The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (28 page)

In 1871, 34 million passengers rode the street railways within a ten-mile radius of downtown Boston. A decade later, the ridership had doubled to 68 million, and another decade after that, in 1891, it had doubled again, to 136 million passengers. There were too many people and not enough seats for them, and in June 1891, a city desperate for relief finally acted. Matthews, after ordering that a commission be formed to study the problem and present a solution, had set aside $20,000 for its work. It was called the Commission to Promote Rapid Transit for the City of Boston and Its Suburbs. On June 10, the members were named; on June 18, they were confirmed by the city council; and on June 20, they met at the mayor’s office for the first time.

Among the commission members were Henry Lee Higginson, a Civil War hero and philanthropist who, a decade earlier, had founded the Boston Symphony, and John Quincy Adams, a Harvard-educated lawyer and the great-grandson of President John Adams and the grandson of President John Quincy Adams. After four years of dickering and debating with no progress, one new, swift-acting mayor, in a span of just seventeen days, had put the pieces in place for Boston to finally solve its transportation crisis. The commission’s first order of business was to hear from the public.

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AT ITS FIRST HEARING ON
June 25, 1891, a dozen or so citizens, including Henry Whitney and several prominent businessmen and railroad leaders, came to City Hall at the corner of School Street and Tremont Street. At eleven o’clock, Mayor Matthews called the meeting to order, and he noted how much time the commission had. Its deadline, he said, was April 1892, at which point it was expected to submit a detailed report.

As the hearing commenced, Whitney volunteered to go first, but he had only a few words to say. He said that his West End Street Railway Company had submitted a number of proposals for the city and the commission to study, and he asked only that the plans be kept private unless his company agreed to release them. The most serious of those proposals, he explained, was being prepared by the company’s chief consulting engineer, who outlined an attractive plan that included a subway and an elevated structure, both for electric trains.

After Whitney spoke, one man after another stood up to speak. A former Boston mayor from the late 1870s, Frederick Prince, now a seventy-four-year-old man with a bushy gray mustache that turned down at the tips, showed up to ask if the hearings were open to everybody, or only those with ideas to suggest. “We intend to hear everybody,” Matthews replied. A retired physician, Ira Moore, who represented a trust that held millions of dollars of downtown property, stood up to say only that he was firmly in the camp against any and all elevated roads, while a Brookline gentleman, W. W. Toussaint, said he had plans for a tunnel beneath the sidewalks. Even the American Express company sent a representative, who proposed tracks straight across the Common. After the meeting ended, the only decision reached was a logistical one. If so many citizens were going to be coming forward with their own plans, the commission agreed a stenographer needed to be on hand to record the ideas on a typewriter so they could be reviewed in detail by the commission.

Ten months later, and after fifty more public hearings had been held and two commission members had traveled across Europe to study how other cities were handling their overcrowded streets, the commission’s work was done. On the morning of April 5, 1892, a 296-page report was submitted for approval to the general court.

“The length of this report is greater than we had expected,” it said on page 103. Perhaps that explained why a few months later Matthews confessed that he had yet to find a single person who had read the full report. No document would be so detailed, so meticulously researched, so full of questions. It’s no wonder it divided the city into factions. Who would build and operate and pay for the next project, private businesses like the West End Street Railway Company or the government? How could the steam railroads be improved to handle the growth in the suburbs and the growing wave of people riding the trains into the city? And, finally, would Boston get a subway, elevated tracks, or both?

The report of the commission did not signal the end but the beginning of the debate over subways versus elevated tracks. And nowhere in the report was that more clear than in a brief section titled “Tunnels.” During the summer of 1891, Congressman John Fitzgerald, who was appointed to the commission by Mayor Matthews, and
Herald
editor Osborne Howes Jr., a state appointee, traveled together to London, Paris, and Berlin, cities that had built or were building rapid transit systems.

