The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (43 page)

In the first year of the 1900s, Moses Epps and Edwin Robinson found themselves in the same city, on the same job, two struggling men looking for work who found it, of all places, in the bowels of New York City. One of them took work as a timekeeper, his only tools paper and pencil. The other worked as a powderman, handling the dynamite that was used to blow up the ground beneath the streets. The New York City subway project brought together men from all walks of life, like Epps and Robinson. It also brought together men from all parts of the world, from the rolling hills of Ireland to the small villages of Italy to the diamond fields of South Africa and the coal mines of Pennsylvania.

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ON THE CRISP AND SUNNY
morning of March 24, 1900, inside a tiny courtroom in Mount Vernon, New York, the county judge, Smith Lent, faced an unusually large crowd. More than two hundred people had packed themselves in, almost all of them young men. It should have been a Saturday of smiles and cheer, since they were all there for the same reason, to receive their naturalization papers to become citizens of the United States. But as the day’s proceedings began, and each man came before Justice Lent, he grew more visibly annoyed. They were filthy, their hands and faces caked with dirt and their clothes like rags. They looked as if they hadn’t bathed in days, and they reeked of body odor and pipe smoke. Smith found it disrespectful that they would come into his courtroom in such a filthy state. By the time a young Italian man from Yonkers stepped before Lent, he’d had enough.

“Haven’t you any water or soap in Yonkers?” Lent asked him.

“Not much,” the Italian answered.

Lent looked out to the room, incredulous. “You foreigners must wash your hands before you come before me,” he shouted to the men, most of them Italians, Germans, Poles, and Scandinavians who spoke in their own slangs and jargons and understood little, if any, English. “Water costs nothing and soap is cheap. I would grant your application for citizenship with great pleasure if you were clean.”

The men in the room nodded their heads and promised the judge they would keep clean from that day forward. It was a promise they should not have made. The reason they needed their immigration papers to be official was that they had come to America for one reason: to get hired to work on the rapid transit tunnel that New York was about to begin digging. In fact, at the same moment they were sitting in Lent’s courtroom, a much larger crowd was beginning to gather at City Hall Park, where the final touches were being put on the subway’s groundbreaking celebration, scheduled to begin in a few hours. If they were lucky enough to be among the thousands hired for the job, they would earn two dollars a day for ten hours of work, gouging a trench into the ground by swinging axes, picks, shovels, and hammers, hard labor that was sure to cover them head to toe in dirt and grime and sweat and blood. It was not exactly ideal work for men who had just promised a judge they would smell fresh and keep their hands clean.

*   *   *

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE
a miserable day of rain. Instead, clouds gave way to a blue sky and bright sunshine. For an event that had been talked about for half a century, no detail was overlooked in planning the celebration to build a subway. For Boston’s groundbreaking five years earlier, half a dozen officials just showed up and, with a small crowd looking on, stuck a shovel in the ground. So understated was it that the mayor didn’t see a reason to attend. New York was not about to let its moment pass so quietly.

John Philip Sousa, the forty-four-year-old composer and conductor who had played for presidents, led his band in entertaining the crowd, drowning out the clanging church bells from the neighborhood. Pulitzer’s
World
newspaper hired the Pain Fireworks Company of New Jersey to set off explosions of dynamite, and a twenty-one-gun cannon salute was planned. Out in the harbor, horns and whistles blew and fog bells rang. It was a cacophony of sound that was matched by the majestic appearance of City Hall. Half-moon American flags hung off the roof and outside windows.

The crowd began arriving as early as seven o’clock in the morning, with the throngs showing up two hours later and lining up behind the thousand police officers on hand to maintain order. But there almost weren’t enough police as the pushing and shoving led to a crushing scene. One woman fainted and cut her head when she fell, and several small children had to be plucked from the crowd before they were trampled. The early birds watched excitedly as a few workers came out before noon and chipped a small hole into the ground with pickaxes, marking the spot where city officials would do the more official deed in a few minutes. A few stones from the broken pavement flew into the crowd and were pocketed as souvenirs. As noon approached, dignitaries gathered on the balcony, while thousands of citizens crammed their necks from the windows in nearby buildings and from the sidewalks below, stretching in a solid wall from Broadway through the entire length of City Hall Park. Boston broke ground on its subway with no fanfare or celebration. But there was no chance of New Yorkers overlooking their own moment. It was estimated that 25,000 people turned out.

