The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (50 page)

On March 21, 2013, a present-day sandhog nearly met the same fate as Timothy Sullivan, one of the earliest sandhogs, the worker killed in the Washington Heights explosion in 1903. It was his son, Sammy, who watched as his body was carried out of the tunnel. More than a century later, Joseph Barone, a fifty-one-year-old sandhog from Lyndhurst, New Jersey, slipped while walking through a tunnel near Ninety-fifth Street and found himself pinned, waist deep, beneath plywood and amid freezing water and mud one hundred feet below the streets. One rescue worker described the predicament as “a hell hole.” It took a pulley system, a backhoe, and a powerful griphoist machine, not to mention the muscles and determination of dozens of firefighters, to finally dig out Barone, who had hypothermia but suffered only minor injuries. “Everybody did what they had to do to get me out,” Barone told his rescuers a month later. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here—you’d be talking to a box.” His words were a reminder of the dangers of tunnel digging, but the fact that he was alive to thank his rescuers was also a reminder of how far man had come since the earliest subway tunnels were built.

When it’s completed, the Second Avenue subway will be a fitting tribute to the founder of Parsons Brinckerhoff, who would have appreciated the challenge it presented. William Parsons, as much a writer as an engineer throughout his life, was at work on a book about engineering during the Renaissance when he died on May 9, 1932, after surgery following a pulmonary embolism at the age of seventy-three.

As the people of San Francisco, Washington, Miami, Atlanta, Chicago, Baltimore, Jersey City, Cleveland, and Philadelphia would discover in the coming century, only the subway could successfully relieve their overcrowding. Even Los Angeles, a city where people live as much in their cars as their homes, is embracing the underground train, building a line that will connect downtown with the Pacific Ocean in a project being called the “Subway to the Sea.” Subway ridership nationwide reached record levels in 2012, and New York and Boston were no exceptions. In New York, 1.7 billion trips were taken on the subway, the highest total in sixty-two years, while Boston recorded more than 400 million rides, the first time that milestone has been broken.

*   *   *

WHEN ALFRED BEACH PROPOSED TUNNELING
under Broadway in 1849, the public reacted as if he had suggested that man should one day fly to the moon. Preposterous! And he was laughed right back to his job at
Scientific American
. Then, twenty years later, he blew a train down a track inside of a glittering tunnel, and the public gasped in disbelief. All Beach had done was to use the power of suggestion to push mankind to imagine the possibilities of technology, to think big, not small, to always ask, Why not? instead of merely, Why?

A century after Beach’s dream died, an article appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
under the headline
L.A. TO N.Y. IN HALF AN HOUR
? The article in 1972 went on to describe the acclaimed RAND Corporation physicist Robert M. Salter’s dream of digging a tunnel along the routes of U.S. highways that crossed the country. Tubes inside the tunnel would carry trains that floated on electromagnetic fields—at top speeds of ten thousand miles per hour. The cars would float on the fields just as a surfboard rides on the ocean’s waves. There would be no motors on the train and no tracks. No friction at all. In the cases he studied, Salter, who died in 2011, suggested that in the ideal scenario, the trip from coast to coast could be achieved in twenty-one minutes. “Safe, convenient, low-cost, efficient, and non-polluting service is offered,” Salter said in one of the many talks he delivered on his idea. “With short transit times, it is possible for a businessman in New York to travel to Los Angeles during his lunch hour and hold an afternoon/morning meeting and return at his regular quitting time.”

Laughable? Of course. But Salter was no crackpot. He started out as an intern at General Motors and rose up to work for the military on antiballistic missile technology. He was, like Alfred Beach, a dreamer. And he was a student of history, who noted how tunneling under the English Channel was proposed during the era of Napoleon, only to be delayed for centuries, and how Henry Ford developed the automobile long before the government decided roads and highways were a worthy investment. Salter said that the obstacles to something as ambitious as a “vactrain,” as it has come to be called for its use of vacuumlike technology, are not technological. They are political. And, in fact, engineers at the National Power Traction Laboratory in China are said to be working on a vactrain that could travel at unheard-of speeds of one thousand kilometers per hour. “The U.S. has the greatest industrial and technical basis in world history,” Salter once said. “We proved that we could perform the prodigious feat of putting man on the moon. It would be useful to employ a small fraction of that capability to explore our future options in travel on this planet.”

