The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (47 page)

An appraisal of his estate confirmed the success he’d achieved, though it put him nowhere close to the fortune of his Fifth Avenue friends. Whitney’s real estate and personal holdings were valued at nearly $23 million. William Hussey Page, a friend and Harvard lawyer who helped him argue his railway legal battles in New York in the 1890s, eulogized Whitney in the pages of
Harper’s Weekly
a few weeks after his death. Four lines summed up the man perfectly:

Generous, magnanimous, and just

Thoughtful for all, of station high or low,

Lion in action, fearless, frank,

In friendship true as steel and pure as gold

Maybe it was because, by 1904, Boston, Budapest, Paris, Glasgow, and London were operating subways, millions of passengers were riding on them, and nobody was dropping dead from breathing the subterranean air. Maybe it was because, after half a century of watching subway plans come and go so many times that they had thrown up their hands in resignation, they assumed a subway would never be built in their lifetimes. Or maybe New Yorkers were just harder to scare. But for whatever reason, the same fears that Bostonians voiced for years throughout the 1890s—about traveling underground, comparing their subway to long underground coffins and insisting that the only people who should go beneath the streets are the dead—never materialized in Gotham with any real strength. The subway was more like a curiosity for New Yorkers.

As summer gave way to fall and the scheduled October opening approached, to put to rest any concerns once and for all, Dr. Thomas Darlington, New York’s commissioner for public health, wrote an essay in the Sunday
World.
He had spent considerable time in the tunnels, measuring the quality of the air not only to assess its breathability but also to compare it to the air on the streets, as well as the air inside poorly ventilated places, like theaters, schools, cars, and berths of ships. He found nothing that concerned him, and in fact with 119 openings into the subway between City Hall and 157th Street, the air quality was almost identical above ground as below it. The subway air had plenty of oxygen, and it was not, as some suggested, poisoned by carbon dioxide. The subway was given a clean bill of health.

But New Yorkers had other concerns. Even before the subway opened, in the weeks leading up to the big day, passengers wanted answers to their mundane, even frivolous questions, to help them understand how this contraption worked and why they should feel assured that it would be operated safely. The questions were answered in the papers and by subway officials, who found themselves being cornered daily by eager, if slightly anxiety-filled, passengers.

If a fuse on the front engine burns out, will the entire train be stopped for a long time, blocking traffic in the tunnels?
No, thanks to Frank Sprague, whose multiple-unit control system allows for the rear cars to have their own motors that can push the train forward.
How long will trains stop at stations?
Approximately fifteen seconds, depending on how many people get on and off.
How long will it take to get from Times Square to Grand Central if you’re racing to catch a train there?
About forty-five seconds.
Can subway travel hurt the eyes?
Yes, looking at the long rows of white columns strains the eyes, so don’t do it.
What do the green and red lights inside of the tunnels mean?
Green tells the motormen to go, the track ahead is clear, and red means stop.
Will every passenger get a seat?
No, but overhead straps in the cars are safe to hold during travel.
Could heavy rains flood a tunnel?
No, the walls are waterproofed, and the entrances are protected.
How fast will the express trains go?
Up to forty-five miles per hour.
Can you get a transfer from the subway to the streetcars or elevated lines?
No.
Can you stick your head out of a subway car like you can on a streetcar?
No, the lower windows are locked.

The questions were endless. Nobody was more curious than the city’s children.

The day before the subway was to open, about fifty boys ventured to their new favorite place for hijinks. At the one place where the subway trains would be emerging from underground for a brief bolt through the outdoors, near 120th Street, the boys discovered a low barrier about four feet high right next to the tracks. At four thirty in the afternoon, the boys gathered to sit on the ledge and wait for a train taking a test run to pass by. Just as they heard one approaching, one of the boys, about twelve years old, lost his balance and fell right onto the tracks. The motorman fortunately was running at a slow speed and was able to apply his emergency brake, giving the boy just enough time to scramble to his feet and hustle back to his ledge, where he gleefully taunted the train as it passed.

