The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (34 page)

On their way down, Crocker told them it was “the finest example of concrete work to be found anywhere on the American continent,” and no one questioned him. One detail that was shown to the visitors was a feature being built into the sidewalls throughout all the tunnels. Notches, about the size of a human being, were being carved out of the walls at close intervals, for workers down in the subway to leap into in the event an oncoming train catches them by surprise and they need a quick escape. As for any doubts about the strength of the subway walls to hold up beneath the weight of overhead traffic, those were put to rest with a simple explanation. First, there was a back wall of concrete one foot thick, plastered and waterproofed. On top of that were two inches of ribbed tiling, a layer of clay terra cotta, four inches of brick, half an inch of cement mortar, half an inch of asphalt waterproofing, and finally three more solid feet of top-grade concrete. The walls were more solid than a rock.

*   *   *

EVEN AS MORE CITIES AROUND
the world moved closer to having their traffic underground, a new competitor was emerging that would simply replace one vehicle on the streets with another. Any hope that cities may have had of their streets becoming quiet and safe and pedestrian-friendly in the absence of all that streetcar traffic would be short-lived.

A young man from Michigan was putting the finishing touches on an idea for a horseless carriage powered by gasoline. He called his five-hundred-pound invention the quadricycle, because it was no more than a bicycle with four wheels and a place to sit and steer. With its two-cylinder engine powered by ethanol, it motored along all by itself, and Henry Ford was so eager to show it off that in the summer of 1896 he traveled to New York to attend a convention of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies. When the thirty-three-year-old Ford met the world-famous Edison and described his gas-powered car, Edison was instantly intrigued and fired questions at the young inventor. Hearing the answers, Edison supposedly banged his fist on the table. “Young man, that’s the thing. You have it! The self-contained unit carrying its own fuel with it! Keep at it!” Ford would keep at it.

*   *   *

AS THE NEW YEAR ARRIVED,
anticipation in Boston began to build about the opening of the subway. An important step was achieved on the first day of 1897, resolving one of the biggest problems Boston and New York had struggled with during their debates about how to pay for a subway. Henry Whitney back in his day had demanded that the West End company design, build, and own the system, retaining total control over every piece of the subway. He did not want the city’s interference, and he wanted to be able to determine where the tracks went and how frequently they were traveled. But the Boston Transit Commission had grown wise to the flaws of that plan, and Boston’s citizens had made it clear they were tired of the West End monopoly.

With Whitney out of the picture and the subway nearly complete, a deal was struck between the West End Street Railway Company and the Boston Transit Commission, and it was approved by the Boston Board of Railroad Commissioners on January 1. The West End company would lease exclusive control of the subway tracks from the city for twenty years and pay the city a fee of 4
⁷
⁄
₈
percent of what it would cost to operate the system. Fares for passengers had to remain at five cents, and free transfers would continue. And if, for whatever reason, the West End company could no longer operate the subway, the city would retake control of it. The contract put the system in the hands of the city, not a private company, which meant the city would decide where, when, and how it could be expanded. The West End Street Railway Company would prosper as long as it provided clean, safe, and swift travel in the new subway.

In February 1897, a gigantic new piece of equipment designed by an assistant city engineer arrived on the scene and caused great excitement among the laborers. It was an unusual shield, and it weighed twenty tons and had a span of almost thirty feet. Shaped like a crescent moon and not a complete circle like the Greathead shield, it had a much simpler purpose: It was a roof shield.

One of the trickier parts of the subway work proved to be digging a sufficiently smooth surface at the very top of the sidewalls of the tunnel in order to properly seal it off. The workers spent weeks swinging their shovels and picks, trying to knock loose the hard dirt above them. With the new shield, workers could move through the tunnel dislodging the hardest dirt at a much faster pace than a group of diggers ever could. The machine was hailed in the newspapers as a “labor and time saving machine,” and it was hoped that the new shield might cut weeks off the final preparations of the tunnel. It had cost $10,000 to make but paid for itself in the amount of time and labor it saved. By the time the shield arrived, very little cutting in the cut-and-cover method was being done, and most of the work involved covering. Citizens could no longer peer down and see an enormous dirt trench at most spots along the route. The trench had been covered by hundreds of beams, and workers were preparing to put down the masonry arches and concrete and begin the process of sealing off the roof.

