The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (36 page)

In the hours after the blast, Howard Carson, the chief engineer of the subway, was immediately concerned not with who or what caused the explosion but with how badly it damaged his tunnel. Workers from Boston Gas Light Company and the Edison Electric Company wasted no time in setting to work to repair the damage. Within hours, two eight-inch pipes and one six-inch pipe were being closely inspected, and it was obvious to everyone that while the bigger pipes were new, the smaller one was older and had a fracture in it that seemed certain to have played a part in the accident.

*   *   *

CARSON WASTED NO TIME
touring the tunnel, and at an emergency meeting of the Boston Transit Commission held just a few hours after the accident, he assured the commissioners that it appeared secure. Because the explosion occurred between the roof of the subway tunnel and the surface of the street, he explained, the inside of the tunnel was not damaged.

“It appears to be in perfect condition, and not injured in any way by the explosion of gas this morning,” Carson said. “Whether the exterior may in any way be injured I cannot say until it is more nearly uncovered, but I do not expect to find any injury unless possibly to the tiling on the exterior.” And even if the tiling was damaged, he added, it would not weaken the strength or stability of the subway tunnel. “The explosion occurred entirely above and outside of the subway and none of the employees in the subway were hurt.”

He hoped his words would have a calming effect in the wake of the tragedy. Carson was no fool. He knew how apprehensive the citizens of Boston had been about a subway, and he assumed the coverage of the explosion would only reignite their strongest fears that it could never be entirely safe, not when they would be traveling along the same ground where gas lines were buried. All he could do was push his contractors to keep working and hope that in six months, when the subway was expected to open, the accident would be long forgotten.

On March 5, 1897, all the city’s newspapers were filled with long front-page stories of the explosion and detailed eyewitness accounts. The coverage of the emergency meeting of the Boston Transit Commission, where Carson sought to reassure the public, was relegated to seven small paragraphs in
The Globe
under the headline
SUBWAY IS NOT INJURED
. Reading the day’s coverage, it was as if the country’s biggest news of the day never even happened. “It isn’t often that home news outshadows the inauguration of a new president on March 4,”
The Globe
wrote the following day, “but it did so most gloomily on March 4, 1897.”

*   *   *

ON JULY 3, 1897,
Sam Little invited a dozen reporters and a few high-ranking members of his West End Street Railway Company to join him for a test ride. At precisely two o’clock, a single car dipped beneath the road on Boylston Street in front of the Public Garden and zoomed into a brightly lit tunnel. From the moment the electric engine hissed to life, the passengers seemed in awe. The train went straight under Boylston to the sharp turn at Tremont and, without stopping, continued on to the Park Street station, where it slowed, completed a loop turn, and went right back to where it started without a single stop. It could not have gone smoother. The polished tracks glistened. The white walls were so bright they almost required squinting in the lights. The bed of crushed stones covered every inch of ground between the spiked-in rails and wooden ties. And almost entirely out of sight, embedded in the ceiling of the tunnel, a black electric cable followed the path of the tracks below. “Pure air, true light, perfect ventilation, express speed, absolute safety,”
The Globe
reported the next day.

But even more important was its headline:
RAPID TRANSIT INSURED: SUBWAY SAVES NINE MINUTES IN RUNNING TIME FROM PUBLIC GARDEN TO PARK STREET
. The subway was scheduled to open in less than two months. The blue and gold sign boards were up to tell passengers where to catch certain cars bound for the right destination. The ticket offices and turnstiles were almost finished, and two railings were being installed on the stairways to try and separate the entering and exiting crowds. If there were any doubters left, nothing would change their minds.

*   *   *

ON AUGUST 25 THE JOYOUS
mood of the city was nearly crushed by a five-ton derrick. Another tragedy, one week before the opening of the subway, would not only cast a pall over the day, it would erase all of the good feelings that emerged out of Sam Little’s public relations coup in July.

