The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (37 page)

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WHENEVER ONE OF THE WORLD’S
engineering marvels of the second half of the nineteenth century had been completed, they were accompanied by orchestrated celebrations. On January 9, 1863, the night London opened its Underground, a banquet at the Farringdon Street station was held to toast the feat. Seven years later, in New York City, when Alfred Beach unveiled his one-block pneumatic subway tunnel, he did not let the moment pass quietly. Ever the showman, he invited dignitaries down and crowed to the world that he had solved the urban transportation nightmare. On May 10, 1869, when the last hammer swung to finish the transcontinental railroad, thousands gathered in the flatlands of Promontory, Utah, and stood in a circle or sat on the idling trains to watch as a gold spike was hammered into the ground. Within minutes, President Ulysses S. Grant received a telegram telling him the railroad was complete. In May 1883, when the Brooklyn Bridge opened, President Chester A. Arthur attended the festivities, as did hundreds of thousands of citizens on land and in the boats in the harbor. Children skipped school, workers skipped work, vendors made small fortunes hawking their wares, and there was an hour of speeches followed by a parade. And two years later, President Arthur came out again for the dedication of the Washington Monument, the tallest building in the world, and he led a procession to the Capitol Building, where he greeted passing U.S. troops. For each occasion, no detail was overlooked, and there were often buttons, pamphlets, balloons, and bands to mark the occasion.

But on this historic morning for Boston and the country, there would be no boastful proclamations, no processions, and no celebratory spikes of the last subway rail. The only question to be decided was, Who was going to drive the first subway car in America?

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EACH CAR WOULD HAVE
a motorman and a conductor, one to drive, the other to collect the tickets from the passengers. Strapping James Reed, or Jimmy as he was known, short and muscular with a thick mustache and weathered and bronzed face from nearly thirty years of railway driving, and Gilman “Gil” Trufant, one of the oldest and gentlest conductors in Boston, were two of the most experienced transit men in the city, and so it was decided that their Pearl Street–Allston car should be the first through the tunnel.

Reed grew up in a small brownstone on Tyler Street and attended public schools downtown until his family moved to the grittier Charlestown neighborhood. He enlisted in the army for the Civil War, but when he was told he wasn’t old enough to shoulder a gun, he was made a drummer. He came home frustrated after his enlistment ended, feeling as if he had not done his part, but he quickly grew bored and reenlisted, this time as a private, and his second stint earned him his stripes since he took part in some of the war’s fiercest battles. When the war ended, he came home to Boston and took up in the railway business. He drove his first railway car in 1868 for the Middlesex Railroad Company, from Boston up to Malden, and later joined the Metropolitan and the South Boston companies, before Whitney’s West End merger swallowed them up. When the day arrived for Boston to unveil its subway, he was a natural choice to man the first trip. He knew his job so well that he would entertain his passengers with a joke or by telling them exactly how many railroad ties there are in a mile.

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WHEN JIMMY REED WALKED INTO
the Allston shed, looking nattier than usual in a new, trim-fitting uniform, a single-breasted dark blue coat with seven gold buttons, and a cap with a straight visor and two bands of gold, he greeted his passengers and confessed with no hesitation that he was tired after a night of restless sleep. Dreams of his trolley rushing to reach the subway tunnel first and on time kept him awake, he said.

One of the last passengers to arrive was the chief inspector for the West End Street Railway Company, Fred Stearns, who took up a spot on the car’s footboard so that he could warn boarding passengers to keep their hands and heads inside to avoid bumping any posts or trees. After one final inspection to make sure the car was ready, the doors to the garage opened and the passengers let out a hearty cheer as the electric motor sent the Allston trolley on its way. The nine rows of benches were not filled yet, but they would be soon enough. Outside, a small group of onlookers waved their handkerchiefs and shouted out words of encouragement at the popular motorman. “Get there, Jim, old man, and don’t let any of ’em get ahead of you,” one cry went out.

Reed smiled. But he turned serious as his car rounded a bend, and he braked to a stop to allow another dozen passengers on board. “All aboard for the subway and Park Street,” he shouted with confidence. A voice shouted back at him, “That’s right, Jim, you did that without a stutter!”

