The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (10 page)

On this winter day, the forty-one-year-old Whitney was ready to head for home when he pulled up behind a pair of chestnuts trotting through the park more slowly than he preferred. Impatient, he steered his animals out of the park onto Fifth Avenue heading south and pushed them to pick up the pace. He had gone only two blocks when he saw a large wagon heading in his direction. Just as they neared, a handcart pushed by a boy veered out from behind the wagon. Whitney’s horses dashed across the avenue, still in his control, until they came upon another wagon. He tried desperately to straighten them out, but instead he lost the reins. In an instant, Whitney was flying through the air. His carriage had struck a curb and tossed him clear into a telegraph pole, while his horses ran ahead without him down to Eighty-third Street. One of them broke a leg and caused the other to stop. The injured horse was shot dead on the street by a police officer, while a battered Whitney was taken home. His doctors were called to his mansion, and they told him that while he was a lucky man, he had fractured his left ankle, bruised his left knee, and sprained his left wrist. Bed rest, they ordered. Whitney had hoped that a leisurely ride might clear his head so he could think about the next chapter in his career. Instead, it had landed him on crutches. Telling him to sit still proved fruitless, since only a few days later, still bandaged in splints, he got himself back into his carriage for another ride. But that only set his recovery back further, while providing endless amusement for the city’s papers like
The Tribune
. “Tammany may as well take warning,” the paper wrote. “There’s no use trying to upset or break down this man. He doesn’t know when he’s smashed up and keeps right on as usual!”

That was certainly true. But after a decade bogged down in the minutiae of city politics, Whitney was ready for his next challenge. He had no idea how much his life was about to change.

*   *   *

ON MONDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 1882,
eight months after his riding accident, Whitney sent his letter of resignation to New York’s newest mayor, Democrat William R. Grace.

Whitney chose the day before the election to step down because he had put hundreds of hours into backing the campaign of the Democratic candidate for governor and wanted to enjoy the election without worrying about any implications on his job. He also wanted to return to private practice. He had collected a wealth of expertise in finance, taxation, and franchises, and along with his past experience in banking, real estate, and transportation, he hoped to build a thriving practice and finally make his own fortune. His resignation letter summarized what he had told a reporter a few weeks earlier, when he said, “I am exceedingly anxious to get out of the office.” Unanimously, the newspapers praised his seven years of service as corporation counsel, and some predicted that the Democratic party would be wise to find a powerful place for him.

Even if he had no interest in running for elected office again, after a disastrous run for district attorney early in his career, Whitney still loved the game of politics. When Buffalo’s mayor, Grover Cleveland, considered a run for governor early in 1882 and sent an aide down to the city to collect the advice of a few trusted and respected political leaders, Whitney was blunt with the aide. Go back upstate, he said. Build a stable of delegates who will support Cleveland no matter what, and then we’ll talk. Privately, Whitney was sure Cleveland had no chance, even though he did like and respect him for the way he ignored anyone with ties to the Tammany Hall machine.

“Frankly I think there is no more chance of his being nominated for governor than there is in his being struck by lightning,” Whitney said.

But lightning did strike after Cleveland’s aide took Whitney’s advice back to Buffalo, and on November 7, the day after Whitney had resigned his counsel job, Grover Cleveland swept into the governor’s office by a huge margin.

Whitney was exhausted. It had been an emotional year, between his riding accident, Cleveland’s campaign, his resignation, and Cleveland’s election. He retreated into private life and work, and he spent time with his family. While Whitney had been busy building his career, his wife had come to love the New York society scene, throwing parties and making sure they did not miss any. They certainly didn’t miss the party that came to define the Gilded Age, when Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt threw an extravagant ball on the evening of March 26, 1883. The Vanderbilt mansion at the corner of Fifty-second Street and Fifth Avenue was ablaze in light and the sidewalk outside pulsed with a crowd that watched as mounted police struggled to keep order while more than a thousand costumed guests paraded inside.