Thomas Ryan, a twenty-four-year-old engineer, was working along with laborers Maurice Connors and Bernard Rodder in a fifty-foot hole on a later section of the subway being built in Scollay Square, a few blocks from the Park Street Church. The arm of the giant derrick was swinging over a fence on the construction site and getting ready to reach into the hole to lower a five-thousand-pound granite block into it. The derrick suddenly lurched and tilted, and even though the engine cut off it began to lean forward and slide into the hole, right on top of Ryan, who was trapped in a corner, and Rodder, who was scrambling to climb out on a rope. As the ground caved in around the hole and the derrick toppled over, Rodder and Ryan managed to dive out of the way and fall on top of each other, just feet away from the wreck of a giant machine. Ryan twisted his left leg and his chest took a hard blow, while Rodder cut his head and right arm. But a tragedy had been averted, both men had cheated death, and it seemed now as if the city was poised for its historic day.

A few minutes after ten o’clock on the night of August 30, a well-dressed crowd of about two thousand people spilled out of the cozy Tremont Theater and onto Tremont Street. In less than eight hours, America’s first subway was scheduled to roll underground. The audience filing out had just seen a dramatic opening-night performance of
The Sunshine of Paradise Alley,
a play featuring a young girl who comforts troubled souls and sets them on a stronger path. It was playing in Boston just as the country was emerging from the worst of times following the panic of 1893, a point that was not lost on critics of the day. In previewing the performance,
The Globe
said, “It will teach those who live in luxurious homes that amidst squalid surroundings and under ragged clothes there beats many a warm heart and exists many a sunny nature; that in such poverty-stricken districts many deserving people may be found.”

As the theatergoers streamed out of the theater across from Boston Common, a strange sight greeted them. The sidewalks were crowded with audiences emerging from several theaters on the block or the nearby restaurants, such as the fine French bistro Locke-Ober; the more casual German spot, Jacob Wirth Company, known for its bratwurst, pea soup, and dark rye bread; or the Parker House, famous for its warm rolls, Boston cream pie, and codfish. But as crowded as it was downtown, the streets were almost entirely empty of traffic. On a night when Tremont Street should have been bustling, most of the streetcars that normally choked it were otherwise occupied. The managers of the West End Street Railway Company were running their final preparations for the next day, and in the process they were giving Bostonians a sneak peek of their future. Clear streets at last.

The Boston Daily Globe
could hardly contain its excitement. Two weeks earlier,
The New York Times
had tweaked Boston with an article that expressed disappointment and surprise at losing the race underground, proclaiming it “remarkable” that “so conservative an American town should happen to be the pioneer in adopting this.” Now, on the day of its subway opening, Boston’s largest paper volleyed back with a dig of its own.

On the morning of September 1, 1897, Bostonians awoke to a headline in
The Globe,
NOW FOR THE SUBWAY
. It was only a short piece, five paragraphs in total. But in closing, the editorial pointed out that Boston’s project had been followed for years from around the world and that today was an accomplishment worth cheering. “Boston’s experiment in subway construction has been watched with a great deal of interest elsewhere. Its success will mean setting the pace for greater Gotham, not to mention many smaller cities in our land.”

Had he seen
The Globe
article, William Barclay Parsons would surely have cringed at the thought of little old Boston setting the pace for New York City to follow.

13

“FIRST CAR OFF THE EARTH!”

SHE MUST HAVE BEEN QUITE THE SIGHT.
It was not yet five o’clock in the morning when the young woman, still fastening the strings of her bonnet, realized she had better start running. She heard a rooster crow from a remote backyard and hoped that she still had time. Down the empty sidewalk in the Boston neighborhood of Allston she ran as fast as her long dress would allow, under a dark sky streaked with pink. Only when she came gasping around a corner onto Cambridge Street and she saw a group of railway men standing and chatting on the sidewalk did she know that she had made it. She stopped for a moment to catch her breath and to finish straightening her bonnet, and then she approached the group with a smile. When one of the men saw her, he congratulated her on showing such pluck at an early hour and invited her into the car shed. That’s where the open-air trolley number 1752 with a
SUBWAY TO PARK ST
. sign on top was waiting.

It was one of the newer models in the West End’s system, built just two years earlier by the Massachusetts Car Company in the town of Ashburnham, and so it was not yet showing too many signs of wear. With its freshly polished brass fixtures and nine shiny rows of wood benches it looked almost new for its special trip. The worker helped the young woman take a seat in the front-row bench, right alongside the spaces that were being reserved for the half dozen newspaper reporters. Within minutes she was joined on the car by thirty other early-rising passengers, each one more giddy than the next. Together, they sat and they waited.

