The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (3 page)

On the chopped-up streets, garbage and debris were mixing with the perfume of horse-drawn carriages and piles of dung to create an odor that was almost unbearable to breathe in. And the packed sidewalks and overcrowded streets were grinding New York to an angry standstill. On some mornings, the carriages would be forced to stand motionless for half an hour or longer. When they finally moved at all, it was inches or feet at a time. One horse would lurch forward, then another, and just when it seemed as if the congestion was about to ease, it wouldn’t. All day long, drivers jostled with other drivers, whipping their own horses or the one next to them, competing for passengers. The horses didn’t like it any more than the well-dressed passengers inside the carriages they were pulling. The animals neighed at each other and sometimes raised up their front legs, causing fear and pandemonium. Pedestrians who tried to cross the street knew the risk they were taking carried deadly consequences with one misstep.

“We can travel from New York half-way to Philadelphia in less time than the length of Broadway,”
The New York Tribune
wrote. Beach didn’t see a problem in this clutter. From high above the city streets, he saw opportunity.

In 1849, Beach, by now sporting the skinny mustache that would become his trademark feature, lived a walkable distance from his office. And yet dodging the horses, the carriages, and the throngs of people each day turned his short walk from his office near City Hall to his house over on West Twentieth Street into a treacherous hour-long commute. After three years of listening to a parade of inventors promote their dreams to him, Beach decided it was time to share his own dream for his city, in an essay he published in
Scientific American
.

“Nothing less than a railway underneath, instead of one above,” he wrote. “Railway life down stairs, instead of railway life up stairs. The idea is at least original, but anything except feasible, that is so far as the expense is concerned, for there would lie no difficulty in executing the work. To tunnel Broadway through the whole length, with openings and stairways at every corner. This subterranean passage is to be laid down with double track, with a road for foot passengers on either side—the whole to be brilliantly lighted with gas. The cars, which are to be drawn by horses, will stop ten seconds at every corner—thus performing the trip up and down, including stops, in about an hour.”

Beach’s proposal went nowhere. The newspapers ridiculed him and New Yorkers sneered. Who would risk going down there under the streets and sidewalks? That’s where you go when you’re dead. It was ludicrous. “It’s better to wait for the Devil than to make roads down into hell,” one critic said of the idea of subways. Only somebody who worked at a science magazine would believe something so outrageous could actually work. On and on the criticism went. Reluctantly, Beach took the hint and moved on.

*   *   *

ON MARCH 4, 1861, IGNORING
the advice of those who feared for his safety, the president-elect, Abraham Lincoln, decided to travel through the streets of Washington to his inauguration with President James Buchanan. Together, in a horse-drawn carriage, they rode from the Willard Hotel to the steps of the Capitol Building. In the two months leading up to the inauguration, Texas, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina had seceded from the Union, and a civil war appeared unavoidable. Yet in his speech Lincoln promised peace unless an attack on his people left him no choice.

“There needs to be no bloodshed or violence,” Lincoln said, “and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority.” Five weeks later it was, with the first shots fired at Fort Sumter. Not even the Civil War, however, would slow the transportation revolution under way. On January 9, 1863, nine days after Lincoln ended slavery by signing the Emancipation Proclamation, workers in London achieved one of mankind’s greatest industrial breakthroughs. After four years of digging through mostly thick clay and rock, London opened the world’s first subway.

But while London’s subway, which came to be called the Underground, proved that a long tunnel could be built beneath a city to carry trains and move millions of passengers, it had numerous fundamental flaws. Those trains were powered by steam, and from the very first day the tunnels were filled with dark soot, black smoke, and showers of sparks that made for an altogether miserable traveling experience. Even the chief inspector of railways in Great Britain, Captain Douglas Galton, cautioned other cities from following London’s lead. “An underground road is enormously expensive to construct,” he said. “It greatly interferes with street traffic during construction, from the large quantities of material to be removed and brought to the surface; it can never be wholesome or free of deleterious gases, and in foggy weather it is always full of thick atmosphere, which increases the liability to accident and is very disagreeable to passengers.” A rousing endorsement to a historical achievement it was not.

