The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (21 page)

Finally, with all the roads and real estate that they had amassed came the responsibility to do what Jake Sharp had not done for years: make getting around New York easier. One of the first changes they made was to reroute the lines, so that passengers could stay on a single car longer to get to their destination faster. But for those passengers who did have to switch from one line to another, the group implemented a second change to the system. They began to allow passengers to transfer from one car to another, one route to another, for free, something Sharp had long resisted because of how much he believed it would have cost him. The new owners believed otherwise. They saw free transfers as a moneymaker. Under the new system, a single fare of five cents was all it cost to ride New York’s transit system anywhere, for any distance. It reduced the cost for riders, essentially charging them one fare for two rides, while at the same time encouraging more people to ride. And it worked. In less than a year the Metropolitan issued more than a million transfers, a huge portion of which it learned were from passengers who otherwise would never have boarded a car at all. The free transfer would be one of Whitney’s greatest gifts to his city.

But there was an even more pressing decision that needed to be made by the new leaders of New York’s street railways: what would replace the horse as the source of power for New York’s street railways as they entered the twentieth century?

*   *   *

IT HAD BEEN ALMOST
six years since September 4, 1882, the day Thomas Edison, sporting a new Prince Albert coat, stood inside the Drexel, Morgan building at 23 Wall Street in downtown New York, flipped a switch, and watched as a direct current of electricity fed into his system and eight hundred lamps in the Drexel building and over at the
New York Times
offices flickered on. J. P. Morgan’s Madison Avenue mansion was the first private home in the city to convert to incandescent lighting, though the first attempt saw an explosion that scorched Morgan’s carpets and walls. Within a year, more than five hundred of the city’s wealthiest homes were glowing brighter than they ever had.

Almost overnight, Manhattan came alive. Daytime businesses like printing and machine shops, piano factories, and lawyers’ offices switched over and found the lightbulb to be so much more pleasant to work under than the gas lamp. But it was the change in nightlife that most excited New Yorkers. The formerly dark, nighttime storefronts of department stores lit up, and window browsing became a popular after-dinner activity. Theaters and restaurants were brighter, and so was the Statue of Liberty, the torch in her hand suddenly shining more brightly for ship captains to see her easily. More than fifteen hundred street lamps were alive in the city by 1886, and the number was growing by the week.

By 1888, a sea of wires that stretched from pole to pole, rooftop to rooftop, filled the air over New York’s streets. The idea of burying lines in the ground had not yet been embraced, and so when New Yorkers gazed upward, their view was blocked by a dizzying collection of ugly black lines. In addition to Edison’s, there were wires from Bell Telephone, the Gold and Stock Ticker Company, the fire and police departments, private alarm companies, Western Union, and more. There was little incentive to share a power line, and so a single fifty-foot pole might carry a dozen or more wires. To no one’s surprise, the weight was often too much for the poles to hold, and they might snap and bring down dangerous live wires to the street. An attempt to legislate the crisis failed when the biggest companies simply ignored an order to put their lines underground and received no punishment.

*   *   *

FROM THE CITIES TO THE
heartland, innovation was thriving in America. Out on the farms, a new combine harvester called the Sunshine was making farmers more productive, allowing them to move greater amounts of wheat, oat, barley, rice, and corn and increase their profits. In the big cities, electricity was generating an exciting nightlife scene, and Edison was already working on his next idea, combining sound with motion pictures in a device he called the kinetoscope. An electric-trolley experiment in Cleveland had worked successfully, and now other cities, most aggressively Richmond and now Boston, were implementing the idea. In Washington, the finishing touches were being put on the world’s tallest stone structure, the 555-foot obelisk known as the Washington Monument. In New York, the waters surrounding the island had seen two exciting symbols of progress open in the past five years, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty.

As fast as New York was growing, Chicago was growing faster. It was expanding its boundaries and growing its population through the annexation of more than a hundred square miles of suburban neighborhoods. The 1890 census would find that Manhattan was not as dominant as it once was and that Chicago, with 1.1 million people, was gaining on New York’s 1.5 million. It was more than a number. If Chicago overtook New York in population, there was no telling the impact it would have on the cultural, political, and economic worlds of Gotham. Would banks see New York as weakening and the heartland as the new strength of America and shift their headquarters there? “New York would undoubtedly lose a great deal in prestige the world over—and in actual dollars and cents too—should Chicago or any other city on the continent count a larger population,”
The Real Estate Record
wrote. When Congress soon awarded Chicago, and not New York, the right to host what would be the grandest World’s Fair in celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s famous voyage, it was a shove for New York to grow or be passed by.

“The elevated roads may be able to cram more people into their cars but they have long since passed the limit at which they can comfortably provide for their passengers during the busy hours of travel,”
The New York Times
wrote in a blistering editorial in the spring of 1888. “Moreover they do not afford rapid transit at all. What electricity may do on the surface is yet to be proved, but rapid transit cannot be furnished on the surface, and as for cables they will only obstruct and delay the solution of the question. There is urgent need of underground rapid transit roads.”

There was just one problem with electricity and the electric streetcar, and a few minutes after one o’clock in the afternoon on October 12, 1889, New Yorkers witnessed it firsthand in a horrifying way. A sturdy, thirty-year-old lineman for the Western Union Telegraph Company climbed up a pole at the southwest corner of Centre and Chambers streets right in front of Fire Engine Company number 7. His task was to cut out the dead wires of the company.

