The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (16 page)

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TWO YEARS EARLIER, THE
Third Avenue Street Railway Company of New York City had been faced with a decision almost identical to the one that Whitney had been wrestling with for Boston. The men in charge of the New York decision had traveled north to Providence late in 1886 to see how well an experimental electric line there was working. It was operating smoothly, and it offered great promise, but when the New Yorkers learned that an electric railway would cost their city 25 percent more than a cable-pulled railway, their decision was made in haste.

In making his decision, Henry Whitney did not ignore the cost. It was clear that cable was the cheaper alternative. But now, at the age of forty-nine, with a wife; five children; a beautiful, ivy-covered home in Brookline; a vacation estate on the South Shore in the pretty coastal town of Cohasset; and an enormous operation in the West End Street Railway Company, he was a changed man, a patient, mature businessman. His patience had led him to Richmond, introduced him to Sprague, and helped him set the course for the future of Boston.

In 1888, there were six thousand miles of street railway systems across the United States, and more than 90 percent of those miles were operated by horses. Only eighty-six miles claimed electricity as the power source, and the remaining miles were powered either by cable-pulled streetcars or tiny steam locomotives. As for the streetcars themselves, 21,736 were pulled by horses, 2,777 by cable, 258 by steam, and just 166 by electricity. It was very much a horse-pulled world when Henry Whitney and Frank Sprague turned Boston, and the rest of the country, in a new direction. Boston was going to be the first major city to say good-bye to the horse and welcome the age of the electric trolley.

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IT WOULD TAKE A DISASTER
unlike anything history had ever seen in order for New York’s leaders to reach the same, obvious decision. Heading into the weekend of March 10, 1888, New York City, like the rest of the East Coast, was winding down one of the warmest winters in years. Snow was the furthest thing from peoples’ minds. If not for the events that were about to unfold, New Yorkers might have ridden cable-pulled streetcars and elevated railways well into the next century, and a subway might have been put off for another fifty years. But on that unusually mild late winter weekend, bright sunshine turned to light rain. And then it started to come down harder. And finally the wind kicked up. Hundreds of New Yorkers were about to die. And as the clock ticked past midnight and into Monday morning, their only clue that something catastrophic was unfolding was that it started to get a little colder outside.

Part Two

THE BLIZZARD AND THE BILLIONAIRES

5

THE BLIZZARD THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

IT WAS SWALLOWING HIM UP
like white quicksand. And the more that ten-year-old Sam Strong struggled to climb through the heavy snow in his new, thigh-high rubber boots, navy blue overcoat, heavy winter cap, woolen gloves, and the muffler around his neck, the more it buried him alive. “You could go to the North Pole in that outfit,” his aunt had said to him only a few minutes earlier. But she went right on buttoning him up, and on the morning of Monday, March 12, 1888, she pushed him out the door as if it was just another day. “Hurry up now, so you won’t be late for school.”

The night before, Sam had looked out the window of their apartment on West 123rd Street near Lenox Avenue north of Central Park and amused himself by watching through the raindrops as the gas lamps on top of the wood and iron posts flickered to life. Lamplighters walked by nightly with a five-foot-long stick. They would reach up until their burning wick was safely under the glass globe, turn the gas lever to ignite the gas jet, and wait until the lamp inside was aglow before moving on to the next one. For a young boy, it was endless entertainment to see globe after globe light up on the street.

The next morning after breakfast, Sam was again looking out the window, but now the rain had stopped and the street was blanketed in white. He watched as a grown man, at least a full hundred pounds heavier than he was, got blown right over by the howling wind. He told his aunt what he saw, but she wasn’t worried. She needed him to run an errand for her before school. A dressmaker was coming to the house at seven thirty in the morning, and she gave Sam a list for the store. Whalebones, chalk for the dressmaker, and a large needle, all to help sew a new corset. When Sam went to the basement to leave, he found it blocked by a pile of snow. He turned around, came upstairs, and went out through the front door instead, floundering and slipping and sliding down the steps without actually feeling them under his feet. The snow was whirling so much it was nearly impossible to see. It felt like needles on his soft cheeks. But for a schoolboy who came from Indiana, it was also an adventure.

