to have a private automobile, and on the streets of New York they fought for space with the street railways. Inevitably, fatal accidents became more common.

  But there was no turning back. The age of the automobile was coming, and the era of the subway was here.

  * * *

  ON NEW YEAR’S DAY of 1904, New York’s newest mayor, George B. McClellan, joined Belmont, Parsons, McDonald, and others on a six-mile journey inside a handcar powered by the strong arms of nine cheerful Italians; they rode beneath their city to see how close the subway was to completion. Afterward, at a party at Sherry’s, an unknown guest toasted McDonald: “We all want to thank you for giving us an opportunity to appreciate this great work,” he said. Parsons, who was close by, scoffed. Perfectionist to the end, for him it wasn’t done until it was done. “Pshaw!” he said. “There’s no citizen so poor that he cannot appreciate it much more comfortably a few months from now—for five cents.”

  The subway’s arrival and continued expansion was inevitably going to take passengers away from New York’s other crowded transit systems, the elevated lines and the street railways. In one more sign of the times, the once-almighty Metropolitan Street Railway Company, which once controlled the streets of New York just as the West End Street Railway Company controlled the streets of Boston, dissolved with a debt of more than $20 million.

  And what of its founder, a brigadier general’s youngest son, who grew up from a lonely and shy boy reading books by a Massachusetts river to a man who helped elect a president, rebuilt the United States navy, raised one of the most prominent American families in history, and ran a powerful street railway company? Until his final day, William Whitney kept secret how he had helped August Belmont receive the critical charter that cleared the way for Belmont to build and operate the New York City subway.

  On January 28, 1904, a Thursday evening, Whitney joined his secretary, Thomas J. Regan, for a performance of Parsifal at the Metropolitan Opera. Whitney did not feel well, and, after leaving his box early, he disappeared into a private room, threw his silk hat on the floor, and collapsed on the couch. He did not know it, but his appendix was inflamed. After six days of fading in an out of consciousness at his home, with his children by his side and his older brother, Henry, rushing down from Boston, William Whitney died on February 4, so peacefully that his doctors did not even notice his heart had stopped beating.

  An appraisal of his estate confirmed the success he’d achieved, though it put him nowhere close to the fortune of his Fifth Avenue friends. Whitney’s real estate and personal holdings were valued at nearly $23 million. William Hussey Page, a friend and Harvard lawyer who helped him argue his railway legal battles in New York in the 1890s, eulogized Whitney in the pages of Harper’s Weekly a few weeks after his death. Four lines summed up the man perfectly:

  Generous, magnanimous, and just

  Thoughtful for all, of station high or low,

  Lion in action, fearless, frank,

  In friendship true as steel and pure as gold

  Maybe it was because, by 1904, Boston, Budapest, Paris, Glasgow, and London were operating subways, millions of passengers were riding on them, and nobody was dropping dead from breathing the subterranean air. Maybe it was because, after half a century of watching subway plans come and go so many times that they had thrown up their hands in resignation, they assumed a subway would never be built in their lifetimes. Or maybe New Yorkers were just harder to scare. But for whatever reason, the same fears that Bostonians voiced for years throughout the 1890s—about traveling underground, comparing their subway to long underground coffins and insisting that the only people who should go beneath the streets are the dead—never materialized in Gotham with any real strength. The subway was more like a curiosity for New Yorkers.

  As summer gave way to fall and the scheduled October opening approached, to put to rest any concerns once and for all, Dr. Thomas Darlington, New York’s commissioner for public health, wrote an essay in the Sunday World. He had spent considerable time in the tunnels, measuring the quality of the air not only to assess its breathability but also to compare it to the air on the streets, as well as the air inside poorly ventilated places, like theaters, schools, cars, and berths of ships. He found nothing that concerned him, and in fact with 119 openings into the subway between City Hall and 157th Street, the air quality was almost identical above ground as below it. The subway air had plenty of oxygen, and it was not, as some suggested, poisoned by carbon dioxide. The subway was given a clean bill of health.

  But New Yorkers had other concerns. Even before the subway opened, in the weeks leading up to the big day, passengers wanted answers to their mundane, even frivolous questions, to help them understand how this contraption worked and why they should feel assured that it would be operated safely. The questions were answered in the papers and by subway officials, who found themselves being cornered daily by eager, if slightly anxiety-filled, passengers.

