The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (25 page)

And with that he said the commission had no choice but to forget about building a subway and pursue an extension of its elevated system, anything to help the city develop its land to the north and encourage people to move out of the overcrowded downtown and midtown neighborhoods. “Something must be done quickly to relieve the pressure,” Steinway said, “and to give renewed impetus to the city’s growth in a northerly direction.” It was his first acknowledgment of failure, and Steinway, whose body at the age of fifty-eight was starting to break down, since his knees caused so much pain that he needed a cane to walk, began to suffer not just physically but also emotionally. In his diary, he jotted down a reflection on January 14, 1893. “To my dismay I see I stand alone in my stand to guard the City from being further disfigured in streets,” he wrote. “I feel dreadful.”

Two months later, on March 4, 1893, the day before Steinway’s birthday, his wife, Ellie, died of a heart attack. Only a month earlier, Steinway had sent a condolence telegram to his friend, William Whitney, who was mourning the sudden loss of his wife, Flora, at the age of fifty. Flora was buried in a marble grave next to their daughter Olive, and on the front page of
The World
it was reported that the elegant Whitney mansion “has become a house of mourning, and the man who could have any office in the gift of President-elect Cleveland and would accept none is prostrated by the bier of a dead wife.” Now another member of New York’s establishment, William Steinway, was in mourning, too. In his diary from that day forward, he would note repeatedly how Ellie’s death destroyed him.

*   *   *

ANOTHER FINANCIAL MELTDOWN SAVED STEINWAY.
The ripple effects from the collapse of the mighty Baring Brothers bank in London three years earlier were still lingering. One by one, the pieces of string that held together America’s economy unraveled. First the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, then the mammoth rope manufacturer National Cordage Company, and finally the banks toppled. The country’s credit system folded, stock prices plummeted, and fortunes disappeared. More than 140 national banks went under, and by year’s end sixteen thousand businesses were gone, too, making the panic of 1893 worse than those in 1873, 1857, and 1837. Police went house to house and found some seventy thousand people unemployed. At least twenty thousand homeless people camped at police stations and shelters.

New Yorkers did not realize it at the time, but the panic of 1893 saved them from living without a subway for years to come. It became clearer than ever that any citywide massive-transportation project would have to be paid for by the government, not private businessmen whose fortunes could vanish in a flash. Six years after Abram Hewitt first proposed his financing plan, it was back on the table.

*   *   *

HEWITT SO DESPISED ANYONE
he believed was standing in the way of progress that he made no attempt to hide his contempt, even when that person might one day become president of the United States. William Whitney was such a man. Hewitt and Whitney in the early years of the 1890s were at their zeniths of power. Despite their differences, they were both being talked about as Democratic presidential candidates. And their opinions on the matter of transportation in the city were as influential as any. Hewitt had established himself as the leading advocate for a subway and was putting all of his efforts into promoting his plan for city ownership rather than leaving it in private hands. Whitney controlled those private hands, as the owner of the Metropolitan Traction Company, the mammoth street-transit company. Had the two men managed to think alike and work together, there is little doubt a subway would have been built much sooner. Instead, their opposing views, stubbornness, and independent interests kept them from ever joining forces in the interests of New Yorkers. The tension that existed between Hewitt and Whitney came to life when the two men were vacationing in London. Whitney was coming down the steps of the Bristol Hotel just as Hewitt was walking up, and they were stunned to see each other on the other side of the pond.

“Hello, Hewitt,” Whitney said. “Are you going back to the states soon?”

Hewitt shot back, “No.”

“Well, you ought to go back and take the nomination for the presidency. You deserve it,” Whitney said politely. Though Whitney, a former navy secretary, was actually being mentioned more favorably than Hewitt, an ousted mayor, for the nomination, he had clearly indicated that he had no interest in running for office. But Hewitt did not receive the words kindly from a man he respected so little.

“You ought to go back and stand trial for the Metropolitan Street Railway operations,” Hewitt snapped at Whitney. “You deserve to get a jail term.”

