A Century of Subways: Celebrating 100 Years of New York's Underground Railways
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A Century of Subways: Celebrating 100 Years of New York's Underground Railways
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Overview
On the afternoon of October 27, 1904, ordinary New Yorkers descended beneath the sidewalks for the first time to ride the electric-powered trains of the newly inaugurated Interborough Rapid Transit System. More than a century later, the subway has expanded greatly, weaving its way into the fabric of New York’s unique and diverse urban life.
In A Century of Subways, transit historian Brian J. Cudahy offers a fascinating tribute to New York’s storied and historic subway system, from its earliest beginnings and many architectural achievements, to the ways it helped shape today’s modern metropolis. Taking a fresh look at one of the marvels of the twentieth century, Cudahy creates a vivid sense of this extraordinary system and the myriad ways the city was transformed once New Yorkers started riding below the ground.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780823222957 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fordham University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/08/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 404 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
August Belmont and His Subway
THE SUBWAY that opened in the City of New York on the afternoon of Thursday, October 27, 1904, was of modest proportions when compared to the massive rail rapid-transit system that would be carrying New Yorkers on their appointed rounds a hundred years later, on Wednesday, October 27, 2004. In 2004, for example, there are important north-south trunk lines in Manhattan — four-track subways allowing both local and express service — under Eighth Avenue, Seventh Avenue, Broadway, Sixth Avenue, and Lexington Avenue. Add to this a modest but separate two-track north-south subway under portions of Sixth Avenue that is part of the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) system, three crosstown subways that intersect the north- south trunk lines while remaining separate from them, a difficult- to-describe loop line through the financial district in lower Manhattan, various feeder routes into the north-south trunk lines, and, finally, segments of a new two-track subway under Second Avenue on the East Side that was begun some decades ago, abandoned and left incomplete in the face of fiscal constraints, but stands on the verge of being activated again, and one has a sense of how popular the single line that opened in 1904 eventually became.
In October 1904, when service was inaugurated on New York's first subway, the route its trains followed was located entirely on Manhattan Island. In 2004, subways in New York serve four of the city's five boroughs, and there are no fewer than thirteen two-track crossings of the East River between Manhattan and Long Island and four separate crossings of the Harlem River linking Manhattan with the Bronx.
Because of this growth and development, contemporary accounts of the New York Subway understandably — and quite properly — focus on its totality and speak in terms of the overall system's three divisions, the IND, the BMT, and the IRT. There is, however, a discreet identity to something called the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, the corporate predecessor of today's IRT Division and the entity that inaugurated subway service in New York in 1904. The Interborough and the IRT deserve attention on their own terms.
CONTRACT ONE AND CONTRACT TWO
A quarter-century before New York inaugurated service on its first subway line in 1904, a quartet of north-south elevated railways was built to link business districts in Lower Manhattan with residential neighborhoods to the north. Constructed entirely with private capital, protected by franchise contracts authorized by state legislation enacted in 1875, and with trains powered by small steam locomotives, this first form of true rapid transit to serve New York City included lines over Second Avenue and Third Avenue on the East Side, Sixth Avenue in the center of Manhattan, and Ninth Avenue on the West Side. The Second Avenue and Sixth Avenue lines were part of an enterprise that was eventually known as the Metropolitan Elevated Railway Company, while the lines over Third and Ninth Avenues were managed jointly as the New York Elevated Railroad Company.
In 1879 — before the Metropolitan's Second Avenue Line had even been completed, in fact — the two elevated companies were merged into a single system called Manhattan Railways, and it was also at this time that financier Jay Gould entered the New York elevated picture, a man whose manipulation of railroad securities had triggered a full-blown financial panic in 1869. As described by historian David McCullough, in his acquisition of the Manhattan elevated lines Gould's plan was "to harass and intimidate the existing owners at every opportunity, drive the stock down below its true value, then begin buying." Under Gould — perhaps even despite him — the four Manhattan elevated lines became an important element of mass transport in New York City during the final quarter of the nineteenth century.
In 1891, Manhattan Railways added a third elevated company to its expanding empire: the Suburban Rapid Transit Company, whose route extended northward from the banks of the Harlem River into the central Bronx — or the "Annexed District," as it was often called in the 1890s. Suburban operated its first train in 1886 and provided connections at its southern end to both the Second Avenue and the Third Avenue lines. Once acquired by Manhattan Railways, Suburban became a northward extension for both Second Avenue and Third Avenue services.
The era that saw the emergence of elevated railways in New York was a time when memories of the Civil War were still vivid in America, and veterans of that awful conflict occupied important positions of trust in business and politics. Transatlantic steamships grew larger and faster year after year, and New York solidified its position as the nation's principal seaport for trade and commerce with Europe. To the west, in the nation's heartland, the mining of coal and the conversion of iron ore into finished steel had become major industries that helped sustain the national economy.