Beach believed the air in a subway had to feel no different than the air above ground, and just like he had taken apart the typewriter and made it better, he set to work to improve upon London’s breakthrough. Five weeks after the underground Metropolitan Railway opened (and introduced “the metro” into the lexicon of transportation), Beach found his inspiration.

*   *   *

WHILE LONDONERS WERE STILL BUZZING
over their new subway, another invention in the same city caught Beach’s eye. The British postal service had approved a charter for a British engineer named T. W. Rammell and his partner, J. Latimer Clark. The two men had designed an underground, airtight tube that could carry mail and packages the short distance between a London post office and nearby suburb. Distributing the mail throughout the world’s largest city was an immense and time-consuming task, and Rammell and Clark promised to make it easier. Their tube was only four feet in diameter, hardly big enough to carry people, but what excited Beach, and impressed British postal officials, was how the mail was moved inside Rammell’s tube.

With a thirty-horsepower steam engine, Rammell produced compressed air that could blow a five-foot-long canister through the tube. The tube could carry 120 mailbags a day, blowing them the one-quarter mile in fifty-five seconds, a huge improvement over the ten minutes it took workers to push mail carts the same distance. It was so efficient that the post office gave Rammell a contract to build a maze of forty-eight tubes under London’s streets. When Beach heard how well this pneumatic-propulsion system worked, and that a couple of curious daredevils had even managed to climb aboard it for a short joyride, he was more certain than ever. It was clean. It was smooth. And when
Mechanics’ Magazine
wrote of Rammell’s invention, “We feel tolerably certain that the day is not very distant when metropolitan railway traffic can be conducted on this principle with so much success,” Beach was convinced.

In 1865, he did for himself what he had done thousands of times for other inventors. He began the application process for a patent and set his eyes on the 1867 American Institute Fair.

*   *   *

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: IN THIS
metropolis of the commerce of the new world, the American Institute uplifts the banner of labor and of creative art,” Horace Greeley, the president of the institute and longtime editor of
The New York Tribune,
told the thousands gathered on the armory’s floor in his opening address on September 12, 1867. He spoke about America’s ability to create tools for farming that were far superior to anything seen in Great Britain. “No nation on earth can make them as good in quality or as cheap in price as we can make them here.” His speech ended with loud applause, and the doors to the fair were thrown open.

Alfred Beach was there. And instead of one invention, he came with two. One was a small tube, twenty-four feet long and two feet wide, which was built to move letters and small packages through it with air blown by a fan. But most visitors barely stopped to study it.

His second idea was suspended from the ceiling by strong cables, and it stretched across the vast room, to all four corners. There was a long plywood tube, and fitted snugly inside of it, with only an inch to spare on the sides, was a cylindrical car with an open top that was big enough to hold ten people. The car rested on four wheels, and a steam engine positioned at one end of the tube powered a large fan that blew the car on its rails. When the fan was reversed, it acted like a vacuum and sucked the car back to its starting point. Throngs of people would stand for hours beneath the tube, lining up to ride it or simply to watch the car go back and forth. Beach himself made sure everybody at the fair, in the city, and beyond knew about the excitement surrounding his creation.

In an article in
Scientific American
published just before the fair opened, Beach wrote that he had developed a transportation system that was as “swift as Aeolus (god of breezes) and silent as Somnus (god of sleep and dreams).”

Halfway through the fair, on October 19, another article on Beach’s pneumatic tube appeared in
Scientific American.
At the time that his article appeared, more than twenty-five thousand people had already ridden the tube and a new line was forming every day. Beach wanted to make sure the crowds kept coming.

“The most novel and attractive feature of the exhibition is by general consent conceded to be the pneumatic railway, erected by Mr. A. E. Beach,” the article began. It spared no words of self-praise. “The car fits the tube like a piston and travels both ways with the utmost regularity and steadiness. Nothing can be more gentle and pleasant than the start and stoppage; no jerking or wrenching of any kind is observable.”

The article focused on the railway’s details, but in one line, it planted the notion that perhaps the pneumatic railway was the future of transportation. “It is probable that a pneumatic railway of considerable length for regular traffic will soon be laid down near New York.”