When Fitzgerald visited London, the city had a mix of steam and electric trains running underground, and he went anticipating that the electric underground would prove to be the future for Boston. He left disappointed. “As a piece of engineering I presume it is perfection,” he wrote in his report to the transit commission. “But as a mode of conveying human beings from one part of a great city to another I should much prefer some other method, and some other feeling when travelling than the buried-alive feeling which one experiences in this tunnel.” Most surprising to Fitzgerald was that the underground steam system actually impressed him more than the underground electric trains. “I traveled over this [steam] road several times, and found it did not contain so much smoke as I expected, because not only do they burn smokeless coal, but their engines also consume their own smoke,” Fitzgerald wrote. “In addition to this, they have open spaces wherever it is possible,” which made the journey more enjoyable because of the frequent bursts of light that shined down into the trains. But the electric cars, he said, moved at fifteen miles per hour, not as fast as he expected, and were too loud for his liking. “The noise is like the roaring of the ocean after a storm, and many persons whom I interviewed told me they always experienced a headache for some time after leaving these cars,” Fitzgerald reported. “I must confess I experienced a similar sensation myself.”

But even Honey Fitz’s skepticism could not dissuade the commission. In its conclusion, the members indirectly pointed at the lack of progress made by the West End Street Railway Company. “The well-worn list of public works which have proved inordinately costly, interminably slow in building, and outrageously inadequate in every way when finished, is brought out and rehearsed once more,” the report said. It also pointed out that public ownership would always mean fending off constant demands and requests for costly extensions and cheaper fares, both of which would be impossible to grant. But despite all of that, the commission recommended that the government should build a new system and then try to lease it to a private company, like the West End Street Railway, for operation. That allowed city and state officials, and not private businessmen, to decide how much a ride should cost, where transit stops should be, what streets should be widened, and what suburban neighborhoods should get their own streetcar lines.

The commission summarized the other recommendations in just a few short paragraphs. There should be two main railroad stations in the city, one called North Union for passengers coming from the north, at the corner of Causeway and Leverett streets, and a second called South Union, on Kneeland Street, for passengers coming up from the south. The streets, especially in the center of Boston, should be widened and extended in certain places and policed more aggressively to make surface travel more convenient for all vehicles and pedestrians. Two elevated railroads should be constructed, one from South Boston to Charlestown and another from Roxbury to Cambridge.

And finally, in a nod to what Whitney had first proposed five years earlier, the commission said that the street railway system should be reorganized by removing a large number of tracks from the narrow downtown streets and replacing them with a tunnel about one mile long beneath Boston Common and Tremont Street, “which shall take the greater part of the through cars to the southern and western portions of the city.”

If they were all adopted, the recommendations would transform Boston, which is probably why the report ended on a somewhat pessimistic note. “If anything is to be undertaken,” it said, “let it be ample and thorough and complete in its kind. Short of that, it were wiser to stand still where we are.”

That was a position nobody in Boston wanted to consider.

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MIDWAY THROUGH THE SUMMER
of 1893, the patience of Boston’s mayor expired. He quietly sent off a letter on August 5 to his city engineer, William Jackson:

Dear Sir,

You asked me the other day to jot down my ideas as to the matters which require the most pressing attention on the matter of rapid transit. I would suggest investigating with a view to ascertaining the following facts: First, as to Sub-Ways, sketch out a four-track subway under Tremont Street from some point at the North or West end, where it would come out upon the surface, to Boylston Street. Thence two tracks diverging down Boylston Street and adjacent to Park Square, the other two tracks going up Tremont Street and coming out near Shawmut Avenue. Also a subway for the two tracks under the proposed elevated railroad. This would give six tracks, with stopping places at the cross streets, and would enable the city to get rid of all the surface cars between the Common and Atlantic Avenue.

After laying out more specifics, Matthews wrote that this, of course, was all “a very crude idea.” But it was an idea he saw great promise in. “If it could be worked out and we could get a four-track elevated railroad system through the heart of the city, partly at the same level and partly on two levels, and all the present surface cars were put underground, we should have a system which should be worth a good deal of money to the people of Boston,” he wrote in closing.

If Boston’s biggest streetcar owner wasn’t going to solve the congestion problem, Boston’s mayor was.