But if industrial growth was an important dynamic in shaping the final decades of the nineteenth century, so, too, was the ever- present possibility of political corruption. Tammany Hall, an organization within the Democratic Party of New York City, was particularly associated with such corruption, especially during the late 1860s when Tammany's leader was the notorious William Marcy ("Boss") Tweed.
Tweed saw the emerging elevated railways as an opportunity and took pains to thwart any rival ventures that might represent competition for the predecessors of Manhattan Railways. The Tweed era would end in the early 1870s, though. "Boss" Tweed was convicted in 1873 and died in prison in 1878, and Manhattan Railways was left to sink or swim without his assistance. The fact remains, however, that one cannot understand the culture of New York City during the age of the elevated railways without paying some attention to the unusual style of politics that was distinctive to the era. Politics and high finance aside, the elevated merger of 1878 was quite sensible, since the two predecessor companies never operated in total independence from each other. All four lines used the same South Ferry terminal at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, for instance, and the Metropolitan's Sixth Avenue Line operated over Ninth Avenue trackage north of 53rd Street. Following the merger in 1878, sections were completed of the various elevated lines that had been authorized but not yet constructed.
Elevated railway service proved popular with New York passengers. In 1881, Manhattan Railways carried 75.6 million riders. A decade later, in 1891, this had grown to 196.7 million. And while the elevated lines clearly represented a major advance in both speed and comfort over surface-running streetcars, the merger of the elevated companies in 1879 did not produce a sound and stable system that could accommodate future patronage growth. A 1900 report in the journal Municipal Affairs claimed that in addition to uncertainties associated with Gould's questionable financial maneuverings, the elevated lines soon became inadequate as providers of needed mass-transport services, noting that for "a number of years following its construction, the elevated railroad seemed to deal satisfactorily with the question of rapid transit. The population, however, kept growing beyond these facilities." So just as elevated railways emerged when streetcars proved inadequate for New York's transportation needs, when the capacity of the elevated system was reached, what began to be heard in New York was a "strong demand for an underground road by which passengers could be transported from the Battery to Harlem in fifteen minutes."
Abram S. Hewitt was born in Haverstraw, New York, in 1822, and after graduating from Columbia College sought his fortune in America's rapidly expanding iron and steel industry. This background made him especially useful during the Civil War, and he was dispatched to Britain to help secure weapons for the Union Army from foundries there. After the war, Hewitt turned his attention to public life and as a reform member of New York's Democratic Party fought the abuses of the Tweed ring and Tammany Hall. After serving five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, in 1886 Hewitt unexpectedly bested Republican Theodore Roosevelt and was elected mayor of New York City, a post he held for a single two-year term from 1887 through 1889.
On January 31, 1888, midway through his term, Mayor Hewitt delivered a message to the city's Board of Aldermen outlining needed municipal improvements in a variety of transportation areas — the harbor and docks, the streets, but most important, rapid transit. "The time has come when the growth of the city is seriously retarded by the want of proper means of access to and from the upper and lower portions of the city," the mayor wrote. Unless a proper system of rapid transit is constructed, "the population which ought to increase at the upper end of the city will be driven to Long Island and New-Jersey."
The mass-transit system that Hewitt proposed would include both subway and elevated segments, and given the fact that electric traction was then in its infancy, the mayor was open to the new system's being powered by either electricity or steam locomotives, while day-to-day operation of the new railway would be handled under contract by a private company. In fact, Hewitt believed that the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad was the obvious choice in this regard. But building the infrastructure itself, Hewitt argued, should be a public-sector responsibility. "[I]t will be proper for the city itself to undertake to make the provision, because the citizens as a body will thus get the benefit of the increase in the value of properties which these facilities will create."
This was a new and very different public policy option — municipal construction of needed rapid-transit facilities. The New York Times gave the mayor's proposal strong editorial endorsement, and while the paper quibbled over some specifics of the routes Hewitt had suggested, the "essential feature of the Mayor's plan ... which provides for the construction of the new rapid-transit system at the expense of the city itself," was something the Times welcomed, since it could well serve to keep the project "free from waste or extravagance for private profit."
Hewitt had been associated with a civic association that advocated municipal construction of an underground urban railway for New York as early as the 1870s, so the idea itself was not new. But it achieved an important new level of maturity when it became a formal recommendation of the city's chief executive officer in January 1888.
