The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (17 page)

*   *   *

AS BAD AS IT WAS
for the street railways, it was worse for New York’s four elevated lines. In the early hours of the storm, it appeared as if the Els might be immune from the conditions. It was harder for the snow to accumulate on the narrow overhead tracks. But what quickly became apparent was that it was easier for the tracks to freeze. By Monday afternoon, icicles were hanging off the tracks and the trains were slowing down to carefully navigate the sharp curves and stop within the required boundaries of the stations.

A Third Avenue elevated train heading downtown carrying five hundred passengers struggled to climb the icy grade near the Seventy-sixth Street station and came to a stop on the slight hill. As it sat on the tracks and its crew tried to strategize a plan to keep moving forward, twenty minutes passed. Suddenly, the passengers heard the shrill of another train’s whistle barreling toward them from behind. While the first train could not move, the second train could not stop, and a massive tragedy seemed all but certain. Just before his train smashed into the one ahead, the fireman on board the second engine leapt off onto the platform, where hundreds of waiting passengers were watching in horror. As he turned to watch the collision, the fireman yelled to the engineer on the first train.

“Jump, for God’s sake, jump!” he screamed.

It was too late. The enormous boom and passenger screams from the collision were followed by a plume of smoke into the snowy air. The two trains slid forward a few more feet, and the tracks shook, but somehow the trains wobbled and did not fall. No car fell off the track, and what seemed like a sure disaster that would cause hundreds of deaths was, incredibly, a minor accident. Passengers smashed windows to free themselves and walked back along the track to the platform or made their way to the ladders that the quickly arriving firemen were leaning up for them. Though the engineer on board the struck train who had not jumped survived, the engineer who had been unable to stop the second train did not. Samuel Towe was still breathing when he was yanked from the wreckage, but his bones were broken and his skin was burned, and he died before he could be taken to a hospital.

Before the day was over, the transportation system in New York that had seemed the safest and most immune from the snow and ice had proved to be no better than the omnibuses, the street railways, and the steam-powered railroads. By the end of the day on Monday, fifteen thousand commuters would be stranded at various points along the elevated tracks, high above the city streets, scared, angry, frustrated, and cold.

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ON WEDNESDAY THE WEATHER
turned again. This time for the better. A few more inches of snow fell to the north, but Philadelphia, New York, and Boston all saw temperatures climb back to forty degrees. Tracks began to thaw, roads began to clear, and when a hundred Italian shovelers finally dug out the Boston
Express
at Fifty-ninth Street, trains began to move again.

THE FIRST TRAIN THROUGH
, read the headline in
The Times
on Thursday, March 15.

As for the nightmarish prediction of a widespread famine, it never happened, though there were some disastrous, long-term effects from the storm. Horses and cows froze to death. Thousands of pounds of butter and thousands of gallons of milk had to be destroyed after going too long with no refrigeration, valuable losses for farmers, who would need months to recover. Ten thousand coal and iron miners in Pennsylvania were laid off when the railroads lost so much revenue.

There was one bright moment to emerge from the storm. At the New York Infant Asylum north of the city in Westchester County, four hundred children between the ages of two weeks and six years old, along with two hundred unwed pregnant women, normally went through about eight cans of milk a day, supplied by a nearby dairy. With local roads closed, the blizzard cut them off from the dairy, and without their milk for a week or more they could have been at risk. But a few days before the storm hit, instead of the typical order of twelve dozen cans of Borden’s canned condensed milk, the asylum was left with twelve gross, or 1,728 cans. The cans were usually for the older children, but now the infants had to drink them, too, and that concerned the physician in charge, Dr. Charles Gilmore Kerley. Cautiously, the staff diluted the condensed milk with barley water to see if the infants could tolerate it. Not only did they like it, but the babies who had been struggling to gain weight suddenly started to fill out. Because of a simple paperwork error, and one forced experiment, canned evaporated milk for infants, with Dr. Kerley’s urging for the next fifty years, went from being shunned to being embraced.