16

OCTOBER 27, 1904

FOR OLDER NEW YORKERS, OCTOBER 27, 1904,
had a familiar feel. Two decades earlier, on a cloudless, breezy May afternoon, the city had come out in droves to celebrate the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, fourteen years in the making. Both engineering marvels had come at great sacrifice. Twenty-seven men died building the Brooklyn Bridge. Twice as many, fifty-four workers and civilians, perished during the four years of the subway’s construction, from anonymous Italians whose bodies were never identified to former war heroes who oversaw construction to innocent onlookers and ordinary working citizens whose fate was decided simply by their proximity to an explosion. And, as with the Brooklyn Bridge, where the greatest fear of its builders were jumpers who saw the span as an adventurous challenge or an easy path to death, the subway men nervously waited for the first train to strike a person carelessly crossing the tracks. Both of those fears would be realized within days of their celebrated openings.

For the Brooklyn Bridge party, President Chester A. Arthur came. Governor Cleveland was there. Buildings were draped in red and white and blue bunting, and vendors peddled everything from bananas to buttons to flags to pictures to commemorative medals. Schools stayed open, and so did the stock exchange, but classrooms were almost all empty, and only a few brokers bothered to show up to the trading floor. When the speeches were finished and the ceremony was over, thousands flocked to rush across the 1,595-foot span above the East River. Brooklyn and Manhattan were still two cities at the time, but the bridge was a signal of what was to come a decade and a half later, when consolidation would link them officially as well as physically.

For the opening of the subway, an equally glorious, if slightly chillier day, the red, white, and blue flags and bunting returned, the boats in the harbor once again bellowed their horns, and the hucksters pounced anew. “Popcorn!” they hollered out in the crowd. “Git a programme, git a programme!” All the dignitaries turned out, too, except this time the most important one curiously skipped the festivities. President Roosevelt, the former police commissioner of the city and governor of the state, who owed his rise to the people of New York, sent his apology in a concise, formally worded telegram that must have disappointed the men behind the subway. “The president regrets his inability to accept the courteous invitation,” read the note from Roosevelt’s press secretary.

Aside from the president’s absence, there was one other noticeable difference between the two historic days. The thousands who came out for the Brooklyn Bridge’s unveiling flocked to the same place, the shores of Brooklyn and Manhattan, as if pulled there by a powerful magnet. The crowd that began to turn out early in the morning for the subway’s opening fanned out across the city, lining up outside of stations from City Hall to Murray Hill to Union Square to Columbus Circle to Washington Heights. There was to be a noontime celebration, but it was for six hundred invited guests only.

The places to be, as New Yorkers smartly figured, were the stairways and kiosks of the subway. Trains were not going to accept passengers until seven o’clock at night, after a long day of speeches and a celebratory ride by public officials. But that didn’t stop the crowds from gathering as the sun came up, and, in what was a preview of life in New York City in the twentieth century, there was pushing and shoving and kicking before the doors had even whooshed open. Expecting a crowd far beyond what the subway was capable of handling on a daily basis, Frank Hedley, the general manager of the subway, warned people to be patient. Never before, he reminded New Yorkers, had a single, giant railroad system been opened at once “on the tick of a clock,” as he put it. “I don’t want the public to pass judgment on the road for the first two days. It would not be exactly fair to us. After that, however, we are willing to submit ourselves to the most critical tests.”

At one o’clock, Mayor McClellan led a procession into the alderman chamber of City Hall. The room could hold five hundred people, and there were at least that many inside. Ex-mayor Van Wyck joined him, as did the mostly unrecognizable members of the Rapid Transit Commission and the directors of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. The wives of all the leading men were escorted in, along with judges; priests; business leaders; the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler; and prominent engineers and railroad men, including Cornelius Vanderbilt. The crowd had mostly settled when the final three men entered, each receiving so much applause that the ovations blended together. Parsons, Belmont, and McDonald filed in together, weary after what had been a long night of drinking at Sherry’s, where the tables were adorned with tall potted rosebushes, a miniature facsimile of the subway was laid on the floor, and Belmont was presented with a magnificent two-foot-tall silver cup. The initials
A. B
. were on one side of it, and on the other, an inscription: “Presented to August Belmont by the directors of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company in appreciation of his services as President in constructing the Rapid Transit Subway, October 27, 1904.”

