The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (46 page)

From the bottom of the island to the top, in one nearly continuous chain, four thousand tons of steel rails lay end to end wherever there was a tunnel underground. A passerby might walk down a street one day and see ten rails, return the next day and see six, see two the following day, and then see none. It was as if a monster from beneath the surface was gobbling them up one by one. The work could be heard but not seen, as the hundred-pound rails were slid into the tunnels on mule-pulled carts, hammered into the ground with spikes, and secured with closely placed hard pine cross-ties. Tracks in a tunnel were the best indication that the end was in sight.

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THE REASON THE WORK HAD
gone so quickly was the cut-and-cover method Parsons had chosen. New Yorkers became so accustomed to it that they began to sarcastically call the tunnels Parsons’s Ditch. But up at 158th Street, from the first day construction began in the spring of 1901, it was apparent that no trench could be dug there. The ground was too hard, the schist too close to the surface. The tunnel needed to be dug through the schist so deep that Parsons planned for elevators big enough to carry dozens of passengers at once down to stations at 168th Street, 181st Street, and 191st Street, where the tracks would run 180 feet below the streets, to this day still the system’s deepest station. Two miles of tunnel between Washington Heights and Hillside Avenue in the Bronx needed to be built, and the only way it could happen was by blasting through the earth with dynamite. This was where McDonald’s experience might help. The only tunnel in the world that could compare to the Washington Heights work was the same long tunnel where dynamite was first used for controlled blasting, the Hoosac Tunnel.

Because working on the Washington Heights tunnel was different and more dangerous than creating a cut-and-cover trench, McDonald wanted more-experienced men on the job. It was more like mining. The moment the Miners’ Union got word about the two-mile subway tunnel, its members came running from around the world, from Colorado, Pennsylvania, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, and Italy. They knew nothing about “subways” or “nickel fares” or “transfers,” words that were meaningless to them. They were pugnacious and jolly, solid men who smoked pipes, told long yarns, and followed orders to the letter. They crossed continents and oceans for work with nothing but a bag on their back, and they put down a bed wherever it was cheapest and closest to their daily job. The drillers made the most, $3.75 a day, the ordinary miners the least, $2 a day. Their routine rarely changed. They climbed into the earth, grunted and sweated for eight or ten hours a day, and then emerged back into civilization coated in filth, blinking and squinting as they readjusted to the sunlight.

But for men who were used to working deep inside mountains, in isolated rural lands where the only company they could find were other miners, the chance to work in a big city surrounded by pubs and brothels and restaurants was irresistible. It’s no wonder they came by the thousands and, almost overnight, transformed New York City into, of all things, a mecca for miners. Who needed sleep when a day of tunneling could be followed by a night of carousing or whoring or whatever else their few dollars a day could buy them?

As work began, they called their tunnel “the mine” to help them feel right at home. When they first flooded into New York, oblivious to where their piece of the job was, they crowded Bowery lodging houses on the Lower East Side. Once they realized their work was uptown, they found shelter in boardinghouses in a southern section of what is now Riverdale called Spuyten Duyvil.

Their presence at nighttime served to liven up the neighborhood, even if it was with more noise than their neighbors were accustomed to. But it was the racket of the tunneling that was the real bother. Because the work was happening so deep, compressed air was pumped into the ground. The monotonous “chug-chug-chug” of the machine was torture for the residents who, after weeks and months of it, were being driven out of their minds. Adding to the din was the dynamite blasting. Even though it was happening so far underground, each explosion caused a dull thud to ricochet toward the streets and a puff of smoke to follow it, evidence of yet another blast. What could not be heard on the streets was the sound of the men singing and laughing from below. It was,
The Times
wrote in the early days of the tunneling, as if “they are in love with life in the bowels of the earth.”

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THE MINE HAD TAKEN SHAPE
nicely by the fall of 1903, and McDonald was so impressed that he visited the site and congratulated the men on winding up such a dangerous job with no accidents. The progress of the tunnel at the time was captured in a photograph that showed the enormity of the challenge. A dozen stern-faced men stand inside of a half-moon tunnel, its cavernous rounded ceiling lined with concrete. The floor is unfinished, a collection of boulders, smaller rocks, and towering piles of dirt on which the workers stand and climb. The men are grimy, all of them wearing hats, their hands by their side or tucked into their pockets or suspenders. A cart filled with debris sits, waiting to be pulled away. What little light there is comes from a row of bright bulbs fixed to the sidewall.

