The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (49 page)

*   *   *

FOR MOST OF THE POLITICIANS,
businessmen, and engineers whose lives were defined by the subways in Boston and New York, the years that followed the openings were good. Some moved on to other challenges, furthering their legacy, while others slipped quietly into seclusion, satisfied with their accomplishments. Two of them feuded over their respective roles in history. Two others saw their lives end with shocking and tragic twists.

Sadly, the man who first proposed a giant subway system for New York and then used the blizzard of 1888 to convince his citizens that there was no other choice, was there to see the first shovel go into the ground, but he died a year before the subway opened. If not for Abram Hewitt’s visionary thinking—to have the city pay for and own the subway system and hire a private business to build and run it—who knows when the New York City subway would have been built?

As for the bullish Irishman, John McDonald, he was briefly considered as a candidate for New York governor in 1904, at the height of his popularity, and he was said to have left behind a multimillion-dollar fortune from his work building the subway when he died peacefully in 1911. August Belmont also reaped millions from his decision to finance McDonald’s work. But Belmont was already rich at the time, and the politics of New York took such a toll on him that he regretted ever getting involved in the subway. He much preferred the life of a sportsman, and it was at the stud farm in Lexington, Kentucky, that he inherited from his father, where Man o’ War, Tracery, and Rock Sand, three of horse racing’s star Thoroughbreds in the early twentieth century, were all bred. Belmont Park in Long Island, one of the greatest horse-racing tracks in the country, remains as much a monument to his life as does the New York subway. When Belmont died of blood poisoning at his Park Avenue apartment in 1924 at the age of seventy-one, the news rocketed around the worlds of racing, politics, and big business, and sympathy cablegrams and telegrams flooded the Belmont home for weeks.

*   *   *

A DECADE LATER, FRANK J.
Sprague died. If one man deserves more credit than he’s received for the birth of the subway, it’s Sprague. The London Underground was a remarkable breakthrough for mankind, but its greatest flaw was the reason it was not replicated for thirty years. Steam trains in underground tunnels made no sense. Only once Sprague perfected the electric motor and the multiple-unit control system could cleaner and quieter subways be built around the world.

Sadly for Sprague, who died on October 25, 1934, the shadow of Thomas Edison proved difficult to escape, even after Sprague branched out on his own. The roots of the resentment Sprague felt toward Edison can be traced back to an article that appeared in
The New York Sun
in 1919. The writer, Edward Marshall, interviewed Edison about the electric streetcar. Marshall credited Edison with “the pioneer appliance of cheap, quick power street transportation in America. Naturally he is proud of it.”

Sprague, who in the 1880s had led the fierce competition to electrify street railways, could not sit by quietly while Edison received what he believed was undue reward. Two weeks after
The Sun
article appeared, Sprague answered back with a long-winded response that ran in
The Sun
under the headline
INVENTORS OF THE ELECTRIC RAILWAY: FRANK J. SPRAGUE PROTESTS AGAINST THE SHARE OF THE GLORY ASSIGNED IN AN INTERVIEW TO THOMAS A. EDISON
. The dispute played out in the pages of
The Sun
over the next few months, two engineering greats demanding the other back off certain claims. Neither would. Sprague went so far as to take the fight to Congress, asking for a correction in the description of Edison’s work that was used in awarding him the Congressional Medal of Honor. It was to no avail. Only long after Edison’s death in 1932 and Sprague’s death two years later did a third party attempt to resolve the matter. Sprague’s widow, Harriet, his second wife, published a short biography, for which the title alone revealed where she stood:
Frank J. Sprague and the Edison Myth
.

As for another engineer who played a huge role in both cities, Fred Pearson, the Tufts prodigy, his life would be filled with one remarkable achievement after another before ending in a most shocking fashion. He died aboard the
Lusitania,
the British ocean liner torpedoed by the Germans in 1915. Pearson would owe much of his engineering legacy to the Whitney brothers.

*   *   *

OF ALL THE MEN
who devoted years of their lives to one of the first two subways in America, it was the man who launched Sprague to his greatest fame and who first proposed the idea of tunneling under Boston Common who lived the most surprising years after leaving the subway behind. Henry Melville Whitney never could settle down, even with a wife and a rollicking houseful of children.