“Dling, dling, dling,” the bell rang out, and the car pulled away again. The journey from Allston through Cambridge to Boston took about twenty minutes most mornings, but the unusual number of passengers at this hour delayed it a few extra seconds at each stop. By the time the car reached Pearl Street in Cambridge, just across the Charles River from Boston, an older gentleman wanting to get on board found there were no seats left, and he was told he’d have to wait for the next car. Not a chance, he shouted back.

He announced that his name was C. W. Davis, that he came all the way down from Dickerson Street in Somerville to enjoy this privilege, and that he deserved to make history with the rest of them. He said that back in 1856 he had ridden on the first horse-pulled car of the Metropolitan Railway line and that he wanted to achieve another first today. “The running schedule called for a car every half hour in those days,” he told his audience. “And that was thought to be fast running. People have learned to live and move faster in these days.” The passengers on board could not refuse the charming Mr. Davis, and they scurried to clear a space for him as he climbed up and hung on to an upright pole. When a photographer hollered at Reed to let the historic trolley sit for a minute at Pearl Street so he could photograph it, the motorman refused, too nervous about falling behind schedule.

As the car got closer to Boston, the crowds along the street grew in numbers, with men, women, and children waiting and waving their hands high. Flower bouquets that Reed and Trufant had been handed were visible up front, but they were being crushed more with each stop. The car by now was brimming over its edges, with passengers standing on the footboard and dangling off the side and limbs visible out of the windows despite the pleas of Stearns to keep all parts inside. As Reed steered his car down Boylston Street, both sides of the street were lined with a sea of people and the roar became louder. Up ahead, he could barely make out the entrance to the tunnel, a black hole surrounded by a sea of people dressed in black.

At the final stop before the tunnel entrance on Boylston between Arlington Street and Charles Street, when it seemed there was not a single inch of room left inside, two more people reached up from the sidewalk and grabbed hold of an arm that was being held on to by another arm, and they were pulled on board and swallowed up by the excitable mass.

“The spaces between the seats were filled with standees,”
The Boston Evening Record
wrote of the car, “the platforms were packed like sardine boxes. Each running board was two deep with humanity, while both fenders were loaded down until there was not enough room for a fly to cling!” A car with seats for forty-five passengers and standing room for a few dozen more had 140 passengers. With Reed at the controls, the Public Garden on his left, and the clock on the Arlington Street church pointing at six o’clock, car number 1752 crept to the summit of the subway tunnel’s downward slope.

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IF THERE WAS A TIME
to stop and acknowledge the moment, this was it. Perhaps a speech from Mayor Quincy was in order, or from the ex-mayor Matthews, or Henry Whitney, or Governor Wolcott, or the chief engineer, Carson—anybody who had a hand in bringing America’s first subway, an electric subway, to this day. Not only was it completed on time, in two and a half years, it came in at $4.2 million, under the $5 million projected cost. Along with the ten killed in the gas explosion, four others died in the building of the subway, and it was constructed without as much disruption to the streets as had been anticipated.

Municipal governments (as New Yorkers would surely agree) at the time were notorious for being small-minded, underachieving bureaucracies too easily intimidated by business interests and susceptible to corruption. Boston had defied all of those labels and even managed to preserve the one piece of land its people cherished the most, Boston Common. The uncovering of 910 bodies in the path of the subway route was an unfortunate finding, but Dr. Green’s delicate handling of it had mitigated the public’s worries. The subway was a success by every measure before it even opened. And as small flags waved amid the deafening cheers, the crowd almost seemed to be clamoring for someone to stop and recognize the achievement.

It had been ten years since two men, Henry Whitney in Boston and Abram Hewitt in New York, first made serious overtures about tunneling beneath their cities. A decade later, one of those cities stood at the brink of history while the other had yet to put a shovel into the ground. For Boston, that was satisfaction enough. By now Reed’s car was so crowded it seemed in danger of tipping over, and it was difficult to imagine the electric motor having enough power to move it. Trufant pulled on his strap signaling that he was ready, Reed clanged his gong and switched on the electric current, and Allston car number 1752 eased forward, crested the hill, dipped down the incline, and disappeared beneath Boylston Street. The passengers in the front seats stood up on their tiptoes and leaned forward, peering ahead to see what sights awaited them. And from the rear, a shout rang out. “Down in front!”

