The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (19 page)

In writing his annual message, Hewitt seemed to suggest that he suspected any objection to his plan would not be over the financing details but over making a subway the cornerstone of his proposal.

“Objections will be made by those who have not fully studied the subject to the fact that considerable portions of the routes indicated are in subways,” Hewitt wrote. “Those objections are based upon the character of the underground tunnels in operation in London, which are not properly lighted and ventilated.” He went on to say how much has been learned from London’s smoke-filled Underground, but that “as long as the tunnels are operated by steam engines they will be more expensive to ventilate.” And so the future of the subway, he wrote, was something other than steam engines. “The electric motor is being daily improved and what is known as the ‘fireless engine,’ propelled by super-heated water or by compressed air, is in successful operation in Europe and in several places in this country.”

It was as bold a proposal as any that a New York City mayor had ever presented, and it came only a few months after the equally radical idea Henry Whitney had proposed for Boston to tunnel a subway under the Common. The New York Chamber of Commerce expressed its approval of Hewitt’s proposal, and so did the powerful Real Estate Board.

THE MAYOR’S BIG SCHEME
, read the headline in
The Times
on February 1, 1888. “Mayor Hewitt has fulfilled the promise he made recently of submitting to the public a comprehensive system of rapid transit,” the story said. And while
The World
sneered suspiciously that the plan was not original,
The Times
disagreed in its editorial, writing enthusiastically about it and singling out the unique financing proposal. “The entire plan is worthy of the most careful consideration,” the editorial read. “The time has come when the city should no longer be a prey to scheming jobbers in consequence of its needs in the matter of rapid transit … The mayor seems to have no motive but the public good and the advancement of the city’s interests and all that he needs to distinguish his administration by the initiation of a grand system of rapid transit and general improvement is the full support of public sentiment.”

It was a rousing endorsement, and six weeks later, on Friday, March 9, just as the blizzard of 1888 was at New York’s door, Hewitt sent a bill to Albany. He called for a Rapid Transit Board that would include the public works commissioner, the city comptroller, and, of course, the mayor. Public hearings would let New Yorkers voice their opinions on everything from what should power the trains to what the new fare should be and even let them contribute to the route and construction method. Hewitt was sure his bill pushing for municipal ownership of a subway would sail through.

Instead, he severely underestimated how many people he had angered in his short time in office. By sweeping out popular but corrupt officials; by taking on the Irish and the Italians, too, in their requests to fly their flags over City Hall; and by closing down saloons and brothels, Hewitt had alienated many of the people who made his election possible. New York was a far better place. But Hewitt would pay for his deeds. The Board of Aldermen loathed him and wanted nothing more than to see him fail as mayor and be ousted at the first chance they got. They never even let his plan out of committee so that it could be voted on by the full board, never mind be subjected to public hearings. And a few months later they got their wish. Hewitt was soundly defeated in his bid for reelection by the New York County sheriff, Hugh J. Grant, who, at thirty years old, was the youngest mayor New York ever had. At nearly seventy years old, after one eventful, tumultuous, and historic term in office, Hewitt was done with politics. But he was not done with his subway.

7

WILLIAM WHITNEY’S MISSED OPPORTUNITY

WHENEVER WILLIAM WHITNEY TOOK ONE
of his horses out for a ride in Central Park, the young Irish rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Stuyvesant Square frequently joined him. A native of Dublin, the Reverend Doctor W. S. Rainsford was ten years younger than Whitney and was as tall and straight as a reed. He was also one of the most politically well-connected religious men in the city, thanks to his tight bond with the financier J. Pierpont Morgan. Perhaps it was because Whitney trusted Rainsford, or because Rainsford helped him find a governess for his daughter, or simply because Whitney valued how frankly the preacher spoke his opinion, but whatever the reason, on one of their many rides together in the park Whitney confessed his ambition to his friend. And it was not, as many suspected, to occupy the White House.

“Mr. Whitney,” Rainsford said, “I suppose you will be our next president.”

“Oh no,” Whitney answered. “I am done with politics. I must make some money. It is time I did. Mrs. Whitney has money. I have none.”

Of course that was an exaggeration. Whitney did have money, from his law practice, his political work, and his stock holdings from his late father’s steamship company, but what he meant was that he did not have the enormous riches of his wife’s family. That was what he desired, and to achieve it he had a plan.