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ON THE MORNING OF
September 7, 1893, the headline in
The Globe
reverberated across the city:
WHITNEY OUT. RESIGNS AS PRESIDENT OF THE WEST END
.

Henry Melville Whitney was fifty-three years old. He was the definition of an American capitalist, a man who grabbed opportunity when he saw it without fear of whether it would shower him with riches or wipe out his very last penny. When an entrepreneur had come to him with samples of bottled orange juice, he didn’t laugh. He brought them home for his children to taste and imagined the fortunes that could be made. It was not to be. “They were uniformly horrible,” his daughter Josie recalled.

In his official capacities, Whitney was serving as president of the West End Street Railway Company and of the Metropolitan Steamship Company, and, most recently, he had taken on the leadership role at the Dominion Coal Company in Nova Scotia. He was also the father of five who enjoyed spending more and more time riding horses with his children at their summer estate in Cohasset. He had built a half-mile track nearby, and soon, when Josephine was a few years older, he would spend hours there, standing with a stopwatch and timing his colts on their laps. He gave Josephine a strawberry-colored pony she named Merry Legs, and he rode alongside her through nearby wooded trails. Their favorite spot was a peak called Turkey Hill, where they could gaze out over the towns of Nantasket and Hingham and relax in the breeze.

By late 1893, six years had passed since he had first proposed building a subway tunnel under Boston Common. His biggest achievements had been to consolidate all of the competing streetcar companies into one giant monopoly, to electrify the tracks, and to expand routes farther into the suburbs. He had built the West End Street Railway Company into a hugely profitable operation, taking a business that functioned mainly in a two-square-mile area and expanding it to run almost ten miles out of downtown. The company finished 1892 with $6.3 million in gross earnings and $1.8 million in profit. Almost two-thirds of its tracks were being powered by electricity. After starting with 8,000 horses in 1887, the company had whittled that total in half, down to 3,754 in five years, providing a huge cost savings as it operated more than 260 miles of track. These were enormous accomplishments. But they could not overshadow how Whitney had never addressed the most critical issue of all, downtown congestion, a point he hinted at in his September 6 letter of resignation to the West End board.

“The time has come when I feel that I have not the strength to manage so many important interests in justice either to those interests or to myself,” he wrote. “It seems to me that it is on the whole a propitious time to give up the presidency of the railway company … I admit that I give up the care of the office with a strong feeling of regret, because the relations between myself and community, as well as with the officers and employees of the road, have been pleasant and a source of gratification to me under the many trying circumstances which have occurred during my administration; and while I am aware that we have been criticized more or less, yet on the whole I feel that the public have appreciated the work in which we have together been engaged.”

That may have been true at first, as Whitney insisted on a flat five-cent fare for all rides and pledged to lessen the reliance on horses and speed up the streetcars. But by the time of his resignation, there was little sadness to see him go. In a letter that Matthews wrote to Whitney just a few months earlier, the mayor referred to the “pleasant, personal relations” the two men shared, but then questioned why Whitney never came forward with a realistic, detailed proposal for the legislature to consider. No response to his letter came. And a few months later, it was clear why. Henry Whitney was ready to move on. So were most Bostonians.

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THE MOST IMPORTANT TASKS
of the transit commission were to assess how long it would take to build a subway and how much it would cost. Very quickly it was realized an initial estimate of $2 million was wishful thinking and that a more realistic number was $5 million because of how many buildings and how much land the city would have to acquire. City bonds would pay for the work, and the city would lease the tracks to a transit company to operate it and earn back the cost. It all seemed quite logical, and, as the weeks passed, one question after another was put to rest. Yes, travel would be faster, perhaps shortening some trips by one-third the time. Yes, Tremont Street would be blessedly free of tracks. Yes, the damage to Boston Common would be minimal, and the only new visible structures would be the stations on the surface for people to walk down into the subway. Yes, as doctors from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital explained, proper drainage of water and ventilation of stale air would make the subway perfectly sanitary and safe. For the supporters of the subway, it was difficult to imagine why anyone could oppose the plan if they took one look around downtown, and yet, sure enough, any time a hearing was held, there was at least one outraged voice and oftentimes many.