A cross-country supersonic subway with no motors and no tracks, powered only by electromagnetic charges? Why not, indeed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It was about halfway through the writing of this book when my family traveled to New York City for a summer weekend getaway. Most of my nights and weekends at that point were consumed by subway research, and, kids being kids, my two never came to understand why I couldn’t just come outside and throw a ball around. “Do you have to work this weekend?” was a question that became painful for me to hear. Sometimes five-year-old Julia would tiptoe quietly into my office and squeeze my arm, or three-year-old Ben would come in with his favorite truck and fall asleep on the couch just so he could be with me. So this weekend away was special, and when we ventured down the steps in my old neighborhood, the Upper West Side, to the Seventy-ninth Street station, I could feel their excitement. As my wife and I sat and waited for the downtown number 1 train to pull in, Ben and Julia alternated between sitting with us and running up to the yellow line and peering down the tracks. Back and forth, back and forth they went. I finally snapped a picture of the two of them leaning out, and when I look at it today, their heads turned sideways, their wide eyes staring into the dark tunnel, I can’t help thinking that the anticipation they were feeling must have been something like what the first passengers in Boston and New York were feeling on the day their subways opened.

When you spend the better part of five years on a single project, there will inevitably be a lot of people who, somewhere along the way, played a part in helping you get through it. For me, that list begins at home. My wife, Mimi Braude, not only allowed me to tackle this mountain, she embraced it eagerly with me, even though she knew it would mean a greater burden on her, from weekends alone with the kids to vacations without me to greater stress in her own job as a wonderful therapist. There were many nights when I would come home after a long day at work and find a warm dinner and hug waiting for me, even though she knew that twenty minutes later I’d be upstairs writing in the office. When the idea for this book was born, we had one child and one car, were living in a third-floor Jamaica Plain condo, and my office was a rickety Ikea desk crammed inside of a tiny, lint-filled laundry room with wet gym clothes hanging over me. A lot has changed since then. But what never changed was my wife’s endless supply of support. Not a day goes by that I am not grateful for our chance encounter at a Boston Speed Dating event.

Working in journalism, as I have for my entire career, you come across writers and editors who inspire you to do more and to do better at each stop in the journey. This book began for me at
The Boston Globe
under one such editor, Marty Baron, who left to be the executive editor of
The Washington Post,
and it was finished under another, Brian McGrory, who took the helm of
The Globe
at an especially challenging time. They are different editors, but they share a passion for narrative storytelling and thorough reporting. I couldn’t ask for two better role models in my career. My long friendships and working relationships with Neil Swidey, Susanne Althoff, Anne Nelson and Scott Helman at the
Boston Globe Magazine
and with Hayley Kaufman, Rebecca Ostriker, Janice Page, Anne Fitzgerald, and Sheryl Julian in the Living/Arts team mean a great deal to me. Lisa Tuite, Wanda Joseph-Rollins, and Jeremiah Manion in the
Globe
library are some of the friendliest and most helpful people I’ve ever encountered at the paper, and when there was a hundred-year-old photo or story that I needed, they inevitably knew where to find it. Joe Sullivan and Dan Shaughnessy are the big dogs in
The Globe
’s unrivaled sports department, whose wisdom and camaraderie make working at the paper fun. Bennie DiNardo is a friend and colleague. His New Hampshire home during one dark and cold winter week provided me six of my most productive days of writing, even if the loose shutter slamming into the side of the house made me feel like I was living out a Stephen King novel.

Writers lean on other writers in times of frustration or simply when it’s 2:00
A.M
. and the eyes are blurry and Facebook or Twitter beckon. Seth Mnookin, Keith O’Brien, Jon Marcus, and Paul Rogers all received more than the occasional late-night note from me, and they were always quick to reply with words of encouragement or to read a passage. Jon Chesto, a Boston business journalist and friend, loaned me his Cape Cod cottage for a week of solitude, a generous gesture I won’t forget. John Gates and the entire team at Elevate Communications helped build my Web site and are as tapped into the Boston media scene as any group. My in-laws, Eric and Judy Braude, helped out in so many ways, from babysitting duties when a night at the movies was in order to words of encouragement to an old tunnel book that proved incredibly useful.