The three-day storm cost businesses in New York about three million dollars in sales, though one store that had no problem moving product was E. Ridley and Sons, where John Meisinger’s foolhardy Friday purchase of three thousand wooden shovels paid off handsomely when every one of them disappeared in a few hours on Monday. The “blizzard sale,” as he called it, netted him $1,800 in less than twenty-four hours. Those Italian laborers also capitalized. The day after the snow stopped falling, they stopped shoveling and went on strike to demand a raise to two dollars a day. The rich railroad magnates wasted no time agreeing. And, finally, there were the deaths. Four hundred was the number estimated by officials in the days after the storm, but it was clearly much more than that. Almost a thousand bodies arrived at cemeteries around New York in the weeks after the blizzard, and the final tally did not include the deaths in other cities and towns up and down the East Coast.

The blizzard of 1888 was the trigger that cities needed to finally acknowledge that the horse-pulled carriages, the steam-powered elevated trains, the cable-pulled trolleys, and even the electrified street railways all suffered from the same flaw that could no longer be ignored. They were at the mercy of the skies. Rain, snow, ice, and scorching heat had shown they were capable of crippling a city or, at the least, making its streets miserable. And too many people needed the trains to get them where they had to go. From 1887 to 1888, the elevated rails saw an increase of thirteen million passengers. And down on the streets, where William Whitney was showing a greater interest in controlling the street railways, that same period saw five million more people take a trip. Ridership was exploding, and there was no room above ground to put more cars. “Who will be the Moses to lead us through this wilderness of uncertainty?” asked
The New York World
.

6

NEW YORK CITY’S MOSES

TWO YEARS. THAT WAS HOW LONG
Abram Hewitt ran the city. The streets of New York were filled with the stench of manure and uncovered, overflowing trash bins, and they were overcrowded with streetcars and street railways. Prostitutes had their own avenues, and saloons defied every attempt to shut them down at night in accordance with the laws. Change would not come overnight, but those streets would never be the same after Hewitt was through with them.

It was his fortuitous timing that his brief tenure was sandwiched around the three days of the blizzard of 1888. But it was his savvy politics, brilliant scheming, engineering know-how, and dogged persistence that helped ensure that those two years would go down as two of the most important in the city’s history and would become a time when Gotham started to clean up its act and when the first seed for the New York City subway was finally, and firmly, planted. “The Father of Rapid Transit,” they would call him. He also fathered six children. And when any of them asked for a toy, he had a ready response. “I won’t buy them, but I’ll give you materials to make them.” Oh, he wanted his children to succeed in life, just not by taking. By building.

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ABRAM STEVENS HEWITT WAS BORN
in a log house forty miles north of New York City on July 31, 1822, in the village of Haverstraw. His family was poor. His father, John, was a skilled mechanic whose cabinet-making business had gone bankrupt, and his mother, Ann, a pretty, sweet-faced daughter of a farmer. What he lacked in resources at home, where he ate mostly porridge and almost no meat, Hewitt made up for in his studies.

After beating out twenty thousand other boys to earn a scholarship to Columbia College, young Hewitt moved to New York. He supported himself by teaching and excelled in his math and science studies, so much so that when he graduated in 1842 he was at the top of his class. After graduating, he tutored grammar school children, sometimes earning as much as $150 in a term from a single pupil. It was this work that introduced him to a young man named Edward Cooper. The two had actually been Columbia classmates, but when Cooper got sick and fell two years behind Hewitt in his studies, he needed assistance, and Cooper’s father, Peter, agreed to pay Hewitt to tutor his son. Edward Cooper and Abram Hewitt would be linked for life from that day forward and would launch a formidable business partnership. There was only one point of sadness to Hewitt’s time at Columbia. So immersed was he in his books day and night that his vision began to fail him, and by the time he graduated he was, in his own words, “nearly blind.”

From his poor upbringing to his studies at Columbia to his fading vision to a near-death experience at sea while returning from an adventure in Europe, Hewitt emerged into adulthood as a wizened twenty-two-year-old young man. “It taught me for the first time that I could stand in the face of death without fear and without flinching,” he said. “It taught me another thing—that my life, which had been miraculously rescued, belonged not to me, and from that hour I gave it to the work which from that time has been in my thoughts—the welfare of my fellow citizens.”

