Subway

1

Horse-Drawn Gridlock and Dreams of a Subway

Corruption and technical obstacles delayed better transit for decades.

In the late 1880s, New York’s congested streets were perilous for both pedestrians and carriage passengers.

When the Civil War ended in 1865, New York was America’s largest city, with roughly 900,000 residents jammed into the lower parts of Manhattan. Its streets were clogged. Large urban stagecoaches, known as omnibuses, and horse-drawn streetcars on rails ran bumper-to-bumper at peak times, making it dangerous for pedestrians to cross the street. By the 1850s, an omnibus passed the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street every 15 seconds in each direction for 13 hours, according to someone who kept count.

By 1880, there were almost 12,000 horses hauling 1,500 omnibuses and streetcars. That brought another hazard: manure. Large draft animals deposited 30 to 50 pounds of fecal material a day. A small industry was devoted just to scooping it up for fertilizer.

Everyone agreed that some form of “rapid transit” was needed, some alternative to the gridlock at street level. The options were elevated lines over the streets or underground lines beneath them. Both posed technical challenges, but vested interests and the city’s monumental corruption were the biggest impediments.

The main engineering challenge was propulsion, particularly for underground lines. Electric motors weren’t powerful enough to pull long trains until the very end of the 19th century, and the steam and smoke from conventional locomotives would build up in long tunnels, making the air unfit to breathe.

The political barrier was Tammany Hall, the club that controlled the local Democratic Party machine and, through it, city government. William “Boss” Tweed, who dominated Tammany Hall from the late 1850s through the early 1870s, was an investor in horse-drawn street railways—forerunners of electric trolleys—and he spearheaded plans for a massive rail viaduct along the east side of Manhattan. Naturally, he opposed any project that could mean competition. Since Tweed was, at various times, a congressman, member of the city’s Board of Supervisors, commissioner of public works, schools commissioner, and a state senator, he had many levers to use against rivals.

As early as 1863, Hugh B. Willson, a railway engineer from Michigan, proposed a subway line up Broadway, after visiting London, where a partly underground rail line had opened that year. Willson arranged $5 million in financing but was blocked by Tweed and his allies in the legislature. Similarly, when Charles Harvey built a cable-drawn elevated line from the Battery to 30th Street in the late 1860s, Tweed sponsored a bill in the legislature to dismantle it. Tweed even laid plans to have a mob attack Harvey’s structure. (Harvey’s line was eventually extended up Ninth Avenue.)

William “Boss” Tweed had stakes in streetcar lines and opposed new forms of transit.

One visionary, Alfred Ely Beach, succeeded in building a short underground line in 1869, but he had to resort to trickery to get around Tammany. Beach told the city his pneumatic tunnel under Broadway would transport only mail. When it opened in 1870, he revealed that it was actually built to carry people (see Other Means of Transport, here).

When Tweed was jailed in 1873 for embezzling tens of millions of public dollars, Tammany Hall was put on the defensive and things looked up for new forms of transit. An 1875 state law allowed cities to grant franchises for elevated rail lines. That set off a construction boom and, by 1880, els, as they were known, ran up Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Avenues from the southern tip of Manhattan to Harlem and into the Bronx, all hauled by small steam engines. Across the East River in Brooklyn, in the late 1880s, el tracks began radiating out from the Brooklyn Bridge and the ferry landings.

The els were far faster than the horse-drawn streetcars, but it still took close to an hour and a half to cover the 10 miles from Wall Street to 155th Street on the Ninth Avenue line.

Moreover, the elevated lines were deeply unpopular. Their locomotives belched smoke and cinders, startled horses, and dripped lubricants on pedestrians. The trains rumbled, clattered, and hissed outside apartment windows, and the streets below were kept in perpetual shadow. One visitor called them “a permanent disfigurement” and “aerial nuisances.”

The els didn’t solve the congestion, either, because the city grew faster than the capacity of the trains (see chapter 10). By the 1880s, business leaders worried that New York would choke on its traffic, and commerce would be diverted to rival ports such as Boston and Philadelphia.

The epic corruption of Tweed and the so-called Tammany Ring was fodder for the political caricaturist Thomas Nast.

Social reformers, too, were persistent advocates for better transit. They saw it as the solution to Manhattan’s crowded, unsanitary slums. For them, the subway marked “the emancipation of the larger part of the city’s population from excessively cramped and uncomfortable manner of living,” allowing them “to reach comparatively cheap land in half an hour.”

Dreams of a subway thus persisted. Sixteen companies obtained charters to build underground lines between 1864 and 1902. The turning point came in 1888 when Abram Hewitt, a Democratic mayor, put forward a detailed proposal. He envisioned underground trains traveling at a nearly unthinkable 45 miles an hour from City Hall to Grand Central Terminal, across 42nd Street, and then up Broadway—essentially the route chosen a decade later. While the street railroads and els had been built entirely with private money, under Hewitt’s plan, the city would pay part of the cost of a subway.

