The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (35 page)

Although the smell of gas should have been an ominous sign, it could not quell the feeling of optimism and excitement in the air, in both Boston and the country. In just a few hours, five hundred miles to the south, in Washington, D.C., William C. McKinley was going to be inaugurated as the country’s twenty-fifth president, renewing hope among Americans that the depression hanging over the country since the panic of 1893 was in its final days. And in six months, Boston was planning to open its subway.

Wolf Koplan’s home was about fifty miles northwest of Boston in the town of Fitchburg. But lately he had been living with family in Boston so that he could work and go to school in the city. The streets of big cities in the late nineteenth century were crowded with young boys earning good wages typically doing one of two jobs, selling papers as newsboys or shining shoes as bootblacks. The leather badge on Koplan’s black cap contained the word
LICENSED
along with his license number in polished letters. The badge also had the letter B on it, which identified him as a bootblack to the adults passing by and the truant officers patrolling the city. The license was free, but the badge cost a dollar and a quarter. And no bootblack received a license unless they attended school at least two hours every day. Most went to school in the morning so they could work in the afternoon, but some, like Koplan, chose the afternoon for school because the morning hours were most profitable.

At the corner of Tremont and Boylston, where he set up his stand, pavers were starting to smooth out the street after two years of disruption. Just beneath the street was about five feet of empty space on top of the roof of the subway barrel. That cavity carried a network of pipes belonging to the Boston Electric Light Company, the Edison Electric Company, or the Boston Gas Light Company.

As streetcars filled the downtown district on this late winter morning, a conveyor system moving large steel buckets ran above them with a clickety-clack sound. The buckets moved in two directions along thick cables, some taking the last piles of dirt away from the subway project, others delivering cement to be used for the tunnel’s sidewalls and foundation. The conveyor system was tedious, but using dump wagons would have meant bringing more vehicles onto city streets that were already beyond capacity.

When Koplan got to his corner in front of the Masonic lodge, he stopped and emptied his pouch on the sidewalk. He took out a hand towel, a soft bristle brush, and two jars of shoeshine, and he prepared for his first customer to come by for a shine. He hoped that on Inauguration Day the men of Boston would want to look especially dapper, because he knew the easiest way to accomplish that was with a quick polish.

*   *   *

THE SMELL HAD BEEN GETTING
worse for months. The leaking gas was presumed responsible for killing a cat in the basement of Walter Pratt’s health food store on Tremont. But when Pratt called the gas company to complain, they sent a man out to replace a pipe in his basement, who told him not to be surprised if the smell returned. “The subway people [are] to blame,” the workman told Pratt. It had become a common refrain for Bostonians. Business was slow—blame the subway project. The streets were too loud—blame the subway project. Traffic was a nightmare—blame the subway project. The city smelled of gas—blame the subway project.

The country was in economic turmoil, and Boston’s retail district, already struggling, was being hurt even more by the subway’s construction. Washington and Tremont streets, parallel thoroughfares, were cluttered with stores specializing in wool, dry goods, fresh produce, leather, and meat. Most of the shoppers who came downtown walked in from two neighborhoods. To the north lay Beacon Hill, where gas lamps lined the streets, brownstones housed the wealthiest families, and for a penny a hungry young boy could stick his arm into a giant goldfish bowl at Greer’s Variety Store and pull out an enormous green pickle. In the other direction, the West End and North End were home to Boston’s working class immigrants, gritty communities filled with saloons, flea markets, and fishmongers.

*   *   *

WHEN THE POLICE OFFICER
Michael Whalen first detected the smell of gas, he didn’t panic. He knew the odor had snaked its way through the neighborhood for months. He knew about the dead cat. He knew apartment dwellers were forced from their homes because the smell got so bad. But each time a gas leak was reported, within a few hours the smell faded and all was forgotten, until the next time and the calls started anew. On this morning, though, the odor didn’t go away. It kept getting stronger. When a young black worker on the subway project left his job site and walked over to Whalen, he asked the obvious question.

“Do you smell that?”

