The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (29 page)

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THOSE VOICES WERE HEARD
at a hearing on Monday morning, March 26, 1894. Beginning at ten o’clock, one by one, people stood up before the commissioners, some of them reading statements from a piece of paper, others just spouting venom. Samuel J. Byrne, who ran a small dry-goods store on Tremont Street, claimed to represent two dozen other merchants, from theater owners to bankers to lawyers and accountants. He said they all feared that the construction would destroy their businesses by making it impossible for shoppers to access their storefronts. In the end, Byrne would prove to be the most successful organizer of opposition, sending three hundred signatures to the legislature and promising that he had twelve thousand in total. “Construction would seriously interfere with travel and traffic,” the petition read, “proving ruinous to hundreds of merchants and in the end failing to relieve the congestion or promote rapid transit.” Henry A. G. Pomeroy had a much briefer argument than Byrne. He told the commissioners he was convinced the temperature underground would be much colder than above ground and could not possibly be safe. John Stone, a seventy-one-year-old former mayor of Charlestown who owned a grocery store, said he had no desire to dump his money into a hole and he’d just as soon have “pirates and misers” take it instead. And still others trotted out the same arguments that had been heard a few years earlier during the public hearings that led to the 1892 report. One man said he was terrified for his mother going “down in that tunnel with her grey hairs, not knowing where she is going.” Half a century after Marc Brunel’s Thames Tunnel opened, fear of the underground still lingered.

Arguments were also heard from a group calling itself the Merchant’s Anti-Subway League. Led by a jeweler named John W. Wilson, the group bombarded the newspapers with letters to the editor, and the papers responded in kind with headlines like
SUBWAY SCARE: MERCHANTS FEAR INJURY TO THEIR TRADE
. Wilson and his brother, Ed, had started out in business together early, selling newspapers in the city’s West End neighborhood as young boys. They were known on their corner for being the most aggressive newsboys around, and it worked, as they saved enough to open Wilson Brothers jewelers on Tremont Street. They may have been good businessmen, but in the subway fight, they were disorganized. Wilson showed up at one hearing just to complain that the voice of the merchants was being ignored, only to be calmly told that every hearing had been advertised well in advance.

One surprising voice against the subway was Michael Meehan, a resident of Jamaica Plain and one of the hardest-working contractors in the city. When some merchants asked Meehan to give his expert opinion on the project, to be attached to the petition they were submitting to the legislature, Meehan happily obliged. He looked at the subway proposal and saw a complicated network of water, sewer, and gas lines that would all have to be rerouted to make room for the tunnel. The subway, he believed, would provide only minimal relief, and it would hardly be enough to justify the exorbitant cost of building it. “I think that it is a very expensive method of solving that problem, and I think we are not going to get proper results for the expenditure,” Meehan wrote in his statement. It was a curious position for a local contractor to take. If a subway bill eventually was passed, and the city sought bids to build the multimillion-dollar project, would Meehan throw his hat in after voicing such a negative opinion of it? And if he did, would the city officials care that he had criticized them for moving forward with it?

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IT SEEMED AS IF THE
arguing was done and as if lawmakers were ready to pass a bill, proposed by Matthews, that called for building a subway and for purchasing the necessary land to begin planning an elevated route outside downtown for a private company to control. It was a savvy compromise by Matthews that seemed sure to pass since both elevated and subway supporters could claim victory. But it was not to be. An old challenger resurfaced at the last possible moment, determined to stir up trouble.

Joe Meigs, or Captain Joe to those who knew him well, had managed to build a short, experimental, steam-powered monorail between Boston and Cambridge a few years earlier and had even written to Abram Hewitt in New York about considering a monorail for his city. Meigs had been given permission twice to build a longer elevated rail and failed to raise the money or start construction, so it was hard to imagine legislators trusting him a third time, especially since the panic of 1893 had bankrupted so many potential investors. But Meigs had a new strategy. He sensed there was growing interest in an elevated line outside downtown, to connect with a possible subway tunnel, and so he smartly lobbied suburbanites for his downtown monorail, knowing they carried a growing influence with legislators. He requested yet another charter, this one to build an elevated line clear across Boston, from Charlestown out to Roxbury, covering a total of thirty-six miles of streets. It was an outlandish plan that would have ripped downtown Boston in half and shut down the business district for months or maybe years during construction. And yet, to the astonishment of nearly everyone in town, Meigs got his wish.