During the construction, the city managed to keep its busiest streets open to traffic and to close them only after 11:30 at night, allowing just enough room for fire trucks to get by. The path of the first leg of the subway ran almost directly above the sidewalk down Tremont Street, but building the tunnel required a much wider construction site than the mere width of the sidewalk. The cutting and covering of the tunnel extended far into Tremont Street, directly into the path of the street railway tracks. But rather than eliminate street railway service for more than two years, which would have caused enormous hardship to citizens and businesses along the route, the engineers took the extraordinary step of designing a detour of the tracks, which was constantly shifted to accommodate the tunnel work. The temporary tracks coming down Tremont Street from Scollay Square veered toward the Common directly in front of the Park Street Church and made a wide turn in the shape of the letter C before veering back into Tremont Street. That took the streetcars around the construction work, no more than fifteen feet from the laborers, before they continued on their way down Tremont.

*   *   *

BY MARCH OF 1897 ALMOST
two years had passed since the work on the subway began. It had not been an accident-free project, but there had been no massive catastrophes. At one point early on in the work, Meehan had said, “I had hoped to go through with this job without injuring a man. In all the work I have ever done I have not had a man under me hurt.” That may have been true. But it was safe to assume that Meehan had never taken on a job with so much potential for disaster. Forty-foot steel beams swinging from a boom. Enormous scoops of dirt and concrete hanging from above. Gas leaks. Flooded trenches. Deep holes that could claim a life with a simple slip. There were so many ways to get hurt.

One worker was killed when a sheet of concrete paving foundation fell on his head. Another died when he was crushed by a piece of falling masonry. Digging a two-mile stretch of subway was proving to be less dangerous and not nearly as challenging as the decade-long building of the Brooklyn Bridge, which required thousands of miles of cable and claimed the lives of almost thirty people along the way. But the subway construction site provided unique perils.

Two friends and laborers, Patrick Gaffney and Michael Powers, were badly injured one morning when they carried lighted lanterns into a sewer tunnel where gas was leaking from a pipe. The loud explosion threw both men to the ground with badly burned faces and caused a small cave-in. Three men were nearly crushed to death when an engineer raised the dirt-filled scoop on his derrick too high, causing the scoop to break free from its boom and fall into a trench. In the crash, Edward O’Donnell had his foot crushed, Michael Eagen injured his back, and John McCue bruised his foot. And on the same day, only a few hours later, another scoop broke free from its eighty-foot boom and rained a load of concrete down on John Micher, a laborer working in the trench. After Micher was dug out, scared but unscathed, Meehan was fed up. He fired the engineer who lost the concrete-filled scoop. “I’ll have more careful men if I change engineers every hour,” the boss said.

But no matter how careful his men were, nothing could have prevented two gruesome accidents that occurred four days apart in the fall of 1896. During the night of September 16, Charles McMullen, a fresh laborer who had only started work that evening and who was unfamiliar with the terrain of the project, stepped backward and fell into a deep shaft in front of the Park Street Church. He dropped forty-two feet to his death. A similar tragedy nearly ended the life of William Doherty days later. Climbing out of the same shaft on Tremont Street, Doherty’s feet slipped off the ladder, and he plunged back down almost thirty feet, where he struck a bucket. He was badly hurt and lost an eye, rendering him incapable of hard labor.

By early 1897, the pace of the subway construction was almost frantic. The site was an around-the-clock operation. The early days of a few dozen workers were long gone. It was more typical now for there to be a few hundred laborers working in shifts from noon to midnight and back again. The tunnel was complete, and the focus had shifted to making sure the thousands of sewer, water, and gas pipes underground were rerouted, connected, and sealed; that the roof and floor of the tunnel were secure enough to begin piecing the streets back together again; and that any excess dirt was either carted away or packed back into the ground. A date was scheduled for the opening, September 1, and at the rate the work was progressing, only an unexpected disaster could prevent America’s first subway from opening on time.