*   *   *

AS THE SPRING OF 1883
arrived, Flora Whitney was eager to take the children on a vacation. It was an exciting time in New York, as construction on the Brooklyn Bridge, expected to open by the summertime, was finishing up. But Flora’s mind was elsewhere. Anytime she would see one of the massive British White Star steamers pull into New York harbor, she desperately wanted to board one and sail away. William Whitney was simply too busy with his practice to go, but he wanted his wife to enjoy herself and encouraged her summer getaway. He promised to write her frequently, just as he had during their courtship. She packed up their four children and, on May 23, the day before the Brooklyn Bridge opened to the public, hugged her husband a tearful good-bye, and the five of them boarded a ship for Europe. She was eager for her children to see the museums and the opera, to hear another language, and to broaden their education. As the boat pulled out, eleven-year-old Harry kept his father in sight as long as he could by running the length of the ship.

Four days after his family left, Whitney mailed off the first of his many letters. “There is nothing prettier in the world than your relation to your children,” he wrote his wife.

But he grew worried a few weeks later, when she didn’t reply to his question about how the children were. Instead, uncharacteristically, she had sent a very brief letter with few details. In another letter, however, that arrived June 5, he received his answer. Harry and Willie were deathly sick, and six-year-old Olive, their youngest, had just died of diphtheria while they were in Paris. Whitney was crushed and immediately arranged the seven-day voyage to meet up with his family, even as he fretted that more of his children might die before he got there. The day before he sailed, he sent Flora one last cable. “Bear up, My Dear, we must. You must for me and I will for you. It is true that nothing could have taken so much from us as this but it is passed and cannot be recalled. I must see her face once more, remember this in making arrangements.”

He arrived to find that Harry and Willie had recovered, and Pauline never caught the illness. But Whitney’s heart was broken all over when he saw Olive’s face through a glass-covered coffin and read the diary Flora had kept about Olive’s last hours.

“The only time [Olive] spoke when I could not understand her was about twenty minutes before she died. ‘Mama, hold my hand,’ rang in my ears. I went away and when I returned to see her she had on her steamer dress, a crown on her head of white rosebuds, garden pinks and white flowers at her feet, with a bunch of pinks in her clasped hands.” Flora wrote how she went down to see Harry, and when she returned to Olive, she was gone. “The eyes sunken, the sweet mouth and nostrils black; but the head and the little ears charming and the expression as though she was dreaming in a soft still way.”

Before Whitney sent her body back to New York for burial, he clipped a lock of Olive’s blond hair. He placed it inside an envelope and would hold on to it for the rest of his life.

HENRY

Boston was bursting, and Henry Whitney was poised to capitalize on the city’s growth and its expansion. On March 4, 1887, he stood before the general court of Massachusetts to present two ideas. He had recently toured Berlin’s popular tramway system, and when he came to speak he was armed with maps, schedules, and even sample tickets from the company that operated Berlin’s system. Because he was addressing a government body that had oversight over Boston and the entire state of Massachusetts, he came in prepared to emphasize that his plan would benefit not only the eight hundred thousand people in the metropolitan district but also those as far out as Lynn, Salem, Lowell, Lawrence, and other cities.

Whenever he made an important presentation, several habits of Henry Whitney’s surfaced. His dark blue suit, perfectly tailored to fit his stout frame, was his choice of business wear, along with a plain white shirt and light blue tie with white dots. He also tended to drum his fingers in a nervous, impatient sort of way. And, as he learned at a young age, a moistened finger in his ear did a little something to help his defective hearing. His hair was also meticulously combed, dark in the back and on top, but graying above the ears. Only his thick blond mustache hinted at his more youthful side.

In Whitney’s mind, if he controlled Beacon Street, he controlled Brookline. And if he controlled Brookline, he controlled the one wealthy community that Boston’s leaders and thriving streetcar companies had so desperately wanted for years. The suburbs, he had been telling people, were the key to unlocking Boston’s gridlock. If more people moved farther out of the city, it would encourage the street railway companies to follow them out there. And if those streetcar companies in Boston wanted to capture the growing business coming from Brookline, they would need tracks to connect them there. Tracks need land, and that was something Whitney owned in abundance.