On April 30, 1894, the legislature chose to ignore Matthews’s reasoned bill and instead to look more closely into the proposal from Meigs. The outrage was immediate. Accusations flew that he had bribed his way back onto the scene and that nowhere in his charter was there an explanation of how it would be paid for and who would reimburse the businesses that would undoubtedly be damaged during the construction. For three months, the city was in a confused uproar, and nobody was angrier than its mayor. Finally, some level of sanity was restored on June 28. Lawmakers hastily added a measure to the bill giving voters the final say and restoring the important pieces of Matthews’s proposal, namely a subway in the business district and a clause banning any elevated tracks downtown.

But instead of the final bill being seen as a compromise, it was now viewed as a weak attempt to merely placate all sides. Nobody was pleased. The elevated supporters loathed seeing the subway plan in the bill. And the subway backers could not believe Meigs had wormed his way back in to get an elevated charter approved. Even the Citizens Association, which all along had favored the subway proposal, backed off its support because of what Meigs had achieved. On July 2, well after midnight, both the House and the Senate passed the new bill and sent it to Governor Frederic Thomas Greenhalge. He signed it immediately, and Mayor Matthews set July 24 as the date for the citizens to vote on their future.

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ON JULY 23, 1894,
the New York Giants visited Boston to play a game of baseball. It had been a big year of change for the game, and for the Boston Beaneaters. Two months earlier, an enormous fire in Roxbury destroyed South End Grounds, the Beaneaters’ home field, along with more than two hundred other buildings. It left two thousand people homeless and leveled almost twelve acres of the city. The team was forced to move their home games to the Congress Street Grounds, and that’s where the Beaneaters hosted the Giants the day before Bostonians voted on their subway. No doubt tired of all the transit talk, 3,333 people came out on the warm summer day for the game. The polls opened the next day at six o’clock. They would stay open for ten hours, closing at four in the afternoon.

It had taken Boston seven years to get to this day—seven years from Henry Whitney’s 1887 speech first suggesting the city tunnel under its congested downtown to build an electric-powered subway. Whitney had since moved on. Three mayors had been in charge. Blizzards and fires had leveled portions of the city. Tracks had been electrified and extended the city’s limits six miles out of downtown. A bizarre elevated monorail had briefly made an appearance. And finally a compromise had been reached. But would it pass?

The same debate had been raging in New York, launched by Mayor Hewitt after the blizzard of 1888. Almost seven years later, New York was also nearing a vote. The Rapid Transit Commission had finally approved a recommendation from its chief engineer, William Parsons, to build a subway and set a tentative date, November 1894, for the public to vote on it.

Incredibly, half a century after the Thames Tunnel opened and a quarter century after Alfred Beach’s secretly built one-block subway opened, years that were filled with rancor and debate over how to build a safe and comfortable subway that American cities could rely on, Bostonians and New Yorkers were now going to vote on that issue just four months apart.

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IT WAS WET AND WARM
on July 24 in Boston. A steady rain fell from morning to night, and the temperature hovered in the seventies. Maybe that’s why not even thirty thousand people turned out to vote. Or maybe they were tired of all the talking. Or perhaps they just assumed there was no possible way, with the addition of the elevated line to be built by Meigs, that the final bill would be passed. They were wrong. The final vote, counted by hand, was reported differently in nearly every newspaper in town, perhaps because the clerk who had been in charge of the “No” column miscounted the tally at first by more than one thousand votes. But in the end, the result was the same. The referendum was passed.
The Globe
reported the final result as 15,458 in favor, and 14,209 opposed, meaning that, by a slim margin of 1,249 votes, the citizens of Boston said they were ready for a subway. It was hardly overwhelming support.