“I am going into the New York street railroads,” Whitney told Rainsford.

“Well,” Rainsford replied to Whitney’s pledge, “they are in such a tangle you will need a lot of legal work.”

“Tangle” did not begin to describe the state of New York’s streets in the 1880s.
The New York Herald
had described New York’s street railways this way: “The driver quarrels with the passengers and the passengers quarrel with the driver. There are quarrels about getting out and quarrels about getting in. There are quarrels about change and quarrels about the ticket swindle. The driver swears at the passengers and the passengers harangue the driver through the straphole.” It was a daily scene that left women disgusted and embarrassed and that alarmed children to the point of tears.

Crossing Manhattan, from the Hudson to the East River, required switching from one car to another to another and another. There were four different lines and each time riders switched they had to pay a new fare, to go one block or twenty. Free transfers were not an option. More than thirty different street railway companies ruled the streets, each independently owned, and they reported their business to nobody. Most coaches had no ventilation, no source of heat other than a thin bed of hay, and faint light at best, so not only was the smell horrendous but passengers were cold and virtually blind inside. It was a system in drastic need of consolidation and control. And nobody knew better than Whitney the inner workings of New York City politics, thanks to his time as corporation counsel. That knowledge, along with his supreme self-confidence and his growing number of powerful and wealthy friends, was enough to inspire him to believe that he could be the one to transform New York’s streets.

Whitney had been drawn into the business back in 1884. Driven by greed and a good-hearted desire to improve the quality of life in his city, Whitney was poised to take on the man who was making life miserable for New Yorkers and who was about to make it a whole lot worse. Whitney had been watching for years as Jacob Sharp became the king of New York City’s street railways through the strength of his Broadway & Seventh Avenue Railroad, and, like other wealthy New York businessmen, Whitney was determined not to let Sharp control any more of the city’s streets without a fight. There was too much money at stake for one man to have so much power. Old Jake Sharp’s vehicles were filthy, and passengers often had rats as company. And by choosing the routes where his vehicles operated, Sharp could maximize his revenues. New York had more people living per acre south of the Harlem River than London or Paris, most of them in slums, a fact that no doubt contributed to a death rate in the city that was higher than any in the country and among the worst in the world. Sharp already ran horsecars between Fifty-ninth Street and Union Square, but he wanted more, and in particular he wanted to run his line all the way down Broadway to the Battery. If Sharp won control over all of Broadway from Central Park to the wharf, he would essentially be able to hold the island of Manhattan hostage for whatever he wanted and earn a fortune in the process. With the city’s elevated lines already at their capacity and horses clogging the streets worse than ever, New York City stood at a critical moment.

*   *   *

JUST AS LONDONERS GREW TIRED
of their dark, dank, smoke-filled Underground, New Yorkers quickly grew weary of their Els. The city’s four elevated lines had no more room. They were at full capacity on almost every trip and running as close together as possible without posing a danger. The pillars were not strong enough to support longer trains and heavier locomotives, and when the idea was floated to build additional elevated lines to relieve the pressure, New Yorkers said no more. The giant structures on which the tracks rested cast long shadows over the streets all day long, turning sunny days into what
The Times
called “a perpetual city of night.” The steam-powered elevated trains were so packed, sluggish, and loud that the only task harder than conducting business during the day over the rumbling was sleeping through it at night. Property values plummeted, as did the morale of New Yorkers.

As if the vibrating, the noise, and the long shadows did not provide enough misery, as one unfortunate British tourist discovered, steam-powered elevated trains could be dangerous and dirty, too. Walter Gore Marshall was in Greenwich Village crossing the intersection at Sixth Avenue and Twelfth Street one day in 1880 when he decided to pause and look up at the El passing overhead. He regretted it the moment he did. “It was lucky I had not my mouth open at the time,” Marshall recalled, “for as I gazed with my face upturned, I was saluted with a large pat of oil from one of the axle-boxes of a car, which besprinkled my countenance and neck-tie.” Splattered from head to toe, he rushed into a nearby barbershop to clean himself off. “Oil drippings from passing trains are a source of constant annoyance to foot passengers crossing the roadway beneath, a nuisance that could be easily remedied by a proper sort of hard grease,” Marshall said.