Whitney laughed at first, only to stop when he realized the former mayor was not joking. The two men, as powerful as any in New York City, would never become close. For Hewitt, the living conditions in New York were the responsibility of those who could bring about real change, from politicians to wealthy financiers, and in his eyes Whitney had never done his part. Because they traveled in the same social circles, their paths crossed often. But to Hewitt, Whitney stood for all the evils of big business, a millionaire who built his fortune through inheritance, consolidation, and, he believed, even corruption, although there was little evidence of the latter. As the man who controlled New York’s street railway operations, Whitney could have pushed for more radical change, more innovation, than he did, but to Hewitt it seemed all Whitney wanted was to make incremental changes, like free transfers, that helped his transit company’s bottom line but nothing else. Hewitt would have probably enjoyed a better relationship with Whitney’s brother, Henry, in Boston, a man who proposed tunneling under the sacred Boston Common despite fierce opposition and who pursued Frank Sprague’s electric streetcars before any other major city had such foresight. William Whitney’s conservative and questionable decision to choose cable over electricity was exactly the sort of backward thinking that galled the forward-thinking Hewitt.

Whitney’s cable streetcars, along with Gould’s elevated lines, were dominating New York’s streets. The Metropolitan Traction Company was becoming a monster, swallowing up smaller companies that controlled Houston Street, Sixth Avenue, Ninth Avenue, Twenty-third Street, Lexington Avenue, Broadway, and others, planning cable extensions for all of them. Whitney’s biographer would later call it his “Empire on Wheels.”

The “nerve center” was a nine-story building, called appropriately the Cable Building, at 621 Broadway, which dwarfed its neighborhood at the corner of Houston Street. The headquarter offices were on the eighth floor, but it was in the basement where the power plant was a sight to see. Enormous cables wrapped around giant belts went around and around for miles in an endless loop. It was impossible to imagine a cable snapping, as they were made of six steel strands with nineteen twisted wires, and each one weighed about forty tons. But inevitably they did break, and the fixes, costly and time consuming, would bring the huge steam engine that powered them to a halt.

*   *   *

NOWHERE IN NEW YORK
were the conditions more desperate for relief in the mid-1890s than Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where a mass of buildings that were typically seven stories high crammed more people inside of them than seemed possible. While New York City as a whole had seventy-six people per acre of land, the Lower East Side had almost ten times that amount, anywhere between three hundred and seven hundred per acre. It was one of the most crowded places on the planet. The living conditions were dark, wet, cold, rancid, and vermin-infested, and diseases like diphtheria and tuberculosis were common, thanks to poor sanitation and the lack of private toilets and adequate ventilation. Staying clean in a neighborhood filled with horse stables, brothels, slaughterhouses, and saloons was impossible. And yet there was nowhere else for the immigrants to go. Moreover, because they were at least living among others who spoke their language, understood their traditions, and practiced their religion, they were reluctant to assimilate and seek out change.

New York, like Boston, Chicago, and other big American cities filling up with immigrants, was not so much a melting pot yet as a countertop with separate piles of different immigrant groups. Changing that would take one issue that would benefit both the rich and the poor, that could improve the way of life across an entire city, and that the men in power could unite behind. As the last decade of the nineteenth century reached its midway point, that issue was rapid transit.

London had three times as many residents as New York, but New York had more miles of mass transit. And while the average London resident took just seventy-four rides per year, about one every five days, New Yorkers were going gangbusters on their systems, taking almost three hundred trips a year, making it a part of their everyday existence. The only problem was that thousands of immigrants were streaming in through Ellis Island every month and the cable streetcars and elevated trains could not keep up. It was almost as if for every steamship of immigrants that arrived, a ferryboat full of New Yorkers left the city, tired of the overcrowding. The system needed to get faster. It needed to go farther. And it needed to run beneath the streets. And it needed to be built now.