His Dominion Coal Company, the Canadian venture that lured him away from Boston, fizzled like so many others for him. He returned to Boston in the early 1900s, and he was there for his younger and more famous brother’s death in 1904. But Henry Whitney could never quite convince the citizens of Boston to forget about the scandal that nearly doomed him and about his failure to push through his proposal for a subway tunnel. He ran for governor twice and lieutenant governor once, losing each time. But no matter, politics would never have suited Whitney. He could hardly hear a lick or sit still longer than a minute or two. He was happiest when he was out exploring the serious or the frivolous.

A rambling letter to his daughter Laura in 1914, written from his home in Cohasset after he turned seventy-five, provides some insight into Whitney’s impatience and impetuousness. He wrote that he was feeling healthy and strong and full of new ideas. California, he said, was calling to him! The man who once brought his children foul-tasting orange juice was on to a new citrus taste. “Why not lemon juice?” he wrote. “The same as grape and lime juice, and varieties of other fruit juices, and I thought that there was some good reason why it had not been exploited before, that perhaps it would not keep its vitality.” He said he had looked into the matter by speaking to chemistry professors and to the owners of S. S. Pierce, the big market in Brookline’s Coolidge Corner, and that he had been assured that not only would lemon juice stay fresh, it would be a popular item on store shelves. “Nothing may come of all this,” he wrote his daughter, “but it is surely something to think of and may possibly result in giving one something to do. I am certain that Whitney’s Pure Lemon Juice would attract some notice in every store in Boston.”

Nothing came of Whitney’s Pure Lemon Juice, like so many of his crazy pursuits. But for Whitney, life was never about the reward. Or the money. It was about the chase. From steamships to streetcars, from oil to gas, from orange juice to lemon juice, he saw his fortunes rise and his fortunes fall. One of his last investments, into a Rhode Island coal mine, proved to be his biggest mistake. When he finally succumbed to pneumonia on January 25, 1923, at his home on St. Paul Street in Brookline at the age of eighty-three, nobody could have foreseen what they would discover. Whitney had recently divorced Margaret Green after nearly half a century of marriage, and she left him flat broke. The man who had popularized the notion of urban mass-rail transit in America, who electrified the street railways of Boston and created the world’s largest street railway company, who came within a whisker of being elected Massachusetts governor, who owned a summer mansion on the beach and rode horses as a hobby, who dressed impeccably in pinstripe suits, and whose brother very nearly became president of the United States, died penniless and alone. Hundreds of millions of dollars had passed through Whitney’s fingers during his lifetime. And all he left behind was $1,221.93, a $400 Dodge 1921 touring car, a $150 watch, a $75 fur coat, and $20 in books and miscellaneous belongings. It was an unfathomable end to the life of a man who had an enduring impact on everyday life in urban America.

*   *   *

ON A BITTER MORNING
in February 1912, workers for the Degnon Contracting Company, along with a number of New York City officials, carried lighted candles and wormed their way into a ventilation shaft that took them beneath Broadway in lower Manhattan. They were there to scope out the challenges that lay ahead for them in building section 2 of the Broadway subway line. A few days earlier,
The Times
had written that workers should expect to come across “an interesting relic” during their project, in the vicinity of Warren and Murray streets. Sure enough, after climbing down the shaft, the group stumbled into precisely what
The Times
predicted they would: Alfred Beach’s pneumatic subway tunnel, forty years after it had been sealed up for good. They could not believe what they saw.

It looked more like an archaeological find than the engineering marvel that it once was. The one-block tube remained in almost pristine condition, and while the rails in the ground had rusted away, the brickwork lining the walls remained dry and solid, a testament to how well it had been built. The fountain was there, rotted and dried up but intact, a bizarre reminder of Beach’s vision for underground splendor. And a steam pipe was leaking hot air, but otherwise the air in the tube was comfortable. The car that had been blown through the tube by a giant fan, carrying two dozen excited passengers on each trip back and forth, was a wreck of rotted wood. Its wheels were nowhere to be found. But the shield Beach had designed to push safely through the earth was still there, or at least the rusted metal frame of it, leaning up against a far wall that it had once bored through inch by inch.

