The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (38 page)

Inevitably, there were some who simply found the bustle too much to take. “Damn me if I’ll go through this again,” one red-faced man blurted out after squeezing off his train and onto the Park Street platform. “I’ll take my regular train the next time,” gasped another. But they were outnumbered. When a young woman hopped off her train smiling, she could not hide her surprise at the whole experience. “I thought it would be cold, damp and dingy,” she said. “But it is so bright and the air seems so pure.”

Women like her were thought to be the hardest customers to please. They had complained that the subway cars should have settees on them for more comfortable seating after they’d had a long day of shopping. That complaint was all but forgotten on the first rides of the day as women carried on board their babies and their bundles, and their amazement at the tunnel seemed to make them dismiss their worries about their sore bottoms. They were even more enthusiastic than the men, holding their breath in anticipation and letting loose with an “Oh, dear” followed by “Oh, my.”

They were especially admiring of the subway employees. “Such nice looking men,” was a comment heard often in those first few hours, directed at the manly-looking West End workers in their crisp new blue and gold uniforms. Some women suspected they were a handpicked lot of the most handsome men employed by the West End company, to distract their focus away from the tunnel. As for the children, the subway took some getting used to. The crush of people, the strangeness of the underground, it was too much for the littlest ones at first, and in the early hours and days of the subway, they could be heard wailing whenever the car they were on started moving.

Car number 1752 was not alone in the tunnel for long. It was followed quickly by a second car, 1743, also from Allston; a third, 2534, from Cypress Street in Brookline; and soon a string of them, one after another, each one stuffed beyond capacity with passengers hanging off the sides and crammed into the rows of seats, cheering and waving like caged wild animals. Of the dignitaries in town, the earliest to ride through the subway was Sam Little, the president of the West End railway, who arrived at seven o’clock, an hour after the opening.

Within four hours, the typical trip from the entrance at the Public Garden by Arlington Street up to the Boylston Street station, around the corner, and to the end at the Park Street stop was taking between three and four minutes, depending on the volume of passengers or the timid nature of the motorman at the car’s controls. That same trip on a typical weekday on the surface of Tremont and Boylston streets took at least ten minutes and sometimes longer, with cars sometimes sitting perfectly still for two or three minutes at a time while they waited for the one ahead of them to inch forward.

Even more impressive than the speed at which the subway cars moved was the rapid, machinelike manner in which passengers were able to board and exit the cars. Only seconds passed from the time that a car pulled into Park Street, unloaded its passengers, and took on a new group for the return trip to Arlington Street. It was a most unusual sight to see for anyone who had grown accustomed to the painstaking surface experience of loading and unloading. A hundred and twenty cars an hour pulled out of Park Street during the first day of operation, a shocking number.

Only one of them did not make it out unscathed. The tunnel was barely four hours old when it was the scene of the first subway accident in America. At 10:20 in the morning, car number 2022, bound for Jamaica Plain and marked with the sign
HUNTINGTON AVE. CROSS-TOWN
was emerging from the tunnel at the Public Garden when its roof nicked the crossbeam at the end of the covered portion. The motorman stopped the car immediately and joined his conductor in a quick climb on top of the car, where they assessed the damage, hopped back down, and had their trolley moving again in minutes.

*   *   *

THOUGH PUBLIC OFFICIALS DID NOT
deem the day worthy of a special event, the city’s biggest paper certainly did. Within a few hours of the first trip underground, paper boys were hawking
The Globe
’s special edition on the streets.
FIRST CAR OFF THE EARTH!
the headline blared.
ALLSTON ELECTRIC GOES INTO THE SUBWAY ON SCHEDULE TIME
.

“Out of the sunlight of the morning into the white light of the subway rolled the first regular passenger-carrying car at 6:01,” the paper wrote. “The car was from Allston and it approached the immense yawn in the earth by way of Pearl St Cambridgeport and the Harvard bridge.” In colorful language, the paper described how Reed’s trolley car “hissed along like a brood of vipers.”

Of all the new habits passengers had to get used to with their subway, there were two that caused great consternation from the very first trip through the stations. At the stairways, to control the flow of traffic out of the stations and back to the streets, eight-foot-tall wooden turnstiles were installed. Above each one, a sign read,
LOITERING ON THIS STAIRWAY PROHIBITED
, to prevent the platforms from becoming a place where people on the street came for shelter from rain or snow or the homeless came to loaf, panhandle, or sleep.