He had just one problem. Starting up his West End Street Railway Company was proving more challenging than he anticipated.
The Boston Globe,
in 1887, showed just how busy Tremont Street was downtown when it counted 303 cars passing by the Park Street Church at rush hour, a staggering number. A
Globe
writer said traffic moved at “a mile an hour pace.” There simply were too many people and not enough trains.

Riders may not have been happy. But the railway companies were getting richer by the minute, and they would fight to keep any new competitors away from their passengers. Whitney had to convince lawmakers that he had a solution to make the streetcars less crowded, and the streets of Boston, too. His speech showed the confidence of a man no longer living in the shadow of his father, or even his more successful brother in New York.

“That the streets of Boston are and have for a long time been overcrowded with cars and vehicles,” Henry Whitney said, “and that to remove or diminish the difficulties arising therefrom, and to furnish such further accommodation as the public requires, it has become necessary to construct tunnels under Boston Common and under Beacon Hill, so-called, in said City of Boston, running to some central point near Tremont and Park Streets, and diverging in various directions to different portions of said city.” He said the tunnel he was proposing was “somewhat similar in construction to the Greathead system,” a reference to British engineer James Henry Greathead, whose tunneling shield that dug the London Underground was a vast improvement over the one Marc Brunel had designed for the Thames Tunnel. Whitney even outlined the path of the tunnel. “Our proposed tunnel follows the edge of the Common on Tremont Street, then across Park Street under the Park Street Church, and under the Granary Burying Ground, through Tremont place.”

It was the first time anybody had proposed to tunnel underneath the streets and parks of Boston. But he was not done. He also asked for what he described as “uniformity of practice” in how street and other railways were overseen, to eliminate the varied fares being charged, the overlapping routes, and the dangerous braking and racing that went on to pick up passengers. It was his way of saying the city needed to consolidate its transit system from half a dozen smaller competing companies into one giant operation.

“Your petitioner,” he said, “further represents that it believes that improvements have recently been made in the use of electricity as a motor which render it practicable to use the same in the operating of street railways.”

That statement was even more bold than his tunnel proposal. Boston’s population had exploded by 400 percent in Whitney’s lifetime, from 171,030 in 1840 to 848,740 in 1890, and the city’s boundaries had expanded because of all the towns it had annexed. Horses could no longer power a regional transportation network. The electric streetcar could not arrive soon enough.

The other railway companies fought back against Whitney, to no avail. The oldest ones, the Cambridge and the Metropolitan, merged their powerful systems into one. But Whitney used his financial capital and his political muscle to start buying up stock in the Cambridge, Metropolitan, South Boston, and Middlesex lines, sparking fears that he was moving toward creating a monopoly. The financial capital of his company would grow from $80,000 to $7 million if he got his way, and after weeks of negotiations, he did.

In the fall of 1887 at a meeting of his new corporation, Whitney spoke not only about his vision for the West End Street Railway, but about his style of management, which he expected his employees to follow.

“I believe that this company is destined to play a very important part in the lives of this whole community,” he told his employees. “I am myself deeply sensible of the responsibility which this organization holds in this community.”

One of his first acts was to make sure that not only did he keep his friends close, but he kept his enemies closer. Calvin Richards, head of the Metropolitan line, was the first to exchange his shares of Metropolitan for preferred shares of West End stock and was put in charge of the West End’s daily operations as general manager. Another onetime competitor, Prentiss Cummings, president of the Cambridge Railroad Company, became vice president of the West End Street Railway.

“Into whose hands will all this pass?” Richards said in explaining his decision. “What kind of men are they? It will pass into the hands, not of a set of speculators, whose headquarters are in a different city, and who long tried to obtain this control, but into the possession of Boston men; will be owned by Boston capital and managed by Boston experience. At the head of it will be a man who has done more to build up our city, both in its real estate and its commercial interests, than any other man of his age; a man who believes, evidently, in the importance of Boston’s citizens to own, run and build the street railways of their own city.”