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A “HORROR OF TUNNELS,”
is how one Chicago resident once described the idea of a subway. One Bostonian used more vivid terms, saying subways gave him a “buried-alive feeling.” Even John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, a member of the 1892 Massachusetts Rapid Transit Commission, came back from his trip overseas and described the noise of the London Underground like “the roaring of the ocean after a storm.” But then along came Frank Sprague and Thomas Edison, and suddenly it was possible not only to use quiet, clean, and safe electric trolleys underground but also to light up those tunnels with bright-white electric lightbulbs. At the start of the nineteenth century, barges were still stacking up at the entrances of canal tunnels as their nervous crews argued over who would steer into the darkness first. By the middle of the century, the Thames Tunnel was complete and the London Underground was operating. Now, near the dawn of the twentieth century, public opinion in America had officially swayed. And when Jimmy Reed guided his trolley underground, any lingering fears were quashed for good.

“Oh, dear, isn’t it delightful!”

“I thought it would be quite dark and gloomy looking.”

“Oh, come, and let us ride around again.”

“My, how white it is.”

There were no screams of fear or groans of disgust or complaints of rank odors. Nobody was more impressed than old C. W. Davis, who found no comparison between the trip he took above ground in 1856 and this one forty years later. “What a difference there was in the ride this morning,” he said the moment his journey from Somerville to Cambridge to Boston had ended. “Why you could not scare up as many people on a dozen trips as we had on that car when it reached the subway. And the cars! Think of a car that would hold comfortably about twenty persons, drawn by one horse, and not a fast one at that. None of the comforts of open cars then. The door was at the rear end and the driver was conductor as well.”

The reviews were glowing. Only the draft blowing through the car elicited complaints. It was bright enough to read, with the white bulbs bouncing off the white enameled brick walls and combining with the sunlight that peeked down through the staircases and in through the overhead vents to make it feel like noon on a sunny day. It was dry enough to sit on the ground, thanks to automated electric pumps tied to the city sewers that took care of the water that leaked into the stations from the inclines at Arlington and Park streets. And the air was clean enough to take in one long deep breath and not notice any difference from above ground. It smelled no different than a crowded church or theater. That was aided by ventilating chambers and large, inconspicuous fans installed along the route.

The first car in moved slower than it might normally because of its overcrowding, and Reed took the curve smoothly beneath the corner of Boylston and Tremont streets. But it must have been a bizarre moment when, in a place that once housed thousands of coffins and where hundreds of human skeletons were found only a few years earlier, a passenger on board the first subway car, too joyous to contain himself, broke out in old Irish song. “O, Mister Captain, stop the ship! I want to get out and walk.” Another voice hollered back in tune, “What’s the matter with riding?” to which the first singer replied, “There are 19 elbows planted against my spine, there are two boys on my shoulders, and 14 feet on my pet corns. Do you blame me?” Laughter broke out on the car as it pulled into the Boylston Street station.

Reed was thankful to see only a few people waiting for him, and they agreed to wait for the next car. He pulled away, with cheers filling the tunnel, and at 6:06
A.M
., car number 1752 arrived at the Park Street station, its first voyage complete. More than three hundred were standing and waiting, hats waving in the air. “Bravo, bravo,” the cries rang out. “Bravissimo,” a group of dark-skinned Italians hooted. But when another man hollered out, “Three cheers for the subway!” in an attempt to start a hip-hip-hooray chant, he found himself shouting all by himself, the crowd too distracted to join him.

Half of the passengers disembarked and quickly filed through the turnstile that led them up to the street again. But the other passengers were too excited to get off, and they remained on board as the car took on more passengers, turned around in the loop, and headed back for Arlington Street. Those who boarded at Park Street were the ones who had purchased the day’s first tickets, with numbers like 000002 and 000240, which they no doubt kept as souvenirs.