For two years, most of the rock that was blasted was solid mica schist. The explosions were clean, and there was little chance that they would cause the schist to become unstable. But when the miners encountered short stretches of soft rock, like they did at 155th Street or 193rd Street, they knew they had to be more careful and that they had to wedge timbers between gaps in the schist and the concrete lining.

Only a few hundred feet left of tunneling was needed to connect the tunnel the entire way through. The McCabe brothers, the subcontractors on the deep tunneling job, were eager to finish, knowing it was such a monumental feat. Rather than blast twice a day, they ordered three dynamite explosions daily. The remaining blasts were needed to widen the tunnel to its required twenty-five feet. It was about ten thirty at night on October 24 when the last blast of the day went off, 110 feet below the streets in the area near Fort George and 193rd Street. It was customary to wait a few minutes after a blast to let any loose debris fall, and so when the foreman on the job, Timothy Sullivan, went in after ten minutes to see if the walls were secure, he had little reason to be nervous. He looked around, saw no problems, and shouted back to his workers.

“Come on boys,” he said, “let’s get to work.”

What Sullivan could not see were two veins running through an enormous boulder in the ceiling that weakened it to the point where the slightest quake, never mind a dynamite blast, could cause it to split.

A young German electrician named William Scheutte was the first in so he could string up the lights to brighten the way for the others. A pair of black miners, Michael Hargraves and Charles Crocker, followed, pushing in a tramcar to load up with rocks, and along with them came a line of Italians. The large group had barely set foot into the tunnel when they heard three separate blasts, followed by a loud, horrifying rumbling. The men at the back of the line who had not yet entered the cave turned around and sprinted back up toward the street. The others ahead of them never had a chance.

That three-hundred-ton rock, which measured almost five feet wide and forty-four feet long, came crashing down right on top of the workmen who had just arrived. Men were crushed, pinned, and buried. Small rivulets of blood began to drip down the side of the boulder. Six died instantly, and eight others were seriously hurt, including an Italian named Alfonzo Annetello, who had to have his crushed leg amputated in order to be freed. From the street, the cries of agony could be heard. Father Thomas Lynch, the sixty-year-old priest with a ruddy face and kindly blue eyes from nearby St. Elizabeth’s Roman Catholic Church, rushed into the ghastly tunnel in his black robe, ignoring warnings shouted at him so that he could tend to the injured and dying. Kneeling in puddles of blood and water, with a red-shirted Italian by his side as an interpreter, Father Lynch gave the last rites to the most gravely injured, touching his crucifix to a dying man’s lips. “Kyrie, eleison,” or “Lord have mercy,” Lynch said, and the others in the tunnel bowed their heads.

When other rescuers reached the tunnel, three men were found to be in such pain that doctors injected them quickly with morphine, but it mattered little as they died minutes later. And Alfonzo Annetello also died a few hours later. It took all night to get the bodies of the injured and the dead out, the last one emerging at ten in the morning. The ten who died were Italians, except for Scheutte and Sullivan.

The removal of Sullivan’s body brought onlookers to their knees. His young son, Sammy, stood outside the tunnel all night long, waiting and watching. When a tramcar came to the surface carrying Sullivan’s body, his face bloodied and disfigured, Sullivan’s son walked beside the car, climbed into the patrol wagon with it, and left without shedding a tear, even when a police officer put his arm around the boy. “Sorry for you, little man,” the officer said as they left.

Parsons was out of town when he got word by telegram the morning after the accident, and he ordered his deputy, George Rice, to rush to the scene. Hours after the bodies were removed, Rice compared the accident to the one that nearly struck Parsons down in Murray Hill. “Whether the falling in of the mass of rock was due to moisture or to fissures, or what, nobody will know,” Rice said. “It is one of those things that happen every day in tunnel construction and the workmen all know what risks they are incurring. The accident by which Major Ira Shaler lost his life on June 17, 1902, was precisely the same as that which happened last night.”