Of the hundreds of inventions that filled the floor of the armory for six weeks, Beach’s pneumatic tube was the sensation that could not be ignored. Everybody wanted to ride on it, and by the time the fair closed in November, more than seventy-five thousand people had. Beach wanted everyone to remember what they had witnessed, so that he could begin to push the idea with New York’s lawmakers. He published a pamphlet in which he described in the simplest terms how his pneumatic railway worked.

“A tube, a car, a revolving fan!” he wrote. “Little more is required. The ponderous locomotive, with its various appurtenances, is dispensed with, and the light aerial fluid that we breathe is the substituted motor.”

New Yorkers believed.

“Passengers by a through city tube could be carried from City Hall to Madison Square in five minutes, to Harlem and Manhattanville in fourteen minutes, to Washington Heights in twenty minutes, and by sub-river to Jersey City or Hoboken in five minutes,”
The Times
wrote after the fair had ended.

Beach was jubilant. Just as it had in 1856 for his typewriter, the American Institute Fair once again awarded him its top prize, and New Yorkers were buzzing with talk about this sleek, quiet, smooth-riding train and how Alfred Beach had struck upon a solution to the overcrowding that everybody was clamoring for. Everybody, that is, except for the one person who really mattered, a three-hundred-pound state senator who also happened to be the crime boss ruling New York City.

*   *   *

WILLIAM MAGEAR “BOSS” TWEED JR.
ran the most corrupt political machine in the country, Tammany Hall, and it was tied closely to the city’s omnibus system. Tweed, with his blue eyes and long mess of a gray beard, stood six feet tall and was grotesquely overweight. Nothing happened in his city without his approval.

Born into a Scottish-American family in 1823, he joined his father’s business making chairs as a boy, and in his early twenties he showed his outgoing spirit by convincing some seventy-five friends and strangers to join a fire company he was starting up. It came to be known as “Big Six,” and it was the first sign of the power of persuasion that Tweed could have over people. His men wore red shirts, and they elected their husky leader as foreman; soon he was wearing a white fire coat while leading Americus Engine Company Number 6 in fighting fires. It proved to be a short-lived career for him when the city’s chief fire engineer booted him out for fighting with other fire companies, but all that did was raise Tweed’s profile in a city where Democrats were hungry for leaders. They drafted him to run for assistant alderman as a twenty-seven-year-old in 1850, and he lost. But a year later he was back, and this time his victory marked the beginning of what would be two decades of ruling the city by whatever means necessary.

Using kickbacks, violence, and bribery, Tweed became the third largest landowner in the city and one of its richest men (a point he took great pride in, by flaunting his giant mansions, private cars, yachts, and a diamond pin that he wore every day on his shirt). For years, as New York’s deputy street commissioner and later as public works commissioner, he extorted a nickel out of every omnibus fare in the city. And with twenty-nine bus lines and fourteen horse-pulled lines carrying more than one hundred million passengers a year in New York, Tweed had become a very wealthy man. Boss Tweed, determined to maintain his stranglehold on the city’s street transit system, blocked any attempt that came along that might threaten his empire, with a whisper, a nudge, a payoff, a threat, or a promise. He instructed those in power, all the way up to the governor’s office, to reject what he said to reject and approve what he said to approve. And they did. Most men who ran up against Boss Tweed eventually backed down, knowing it was a fight they could never win. One did not.

*   *   *

TWEED REFUSED TO GIVE BEACH
a penny for his project or to grant him the charter that he needed. In 1868, Tweed was at his most powerful, after the candidates he owned had won city and statewide offices. If he didn’t want something done, it didn’t get done. But Beach was a foe unlike any Tweed had encountered. Beach believed that his pneumatic subway was going to change the city, maybe even the world. That attitude drove him in the same year that he unveiled his subway to donate a large sum of money to open what eventually became the Beach Institute in Savannah, Georgia, a school for freed slaves that was staffed with white teachers from the North. With his school, as with his subway, Beach was determined to build a proud legacy. And nobody, not even the man who ruthlessly reigned over the city, was going to stop him.