The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (22 page)

When the chairman of the Underground handed the Prince of Wales a specially made gold key, the prince turned a switch and an electric current started up the train awaiting them. There was no rumbling. No burst of black smoke in the air. No whistle screaming. When the royal passengers took their seats in one of the three carriages, the train pulled slowly away from the platform, quickly zooming up to fifteen miles per hour without a hitch. Their entire journey lasted eight minutes. London’s newest subway line was just a three-mile stretch, from the Monument to the south bank of the Thames River in Stockwell. But instead of being powered by steam or by cable as was first intended, its cars moved by electricity. A steel channel was run alongside the rails and iron “scoops” fixed on the bottom of the locomotives picked up the current. This was the world’s first electrically powered subway.

At a luncheon after the journey, the Prince of Wales spoke about the significance of the electrified Underground and how its clean air was immensely more enjoyable. “It must be a matter of deep thought to all of us, the ever-increasing growth of this city, and the consequent increasing difficulties of the means of travel,” the prince said. “This, the first electric railway in England, will, I hope, do much to relieve the congestion of traffic which exists in the city. Businessmen who have great distances to come will by this means find an easy way of leaving the city and of enjoying the fresh air of the country.”

“Hear, hear!” the crowd shouted back.

Over time, as the City and South London Railway took on more passengers and expanded, there would be gripes about the cramped small carriages that had no windows, the annoying ringing sound that could be heard as the train whisked through the tunnels, and even the slower-than-expected speed at which the trains moved. But there was no denying that the electrified trains were more pleasant than the steam-powered ones on London’s other lines. And among all the speakers who took to the podium at the luncheon on the day the electric subway was unveiled, it was a bearded, seventy-three-year-old British civil engineer who specialized in the construction of railways who posed the question on the minds of everyone, not just in London but around the world.

“Can this electric railway,” Sir John Fowler asked, “be looked upon as a guide for the future?”

Back across the pond, another civil engineer half the age of Fowler, who had studied in London as a young man and closely followed the success of the Underground, was asking the same question.

8

THE ENGINEER AND THE PIANO MAKER

THERE WERE FOUR GANGS, EACH WITH ABOUT
half a dozen men, and on a sunny and warm weekday in early June of 1891 they swarmed over the streets in lower Manhattan like small armies on the move. They were mostly recent Italian immigrants, with names like Giuseppe, Luigi, and Alfonzo, but there were Irish and blacks, too. It was hard labor that paid $1.50 a day, and there was no shortage of men lining up for it. They wore hats with oversized brims and baggy overalls, and most of them had suspenders, too. They all had the hands of laborers, weathered, scratched, scarred, and perpetually stained with dirt or grease. Each group had the same peculiar load of machinery, and when one of the gangs arrived at the corner of Front and Whitehall streets, they immediately attracted a growing crowd.

One man cast an especially long shadow in the summer sun as he watched their progress, day after day, night after night. Always serious, he kept his beard scraggly and full around his chin and his thinning hair combed over on top to hide a balding head. He often wore a hat that covered his thinning hair and was pulled low over his deep-set eyes. At more than six feet, four inches tall, he was Lincolnesque in stature and because of the attention that his presence commanded. When he would arrive at one of the construction sites, the pace of the work quickened, and any laughter stopped. Occasionally he would pull a pencil from his jacket pocket and jot down a note. Later in his life,
The New York Times
described him as “city-born, city-bred, and city-minded,” and as he watched these workers with intense interest it was an apt description. To William Barclay Parsons Jr., the work he was witnessing would determine not only how he would spend the next decade of his life. It would set in motion his personal legacy and that of one of the great engineering companies in the world.

