-
A Century and a Half of SubwaysAwake!—1997 | March 22
-
-
THE tunnel diggers gazed in disbelief at what they had uncovered. The year was 1912. Deep beneath the streets of New York City, while excavating an extension of the newly built subway, they had broken into a large hidden chamber. The room was magnificently furnished—like a palace! Along its length were mirrors, chandeliers, and frescoes. Wood paneling, crumbling with age, still adorned the walls. In the middle of the room stood a decorative fountain, its bubbling long silent.
The room led to a tunnel. To the workers’ astonishment, there sat a graciously decorated 22-passenger subway car on its rails. Had there been another subway under New York before the one they were digging? Who could have built this place?
-
-
A Century and a Half of SubwaysAwake!—1997 | March 22
-
-
New York’s First Subway
Across the Atlantic from London, another talented inventor, Alfred Ely Beach, puzzled over the equally dire traffic situation in New York. As the publisher of the journal Scientific American, Beach was a promoter of modern solutions to old problems, such as clogged streets. In 1849 he offered a radical plan: “Tunnel Broadway,” one of the most congested streets, “with openings and stairways at every corner. This subterranean passage is to be laid down with double track, with a road for foot passengers on either side.”
During the following two decades, other transportation developers also presented rapid-transit proposals for New York. All of these were ultimately voted down. Corrupt political strongman Boss Tweed did not want any competition with surface transportation companies, the source of much of his illegal income. But the resourceful Mr. Beach, who had never abandoned his idea, outwitted the boisterous Boss.
Beach obtained a legal franchise to construct a pair of adjacent tunnels, too small for transporting passengers, under Broadway. These were to serve “for the transmission of letters, packages and merchandise” to the main post office. He then applied for an amendment allowing him to build just one large tunnel, purportedly to save expense. Somehow his ruse went unnoticed, and the amendment was approved. Beach went to work immediately but out of sight. He dug from the basement of a clothing store, removing the dirt by night with wagons having wheels muffled for silence. In just 58 nights, the 312-foot [95 m] tunnel was finished.
A “Rope of Air”
Beach was very conscious of the gagging pollution in the London subways, a result of using coal-burning steam engines. He impelled his car with a “rope of air”—the pressure from a huge fan built into an alcove on one end of the tunnel. The air gently pushed the car along at six miles [10 km] per hour, though it could have gone ten times faster. When the car reached the other end of the line, the fan was reversed to suck the car back! To overcome people’s lingering hesitancy to venture underground, Beach made sure that the spacious waiting room was abundantly illuminated with zircon lamps, among the brightest and clearest then available. And he furnished it lavishly with plush chairs, statues, curtained false windows, and even a grand piano and a goldfish tank! The little line was opened to an unsuspecting public in February 1870 and was an immediate, stunning success. In one year, 400,000 people visited the subway.
Boss Tweed was furious! Political maneuvering ensued, and Tweed persuaded the governor to approve an opposing plan for an elevated train costing 16 times as much as the pneumatic underground system proposed by Beach. Shortly thereafter, Tweed was indicted, leading to his imprisonment for life. But a stock-market panic in 1873 turned the attention of investors and officials away from subways, and Beach finally sealed up the tunnel. So it rested in oblivion until it was accidentally unearthed in 1912, more than seven years after the opening of New York’s present subway in 1904. A portion of Beach’s original tunnel later became part of the present City Hall Station, in downtown Manhattan.
-