The decade and a half following Hewitt's message, when the New York Subway progressed from conceptual proposal to concrete-and-steel actuality, was one of extraordinarily fundamental political change and realignment in metropolitan New York. In addition, it was an interval when the mass-transport industry would experience the most important and profound technological advances in its entire history. A mere two days after Mayor Hewitt delivered his message to the Board of Aldermen on January 31, 1888, 335 miles south of New York City, in Richmond, Virginia, a one-time naval officer by the name of Frank Sprague completed work on the electrification of the Union Passenger Railway there, an achievement widely regarded as the first truly successful deployment of electric traction as the source of power for any kind of commercial railway service. Between them, Hewitt's call for municipal construction of mass-transport facilities and Sprague's "subjugation of the subtle and hitherto illusive force of electricity" for mass-transport purposes were both necessary preconditions for what would happen in New York on October 27, 1904.
That subway proponents in New York were able to marshal the political, the financial, and the technical consensus that their project necessarily required precisely at a time when basic frames of reference in all three areas were anything but stable is further testament to the extraordinary achievement the 1904 subway truly was. Consider, for example, the fact that January 1, 1898, was the culmination of the single most profound political shift that New York had ever seen — and likely ever will see. In a lengthy effort that was motivated, at least in substantial part, by a desire to dilute the often-corrupt influence that Tammany Hall exercised on New York City politics, this date saw the amalgamation of the five- borough City of New York out of a variety of formerly independent cities and towns. Prior to January 1, 1898, New York City included only Manhattan and the Bronx. From that day on, the City of New York has been a five-borough colossus that also includes Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. And yet the newly amalgamated city executed the first contract for subway construction less than two years after it had been formerly established, and the various commissions and boards out of whose work the technical specifications for the subway emerged were conducting their deliberations at the very same time that municipal amalgamation was also under active deliberation and debate.
It is entirely plausible, of course, that subway proponents in New York welcomed the diversion that amalgamation provided, and had overall political matters been more stable in the years leading up to 1904, the business of seeing the subway through to completion and developing its specifications might have been subject to hopeless compromise from political quarters that were more than preoccupied by the business of amalgamation. Such a possibility aside, though, a strong measure of admiration is in order for advocates in New York who were able to forge a decision to build a subway and proceed with its construction at the very same time when fundamental political realignment of unprecedented dimensions was also under way.
The era defined by Hewitt's message to the Board of Aldermen in January 1888 and the opening of the city's first subway in October 1904 was no less tumultuous in national and world affairs. In politics, Grover Cleveland would be elected to the only nonconsecutive second term in presidential history in 1892, while in 1901 William McKinley became the third U.S. president to suffer the terrible fate of assassination. In February 1898, the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor, and before the year was over the United States had declared war on Spain. Germany, Austria-Hungry, and Italy created the Triple Alliance in 1902, sowing the seeds of world conflict in years to come, and the eventual dissolution of the mighty British Empire was foreshadowed when separate colonies in Australia were united into a self-governing commonwealth in 1901.
It was also an interval that saw Henry Ford perfect assembly- line production of automobiles in 1903, the same year that two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, traveled to Kitty Hawk on North Carolina's Outer Banks and confidently left the face of the earth in a vehicle that was heavier than the air through which it flew. Back in New York City, in 1902 architect Daniel H. Burnham's Flatiron Building was constructed on a triangular piece of land at the three- way intersection of Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 23rd Street. On June 16, 1904, mere months before the new subway opened for business, the excursion steamboat General Slocum was heading up the East River with a church group from the Lower East Side. The vessel caught fire, flames quickly engulfed its wooden superstructure, and 1,029 souls lost their lives in a disaster whose horror would not be eclipsed in New York until September 11, 2001. As for the man Abram S. Hewitt defeated in 1886 to become mayor, on the day subway service was inaugurated in New York in 1904, former mayoral candidate Theodore Roosevelt was serving as the twenty-sixth president of the United States. Indeed, October 27, 1904, the day the subway opened, was President Roosevelt's forty-sixth birthday.
Amid all this change and upheaval, a number of benchmarks can be identified that helped define a path from Mayor Hewitt's 1888 message to the inauguration of subway service in 1904. They include the following:
• In April 1890, Hewitt's successor as mayor of New York City, Hugh J. Grant, appointed a five-member commission to prepare preliminary recommendations for the city's rapid- transit needs. The chair of this ad hoc commission was an immigrant banker by the name of August Belmont, and under his leadership a recommendation was sent to the mayor in July of 1890 calling for the construction of a four-track underground railway from lower Manhattan to the Bronx.
• Next the mayor appointed a new and different commission to carry the matter forward. Presided over by William Steinway and popularly known as the Steinway Commission, it drew up more detailed transit plans, which were approved by the Board of Aldermen in 1891.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Introduction,
Stonehenge via Subway,
1. August Belmont and His Subway,
2. Change at Park Street Under,
3. The World's First Subway,
4. New York's Electrified Railroads,
5. The Legacy of the IRT,
Appendix,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,