When Parsons arrived two days after the accident, he repeated in cold, almost robotic terms similar sentiments to what he had said at all the other accidents on his project. The proper precautions had been taken. The deaths were unavoidable, in this case caused by “a seam that could not have been detected.”

Walking out of the tunnel, Parsons looked down at his hands, moist from a mixture of blood and water after he had rubbed them up against the fallen rocks underground. He refused to wipe them clean, however. And when a reporter tried to pry a reaction to the tragedy from him, Parsons could only muster a few soft words. “The rock was weaker than any of us knew.”

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THE ELECTRIC SUBWAY WAS GOING
to speed up life in cities and expand their boundaries for miles beyond the crowded downtowns. That much was now clear. But as 1903 came to an end, another transportation marvel, this one targeted at making long-distance travel faster and easier, quietly made its debut trip a thousand miles away. On December 17, above a windy beach on the coast of North Carolina, Wilbur Wright piloted the first powered airplane for a record fifty-nine seconds, covering 852 feet. If the mission of the subway was for cities to feel a little bit smaller by quickening the way people could move from one neighborhood to the next, then Orville and Wilbur Wright had a similar goal. They were determined to make the whole world feel a little bit smaller. Their rickety 605-pound double-winged plane with a wingspan of forty feet and a twelve-horsepower engine was going to make the transcontinental railroad feel like a horse-drawn buggy and the steamship feel like a rowboat.

The following year was shaping up to herald the future of travel. And the New York City subway was not even the most exciting transportation innovation. As the Wright brothers perfected their airplane to make it fly farther and faster, a hundred thousand people crowded into Madison Square Garden in January 1904 to see how much the automobile had advanced since the turn of the century. They saw new rubber tires, powerful engines, and more comfortable seats, and they heard boasts about cars that could cover a mile in forty seconds, not quite as fast as steam locomotives but not far behind. Only the rich could afford to have a private automobile, and on the streets of New York they fought for space with the street railways. Inevitably, fatal accidents became more common.

But there was no turning back. The age of the automobile was coming, and the era of the subway was here.

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ON NEW YEAR’S DAY
of 1904, New York’s newest mayor, George B. McClellan, joined Belmont, Parsons, McDonald, and others on a six-mile journey inside a handcar powered by the strong arms of nine cheerful Italians; they rode beneath their city to see how close the subway was to completion. Afterward, at a party at Sherry’s, an unknown guest toasted McDonald: “We all want to thank you for giving us an opportunity to appreciate this great work,” he said. Parsons, who was close by, scoffed. Perfectionist to the end, for him it wasn’t done until it was done. “Pshaw!” he said. “There’s no citizen so poor that he cannot appreciate it much more comfortably a few months from now—for five cents.”

The subway’s arrival and continued expansion was inevitably going to take passengers away from New York’s other crowded transit systems, the elevated lines and the street railways. In one more sign of the times, the once-almighty Metropolitan Street Railway Company, which once controlled the streets of New York just as the West End Street Railway Company controlled the streets of Boston, dissolved with a debt of more than $20 million.

And what of its founder, a brigadier general’s youngest son, who grew up from a lonely and shy boy reading books by a Massachusetts river to a man who helped elect a president, rebuilt the United States navy, raised one of the most prominent American families in history, and ran a powerful street railway company? Until his final day, William Whitney kept secret how he had helped August Belmont receive the critical charter that cleared the way for Belmont to build and operate the New York City subway.

On January 28, 1904, a Thursday evening, Whitney joined his secretary, Thomas J. Regan, for a performance of
Parsifal
at the Metropolitan Opera. Whitney did not feel well, and, after leaving his box early, he disappeared into a private room, threw his silk hat on the floor, and collapsed on the couch. He did not know it, but his appendix was inflamed. After six days of fading in an out of consciousness at his home, with his children by his side and his older brother, Henry, rushing down from Boston, William Whitney died on February 4, so peacefully that his doctors did not even notice his heart had stopped beating.