It was a bold plan, but Hewitt couldn’t get it adopted. Though he had been elected with support from Tammany Hall, he was a Protestant, anti-immigrant businessman who was soon on the outs with the predominantly Catholic, heavily Irish, Tammany wing of the party, which relied on immigrant support. It didn’t help that Hewitt skipped a St. Patrick’s Day parade, refused to indulge in patronage politics, strictly enforced tavern closing hours, and shut down brothels. Meanwhile, businessmen who generally supported Hewitt feared that, if the city constructed the subway, it would be an open invitation to graft. Hewitt’s proposal died in the city council, and he lost his bid for reelection the same year.

Hewitt’s vision lived on, however. A reconstituted Board of Rapid Transit Commissioners, formed in 1891, drew up a plan for a privately financed subway and put it out for bids from contractors. It received just one offer, a $1,000 bid that was not deemed serious. It wasn’t until 1894 that the pieces began to fall into place. That year the city’s Chamber of Commerce allied with Republicans in Albany to form a new board independent of city politicians. Six of the eight commissioners would come from the Chamber itself—the law specified five members by name—and the commissioners were appointed for life with the power to name their successors. They were, in effect, accountable to no one. The bill’s proponents “thought responsibility for a subway should be entrusted to a special breed of honest, upright, farsighted men—namely, themselves,” in the words of historian Clifton Hood.

Mayor Abram Hewitt’s 1888 proposal for a publicly funded subway that could run at up to 45 mph went nowhere while he was in office, but it was the basis for the first line when it was built in 1900–1904.

The Chamber succeeded in its end run around the city’s politicians, and electric motors had advanced enough by 1894 that it was now viable to use electricity instead of steam power, so the Board moved forward. Various routes were contemplated, including Hewitt’s and an alternative scheme where two lines would branch north of Union Square, one continuing up Broadway to the West Side and another heading up Madison Avenue, Park Avenue (then Fourth Avenue), or Lexington Avenue to the East Side.

An antique postcard shows the maze of crisscrossing and double-decked el lines that blanketed Chatham Square. There hasn’t been any rapid transit here since the Second and Third Avenue elevated lines were demolished. The Second Avenue subway is slated to run through the intersection eventually.

The financiers behind the street railway and elevated line companies, which were threatened by a subway, didn’t give up without a fight, however. They delayed matters by making vague offers to extend their lines, forcing the Board to postpone a final decision about the subway route. The “fine, high-minded, soft-hearted old gentlemen” on the Board were no match for “the impossibly alert young fellows of Wall Street, with their unlimited money, with their control of the political machines, with the best legal brains at their disposal,” journalist Ray Stannard Baker wrote in 1905, explaining the years of delay.

In addition, property owners sued to block the project. State law required the Board to obtain the consent of at least half of the adjacent property owners. If it couldn’t, it had to go to court for approval. Those with buildings along the proposed route feared the digging would undermine foundations and disrupt business. (The “not in my backyard” concept is not new.) Uptown, where speculators had snapped up large swaths of undeveloped land along the route, owners objected to plans to run the trains on elevated tracks along Broadway north of 92nd Street to save money. The speculators pleaded (successfully) for it to be submerged.

Finally, in 1898, the last suits were settled, and the Board got down to the nitty-gritty financial and engineering details. A protracted financial crisis in the mid-1890s had persuaded even the business community that public money would be needed, and a scheme was devised to use a combination of public and private capital and a private contractor and operator. The city would borrow money to pay for the construction, and it would put the job out for bids. To entice offers, the winner would get to operate the subway and collect the profits under a 50-year lease, with the option for a 25-year renewal. It would pay for the cars and other equipment and pay a yearly sum to the city to cover what the city paid in interest on the construction bonds.

This approach reflected the long shadow that Boss Tweed cast more than 20 years after he died in the Ludlow Street Jail. By employing a private company to do the work at a fixed price, the reformers and the Board hoped to prevent municipal officials from skimming money and doling out contracts to political supporters. And since the company would operate the line for decades, it would have an incentive to see that the job was done right.

In January 1900, John B. McDonald was awarded the contract after making the low bid, $35 million. The Irish immigrant had compiled an impressive track record building difficult train tunnels. He was a subcontractor on the 4.75-mile Hoosac Tunnel in western Massachusetts, the second longest in the world when it opened in 1875, and he had constructed a technically challenging electrified rail tunnel under Downtown Baltimore in the 1890s.

But the city required the winning bidder to post $7 million in deposits and surety bonds—money McDonald did not have. So he teamed up with August Belmont Jr., a powerful Wall Street banker, who provided the capital. In exchange, McDonald handed over to Belmont the right to operate the subway when it was completed. Conveniently, McDonald had ties to Tammany Hall, and Belmont was a major player in the establishment wing of the Democratic Party.

It had been 37 years since Hugh Willson first proposed a subway for New York. By the time work began in New York, London had been operating a fully underground electric line for 10 years, and Paris was poised to debut its Metro. When New York’s subway finally opened in October 1904, electric underground railroads were also running in Boston, Berlin, and Budapest.