12

BOOM!

EARLY IN THE MORNING OF
March 4, 1897, James Groake took hold of a lantern with a candle burning brightly inside and went underground. It was 3:00
A.M
. Because of the temporary bridge that had been constructed over the tunnel trench near the corner of Boylston and Tremont streets, he had to lift up some of the planking in order to go down below. He was looking for a place to dump two carts filled with dirt. When he found a good-sized cavity, he instructed the men with him to shovel the soil through the hole in the planking that he had made. It took them almost three hours to empty the carts. As they were finishing, the dark sky was just beginning to show the first signs of light and the early risers of the day were strolling down the sidewalks.

Groake’s men had dumped dirt into the hole. The Italians arrived to distribute it around and to pack it in tightly against the pipes. They had iron rammers with short handles, each weighing about ten pounds, and they would pound the dirt into the ground, flattening it as much as possible. It was not delicate work, but it did require concentration because of one factor. There was a six-inch pipe filled with gas and held aloft by steel supports right in the cavity where they were working. It was dark, and the spot where they were standing and swinging their rammers was tight. They had to be careful to avoid striking each other, let alone nicking the gas pipe. If the pipe was fractured or, worse, if it was cracked so slightly as to be unnoticed, gas could slowly leak up and pool just below the surface of the street.

When Groake left the tunnel, there was nothing to alarm him, and there was certainly no smell of gas, which he would have been sure to notice. It was seven o’clock in the morning when the Italians finished their pounding and emerged back on the street. Groake watched as the planks he had lifted up four hours earlier were hammered back into the ground and the bridge was returned to the exact condition he had found it in. He headed home, confident that the traffic of the day would drive safely over the spot where his men had been working overnight and that pipes sitting in a maze only a few feet beneath the surface were as airtight as they’d been when his shift started. “So far as I know,” Groake would say later, “no pipes or supports were touched while our men were at work there that morning.”

As the day began and the sidewalks and streets grew crowded, the corner of Tremont and Boylston once again became the intersection around which the city functioned. The biggest attraction besides the subway project was an enormous painting inside the Masonic lodge. Measuring thirty-one feet by twenty-four feet,
Le mort de Babylone,
or
The Fall of Babylon,
by the French artist Georges Antoine Rochegrosse, had been on exhibit since December, and it was attracting hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people every day. Art students came to study and talk about it or just to attend the daily lectures about the history behind the painting. The story went that Rochegrosse took ten years to complete the work. The painting depicted in rich colors the conquering Cyrus amid a royal feast. Nude women lying on their backs and drunken men dotted the foreground. Rich draperies, gold and silver vases, and flowers and crumbs from the feast filled out the canvas. The angel of death was visible in the center toward the top of a monumental staircase, awaiting the band of invaders at the gates. Perhaps it was the grim tone of the painting that drew the crowds, but it turned a busy corner into the most congested spot in Boston.

*   *   *

JUST AFTER EIGHT O’CLOCK IN
the morning, Wolf Koplan, a fifteen-year-old boy wearing a black cap and lugging a satchel over his shoulder, turned the corner from Washington Street onto Boylston Street in downtown Boston and headed up one block to the corner of Tremont Street. A powerful smell of gas greeted him as he strolled, but that had become a daily occurance.

All morning, the number of people who smelled the gas had grown by the minute. Thomas B. Hosmer, a dentist whose office was on Boylston Street, tried to use his gas, but he could not get enough of it to reach the required temperature of 180 degrees. Another dentist, Leonard Howe, whose office was in the Hotel Pelham, could not summon enough gas to use his Bunsen burner and was forced to give up when the flame would go down after two or three minutes. Somebody found the smell so strong that they telephoned the gas company to report it. From December 22, 1896, when the first gas leak was reported on Boylston Street, to this day, March 4, more than two thousand leaks, or about twenty per day, were reported.