What should have been treated as a piece of history and at least photographed extensively to preserve its memory was instead regarded as little more than a nuisance in the way of progress. A few random artifacts were collected as souvenirs; pieces of the digging shield were offered to Beach’s elderly son, Frederick, who had taken over as editor of
Scientific American
; and the laborers for Degnon Contracting got to work on the Broadway subway line. Quite quickly, most of Beach’s tunnel was destroyed, and the portions that were preserved were blended in with the subway station at City Hall. In just a few weeks, workers had dismantled what had taken Beach twenty years to achieve, from the day he suggested a subway for New York in 1849, writing of “railway life down stairs, instead of railway life up stairs,” to the day it opened in 1870. The man who had challenged, and beaten, the indomitable Boss Tweed surely deserved a more suitable honor.

*   *   *

NOT EVEN ONE YEAR AFTER
the New York subway opened in 1904, William Barclay Parsons moved on to be the chief engineer of the Cape Cod Canal. He would not go it alone. Financing the project was none other than his partner on the subway, August Belmont. The canal, which connected Buzzards Bay and Cape Cod Bay through a two-hundred-foot-wide S-shaped path, fulfilled a dream of New Englanders that was three centuries old, and that had once interested George Washington in 1776 as a speedier way to move his Continental army from Boston to New York. Nothing came of Washington’s dream, and it would be another 140 years before another great leader came along and built the canal. The hundredth anniversary of the Cape Cod Canal will be celebrated in 2014, and Parsons and Belmont are sure to be hailed.

Parsons’s motivation to build the canal was not unlike what had drawn him to the subway. The work’s difficulty, importance to businesses big and small, and ability to greatly improve the quality of life for thousands of people all appealed to Parsons. Circumnavigating the tip of Cape Cod, where the weather could be treacherous and the coastline was a jagged edge of the earth, had become a death trap for ships. One count tallied 2,131 shipwrecks along the coast of the Cape between 1845 and 1903, during which time 700 sailors died. Parsons believed a canal was more than just a way to shorten the trip for big boats by five or six hours, or seventy-five miles. It was essential for improving the flow of goods between Boston and New York and ensuring that the two cities remained the two dominant cities on the East Coast. His prediction that the canal would take three years to build proved only slightly optimistic, as the waters between the two bays blended together on July 4, 1914, when Parsons allowed his wife, Anna, and daughter, Sylvia, to lift a few ceremonial shovelfuls of dirt. With that act, they cleared the way for a rush of water to form one single winding route between the two bays. The Cape Cod Canal had taken five years to complete.

Between the subway and the canal, Parsons established himself as one of the greatest engineering minds in history, and it was a mind that every city in America soon wanted to borrow. Cambridge, Massachusetts; Cleveland; Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; Detroit; Philadelphia; Atlanta; Newark, New Jersey; and Westchester County, New York, all sought reports from Parsons on their transit possibilities. The small firm he started with his brother became a behemoth that thrives to this day. Known as Parsons Brinckerhoff, it employs thousands worldwide and boasts a complement of projects that includes sports arenas, rail lines, canals, pipelines, and highway tunnels, including Boston’s infamous Big Dig.

In a return to its roots, Parsons Brinckerhoff is responsible for the design of the Second Avenue subway now under construction in New York. This has been called the most complex, and one of the most expensive, public projects the city has ever undertaken. No longer reliant on picks, axes, and a crude tunneling shield to push forward, today’s sandhogs, wearing neon-green vests and hard hats, are digging two twenty-two-foot-wide tunnels, eighty feet below the surface, using a wormlike machine that chews up the earth with its head of whirling steel discs. When they blast, it’s a controlled blast that merely causes a bump or vibration on the surface. Windows are not shattered, and horses don’t let out yelps of fear. But that’s not to say the neighborhood hasn’t complained or that the workers don’t face risks. It is, after all, solid rock they are tunneling through.