The elevated trains were not as bad as residents insisted, but there was no denying that steam power, for all of its reliability, was just not suited to coexist with city living. And while Chicago and Brooklyn were quick to follow Manhattan and build their own Els, Saint Louis, Philadelphia, and Boston all saw the flaws and decided that steam trains passing overhead and dropping oil, cinders, and soot on pedestrians below was perhaps not the future, after all.

Decisions had to be made about what should power the city’s transportation system in the future and how it should be expanded to cover more territory so that residents could spread out more. Horses were trusted and reliable, but they were slow, they smelled, and they were at the mercy of the weather. The steam-powered elevated trains were speedier and above the crowded streets, but the shadows they cast on and the dangers they posed for pedestrians below were slowing down momentum for their expansion. Cables were quiet and smooth and seemed promising, but installing them was wildly expensive, and they worked best on long straight roads, which worked well for portions of New York but not the entire island, and also posed a severe limitation in how far east and west on Manhattan they could go.

Was the city willing to experiment with electric traction on its streets, which was still in its infancy but showing promise? Or was New York ready to follow London’s lead and build the world’s second subway, and America’s first? Tunneling was now being done much faster than it was when London dug its subway in the early 1860s. In 1869, a new shield had bored 1,350 feet, or a quarter of a mile, beneath the Thames River in just five months, unheard-of speed. Fifteen years later, in 1884, London’s Parliament authorized the use of a shield with additional improvements for digging a pair of railroad tunnels starting near London Bridge. The combination of tunneling with electric traction could be the greatest achievement yet. Clean, quiet, and underground.

A myriad of issues faced New York, and William Whitney was eager to take them all on, even if doing so meant splitting his life between Washington and New York.

Secretary of the navy was never a passion or a career ambition for Whitney. President Cleveland, who had not yet married his twenty-year-old girlfriend Frances Folsom, was a social oaf in Washington, and he relied on the Whitneys for companionship. The two men played in a poker group regularly, and Flora held so many lavish parties, always inviting the president, that Whitney had to tell his wife to be careful about earning Cleveland a reputation as a rich, party-going elitist. Cleveland treasured how Whitney watched out for him. “Mr. Whitney had more calm, forceful efficiency than any man I ever knew,” Cleveland later said of his friend. “In work that interested him he actually seemed to court difficulties and to find pleasure and exhilaration in overcoming them.”

It was an accurate description, and it explained why Whitney could not resist the pull of New York even as he was restoring the navy to its glory.

*   *   *

IN THOMAS FORTUNE RYAN,
an aggressive Irish-American, Virginia-born stockbroker, Whitney found a mate to go to battle with and to take on Jake Sharp. The two men became fast friends and mutually set out to rip from Sharp’s hands his most prized possession: Broadway, the spine of Manhattan.

Whitney and Ryan helped form what they called the New York Cable Railway Company. And only a few months later, in early 1885, they joined forces with a trio of Philadelphia transit men, William Elkins, Peter A. B. Widener, and William Kemble, who were behind a cable road that was recently launched on Market Street in Philadelphia, where they dominated the city’s street railways. It was a formidable team these men created, and they would form one of the most famous alliances of wealth and power in American history. They would in a few short years acquire aging horsecar lines that covered Columbus Avenue, Lexington Avenue, Fulton Street, Thirty-fourth Street, and Twenty-ninth Street. With one deal after another, sometimes buying, sometimes leasing, other times overpowering, they soon controlled virtually every horsecar line in Manhattan. They were not profitable lines, but the businessmen had other schemes in mind for making a fortune. They believed the money wasn’t in the subway itself but in the utilities required to operate it, namely gas and electricity. What Ryan and Whitney lacked in transit experience they made up for with their powerful connections, legal expertise, and deep knowledge of the ways of New York politics. And while the Philadelphians were outsiders to New York, they brought with them experience in street railways and in promoting cable streetcars. Together they were five men with vast amounts of money, influence, experience, and connections, and they shared the mutual goal of bringing to New York a streamlined street-transit network. If there was a weak link to their group, it was Whitney. His partners worried whether he could remain committed to taking down Sharp and taking over New York’s street railways while rebuilding the navy from Washington. Whitney assured them he was on board, even as he became more entrenched by the day in the political and social scenes of Washington.