The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (33 page)

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THE CHARLES STREET SIDES
of Boston Common and the Public Garden were often damp and putrid year-round. They were the lowest parts of the parks, and they were dumping grounds for city workers looking for a place to put snow and ice and mud and street refuse in the winter. Additionally, the Public Garden had been built upon a salt marsh of fibrous peat, which, when uncovered, gave off an eye-watering rotten-egg smell. The result of all this was a moist stew that reeked and that was a mess to walk over, steering people to other parts of the park. The only solution was to raise the grade with additional soil and then to make sure it was no longer used as an unofficial city dump. But the enormous amount of dirt needed was always too costly, and the problem was continually avoided. It was estimated that 9,000 cubic yards were needed for the Public Garden, and 62,000 cubic yards for the Common. With a single cubic yard weighing about 3,000 pounds, that was roughly 14,000 tons of dirt for the garden and a whopping 93,000 tons for the Common.

But suddenly, there it was.

In the summer of 1895, thousands of loads of dirt had been dug up and the wagons carting it all away were struggling to keep up with the fast-moving workers. In anticipating this possibility, the transit commission had said, “So rare an opportunity for making this important improvement at a trifling cost should not be lost.” And so it was done. A plan was drawn up that called for plowing up portions of the parks, putting down the new dirt to create an undulating surface, planting new grass seed, and inviting lawn bowling, lacrosse, and other games onto the grounds. In fact, any game was welcome, except for baseball. In the end, the new surface in the two parks was in some places a full six feet higher than the old, and 3,500 square feet of new paths were created.

On the last day in April, more skeletons were unearthed while three different derricks helped workers push deeper into the ground and get past the layer of dirt to where the soil was stiff blue clay. The clay was a critical discovery because it ensured a stronger foundation for the subway.

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NO VISITOR HAD AS MUCH
history with the subway as the man who first proposed it eight years earlier. When Henry Whitney, who still kept a home in Brookline, stopped by the Common briefly on April 30, it did not go unnoticed. The West End Street Railway Company of 1895 looked nothing like the one he founded back in 1887. Instead of eight thousand horses housed in sixty different stables across the city, the company owned fewer than a thousand horses, and that number was continuing to dwindle fast. And a transit operation that started out owning zero electric motors now had 1,842 of them. Virtually every mile of track had been electrified by 1895, including most recently the ones that ran into Brookline near Whitney’s house.

What had not changed was West End’s growth and prosperity. It was earning a thousand dollars more per day from passenger rides than the previous year, a success story that no doubt would have made Whitney proud. During his visit to the subway site, the fifty-six-year-old Whitney made little fuss and did not wish to talk to reporters, especially since it was difficult for him to hear through all the racket. But he left impressed, and he said only that he was pleased that something he had suggested so long ago was finally happening. A subway, Whitney said before leaving, was the only practicable and possible solution for Boston’s rapid transit woes. Savvy Bostonians must have been left shaking their heads, wondering why the man who had been in charge of the West End Street Railway Company for so many years and who brought them electric streetcars never made a serious effort to fix the broader problem himself.

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BY EARLY MAY, 130 ELM
trees that were in the subway’s path had been replanted, with forty of them going along the sidewalk of the Public Garden by Arlington Street. On May 21, 1895, the site was a bustle of activity. An enormous pile driver was slamming its hammer into the ground with a great loud thud to loosen the dirt for the workers, who quickly shoveled it into the wagons and waited for the next drop. A stout iron chain kept back onlookers fascinated by the powerful, 2,300-pound pile driver, and every time it slammed down with a whack, whack, whack! a collective “ohhhh” shot up from the crowd.

Nearby, a large wagon was pulling slowly onto the site behind four horses. The wagon was loaded up with giant granite blocks, and as it came to a stop, laborers prepared to wrap a chain around one of the stones so it could be hoisted out.