The turnstile was a new contraption for the times, and they were immediately deemed everything from an “irredeemable nuisance” to “clumsy, complicated things.” People getting off their trains would stand and stare at the turnstile, unsure how to navigate it and wanting to see others go first or receive assistance from the handsome West End workers. Couples got scared at the thought of being separated even for an instant, and friends who insisted on going through together inevitably got jammed or bumped in the face or the rear by the swinging bar. Little old ladies cringed and closed their eyes as they passed through while men carrying baskets filled with groceries caught glares from those behind them as it took them an extra few seconds. The heavyset crowd especially loathed the turnstiles, as they found it embarrassing to squeeze through the turnstiles and draw attention to their girth. When one exceptionally overweight gentleman got stuck, he required a shove from behind by an alert, if sheepish, West End employee. But as annoying as the turnstiles were, they were effective. Sixty passengers could melt through the turnstile in sixty seconds if prodded. And they usually were.

The other source of immediate complaining was the ticketing system. Sam Little wanted the ticketing process for his West End company to be handled on the streets, in kiosks at the top of the stairs, rather than at the bottom inside the stations. But an old concern reared up again at that request—marring the appearance of Boston Common with ugly architecture. And so the battle was lost and the ticketing was handled underground. Passengers who came down the stairs had no choice but to stand in line and wait to be next up to the window to purchase a ticket for a nickel. Even though Park Street was equipped with four ticket offices, each with a roll of tickets to sell, the workers could not keep up with demand, as most people came in to purchase tickets for a ride, but plenty more simply wanted a ticket to keep as a souvenir and never used it. By 11:15
A.M
., one office had sold 2,500 tickets, another 2,100, the third 1,500, and the last 1,250. As the day proved, a slow ticket agent was disastrous, since the time it took to count out the correct change and hand over a ticket caused lines to grow, passengers to fret, and the boarding system to grind to a standstill.

“Why can’t the conductors take cash fares on the cars as before,” one gentleman standing in line was heard saying on the morning of the first day.

A nearby West End worker heard the gripe and came over with his answer. He explained that the ticketing space was meant to keep people out of the subway who had no intention of riding and to allow the conductors to collect all the fares before the car leaves rather than try to hunt down passengers on board. Because the cars were moving much faster now, conductors would miss collecting fares from passengers before they exited. But those answers were not sufficient for one man, who suggested bluntly that if this were another certain city, the people would not stand for such foolishness.

“It’s a shame to have such incompetents doing such work,” the complainer muttered. “Of course they’re new, but that’s no reason patrons should be made to put up with such annoyance … You can just bet they would stand no such nuisance in New York. They have men there who know…” His voice stopped without warning as he looked out toward the tracks. “There’s my car!” he hollered without finishing his thought, and off he dashed excitedly.

*   *   *

WHILE THE SUBWAY’S FIRST DAY
progressed smoothly underground, the real measure of its success was on the streets. The transformation on the morning of September 1 was astounding. Tremont Street looked deserted, with greater distances separating the cars than had been seen in years, or at least since motormen went on a brief strike over Christmas the previous year. Standing at the corner of Boylston and Tremont streets, looking in both directions, it was sometimes two or three minutes before a single car would pass. Only one week earlier, fifty cars might have passed in the same period. Pedestrians didn’t quite know what to make of this empty feeling, and some of them stood on the sidewalk, by force of habit, waiting for the crush of cars to come, only to realize how foolish they looked and to finally cross the empty street at a leisurely pace they hadn’t tried for years. As they looked out at the streets, pedestrians began to wonder when the annoying tracks along Tremont and Boylston could be ripped out so the streets could become more friendly to cross. It would not be long.

On the concrete plaza at the corner of Park Street and Tremont, across from the Park Street Church, long lines formed outside the two stairway buildings leading down to the tracks. The buildings for the staircases, and there were eight of them now on Boston Common, were modeled after the subway buildings in Budapest, fortress-like with granite walls, white enameled brick, and glass and copper roofs. Including the staircase, each building cost $11,000. The crowd outside the stairways was overwhelmingly men, as they mingled in their bowler hats and dark suits. The women stood out because of the umbrellas they carried to shield them from the sunlight.