“Yes, it’s pretty strong,” Whalen answered. “Can you tell where it’s coming from?”

They both looked around puzzled. Whalen tried to follow the smell, but when he walked across the street, it was less strong, and then as soon as he walked back to the Hotel Pelham, there it was again. He remembered there had been a gas leak six weeks earlier at this same location that had caused the gas supply to be cut off for two days, and he was determined this time to find the source.

At seven minutes after eleven o’clock in the morning, the phone rang at the Boston Gas Light Company, and Nellie Harmon answered.

“Are you the Boston Gas Light Company?” a man’s panicked voice said.

“Yes sir,” Harmon said.

“Will you please send some men to the corner of Tremont and Boylston streets right away?”

“What is the trouble?” He told her there was a bad leak and to send someone fast. Harmon reached for her complaint ticket and wrote down, “Corner of Tremont and Boylston. Leak bad.”

“Who are you?” she asked the caller. But all he said was, “Mason temple” and “Thank you.”

As each minute of the gas leak passed, it had spread so far that it made its way into the basement of the Masonic temple a block away on Washington Street. Because that was where the call to Harmon came from, she sent her workers there, assuming the cause of the smell was a building leak. Except it was not. So while the temple was being evacuated shortly before noon, gas continued to pool a block away, in the actual site of the leak, just below the surface of the street at the corner of Tremont and Boylston, feet away from Wolf Koplan’s shoeshine stand and directly over the workers putting the finishing touches on the first subway in America.

A few minutes before noon, three crowded streetcars rounded the corner at Boylston and Tremont. Each car had a different destination as signified by its sign. One, which said
BACK BAY
, the neighborhood nearest to the intersection, was on its way directly across Tremont Street. The second said
RESERVOIR
, a station farther out in the wealthy town of Brookline. It was turning right from Tremont onto Boylston. The last of the three cars, trolley 461, with the words
MT. AUBURN
on its front was the one that caught the attention of Whalen. As it screeched around the corner, the officer looked down at its wheels and saw them grinding on the sand scattered over the rails, causing sparks to fly off the side. Up on board, the passengers nearly gagged from the smell of gas, and some turned their heads in search of a breath of fresh air. Then, with no warning at all, the ground shook, and the sound of a cannon boomed.

*   *   *

THE EXPLOSION WAS SO POWERFUL
that the clock in the tower of the Young Men’s Christian Union building recorded the precise moment, stopping at 11:47. The two streetcars that were rounding the corner at the precise moment of the boom soared into the air in a burst of flames, splintering into pieces and drowning out the shrieks of the horses and the screams of the passengers. As Wolf Koplan gave one last wipe of his rag across the shoe tops of his customer, he stood up and was slammed against the side of the Masonic building and knocked out cold. He cut his right thumb badly. It took a few minutes for some pedestrians to help revive him and get him to his feet, and only then did he realize he had more than a pounding headache. He could hardly hear out of his right ear, a loss that would stick with him for the remainder of his life.

The hole in the surface of the street looked like a gaping wound. A tangled mess of badly damaged gas main lines, electric wires, pipes, and the rails and wooden planks from the street railway tracks were left dangling just over the roof of the exposed underground tunnel.

An umbrella-shaped black cloud rose up from the street, followed by an even bigger puff of white steam that seemed to push the black cloud high into the air. The two gray horses that had been attached to the Back Bay car pulled free from their vehicle and dashed across Boston Common, somehow not trampling over the workers and people in the park. The Mount Auburn car, after soaring into the air, twisted and in an instant came crashing down on its side, directly on top of its horses, a crash so loud that none of the screams from inside it could be heard. The second it hit the ground, the streetcar burst into flames, sending a bright orange plume at least fifty feet into the air. The explosion caused the Hotel Pelham’s windows to break and rain down shards of glass on the sidewalk.

“The people didn’t have a chance for their lives,” said one passenger who survived the blast, James Hardeman. “For as soon as the car rolled over on its side a sheet of flame shot up.”