  If a fuse on the front engine burns out, will the entire train be stopped for a long time, blocking traffic in the tunnels? No, thanks to Frank Sprague, whose multiple-unit control system allows for the rear cars to have their own motors that can push the train forward. How long will trains stop at stations? Approximately fifteen seconds, depending on how many people get on and off. How long will it take to get from Times Square to Grand Central if you’re racing to catch a train there? About forty-five seconds. Can subway travel hurt the eyes? Yes, looking at the long rows of white columns strains the eyes, so don’t do it. What do the green and red lights inside of the tunnels mean? Green tells the motormen to go, the track ahead is clear, and red means stop. Will every passenger get a seat? No, but overhead straps in the cars are safe to hold during travel. Could heavy rains flood a tunnel? No, the walls are waterproofed, and the entrances are protected. How fast will the express trains go? Up to forty-five miles per hour. Can you get a transfer from the subway to the streetcars or elevated lines? No. Can you stick your head out of a subway car like you can on a streetcar? No, the lower windows are locked.

  The questions were endless. Nobody was more curious than the city’s children.

  The day before the subway was to open, about fifty boys ventured to their new favorite place for hijinks. At the one place where the subway trains would be emerging from underground for a brief bolt through the outdoors, near 120th Street, the boys discovered a low barrier about four feet high right next to the tracks. At four thirty in the afternoon, the boys gathered to sit on the ledge and wait for a train taking a test run to pass by. Just as they heard one approaching, one of the boys, about twelve years old, lost his balance and fell right onto the tracks. The motorman fortunately was running at a slow speed and was able to apply his emergency brake, giving the boy just enough time to scramble to his feet and hustle back to his ledge, where he gleefully taunted the train as it passed.

  16

  OCTOBER 27, 1904

  FOR OLDER NEW YORKERS, OCTOBER 27, 1904, had a familiar feel. Two decades earlier, on a cloudless, breezy May afternoon, the city had come out in droves to celebrate the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, fourteen years in the making. Both engineering marvels had come at great sacrifice. Twenty-seven men died building the Brooklyn Bridge. Twice as many, fifty-four workers and civilians, perished during the four years of the subway’s construction, from anonymous Italians whose bodies were never identified to former war heroes who oversaw construction to innocent onlookers and ordinary working citizens whose fate was decided simply by their proximity to an explosion. And, as with the Brooklyn Bridge, where the greatest fear of its buil
ders were jumpers who saw the span as an adventurous challenge or an easy path to death, the subway men nervously waited for the first train to strike a person carelessly crossing the tracks. Both of those fears would be realized within days of their celebrated openings.

  For the Brooklyn Bridge party, President Chester A. Arthur came. Governor Cleveland was there. Buildings were draped in red and white and blue bunting, and vendors peddled everything from bananas to buttons to flags to pictures to commemorative medals. Schools stayed open, and so did the stock exchange, but classrooms were almost all empty, and only a few brokers bothered to show up to the trading floor. When the speeches were finished and the ceremony was over, thousands flocked to rush across the 1,595-foot span above the East River. Brooklyn and Manhattan were still two cities at the time, but the bridge was a signal of what was to come a decade and a half later, when consolidation would link them officially as well as physically.

  For the opening of the subway, an equally glorious, if slightly chillier day, the red, white, and blue flags and bunting returned, the boats in the harbor once again bellowed their horns, and the hucksters pounced anew. “Popcorn!” they hollered out in the crowd. “Git a programme, git a programme!” All the dignitaries turned out, too, except this time the most important one curiously skipped the festivities. President Roosevelt, the former police commissioner of the city and governor of the state, who owed his rise to the people of New York, sent his apology in a concise, formally worded telegram that must have disappointed the men behind the subway. “The president regrets his inability to accept the courteous invitation,” read the note from Roosevelt’s press secretary.

  Aside from the president’s absence, there was one other noticeable difference between the two historic days. The thousands who came out for the Brooklyn Bridge’s unveiling flocked to the same place, the shores of Brooklyn and Manhattan, as if pulled there by a powerful magnet. The crowd that began to turn out early in the morning for the subway’s opening fanned out across the city, lining up outside of stations from City Hall to Murray Hill to Union Square to Columbus Circle to Washington Heights. There was to be a noontime celebration, but it was for six hundred invited guests only.