On this June day, from the back of the flatbed carriage that came with them, the laborers took out a pump that was mounted on a petroleum barrel; carried out dozens of pieces of wrought iron pipe, some of them an inch in diameter, others two inches; and then wheeled out a small pile driver. Once they seemed to have everything positioned properly, they went to work. First, they lifted up a block from the pavement as close to the street corner as possible. A few feet away, a worker took one of the sections of two-inch pipe and tapped it into the soil until it was securely standing up, at which point the pile driver was positioned over the pipe. Next, a pulley from the pile driver was raised over the pipe, a rope was connected to the pipe, and, when the signal was given, WHAM! A one-hundred-and-fifty-pound hammer drove down on top of the pipe and slammed it into the earth. When it disappeared, a worker reached down into the ground, unscrewed a cap from the top of the pipe, and took hold of another section and screwed it into the pipe in the ground, thereby doubling its length and leaving a new piece for the pile driver to hit. WHAM! It was hammered again, and the process was repeated, each time a new piece of pipe adding another four or five feet to the growing pipe in the ground. It was a mystery how far down it would go before it struck something solid, and that was the whole purpose of the exercise.

A reporter for
The Times
was among the crowd watching when a man approached him. In a thick country drawl the inquisitor asked the reporter about the work that was going on, as he assumed the newspaperman would have the answers. “About how far’ll they have to go daown to git to water?” the man asked. The reporter explained it wasn’t water they were digging for. It was bedrock, or Manhattan schist, as it was known. They wanted to know how deep the soil went at precisely this corner of the island.

As it turned out, the soil didn’t go deep at all. After about five good whacks from the pile driver, the pipe could go no farther. It was some twenty feet into the ground. And it was then that the second stage of work began, which would provide the second set of results of what they came to learn. A narrower, one-inch pipe was hammered into the two-inch pipe, and it brought back to the surface dozens of soil samples that were collected in pails. Each pail was designated to hold a sample from a particular depth in the ground. That way, a complete register could be kept of every five-foot section of soil-covered bedrock. Most of the pails were filled with nothing but water and sand. But when the narrow pipe was pushed deeper into the ground, the samples coming back got thicker, first with vegetable matter and then with dark clay. That change was revealing, because it told Parsons which parts of the city could handle a trench and which parts might require tunneling.

These small groups of men scattered across the streets along Broadway from the southern tip at South Ferry up to Fifty-ninth Street. Their job had never been done before, but it was quite simple. They were going to collect accurate measurements of the actual shape of the rock on which New Yorkers were living. Until this day, only estimates had been made as to the depth of the soil, and they would be proved wildly inaccurate.

Canal Street, in particular, was expected to pose a huge problem. For years it was assumed that a subterranean creek flowed beneath it, creating an underground muck that would make it too weak to support any sort of tunnel. Instead, workers did not discover any creek there and determined that the ground south of Eighth Street was mostly gravel and stones the size of chestnuts, ideal for supporting a tunnel. Workers believed, in fact, that the tunnel might be built faster beneath Canal Street than in any other part of the city, perhaps as brisk as fifteen to twenty feet per day. As the workers discovered with the holes they punctured in the island, it was shaped like an upside-down mountain range, with peaks and valleys of all shapes and sizes from one neighborhood to the next.

At various points along Whitehall Street, rock was struck with a pipe at twenty feet, sixteen feet, twenty-eight feet, and as deep as thirty-four feet at Beaver Street. But the workers over at Exchange Place had to put a lot more pipe into the ground before they struck bedrock. The bedrock was sixty-one feet down at Wall Street; sixty-three at Rector; seventy at Pine; seventy-three at Cortland; eighty-three feet at Fulton. It was 112 feet at Park Place and a foot deeper at Murray Street. The deepest spot measured was Duane Street, where the pipe was hammered 163 feet into the ground before it struck bedrock. In contrast, when a pipe was hammered into the ground at Thirty-third Street, it went just four feet down.

