The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (39 page)

As advanced as London was, Glasgow proved to be more interesting and enlightening for Parsons. Glasgow already had one subway operating and two more under construction when he visited. The tunnel was plenty big, twenty-six feet in diameter, and it was dug through solid rock, shale, clay, sand, and mud. Because of how varied he knew the ground to be under New York’s streets, the Glasgow tunnel was especially interesting to him. Some portions were tunneled while others were dug as a trench through the street, which is how he suspected New York’s subway might be built. And one of the most important nuggets he took away from his trip was that it cost roughly eight times more to tunnel using a shield than it did to dig a trench in the street and cover it over. He praised Glasgow’s engineers by noting that the only places where there appeared to be some settling of the street surface was where the subway was built, and no place else, meaning they had successfully secured the areas on the edges of the tunnel. But he seemed less pleased with their decision to light the trains using electricity yet to power them using cables. Parsons was coming to believe that cable streetcars were yesterday’s technology.

In Paris, which was only just beginning to build its tunnel, he summarized conversations he had with their engineers and seemed energized by what they told him. Use masonry instead of iron, they explained. Avoid using any special stones that might prove difficult to cut. Remove by train the enormous amounts of dirt and rocks that are dug up, instead of putting the materials on carriages to be pulled through the streets. That will only worsen congestion. And last, dig the tunnel as close as possible to the surface. Every inch you go down, they told him, the cost rises significantly.

Toward the end of his lengthy report, Parsons devoted space to two American examples that he said possessed “decidedly novel features.” One was the elevated Intramural Railway that ran on electricity during the Chicago World’s Fair. The other was the Baltimore Belt Railroad, which was built to allow passenger and freight trains to pass between New York and Washington through Baltimore without disruption. A tunnel beneath Baltimore’s busiest thoroughfare, Howard Street, impressed Parsons, who wrote about the ease with which the trains passed through the hilly tunnel with engines built by the General Electric Company: “These motors are designed to attain a speed of fifty miles per hour, and do everything that a steam locomotive can do. These machines are far beyond anything before attempted in the electrical line, and will put it, as far as power is concerned, on the same footing with steam.”

Where to place the doors on a subway car was a question that especially intrigued Parsons and also confused him. It was one of those details a less meticulous engineer might overlook, but for him it was essential to the passenger experience, and in every city he visited he saw that there was no consistent answer. In Berlin and in London, where side doors were in use on some lines, stops averaged between thirty and fifty-five seconds. On the elevated Liverpool line, side doors resulted in twenty-second stops, while the end doors on the City and South London line made for fourteen-second stops. He recommended end doors in his report, believing they allowed passengers to step on and off faster. “This is due largely to the confusion resulting from compartments, classes and many doors,” he wrote. “Passengers run along platforms looking for good seats, while with the end door arrangement they enter the car at once and distribute afterwards.”

His section on the doors was one of the few places were Parsons inserted a touch of humor into his report, even if it was unintentional. He explained how stops in New York were unusually fast, from a speedy four seconds to thirty depending on the time of day. Because they were so quick, he did not bother comparing them to the European cities, where it seemed passengers were less hurried to get on their way. He blamed (or credited?) the fast stops in New York on “the nervous and active temperament of the people.” New Yorkers? A “nervous and active temperament”? Imagine that.

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PARSONS WAITED UNTIL THE FINAL
section of his report to tackle the one issue that was most responsible for the thirty years that passed between London’s inaugural subway in 1863 and another city following its lead. “There is a wide-spread popular idea,” he wrote, “that electricity has some mysterious properties which render vastly superior and more economical than steam as a motive power.” He called that thinking “fallacious in the extreme.” He went on to explain that while there was no debating that an electric subway would be cleaner than a steam-powered subway, it was important to look at the costs of the two. In great detail, he explained how coal was required for both, with one critical difference. The coal in a steam-powered train was needed on the train itself, where it was burned in its own boiler in the locomotive to help convert water into steam that powered the cylinder and piston rods that made the wheels turn. It was an entirely self-contained process. Not so with an electric train.