Nineteen hundred was a year when New York’s biggest names were at, or near, their height of power, and right behind them stood a generation itching to seize their own day. Fiorello La Guardia, Jimmy Walker, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were all teenagers growing up in the city. John Singer Sargent, Alfred E. Smith, William Randolph Hearst, and Teddy Roosevelt were the power brokers as the new century began, still in their thirties and forties. None was more powerful than J. P. Morgan, who was Wall Street’s king after rebuilding the city’s financial strength in the wake of the panic of 1893 by investing in steel and copper at outrageous profits. In his remarks on that March morning, New York’s mayor spared no hyperbole about the significance of the moment.

“The completion of this undertaking,” Van Wyck said shortly after one o’clock, “will be second only in importance to that of the Erie Canal, celebrated in this city seventy-five years ago.” A few other perfunctory speeches followed, at which point the mayor was handed a spade. August Belmont, a man who spared no expense in life, was not about to let this moment pass without putting his personal stamp on it. He had asked Tiffany & Co. to make him a special silver spade for the occasion, with a wooden handle crafted out of one of the thirteen trees that Alexander Hamilton planted in Washington Heights in 1803 to recognize the original thirteen states. The coat of arms of New York was etched into the blade. It was more jewelry than tool. Taking a shovelful of dirt from the pile neatly prepared for the ceremony, Van Wyck deposited it into his hat, which he had removed from his head, a souvenir for his office.

“Bravo, old man,” a voice shouted out, and a roar of cheers erupted from the crowd as fireworks boomed into the sky.

When John McDonald’s turn came, he was surprisingly timid in the way he reached for some dirt and gently placed it to the side, acting more like a stiff politician than a burly contractor. Parsons, knowing that he’d be monitoring McDonald’s work for the next few years, could not let the incident pass. “If your laborers shirk work like that, there will be trouble,” Parsons joked.

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TWO DAYS LATER, ON
March 26, 1900, at the corner of Bleecker and Greene streets, the chief engineer himself took hold of an ordinary pickax. It was only a few blocks from where Parsons grew up. Chatting with those who had gathered, he said it was a poignant event for him to be able to strike the blow that broke ground on such a historic event, so close to his boyhood home. Just after eight o’clock in the morning, Parsons held the pickax low between two cobblestones in the street long enough for photographers to get their posed pictures. He then raised the tool high and slammed it into the earth with such force that it must have felt like letting ten years of frustration out with one single violent swing. The subway was officially under construction. Other cities had beaten New York. But their subways, with the exception of London’s, were toy train sets compared with what New York was set to embark upon. The city’s timing was perfect.

Trapped between its two rivers, New York trailed London in population but little else. With a century of enormous growth and the 1898 consolidation, it had blossomed from a village to a town and from a town to a city to a megalopolis. The Belmonts, Astors, Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Carnegies, and Morgans gathered for costumed galas at their Fifth Avenue mansions, sat in their private boxes to hear Italian arias at the Metropolitan Opera, and began to recognize that the Metropolitan Museum of Art was on its way toward becoming one of the world’s great museums. It was already a home to classical antiquities, and its purchase of two pieces by Édouard Manet in 1889 had signaled that it was serious about building its collection of famous canvas paintings. Broadway was vibrant and repetitive, as the same plays often monopolized theaters for months or years. A single actor named Joseph Jefferson played Rip Van Winkle more than 2,500 times, and in
Monte Cristo
an older actor named James O’Neill, the father of Eugene O’Neill, starred almost as often.
Sherlock Holmes
was popular, and so were the plump ladies of vaudeville dressed in short frilly skirts in
Billy Watson’s Beef Trust
. The most popular organized sports were not college football or professional baseball, which were growing but still in their early days, but more brutal activities suitable for small crowds, from dog fights to prize fights. Jazz was only taking shape in New Orleans and had not yet migrated north, but one area where New York shined was fine dining. Delmonico’s, the Claremont, Shanley’s, and the dining room of the Waldorf, for those who could afford the meals, served thick steaks and rich crepes drowned in brandy. At Sherry’s on Forty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, the Carte du Jour offered Little Neck clams for twenty-five cents, filet of sole for forty cents, filet mignon for sixty-five cents, roast lamb for seventy, venison in a port-wine sauce for a dollar, and, the real splurge, chicken partridge for two dollars and fifty cents. For the working class, a meal for two at those prices was equal to a day’s pay or more. For a Carnegie, it was pocket change.