Sam Little, who had replaced Whitney as president of the West End Street Railway Company, said on the evening after the results had been announced that he was surprised at the total number of people who voted and at the closeness of the vote. “I really thought a large number of people demanded an elevated road, from all the talk to that effect in the newspapers and one way and another, but the result doesn’t seem to indicate it.”

That was one way to look at the results. But another was that fears about the subway, despite assurances from respected doctors from Massachusetts General Hospital that the subway’s air would be just as clean as the air above it, still had not been put to rest in the minds of many. “I don’t believe in a tunnel or a subway,” a local undertaker said after voting no. “I expect to be a long time underground after I am dead, but while I live I want to travel on earth, not under it.”

Over in room 12 at Young’s Hotel, the celebration was loud, and Joe Meigs could not stand still. His attorney told the throng of reporters that his client was not available to speak but that he was elated that his proposal for an elevated railway had been approved after so many years. “The people have spoken,” George V. Towle said. “The citizens of Boston have pronounced in favor of our system and there is nothing more to be said.” As seven o’clock in the evening passed, the chamber room at City Hall was so packed that there was no room to move. Aldermen, department chiefs, city and state politicians, and citizens fascinated with the project all gathered to mingle and discuss the results. Surrounded by well-wishers, Nathan Matthews answered questions from reporters.

For Boston’s mayor, the vote was the victory he had pledged to achieve in his first inauguration speech in 1891. It had taken more than three years and created sharp divisions in the city, but the mayor was convinced that there was no other option. “The election shows that however the citizens may differ upon the merits of elevated railroads, subway routes, etcetera, a majority of them voting at a special election are in favor of a system of subways to be constructed and leased on public account,” Matthews said. “The verdict should be accepted as final and as a reasonably satisfactory conclusion to the rapid transit agitation.”

“What is to be done next?” a reporter shouted at him.

“I should assume that the main plans can be prepared,” the mayor answered, “and the work of construction begun and possibly well advanced before the close of the year.”

Part Three

TRAGEDIES, TRIUMPHS

10

BIDDING TO BUILD HISTORY

THEY GATHERED AT 11:30 IN THE MORNING
on March 20, 1895, a group of about twenty men in the small downtown office of the Boston Transit Commission. Eight months had passed since the rainy day in July when voters approved the combined subway and elevated plan. Now it was a sunny Wednesday with spring just around the corner. When the door to the room opened, all eyes turned to the large tin box being carried into the room by B. Leighton Beal, a former newspaper editor who had recently left the business to become the transit commission’s secretary. With one swoop, Beal hoisted the box up and turned it over, and in dramatic fashion twelve large envelopes flew out onto the table at the front of the room. Beal neatly stacked up the envelopes right next to another stack, this one of twelve smaller envelopes. The smaller ones each contained a $5,000 certified check, for a total of $60,000. The larger ones contained the figures that would decide in whose hands the citizens of Boston would place the building of the first section of their subway.

Sitting at the front table were the commission’s five members, led by George G. Crocker, a likable gray-haired, clean-shaven lawyer and former president of the Massachusetts State Senate. Of all the commissioners, Charles H. Dalton had the most important role. A former parks commissioner, his presence was supposed to reassure those who feared that the subway would destroy trees all over the Common. There were 150 trees in the park standing over portions of the subway route, and 57 of those were too tall to be uprooted and transplanted, while many others were young and just taking hold. It was always assumed that many trees would have to be sacrificed for the subway, but Dalton’s hope was to restore the Common to its full beauty.

The other men in the room with the commissioners were strangers to one another, but they were all too familiar with this process. They had come to find out if their bid, which required a $5,000 check just to be eligible, might win them the contract to build the first section of the Boston subway. These were not the twenty- and thirty-year-old tough Boston Irish laborers who would soon be putting in nine or ten hours a day and taking home $1.70 per shift for their sweat. These were businessmen, the contractors who would hire the laborers, and they were some of the most respected contractors from the East Coast.