For an electric railroad, coal was still required, but it was used in a stationary boiler at a central location, where engines drove dynamos that created the electricity. Only when that electricity was conducted from the powerhouse miles away through the railway tracks and into the trains and the motors converted it back into power did the wheels of the electric train turn. Although both systems required coal, they could use a different type of coal, and that, Parsons explained, was a point that could not be ignored. “On [steam] locomotives it is necessary to carry the best quality of coal,” he wrote, and it had to be lump size, not a powder, or else it would sift right through the grate bars of the boiler. “Coal of that quality commands an extra price. Under stationary boilers, however, the grate bars can be adapted to burn the cheap fine coal of an inferior quality.”

That Parsons had gone so far as to study what grade of coal might make the difference for a New York subway showed just how deeply he cared about the project. In the end, on the subject of how the subway should be powered, he wrote plainly that “the balance of economy is in favor of electricity.”

It was one of the most boring and, at the same time, most important sentences in his entire sixty-six-page report. But in reaching his conclusion, Parsons was not alone.

William Whitney had finally come around as well. With Chicago embracing electricity to power its trains in the early 1890s; London expanding its Underground; Glasgow, Budapest, and Paris all moving forward with subway tunnels; and even Whitney’s brother, Henry, electrifying Boston’s streetcars in the late 1880s, New York found itself in the strange position of falling behind other cities as the century came to a close. The Metropolitan Street Railway Company’s horse-pulled carriages were old and slow, expansion of the city’s elevated lines had been abandoned, and the flaws in the cable lines on Columbus and Lexington avenues were too many to count, from the snapped lines to the cost of maintenance to the congestion they continued to cause on the streets.

When city leaders ruled in 1893 that any future wires would have to be placed underground instead of overhead, Whitney grew desperate. He offered a $50,000 prize to anyone, presumably an engineer, who could show him a way to successfully place wires underground to power his trolleys. And when no one came forward, he wrote to his brother, Henry, in Boston. William hoped that Henry might have a recommendation for an engineer, and as it so happened he did. Henry wrote back to William that Fred Pearson, still only thirty-three years old, was as brilliant as any man and that William should grab him without hesitation. Will Whitney did hire the former Tufts University prodigy, first as a consultant and then as the chief engineer of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company. New York was a huge job that would earn Pearson a salary of $75,000, a long way from the $2,500 that Henry Whitney paid him back in 1888 to be chief engineer of the West End Street Railway Company.

Fifteen years had passed since their father died and the Whitney brothers went their separate ways. One of them used real estate to earn his fortune while the other married into money before finding success through politics and deal making. But eventually both men found themselves as the streetcar kings of Boston and New York, and their shared use of Fred Pearson was an unusual moment when their business interests and their brotherhood aligned. Over the course of the next decade, with Pearson’s guidance, New York would gradually eliminate its cable and horse-pulled lines and see more than a hundred miles of streetcar tracks electrified, including some crosstown streets and nearly all of its long and straight north-south boulevards.

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THE SUBWAY ROUTE THAT WAS
mapped out by the 1894 transit commission mirrored the one passed by Steinway’s 1891 commission, with one route up the east side from Union Square under Park Avenue to the Bronx and a second from South Ferry all the way up Broadway. But there was a wrinkle this time. The 1894 act insisted that the subway cost less than $50 million, and in an effort to save wherever possible the commissioners tweaked their plan in such a way that they hoped to trim $2 million without raising any opposition. They should have known better. That change proposed building cheaper elevated tracks instead of a subway tunnel on a one-mile, mostly vacant stretch between 92nd Street and 112th Street. Though virtually nobody lived in those twenty-two blocks on the Upper West Side, it was valuable land, with 320 individual plots worth between $20,000 and $50,000.