The streets of Harlem should have been bustling with pedestrians on their way to work, schoolchildren, and horse-pulled streetcars, and there should have been a constant rumbling overhead from the steady stream of elevated trains. Instead, as he set out on his walk, the city felt deserted. The entire transportation network was being shut down, one system at a time, first the wagons loaded with goods, the horsecars next, and ultimately the steam-powered elevated trains would be paralyzed, too. Any cars that were visible were either abandoned or barely able to move. The snow was waist deep with every step Sam took, and when he finally made it to Lenox Avenue, then Sixth Avenue, and headed north, the wind nearly blew him backward until he could go no farther. He was thrown into a tall snowdrift, and, unable to move, he cried out for help. The whipping wind drowned him out, and the barrage of flakes started to overtake his small body.

The worst natural disaster in American history was reaching its epic force, a storm that, when it was over, would force cities up and down the East Coast to reexamine everything from the way food was delivered to stores to how power lines and telephone lines sent signals into homes to the way transit systems kept passengers moving no matter how miserable the weather. It would spark the rise of one of New York’s most important political advocates for the construction of a subway. But it would also claim more than four hundred lives. Sam Strong was one of the first to face the full brunt of the storm’s wrath.

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IF ANYBODY EVEN SAW THE
brief item inside
The New York Times
on the bottom of page 13 on Friday, March 9, they probably ignored it. The four lines appeared under the headline
A BLIZZARD IN MINNESOTA
and described a heavy snow storm that was crippling trains in that state. Coming only a few months after the “Schoolhouse Blizzard,” another storm that killed 235 people, mostly children on their way home from school, across Montana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas, this latest one was tracking a similar path. If its course held, it would strike Pennsylvania, and if it didn’t fizzle out there, New York would be its next target.

In what seemed like a strange move at the time, John Meisinger, the hardware buyer for E. Ridley and Sons, a department store in Manhattan, spent $1,200 leading into the weekend to purchase three thousand wooden snow shovels. He was merely planning ahead, expecting to keep them in his basement until the following winter, but when a newspaper reporter learned of his curious purchase in such warm weather, he mocked him in an article, calling him “Snow Shovel John.”

Saturday was a beautiful springlike day that caused purple and yellow crocuses to prematurely bud and brought out a long line of carriages in Central Park. On Long Island, farmers planted potatoes, and up in New Haven, picnickers lined the riverbank near Yale University, watching the rowers glide down the calm waters of the Connecticut River. In Washington, President Cleveland and his young wife took advantage of the springlike weather and left town for a vacation weekend. That night, on the ninth floor of the Equitable Building, one of the tallest buildings in the world, the army sergeant Francis Long stood in the offices of the New York City Weather Station, where he worked a desk job for the U.S. Signal Service. He looked out at the great city and saw bright stars against the dark clear sky. Down below, he saw throngs of people walking back from the three-mile-long torchlight parade celebrating the arrival of the Barnum and Bailey Circus. With spring beckoning, Walt Whitman, the staff poet at
The New York Herald,
wrote a short piece that weekend titled “The First Dandelion.”

Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close emerging.

As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics had ever been.

Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—innocent, golden, calm as the dawn,

The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face.

It started as a gentle and mild rain during the day, hardly ominous. But it picked up Saturday evening, and the wind started to whistle through the streets, and the temperature plummeted. Only then did New Yorkers begin to suspect that this was no ordinary late-winter storm approaching. In fact, it was two storms, one coming north from the Gulf of Mexico, a second moving east from the Great Lakes. As his Saturday night shift ended, Francis Long put out to the newspapers his weather forecast for the following day. “For Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, eastern New York, eastern Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, fresh to brisk southerly winds, slightly warmer, fair weather, followed by rain. For the District of Columbia, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia, fresh to brisk southeasterly winds, slightly warmer, threatening weather and rain.” His work done, he headed down for the streets. The weather center would close for the Sabbath at midnight, and nobody was scheduled to return until five o’clock in the afternoon the following day. During those seventeen hours, the mildly unsettling weather that Long predicted turned into a beast. Those seventeen hours would have several lasting effects. One of them was the Weather Bureau’s decision years later to begin staying open on Sundays, to avoid missing any unpredictable and dramatic shifts in a weather pattern like the one that happened in the early morning hours of Sunday, March 11.