Because of how overcrowded the cars were on the first day, tracking how many people actually rode the subway on September 1 was impossible. But it was estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 made the trip, and, in the words of
The Globe
, “Nearly everything went as smooth as the proverbial clockwork, and the opinion heard on all sides was that, as far as it goes, the subway is an unqualified success.”

*   *   *

IT TOOK FOUR HOURS
for the first delay to register a complaint. The transit commissioner, Horace G. Allen, a mutton-chopped man with wavy dark hair and wire-rimmed spectacles, wandered down into the Park Street station at 10:30 and announced how pleased he was at the morning, especially the lack of any injuries. “If a woman should fall,” he said, “or somebody get thrown by a sudden start there would be a chorus of, ‘Subway! I told you so!’” His smile disappeared, however, when he noticed passengers waiting on the platform and no car in sight. They had only been there for one minute, but for Allen that was too long. He wanted perfection, which is why he had even hired janitors, all of them black men attired in sharp white uniforms, to comb the stations and tracks with dustpans and brooms to keep things looking spotless for as long as possible. Allen asked for emergency rooms to be built into the first few stations, so that a sick or injured passenger could be tended to without hesitation in a room supplied with a cot, chair, table, and electric heater.

The longer that Allen saw passengers waiting, the more he fretted. He wanted their first trips to be memorable, so they would be sure and come back again and again. “Hmmm,” he murmured out loud, “I wonder what’s the trouble. There should be more cars along.”

But before he could inquire, the rumbling of a car was heard and then a second and a third, and all three came into the station at the same time, discharged their loads, and carried off the next crowd. Relieved, Allen himself decided to join them. “I think Boston is going to like it and like it a great deal,” he said smiling, as he stepped on board his subway car. “It will surprise them. Most people imagined that the subway was going to be a close hole in the ground. The sunlight and gas light, the white walls, general cleanliness and the facilities for handling any crowd will surprise and please them.” And with that he vanished into the darkness of America’s first subway tunnel.

14

THE BRAINS, THE BUILDER, AND THE BANKER

IT WAS TITLED “REPORT ON RAPID TRANSIT
in Foreign Cities.” And befitting its author, its sixty-six typed pages were crammed full of meticulous details, drawings, photographs, and charts. When William Parsons delivered it to his commissioners on November 20, 1894, two weeks after New Yorkers had voted in favor of a subway, it immediately became the research paper that would shape the course of New York’s transit efforts for the next decade. From each city he’d visited, he drew lessons about the best methods for digging beneath a city’s streets, for ventilating subway cars and tunnels of stale air, and for where to best place the doors on a subway car.

Of London, Parsons wrote about both the Metropolitan line, which was the first tunnel dug back in the early 1860s and was still using steam locomotives, and the City and South London Railway, which opened in 1890 and was dug using a different tunneling method and powered with electric trains. The steam locomotives used a high-quality coal that was free of foul-smelling sulfur and produced little smoke. And Metropolitan engineers were told to not push their engines too hard in the tunnels. But Parsons called the efforts a waste. “In spite of these precautions, however, the air in the tunnel is extremely offensive,” he wrote. The City and South London line, on the other hand, impressed him greatly. “Inasmuch as the motors are electric, and the only fouling of the air is that due to the passengers, the amount [of air] required to be changed per minute is small,” he wrote. “The air in the stations is quite fair, although susceptible of further improvement.” However, there were other flaws. He described the cars as “small, badly ventilated and lighted, hard riding and noisy,” defects he blamed on the construction. With a diameter of only ten feet, two inches, the tunnels were too narrow and small, forcing the use of small, four-car trains that could seat ninety-six passengers and move at an average speed of thirteen miles per hour. Building bigger tunnels lined with brick or concrete would make for a quieter, more comfortable ride, he said. He was especially excited about the reliability of the electric trains. He noted that the average repair cost per mile of one of London’s electric trains was one and a half cents, whereas the Manhattan Elevated Railway was paying more than three cents per mile to repair its steam locomotives.