Like most of the tall poles in the city, the top was a confusing maze of live and dead wires. There were lines for the police and fire, telephone wires, and multiple Western Union telegraph wires. The worker had one foot resting on one of the half dozen crossbars atop the pole when he reached out for a wire he intended to cut and suddenly his body began to shiver and tremble. With pedestrians watching from below, and screams bringing people to their windows, a flash of bright sparks and blue flame shot out from beneath his hand. His body slumped and fell forward onto a network of wires that caught him and suspended him in a ghastly image forty feet over the street, with flames and blood shooting out of his mouth and nostrils. It took his fellow workmen more than an hour to carefully climb up, cut him loose, and lower him without receiving a deadly shock themselves. But once his lifeless body was removed, it was as if New York City itself had received a jolt.

There was genuine anger about the public death, and there would be an investigation and weeks of public hearings that followed. Mayor Hugh Grant, who only a few months earlier had personally taken an ax to a pole in a symbolic gesture of his desire to put wires underground, now had a horrific exhibit to bolster his case. If horses were the past and electricity was the future of street transportation, those wires would have to be underground.

*   *   *

OR SO IT SEEMED.
The contingent of men controlling New York’s streets had other ideas. Kemble, Ryan, and Widener had a vested interest in cable car systems because they had installed one in Philadelphia. They could not go one way in Philadelphia and another in New York City without raising questions. In the late winter of 1889, the men exchanged letters in which they debated the merits of cable versus other modes of transit power, including electric. Finally, on March 4, 1889, Widener penned a strongly worded letter to his partner William Whitney that took note of what Henry Whitney was building in Boston and urged the younger Whitney brother to look the other way.

“The work your Brother is doing in Boston whilst good would sink into insignificance when compared with it as I am satisfied it would solve the question of local transportation in New York,” Widener wrote. “I say without fear of successful contradiction that if you place such a cable road on Broadway as we would build, it would be the greatest work of your life and one which you could always point to with pride.”

Though Henry and William had remained close into their forties, exchanging letters and visiting frequently with their widowed mother in Brookline, they were also fiercely independent. They were enjoying their increasing clout in their respective cities. And Widener’s letter reflected how they went about their business independently of each other, while at the same time paying attention out of the corner of one eye. Boston was small enough that one powerful businessman could have enormous influence over the streets; as the owner of the world’s largest streetcar operation there, Henry Whitney was that man.

New York was much bigger, and it was harder there for one man to wield as much influence, but if William Whitney and his group could successfully transform the streets and make life more pleasant for the one and a half million residents, he would be close to the equivalent of his brother in a much larger metropolis. But to do that, the younger brother would have to suddenly change his stripes. Throughout their lives, William had been the smart, safe, and conservative brother, preferring to stay in the background while leaving his mark, while Henry had been the risk taker, unafraid to fail. Proposing to dig a subway tunnel beneath the cherished Boston Common was daring. So was switching his streetcar operation from horses to electricity before the electric streetcar had truly shown itself to be a worthy alternative.

Widener’s 1889 letter to Whitney was striking for its stubbornness, in that it ignored the impact electricity was already having on street railways and focused instead on a technology that had severe limitations and was costly to install. There were some nine hundred miles of electrified tracks in the United States, three times as many miles as cable. For the Metropolitan Traction Company, and for the citizens of New York, Whitney’s handling of the letter would be another critical moment.

The Philadelphians had enlisted Whitney because of his influence and connections in New York. They knew that his opinion mattered more than theirs when it came to the company’s New York operations. If Whitney wanted to ignore Widener and follow in the footsteps of his older brother, he surely would have met resistance from his partners as they were dead set against using electricity. He also would have been ignoring the venerable
Street Railway Journal,
which had analyzed the question and weighed in emphatically, saying “the cable system was far superior to any form of the electric, and would never be superseded.”

Widener’s letter must have struck Whitney. He did not follow his brother’s course and instead set his company on a path to pursue cable as a major source of streetcar power in New York. The Metropolitan Traction Company began to move forward with the slow, arduous, and expensive task of replacing the horses on New York’s streets with a system powered by cables. It was, they believed, the most sensible solution, a compromise between the ugliness of steam and the uncertainty of electricity. At Broadway and Fourteenth Street, cable-pulled cars were soon whipping through a sharp, double turn so dangerous that passengers took to calling it “Dead Man’s Curve.” Of all the important moves that William Whitney would make in his life, his choice to pursue a fading technology like cable rather than to follow his brother’s lead and embrace the electric streetcar would be his greatest miscalculation.

It was only a few months after that decision when another big city, not a smaller one like Boston, showed just how foolish and shortsighted Whitney was being.

*   *   *

ON NOVEMBER 4, 1890
, a bright, sunlit morning in downtown London, thousands of people gathered at King William Street near the Monument and looked out for Albert Edward VII, the Prince of Wales, as well as the Duke of Westminster, the Duke of Clarence, and other lords, chancellors, and British dignitaries who were expected to arrive by carriage. It was a tense time in the city. For almost two years, a serial killer was believed to have slaughtered at least eleven women, mostly around London’s Whitechapel district, and he was assigned the name Jack the Ripper after an anonymous letter later believed to be a hoax surfaced. Farmers who slaughtered cattle, along with butchers, physicians, and especially surgeons were all eyed suspiciously by investigators because of the way the women were mutilated, but in the end, after more than a hundred suspects were questioned, nobody was ever arrested.

At least for one morning, the gloom of the Ripper murders lifted off the city and smiles emerged. Together, along with the South African–born engineer James Henry Greathead, the royals in attendance stepped into an oversized hydraulic lift that could hold fifty people and enjoyed a smooth descent sixty feet below the street and into London’s Underground. Once on the station platform, their eyes almost had to squint from the glare of the bright lights off the white glazed tiles. Red
DANGER
signs also shone brightly at tunnel entrances, near where a brightly colored train car decorated in flowers sat quietly.