As you get older in life you come to appreciate your closest friends. Dan O’Neill, his wife, Carina, and their two children are like family to us. My jogs with Dan were about so much more than desperately trying to stay in shape during the writing of this book. They were my release valve, a place for me to bounce ideas off him, but also to talk about anything other than subways. He never tired of hearing one more story about Henry Whitney or William Parsons or the dangers of tunnel building, and the value of a friend like that cannot be overstated.

As invaluable as the Internet was in my research, there were plenty of documents not available online that sent me into research facilities throughout Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. The cavernous reading rooms at the Boston Public Library and New York Public Library are two of the most architecturally beautiful spaces in the world, and they also happen to be incredibly conducive to hammering away at a keyboard. The Massachusetts Historical Society, Bostonian Society, Library of Congress, and the libraries at Columbia University, Tufts University, Harvard College, and Cooper Union all provided useful materials. Lynn Matis at the Massachusetts Transportation Library saw me so many times she set aside a separate shelf for my things. Researchers at Parsons Brinckerhoff dug up some wonderful photos, as did Carey Stumm at the New York Transit Museum.

Several living ancestors of Henry Whitney, especially Lee Sylvester and Laura Marshall, shared invaluable photos and letters, as did Frank Sprague’s grandson, John Sprague. An interview I did with ninety-four-year-old Lydia Lyman Whitney, who described her grandfather Henry as “deaf as a post,” but a man with “a great sense of humor” and who was “good with people,” confirmed everything I’d read about him.

My literary agent, Lane Zachary, at Zachary Shuster Harmsworth, sat with me for many lunches as we brainstormed ideas until we hit upon one that seemed just right, and then was a constant source of encouragement and wisdom. And by landing with St. Martin’s Press, I was fortunate to work with an editor, Michael Flamini, whose sense of humor and broad vision helped improve this book in so many ways. Everybody at St. Martin’s was incredibly encouraging, and on those nights when the clock ticked past midnight, their enthusiasm for this project kept me going.

Finally, I have to thank my older brother Jordan Most and my parents, Al and Paula Most, for so much support and encouragement. While writing this book, my wife and I moved our clan from the city to the suburbs, and during the packing I stumbled upon an old envelope filled with clippings from my childhood that my mother had saved. There were silly drawings of my brother and me, and there was a term paper I’d written on “Moby Dick” that my father had bled red ink all over to help me become a better writer. Sitting with my father and brother as a young boy on our couch in Barrington, Rhode Island, devouring box scores and reading the sports columnists in
The New York Times
, feels like a long time ago, but it also feels like yesterday.

Doug Most

September 2013

AUTHOR’S NOTE

One day while researching for this book, I was sitting in a back room at the New York Public Library with cardboard boxes in front of me, the private papers of Frank Sprague. As I opened up one envelope after another and gently fingered two particularly crinkled, yellowed letters from 1884, it was difficult to not pause and appreciate how we got where we are today. One of the letters was from Sprague to another inventor of his day, Thomas Edison, explaining why he was resigning from Edison’s engineering firm. The second letter was from Edison back to Sprague, accepting the resignation. The electric subway that took me to the library and the soft light that filled the room were the achievements of these two titans, and here I was holding their original words in my hands.

The number of pages that have been devoted to the Boston subway compared with the number devoted to the New York subway is about as different as the subways themselves. The New York subway system has been the subject of dozens of books; the most authoritative is Clifton Hood’s
722 Miles,
and one of the most entertaining is Benson Bobrick’s
Labyrinths of Iron,
which covers the New York subway in two captivating chapters.
The City Beneath Us,
from the New York Transit Museum, has some wonderful anecdotes, and the photographs tell a story all by themselves. Of course, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historical tome
Gotham
devotes various sections to the subway’s development, and every page provides an invaluable nugget.