It had been a remarkable two years for the City on a Hill, as John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, had unwittingly nicknamed Boston in a fiery sermon he delivered in 1630. The opening of the Boston Public Library was followed a year later by a publishing story for the ages. A little-known graduate of the Boston Cooking School named Fanny Merritt Farmer released a cookbook of nearly two thousand recipes that gave home chefs precise measurements to help them make their own angel cakes, baked beans, chowders, and puddings. The home kitchen was never the same. For a city that was already a medical mecca with Boston Floating Hospital, New England Baptist Hospital, the Tufts School of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Boston Lying-In Hospital, the opening of another prominent institution, New England Deaconess Hospital, solidified the city’s place in the world of healing. The subway capped a string of achievements that secured Boston’s spot as a birthplace of innovation.

And yet there were no speeches planned for the morning of September 1, 1897. There was no official program. There was no formal invitation extended to President McKinley or Governor Wolcott or the former mayor Nathan Matthews, the “father of the subway,” or even the man who first proposed the idea of tunneling a subway a decade earlier, fifty-eight-year-old Henry M. Whitney. The current mayor, Josiah Quincy, apparently thought so little of the event that he spent his morning at the Plaza Hotel welcoming two hundred members of the Catholic Young Men’s National Union to Boston.

The final hours before America’s first subway rolled under the streets of Boston were spent on the details, polishing the brass fixtures in the stations, checking the oak railroad ties one last time, applying a final coat of white paint to the picket fences between the underground tracks, and making sure the words “No Smoking” appeared on enough of the white posts. After a decade of debate, Bostonians needed no reminder that this was to be their day. And the men who built the subway decided that the achievement should speak for itself. They did not need dignitaries to affirm what they had accomplished after two and a half years of digging. Their puritanical values told them that no pomp was necessary. And so as “birds were bubbling with the exuberance of morning and the sun was kindling mock fires in east facing windows,” as
The Globe
described the dawn, it was almost shaping up to be an ordinary Wednesday for Boston, aside from the early risers who were starting to gather on the streets downtown.

If there was a practical reason why the subway’s opening did not generate much excitement outside Boston, besides the city’s own unwillingness to celebrate, it might have been that the actual first leg of the subway was so short. Of the eleven total sections being built, only sections 1, 2, and 3 were ready to be unveiled on September 1. The rest of the subway, connecting past Park Street out to Haymarket Square in one direction and from Boylston Street away from the Common out to Pleasant Street in the other, was not far behind. Even those legs would only extend the entire distance of the subway to 1.8 miles. But those three sections traversed beneath the two streets that defined Boston as much as Fifth Avenue and Broadway epitomized New York.

Standing at the corner of Boylston Street and Tremont Street, where the deadly gas line explosion occurred six months earlier, looking in both directions, up Tremont and down Boylston, provided a glimpse into Boston’s history and to its future. The two streets rimming Boston Common and the Public Garden bustled with activity. Tremont Theater was there, and down a nearby alley off Boylston so was Locke-Ober, two establishments that provided many an evening’s entertainment of acting and dinner. “Ladies’ Street,” a row of retail stores, began at the corner of Tremont and Winter streets and was crowded most days with the city’s most fashionable shoppers. There was one of the city’s most revered buildings, Tremont House, with its distinguished reading room and heavy dark granite walls, a place where Andrew Jackson, the Prince of Wales, Charles Dickens, and Henry Clay had all come to read, to write, or just to think. “It has more galleries, colonnades, piazzas, and passages than I can remember or the reader would believe,” Dickens once wrote of it. A little farther down was City Hall, at the corner of Tremont and School streets, a handsome building with a white granite front, tall arching windows, and towering bronze statues of Benjamin Franklin and Josiah Quincy out front. Just a few feet away was the hotel Dickens once called the finest in America, Parker House, and around the corner was one of the country’s oldest bookshops, the Old Corner Bookstore. Boylston was lined with taller buildings than Tremont, many of them occupied by the Boston Conservatory of Music and half a dozen piano manufacturers, who gave the stretch the nickname Piano Row. It was a place William Steinway had visited frequently, to see the showrooms where his pianos were being sold.