On March 12, 1895, fifty angry developers stampeded into a meeting of the Rapid Transit Commission. Leading the charge was a financier named Francis M. Jencks, who years earlier had joined with William Whitney and others in forming the New York Loan and Improvement Company to develop land on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and Washington Heights neighborhoods. Jencks estimated that an elevated line up the west side would reduce the properties there in value by at least five thousand dollars, an enormous sum, and that instead of the land developing into hotels and restaurants and shops and beautiful homes, it would be used for nothing more than five-story flats and tenement housing.

“I feel that an elevated railroad would be ruinous to this property,” he said. “The entire West Side from 72nd Street to the Columbia College property is one of the most important and beautiful residential neighborhoods in New York. The city expended millions of dollars in laying out Riverside Park and other places, and the only way for the city to justify this outlay is to preserve the character of the district.” The president of the Chamber of Commerce, Alexander E. Orr, seemed interested in hearing Jencks, even if he was frustrated at the lateness of the argument.

“What character of construction other than a viaduct would you advise?” Orr asked.

“Either a tunnel or a depressed road,” Jencks answered.

“You have spoken as a property owner,” Orr countered. “As a citizen which would you prefer?”

“Why, an elevated road, which has more air, more light,” Jencks said. “But as I understand, this viaduct is for but one mile and to save expense.”

So strongly did Jencks feel that, a few minutes later, when Jencks was questioned by another commission member, Seth Low, he said that the property owners would be satisfied with no change at all to the transportation in their future neighborhood.

“How do you feel between no road and the road proposed?” Low asked Jencks.

“We would much prefer to see no road built,” Jencks replied. His answer prompted loud applause from the other speculators in the room.

One week later, the Rapid Transit Commission emerged from another closed-door session prepared to issue a decision. Parsons was there. Steinway, hoping for redemption after his 1891 commission had failed, was there, too. And so were the angry developers. When the commissioner John Inman said, “I am prepared to act understandingly and to vote for an underground system,” cheers erupted from the property owners. When other commissioners echoed Inman, the cheers grew louder. The developers had won. There would be no elevated tracks on the west side.

Even though the argument over those twenty blocks was resolved quickly, the timing of the dispute stalled the momentum of the subway project. By the time Mayor William L. Strong and the Board of Aldermen approved the transit commission’s new plan, it was too late.

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AS IT TURNED OUT,
the property owners along the northern portion of the Manhattan route were not the only ones with strong opinions. Just as merchants in Boston along Tremont Street feared that construction of a subway would keep shoppers away during the digging, the same concern surfaced in downtown New York. The difference was that New York’s property owners, unlike Boston’s, had real powers to act. Each one had a vote, and the more valuable their property, the more weight their tally was given.

When they rejected the Rapid Transit Commission’s new plan, the commissioners desperately turned to the New York Supreme Court to step in once and for all and clear the way for construction to begin. It was not to be. Though a three-man panel appointed by the court did approve the subway, it carried no authority. The final approval was needed by the appellate division of the Supreme Court. In a ruling issued on May 22, 1896, the presiding justice, Charles H. Van Brunt, scoffed at the plan, almost ridiculing it, especially the estimated cost of $30 million.

Van Brunt said that he failed to understand how the projected cost was not scrutinized more closely, and he took great pleasure in quoting from the Bible, a passage from Luke 14:28, to make his point. “More than 1,800 years ago,” Van Brunt began, “it was said: ‘For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it.’” He was only warming up. “If there is a probability that financial difficulties will be met and the construction of this road will drag its weary length along for a time which no man can compute, and possibly its construction be absolutely abandoned because of the wreck of the city’s finances, and the intervention of Constitutional prohibitions, it is manifest that great injury will result to the property of abutting owners for which they can never be compensated.” He blamed the transit commission for having too much power and said that it could single-handedly destroy the financial credit of New York City. “The motion should be denied,” he said. It was.