David Keefe, a young worker from Charlestown, was shoveling out dirt that had been loosened by the pile driver when he momentarily lost his whereabouts and leaned too far forward without looking up. Before he could react, the wicked blow from the swinging hammer grazed his forehead and arm and knocked him to the ground unconscious. His coworkers instantly assumed he was dead, that nobody could survive a blow from a hammer that size dropping eighteen feet. Miraculously, the hammer had only stunned Keefe. Had his head been another two inches forward, he would surely have been crushed. He regained consciousness quickly and was taken to the hospital to have his gash dressed and broken arm mended. It was the first serious accident on the construction site. It would not be the last.

There were certain buildings in Boston near the construction site that were given special care to make sure no damage came to them, either because of their proximity to the tunnel or their historic place in the city. There was no more important church in Boston than the Park Street Church, and the subway was going to raise its visibility even higher because it stood directly across the street from the first station scheduled to open, and exiting pedestrians’ first sight as they climbed the stairs would be the church’s majestic white steeple.

On the evening of Sunday, November 24, the Reverend Isaac J. Lansing, an odd-looking pastor with a small chin, bushy mustache, and big ears, who earlier in the year had caused a great uproar when he called President Cleveland a drunkard, was about to begin his sermon, titled “The Sin of Sodom, Ancient and Modern.” Suddenly there was a loud crash from his private office. Reverend Lansing rushed upstairs to find a powerful jet of water had crashed through his glass window and was flooding the luxurious room, soaking the silk upholstered chairs, his desk, carpet, and bookcase. A worker outside had accidentally struck a main waterline with his pickax, and there was immediately a fear that the church’s foundation was being weakened by the water. The water was shut off, but the damage would not stop the evening’s proceedings. Determined to go on with his sermon, Lansing told his members that working on the Sabbath was an outrage. Of the subway, he said, it is “an infernal hole, in more ways than one.” He said the boss of that hole was not Michael Meehan. Lansing paused for effect, and then shouted, “It is the devil!”

The devil was apparently an efficient leader, because as the end of 1895 approached, the finishing touches were being put on the section of the subway from Park Street all the way down Tremont to Boylston Street. The tracks were laid. The walls were almost sealed. All that was left was to fill in the top of the subway with concrete, bricks, and the steel beams. And if the devil himself wanted to help in any way, Meehan surely would have hired him for $1.70 per day. Especially if he came from Jamaica Plain.

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AS CHRISTMAS APPROACHED, A NOTICEABLE
change occurred on the construction site under Jones and Meehan. The Italians joined the Irish. Meehan had initially dismissed them as isolated, but when he decided to reduce the pay he gave his laborers, from seventeen to fifteen cents an hour, his more experienced workers refused the pay cut and left the job. The Italians, he discovered, were more than happy to take his new rate. Meehan’s face lit up as he looked around his job site at his newly invigorated work crew.

On March 28, 1896, a large party gathered at the Hotel Thorndike, which had opened on Boylston Street across from the Public Garden in 1887. Governor Roger Wolcott was there, along with all five members of the Boston Transit Commission, the legislative committee on metropolitan affairs, and more than a dozen senators and representatives. At ten o’clock sharp, Crocker, the commission’s chairman, wearing a light-colored spring suit and a tall, festive hat, stood up. He explained to his audience the significance of the day, and he told them that because of Representative McCarthy’s early efforts to stop the subway, very little work other than digging was done in the first two months. But since then, great progress had been made. “The Boston Transit Commission has nothing but praise to bestow upon the contractors and engineers for the ability, zeal and indefatigable efforts to secure the prompt completion of the work which they undertook,” Crocker said.

When Crocker singled out Boston for having “no counterpart in the world,” it was a reference to two specific milestones. The first, of course, was that Boston’s subway system would be powered by electricity, the trains thanks to Frank Sprague and Fred Pearson and the lighting in the stations thanks to Thomas Edison. The second was more technical but no less critical to the subway’s success. Boston’s subway would be the only one to avoid any track crossings at the same grade by trains moving in opposite directions. By designing the subway tracks in a way that junction points at certain spots kept the trains from ever having to cross, the risk of collisions was negligible, delays would be reduced, and the capacity of the tracks was increased.