Hewitt flirted with becoming a lawyer, but when his eyesight continued to fail him, he and Edward Cooper decided to go into business together. Not only would their relationship net Hewitt his wife, since he married Cooper’s sister in 1855, but their partnership turned into an American industrial force. They got their start when Peter Cooper, one of the richest men in New York, a distinction he owed to his success in business manufacturing and some savvy real estate investments, with no hesitation gave to his son and his son’s friend the iron manufacturing branch of his business. Cooper, Hewitt & Co. was born. The two friends started slowly, making rails for the railroads, but it was also the age of telegraphs, and strong, sturdy, unbreakable wires were becoming the most desired commodity. That’s where Hewitt turned next.

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A CABLE DISPATCH ON
January 23, 1862, changed Hewitt’s life. In fact, he might have decided against ever entering a career in politics later in his life were it not for the message it contained. He was at the home of Peter Cooper on a Sunday evening in the early days of the Civil War. Dispatches at the time typically arrived by messenger and were printed on slips of paper, but this one addressed to Cooper, Hewitt & Co. was unusually long.

“I am told that you can do things which other men declare to be impossible,” the telegraph said. “General Grant is at Cairo [Illinois], ready to start on his movement to capture Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. He has the necessary troops and equipment, including thirty mortars, but the mortar-beds are lacking. The Chief of Ordnance informs me that nine months will be required to build the mortar beds, which must be very heavy in order to carry 13-inch mortars now used for the first time. I appeal to you to have these mortar-beds built within thirty days … Telegraph what you can do. A. Lincoln.”

President Lincoln had never met Hewitt. But Lincoln knew of Hewitt’s reputation as an honest, hardworking manufacturer of iron, and Hewitt felt obliged to help his president in time of war, even if his own Democratic politics did not always align with Lincoln’s Republican values. A mortar bed was the foundation on which mortars were mounted and elevated into firing position, and they were critical at ensuring accurate firing. If General Ulysses S. Grant could successfully take Forts Henry and Donelson, it would be a crippling blow to the railroad bridges and shipping abilities of the Confederate army, which Hewitt, who had followed the war closely, knew.

Grant was building momentum, and Lincoln did not want it stalled for months by military manufacturing delays, which is why he reached out to Cooper, Hewitt & Co. After reading the dispatch, Hewitt rushed from Cooper’s house to the nearest Western Union office and had a cable sent back to the White House. If he could find a bomb carriage quickly that he could use, he would let the president know within a day if the task was possible. The War Department located a bomb carriage in Newport and, at the president’s order, had it sent to Hewitt. It arrived by boat in New York Harbor on Tuesday morning, just two days after Hewitt first heard from the president, and Hewitt took one look and believed the request was doable. He cabled Lincoln, and not even two weeks later, after a furious, round-the-clock production schedule, on February 8 the first four mortar beds were put on a train and sent westward. The remaining twenty-six were sent out within the week, and on each box, Hewitt painted in big black letters,
U.S. GRANT, CAIRO. NOT TO BE SWITCHED UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH
.

Grant, who had successfully taken Fort Henry on February 6, 1862, received Hewitt’s mortar beds a week later, and on February 17 he was able to capture Fort Donelson. “If that is so,” an excited Hewitt wrote to a friend when he received the news, “the backbone of the rebellion is broken.”

In three weeks Hewitt had fulfilled the president’s wishes, a remarkable feat considering that every plate, bar, spring, and loose part had to be made from scratch. Hewitt was a modest man, but even he wanted to make sure his efforts were appreciated and that he was appropriately compensated. It had cost Cooper, Hewitt & Co. $21,000 to finish the work, and they did it with no advance payment from the government. “No effort has been spared,” Hewitt wrote in a cable to Washington. “And as usual when people are in earnest, the work has been accomplished. This brings to a close the most remarkable mechanical achievement, so far as time is concerned, that we have ever witnessed … To serve the country in its time of trial is the dearest wish of our hearts and we hope that the Department will avail itself of our services at any and all times when we can be useful.”