By Sunday morning, the entire East Coast was getting soaked, from Roanoke to Washington to Pittsburgh to Buffalo. In New Jersey, one minister awoke, took in the ominous sky, and tweaked his morning sermon he was about to deliver. “I had the strangest of feelings,” he told his parishioners. “It was as if the unholy one himself was riding in those clouds.” New England was under a dark shadow, and when a freezing gale from out over the Atlantic Ocean moved back inland and picked up the moisture coming up from the south, the rain turned to snow. Baltimore was one of the first cities to feel the impact, and by dinnertime its streets were covered with six inches, and twenty-five-mile-per-hour winds were whistling past the homes. As midnight approached, Philadelphians saw their trees coated in ice and then watched as branches snapped from the weight. By Monday morning, roofs would blow clear off houses in Philadelphia and southern and central New Jersey, powerful wind gusts of more than seventy miles per hour would shatter windows, and snowdrifts six feet tall would line the streets. The storm only got stronger as it moved north, and by the time it reached New York it was at its peak of fury. The Brooklyn Bridge, only five years old, was ordered closed, so that nobody would be blown off the side by a seventy-five-mile-per-hour gust or get stranded on the walkway and die from the cold. Like most cities, New York did not have an antilittering law, and the newspapers, stray pieces of household trash, tin cans, and shards of broken glass all swirled up into minitornadoes that made walking around treacherous. Worst of all was the stench from the wind blowing up the frozen bits of manure and urine that more than sixty thousand horses had left behind on the streets.

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THE GIANT HAND REACHED OUT
and pulled Sam Strong up from the drift.

“You hadn’t ought to be out in this, Sonny,” the policeman hollered to him. “You go straight home.”

But Sam had his aunt’s list to fulfill, and he continued past more abandoned streetcars on 125th Street, shocked to see a team of horses trying mightily to pull a carriage. He finally reached his destination, Brady’s Notion Store, only to find that the snow was piled so high it blocked the door and the window and that it was obviously not open for business. Determined not to disappoint his aunt, even though he knew he was already late, he trekked on for another half mile in search of another store before finally giving up hope and turning around. His aunt and uncle were watching for him out the window, and when he finally appeared and slowly trudged up the front stoop, fighting with every step, they met him at the door and hustled him out of his clothes. He had lost all track of time and was bordering on delirious. The errand he had expected might require just thirty minutes had taken the entire morning.

“Although I had fought the snow for more than four hours,” the boy recalled later, “I had failed in my mission. There were many tears.” His aunt warmed him up and tucked him back into his sheets. “I was in bed with glass bottles filled with hot water, a big slug of raw whiskey and some food, and I was asleep, not waking until night and then only for more food and drink. I was exhausted.” Sam Strong’s determination that day was no fluke. Later, after studying at Columbia, he was Dr. Samuel Meredith Strong, and he went on to become the first flight surgeon in the United States Army, and, as a surgeon living in Queens and practicing in Brooklyn, he built and used the first airplane ambulance.

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FOR ONE WEEK IN MARCH,
bad weather brought the entire northeast to a standstill. A train that left Bridgeport, Connecticut, at 5:41
A.M
. on Monday morning went two miles in an hour before it was trapped in a drift. At least it was close enough for the passengers to get off and walk back. Others were not so lucky. Steam trains from Baltimore to Montreal were buried beneath piles of snow, literally stopped in their tracks or derailed, often great distances from any population hub. Once a train stopped, it was over. The snow was falling so fast and accumulating so quickly that anything that wasn’t moving was covered over in minutes. If animals were on board, there was little effort made to save them. If it was a passenger train, the best hope was that there was enough food on board to feed folks until help arrived or that they were near enough to a farmer who could supply them with enough water, milk, and food to ration among themselves. Staying warm was a different problem. Steam trains had small coal or wood stoves, and to keep the fires burning passengers stuffed into them seats, card tables, luggage, bags full of U.S. mail, and anything else flammable they could find. And because power and telephone lines all came down in the storm, the crews at the stations had no way of knowing where a train was stopped.