Crocker asked everyone to follow him. “I now invite your inspection of the subway,” he said with great confidence. He took the governor’s arm, and they marched across Boylston Street, attracting a growing crowd with each step. It was a significant moment for both men. Crocker’s job was to convince the opponents that this really was the best thing for Boston and to reassure the supporters that they had made the right decision. For Wolcott, who became governor when Thomas Greenhalge died of illness midterm, this was his first official visit to the subway. As the group walked down the incline at the corner of Boylston and Charles streets, the morning light from above faded, and when they reached the bottom everybody stopped moving, suddenly nervous about taking an awkward step in a dark, unfamiliar place. There was no odor or sense of dampness, and the only visible water was drizzling down the inclined path from the sidewalk.

With no warning, one of Crocker’s attendants pushed a button and flooded the entire space with light, more than one hundred feet down the tunnel. In one startling moment, the entire group was bathed in bright white light, and some men even had to squint for a brief second. The electric current worked! Meehan had tested it before this day, but he knew that was no guarantee it would respond when he needed it most. And it had. Of all the fears from citizens that had been expressed during Boston’s long debate about a subway, one of the most often repeated ones was that walking down into a tunnel would feel like walking to your death. Dark. Damp. Scary. Those were just some of the words heard throughout the public hearings, and yet here was a subway tunnel that was bright, clean, dry, and odorless with shiny white walls and a sparkling white roof.

The dryness of the tunnel was particularly striking to the visitors. Engineers were well aware that the deeper they dug, the more likely they were to encounter springs of water in the ground directly beneath where the tracks would lie, and they had to keep that water from seeping into the tunnel. Drains were being installed in the stations at the lowest points, where water might pool, and there were pumps powered by electric motors, Frank Sprague’s electric motors, to push the water out. “This subway is like a ship,” one engineer said of the tunnel. “You build a ship and she floats in water. So this subway can be built, immersed in water and yet on the inside be perfectly dry.” As an extra precaution, waterproof coating was being applied throughout the tunnel, and special measures were taken to keep water from percolating through the walls. It was all quite elaborate, and it was clear to Crocker that he had the group’s attention. They were eager to see more.

When they had first stepped into the tunnel, Crocker asked that only three of the incandescent lights be turned on at first. It was plenty bright enough to cause the governor to glance down at the report of the Boston Transit Commission he’d been given and say, “Ample for one to read by, without the aid of glasses.” But that’s when Crocker really wanted to impress. At his signal, three more incandescent bulbs lit up, and then three more after that. Nine bulbs in total were now lighting the tunnel, and it went from feeling like a comfortably lit restaurant to the Tremont Theater when the curtain comes down on a show and every single light in the house comes on, as if nighttime became daytime in a heartbeat.

“Now,” Crocker told his guests, “we will ascend by this ladder through ventilating chambers and see another portion of the subway.” Most of the men were wearing business attire and shoes that were not ideal for climbing a ladder, but they all managed their way back up to the street without incident. Next, they were heading for the corner of Boylston and Tremont streets, where the work of Jones and Meehan along Tremont would intersect with the work of a fellow contractor, Edward W. Everson, from Providence, who was handling the Boylston Street stretch. Like Meehan, who had Meehanville, Everson had his own village of shanties, dubbed the Everson Stockade.

When they reached the corner of Tremont and Boylston, the pace of the work taking place was impossible to dismiss lightly. Giant derricks were hoisting huge granite stones into the air or placing them into the ground, a stream of horse-pulled wagons was carrying away piles of dirt or dumping load after load of gravel, and there were at least one hundred men hard at work, not one of them standing still. Crocker then led his troops on foot along the Tremont Street mall to the northern section of Meehan’s work, where the first station, at Park Street, would be. Instead of an incline, here the men had to use a ladder inside a wide ventilating shaft to climb down to the grade level of the subway.