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IN A MATTER OF DAYS
after Parsons’s first swing, it looked like bombs had exploded all over the city. Downtown, uptown, midtown—swarms of men wearing baggy pants, heavy boots, brimmed hats, shirts with their long sleeves rolled up, and suspenders emerged with their sharp pickaxes and started swinging. In minutes the streets were reduced to rubble. As one group pushed forward inch by inch, another group behind them shoveled the loose rocks and dirt into wooden carriages attached to mules that carted it away. They made remarkable progress considering their primitive tools. In weeks, the streets were obliterated and the men were standing ten or twenty feet deep, often amid a maze of sewer, water, and gas lines that would need to be rerouted or lowered farther into the ground. So nervous were the crews about gas leaks that, instead of working around the pipes, they rerouted them above ground to get them out of harm’s way.

In Columbus Circle, the imposing seventy-foot marble statue of Christopher Columbus, erected in 1892 to honor the four-hundredth anniversary of his landing in America, soon stood amid utter destruction, looking out over an intersection in chaos. The street railway tracks circling the monument were littered with debris and passed between piles of dirt or directly over newly dug trenches. Waiting passengers stood feet away from the work, and women with children stopped and stared at the progress. The deeper the workers went, the bigger the rocks that they loosened. And that’s when the machinery was needed. The arm of a steam-powered crane would hang over the trench and drop a rope down, waiting for it to be tied to a boulder before hoisting it to the surface.

Throughout the city, diggers would discover coin chests and colonial weapons, and a crazy collection of underground brooks, springs, and even a small subterranean pond at Thirty-second and Madison. Giant mastodon bones surfaced near Dyckman Street, and the charred hull of a seventeenth-century Dutch merchant ship was found near the Battery. Fortunately, they would not, like the workers in Boston, stumble upon hundreds of bodies in cemeteries. Once a section of trench was long and deep enough, steel beams were laid in a grid across the top of it to begin the process of building the roof of the tunnel and of rebuilding the surface of the streets.

*   *   *

BECAUSE THE QUESTION OF
how the trains should be powered had been decided, the next critical question Parsons faced was how deep to dig. His choice would affect the way New Yorkers lived and traveled from that day forward. Today, when New Yorkers merely bound down a dozen or two dozen well-lighted steps to most of their stations across New York City, rather than ride elevators much deeper into the dark underground, it’s because Parsons had the foresight in 1900 to make his decision based not on how difficult it might be to build the subway but on how easy and pleasurable it must be to ride the subway day after day, year after year. As with everything he did, Parsons approached the question of how deep to dig practically, thinking like a passenger, and analytically, using the wealth of engineering knowledge he’d accumulated from more than a decade of drilling holes in the island.

There were two ways Parsons could instruct John McDonald to build the subway. He could tunnel through the earth, far beneath the streets, like London, causing little disruption to the streets during construction. Or he could scoop out a shallow trench right through the streets, like Boston had done.

Tunneling the subway meant boring deep through the earth by using giant shields, oversized drills essentially, which pushed forward inch by inch and carved out the path for the trains. But it also required blasting through rock. McDonald could not claim any firsthand experience in underground subway tunneling. Very few contractors around the world could. However, he did work on the Hoosac Tunnel in Western Massachusetts, a five-mile-long railroad tunnel carved through the seventeen-hundred-foot Hoosac Mountain. It was a disastrous job that dragged on for a quarter of a century, claimed nearly two hundred lives, and involved dozens of explosions, subterranean floods, and cave-ins. It came to be called the Bloody Pit. But it was not a complete wasted effort. On the Hoosac Tunnel, workers used dynamite for the first time to set off controlled explosions, a feat that would come in handy for McDonald. Of course, it was one thing to blow up dynamite inside a mountain in rural Western Massachusetts. McDonald would be digging his tunnel beneath four million people living, working, and riding in streetcars overhead in a city built of steel, iron, wood, and concrete.