*   *   *

FOR AN ISLAND THAT STRETCHED
only seven miles long, Manhattan presented an unusual array of engineering nightmares. The softer rock had a grainy texture, almost like sugar, and was known as dolomitic marble. It was mostly at the island’s northern end. The more solid, challenging rock, Manhattan schist, was dangerous to bore into because it could fracture more easily and collapse on workers. It was at the southern portion. The island’s widest point stretches only about two miles, from river to river, near 125th Street, but just north of that it narrows quickly like a soda bottle. And though it appears flat to pedestrians, most of the city’s terrain is actually quite rolling and rocky, especially between Twenty-third Street and the northern tip of Central Park. North of 110th Street the island has a steep rise in elevation that tops out at 268 feet above sea level, Manhattan’s peak, in Inwood near Fort Washington Avenue and 185th Street. In this northern portion, there were two hurdles for major digging. The bedrock of Manhattan has two major cracks, or fault lines, one at 125th Street and the other further north near what is now Fort Tryon Park, that have existed for millions of years. Although gravel, sand, and silt deposits have mostly filled them in, the faults weaken the structure of the bedrock hundreds of feet beneath the sea.

*   *   *

WILLIAM BARCLAY PARSONS JR.
came from a life of privilege. He was born on April 15, 1859, in New York City. His father, William Barclay Parsons, was a businessman who owned a firm that imported chemicals, and his mother, Eliza Glass Livingston, raised their four boys at their home on Bleecker Street. It was his father who passed down to William Jr. two traits that would serve him well in life: patience and persistence. “When I squeeze lemons, what I’m after is lemon juice,” Parsons said one day late in his life, after his greatest achievements were behind him, among them designing the Panama Canal and the Cape Cod Canal. “My method is to get all the juice out of each lemon before I tackle the next one.”

His parents came from prominent families in England and Scotland. When William was just eleven, his parents sent him to a private school in Torquay, Devonshire, where he studied with tutors and explored Europe at any chance he got. His time overseas shaped his values, and he came to appreciate and admire the aristocracy for the way he believed it demanded civil discourse and implored accepting responsibility for one’s actions. So much was he taken with his British roots that when he came home and moved back in with his family at their Fifth Avenue brownstone, he asked to be called by his middle name, Barclay, which sounded much more English than plain old William or, good heavens, Bill.

Tall and mature-looking for his sixteen years, he enrolled in 1875 at Columbia College, where, despite a few instances of rebelling, including one when talking during chapel services almost got him expelled, he sparkled. Though he was born in New York, Parsons behaved less like a New Yorker and more like a conservative Brit, dressing in somber clothes and adopting a more serious demeanor than his classmates. Still, they took to him and dubbed him Reverend Parsons.

He was hardly a shut-in, debating with the Philolexia Society; participating on the tug-of-war team; filling the role of sports editor for the school paper,
The Spectator;
being chosen as class president; and rowing for his college on the Harlem River. Long after his graduation, members of the crew team would brag about one particular race, when an accident at the start left them hopelessly behind and Parsons, to their amazement, somehow stroked them to improbable victory. By the time he graduated in 1879 with honors, he was tall, big-boned, muscular, athletic, and handsomely confident. Not quite sure what to do with his bachelor of arts, Parsons decided to take an engineering course at Columbia’s School of Mines. It changed his life. He was absorbed by the subject, and when he graduated in 1882 with a degree in civil engineering, it was with the highest scores on record at the school.

Entering America’s workforce as a bright young engineer, his timing could not have been better. Construction of the Brooklyn Bridge was nearly finished, and it was not only going to have a dramatic impact on the way of life in New York but also going to make civil engineering one of the hottest fields for graduating students. Columbia School of Mines graduates were attractive commodities, and Parsons, the most sought after of them all, took a job working for the Erie Railroad. He had only been in his new job for a short while when his supervisor received a letter from his worker’s proud but worrisome father.

“He has never given me, an anxious, watchful parent, one single cause of complaint,” William Barclay Parsons wrote. “I know he is good through and through, capable, highly educated professionally and otherwise, full of ability, energy, industry and integrity.” A short time later, a reply came, informing the elder Parsons he had no reason to fret. “The young gentleman is all that can be desired,” the supervisor wrote back, “and will by his industry and faithfulness force himself to advancement.”