*   *   *

ONLY A FEW HOURS LATER,
they settled into their seats to savor the moment more officially. The tall, bearded, brilliant engineer was the youngest, just forty-four; the short and stiff banker was fifty-one; and the bald, potbellied builder was the elder statesman at sixty.

Parsons had quieted any critics who had suggested he was too young to design the subway for the city. His mastery of the city’s topography, his stern leadership, and his firm grasp of the latest technologies had all been proved, and he had brought the subway to this day on time and on budget. If there was a flaw in his leadership style, it was his almost coldhearted response to the tragedies that occurred on his watch. But refusing to let emotions scare him into charting a new course was his way of remaining focused on the task, treating it like a business, not a family.

For Belmont, who had no intention of getting involved in the subway and was only drawn in when McDonald did not have the money, it was validation. “The subway would not have been built if I had not taken hold of the work,” the arrogant Belmont reflected years later. “McDonald had a contract with the city, but he could not get the money to finance the work.” It was true that Belmont put himself at risk with the deal, because if something had happened to McDonald, Belmont would have had to replace him. He said his lawyers warned him but that he was determined. “I told them I would take the risk and I did. If I had not, the subway would not have been built—at least not at that time.”

McDonald could not make the same boast. If he had not been chosen to build the subway, surely someone else would have come along to do it. But tunneling through the schist of Manhattan had been a huge and dangerous challenge, nothing like what London had done by digging its subway through soft blue clay. Plus, London’s Underground was only longer than New York’s subway after multiple extensions over decades. New York’s twenty-one-mile system, every inch constructed under McDonald, was the world’s longest subway built in one shot. Boston’s first subway along Tremont and Boylston streets, the first in America, was only one and a half miles long when it opened, though it now had more than five miles of tracks. To be sure, there had been collapses and explosions and careless mistakes under McDonald, like storing dynamite in a shed lit by candles, and more than fifty men had died under his stewardship. But after four years of construction, from that day in March of 1900 when the streets were torn up into rubble, the subway was a sight to behold, the air underground was a pleasure to breathe, and the trains ran fast and smooth. In the end, those were McDonald’s gifts to the city.

As the three men walked into the overflowing room, Parsons blushed and Belmont glowed. McDonald smiled broadly, even though inside he was seething. He had not been on the original invite list for the day’s events, and when he found out he flashed his Irish temper by raising a stink and calling a reporter to his office. “When the dirt is off your shovel,” the man who built the subway groused, “Wall Street doesn’t give a damn for you.” His invitation arrived soon after.

*   *   *

MCCLELLAN OPENED THE PROCEEDING
with a declaration: “Without rapid transit, Greater New York would be little more than a geographical expression.” He went on to compare the subway to the Brooklyn Bridge and to discuss how the two projects brought the city into a new era that would help New Yorkers forget what part of the city they came from and instead unite them “in a common destiny.” He then introduced his chief engineer.

For Parsons, this was a moment he’d almost given up on seeing. His trip to China was a distant memory. He had recorded nearly every single day of construction meticulously in his diary, aware of the significance of the achievement. But now, with a podium and an audience, and having a chance to finally exhale and talk about obstacles overcome; the lives lost, including his friend, Ira Shaler; and the revolution New York City was about to undergo, Parsons, wearing his customary long black coat, had no interest in the spotlight he richly deserved. “Mr. Mayor, Mr. Orr, and Mr. President,” he began after the applause had died down, “I have the honor and the very great pleasure to state the Rapid Transit Railroad from the City Hall Station to the station at One Hundred and Forty Fifth Street on the west side line, is ready and complete for operation.” As he stepped away, the applause lasted longer than his speech.