No building suffered more damage than the Hotel Pelham. Every window on its ground floor was smashed; skylights in the roof were cracked or broken. A barber on the hotel’s second floor was in the midst of giving a trim when he was thrown clear across the room.

Paul Klein, the longtime owner of a popular first-floor drugstore at the corner of Tremont and Boylston, was sitting at his desk sifting through bills when the explosion occurred. His two giant plate-glass windows came crashing in on the store, taking down bottles, jars, vases, and other supplies. Klein himself was lucky. He suffered only a few deep cuts in his head from flying glass. One man standing just outside the front door of the drug store had his hat blown clear inside and was killed almost instantly in the blast.

With the entire street corner a ball of fire, witnesses screamed for help for the victims trapped with bloody faces and broken limbs inside the cars and beneath the rubble. It was only seconds before the clanging of approaching fire trucks started to drown out the groans and cries. John Carroll, a carpenter who had walked past only minutes earlier, rushed back to the scene and saw four men dead on the ground. He picked up one of the lifeless bodies, carried it away, and returned to the scene, where he comforted two elderly women. Mary Stone, a music teacher, suffered a bad injury to her scalp along with a fractured left thigh, right kneecap, and right ankle. The one person who cheated death more than any was surely Paul Hackett, the conductor of the Mount Auburn car, who sustained two broken legs, but nothing more.

Reverend W. A. Start, the Tufts University bursar, was walking up Tremont Street and might have been the closest pedestrian to the corner when the explosion occurred. The back of his scalp was badly sliced, his left leg was mangled all the way from the ankle to the hip, and his forearm was fractured. He died right there on the sidewalk. Two wealthy sisters, Amelia M. Bates and Georgianna H. Bates, had left their home on nearby Arlington Street for a drive around town on the pleasant morning. Their carriage was almost directly on top of the hole that burst. Amelia Bates was thrown to the front of her carriage and could not be saved because of all the fire around her. Her sister escaped harm, but their driver fell off into the flames and died instantly. William Vinal, the private secretary of a prominent banker in town, was on his way to collect his boss’s daughters when his carriage was hurled into the air and both he and his driver were killed. He might have been saved by a doctor who tried to get to him with some brandy for his wounds as he lay on the sidewalk, but the crowd was so dense and the scene so frantic that the doctor could not get through, and Vinal took his last breath with a crowd of helpless people standing over him.

Within minutes at least 150 police and fire officers, along with hospital workers, were on the scene. Their first challenge was keeping back the crowd of more than a thousand witnesses, including many who wanted to rush to the aid of their neighbors and shopkeepers. The ground all around the scene was littered with shopping bags and purses, left by women who had been injured or merely dropped them and ran off. The police, frustrated by their crowd-control efforts, finally warned the onlookers that another explosion was imminent. It was a lie. But the crowd scurried back and allowed the rescue workers to work more freely amid the debris, the carcasses of the dead horses, and the torrents of water being poured on the fire.

As the rescue workers began finding bodies, there was relief there had not been more fatalities; in all, ten would be killed. But by early afternoon, once the fire was doused and the rubble was being carted away, the attention of everyone turned to the cause of the explosion. There was no question that leaking gas played a part, but what ignited it? A discarded match? A broken trolley wire? Or the most plausible theory, a spark from the wheel of a car passing over the pool of leaking gas underground?

Both Mayor Quincy and Nathan Matthews, the ex-mayor, visited the site to comfort the injured and the workers. But they had broader concerns, too. They needed to learn whether the subway tunnel had been damaged. “It certainly seems that this accident could not have occurred unless there had been negligence either on the part of the contractors or of the Boston gaslight company,” Mayor Quincy said in the afternoon. “And that responsibility must be divided between them.”

And it would be. Wolf Koplan would be the first of many to file a lawsuit, and when the legal wrangling was said and done, the city of Boston, the West End Street Railway Company, and Boston Gas all paid out settlements to families of the victims and victims themselves. It took a jury all of seven hours in Koplan’s case to blame the gas company for his injuries and award him $3,000 in damages.