*   *   *

ON MAY 22, 1894,
Steinway got his shot at redemption. The state legislature of New York passed a second Rapid Transit Act, which had one major difference from the act of 1891. As the embarrassing public auction had shown, rich, private capitalists had no appetite for taking on the burden of a subway. This time, the city would own the subway and lease it to a contractor, just as Abram Hewitt had first proposed six years earlier. Hewitt also got the man he wanted named as the new commission’s chief engineer, William Parsons. And as yet another sign of how serious this new commitment was, the new Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners held their first meeting on June 8, 1894, only two weeks after the act passed. They wasted no time debating elevated lines versus a subway.

Parsons was dispatched to visit Europe, where the cities were more advanced than Chicago or Boston in their rapid transit plans, even though Boston residents were about to vote in a few weeks on their own subway. Parsons, who set sail in July, had already been to Berlin, where he saw urban train systems that ran at street level with mixed results. Now he was to visit other cities. In London, of course, the Underground was a model for the rest of the world. In tiny Liverpool, an electric elevated train more advanced than Chicago’s was running. Paris was also on the brink of approving a subway. And Glasgow was digging a subway tunnel that was intended to be cable operated, but for which electricity was also being considered. Parsons’s orders were to go and study them all and to return with a report that settled once and for all whether the tools and technology were there to bring to New York a subway with electric-powered trains. Parsons was skeptical.

His appointment as chief engineer had not been unanimously embraced. Despite his experience from the earlier Steinway commission, he was still only thirty-five years old, and there were far more seasoned engineers in the city. Many New Yorkers said his hiring “was a mistake,” as the writer Arthur Goodrich wrote in a profile of Parsons for the magazine
World’s Work
. “But the commission wanted a young man—no one but a young man could possibly complete the inevitably immense plan they were beginning.” And, as Goodrich wrote, no one knew the underbelly of New York quite like Parsons.

Shortly after his appointment, there came an incident when he was put on a witness stand to testify about the work that would be required to dig a subway tunnel. Courtroom observers could not believe the level of detail he was able to spout off, about what sewer pipes were at what corner and at what depth beneath the street. It was as if he had a snapshot of the guts of New York in his brain. After hours of questioning from lawyers who were opposed to a subway, they gave up, acknowledging that they would not be able to fluster him. “The devil take him,” one of those lawyers was overheard saying. “He’s making fools of all of us.”

When he was asked whether he had “the maturity to see this plan through,” Parsons didn’t hesitate in answering.

“Success doesn’t depend on age, nor does it depend on will or enthusiasm,” he said. “It depends on the rigorous analytical methods of a trained and educated mind.” It was what he believed, and it explained why he often liked to quote the famous Greek mathematician Archimedes, who, it is said, once proclaimed: “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I’ll move the world.” It could have been a motto for Parsons.

Parsons also engendered goodwill among those who worked for him. When the Civil Service Commission changed its rules to require that a special exam be taken for every pay raise of $150 in salary, Parsons angrily convinced the commissioners to withdraw the action. He was modest by nature, because, as one man said, “he doesn’t know any better.” It was a trait that made his workers want to please him more. Later in his life, Parsons would take a moment to reflect on his appointment as chief engineer for the subway, and he realized how it was a job that required a man with patience. “I am glad I was not older,” he said. “I doubt if I could now undertake or would undertake such a work under similar conditions. But I had the enthusiasm of youth and inexperience. Had I fully realized all that was ahead of me, I do not think I could have attempted the work. As it was I was treated like a visionary. Some of my friends spoke pityingly of my wasting time on what they considered a dream.”

*   *   *

PARSONS SAILED BACK FROM EUROPE
in September 1894 and went to work on a report for his commissioners. In the meantime, New Yorkers had ballots to cast. Only four months earlier, they had read how the citizens in Boston narrowly approved construction of a subway. Now New Yorkers had their turn. On November 6, the election of a new mayor was relegated to an afterthought. In addition to voting in a Republican dry-goods salesman named William L. Strong as their new leader, New Yorkers overwhelmingly said,
Yes to public ownership!
Of the 184,035 ballots cast, 42,916 voted against city construction and ownership, while 132,647 voted in favor (399 ballots were deemed defective).