Under the Planks

Groundbreaking and the Pneumatic Ghost

Eli: March 24th, 1900, outside City Hall in Manhattan. The mayor turns the first shovel of earth for a subway. The New York Times called the crowd immense, unruly and 'eager for souvenirs.' The man answerable for everything after that shovel was William Barclay Parsons, chief engineer of the Rapid Transit Commission since 1894, hired to plan and supervise the city's first subway line. He'd already built a railroad in China.

Mara: And the listener's question is a plain one: how did New York dig its first subway, and what was it like riding it on opening day in 1904? Today's angle is from street trench disruption to vaulted underground speed.

Eli: The city Parsons was digging under ran on ferries, elevated trains and horse-drawn streetcars, and they could no longer carry Manhattan's population. One passenger groused that 'Modern martyrdom may be succintly defined as riding in a New York omnibus.' Parsons's bet was a shallow trench under those very streets, with the traffic still running on top and nobody yet sure what the ground beneath would do.

Mara: He wasn't the first to go under Broadway, though. In 1870 a publisher built a pneumatic railway there. A hundred-horsepower steam engine drove a gigantic blower. The New York Times described it this way: a massive fan forces air into the tunnel to push the car along, and reversing the current makes a vacuum that pulls it back. One round car, upholstered seats for 18 people.

Eli: So the train rides on a breath. Blow it out, suck it home.

Mara: Exactly: air pressure doing the pushing and the pulling. Fine for one car in one short tube.

Eli: Parsons needed trains for a whole city, not one car on a puff of air, and how that got paid for is Mara's end of it.

Parsons's Ditch and the Timber Roadways

Mara: That air tube went nowhere. It was blocked by politics and too small to grow. Parsons's line needed real money. In January 1900 the city's board awarded the construction contract to one contractor. A financier backed the work and organized the company that would run the trains, later named the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. The city supplied credit; the company carried the risk of running it. On opening day that financier called it 'the true solution of this problem,' with municipal participation 'justified to the extent of furnishing credit.'

Eli: City credit, company profits. Tidy, as long as people ride. And the push to go under had a date: March 1888. A blizzard piled snow twenty feet high in the streets. Horse-drawn streetcars and omnibuses lay abandoned. The elevated trains stalled too, and the whole city was paralyzed.

Mara: Which made the case for a railway below the drifts. Parsons had weighed boring through the sand under Broadway back in 1891. He wrote that 'the cost of doing so would be very excessive, and the risks run very great.' The sand there, he said, was 'approaching, if it is not actually, a quicksand.' So he went shallow, with cut-and-cover: dig an open trench down from the street, build the tunnel inside it, roof it over, give the street back. Temporary wooden decking covered the trenches so traffic could keep moving above.

Eli: Traffic rolling on planks over a hole. Up at street level, Martin Gehringer and John Jacob Astor the Third hold the other reading: the trenching itself was the damage. Entire city blocks were ripped up. Stores were temporarily put out of business. Horse omnibus lines were rerouted. Pedestrians and animals fell into the trenches. Critics gave the whole thing a name: 'Parsons's ditch.'

Mara: So one trench, two readings. For Parsons, the cheaper, safer way past quicksand. For those critics, a ditch that swallowed storefronts. And underneath Parsons's ditch, the hardest digging was still to come, done mostly by hand.

Bedrock, Quicksand, and Human Hands

Eli: Down in that trench, the work was people. Italian and German immigrants, Irish Americans and African Americans dug and built the system virtually by hand. At Canal Street they pushed through quicksand where an old lake once stood. Near City Hall they burrowed under the foundations of the old Times Building and cut straight through Post Office vaults.

Mara: And they hauled out about three and a half million cubic yards doing it.

Eli: Uptown, it got harder. Up there Manhattan schist, the island's hard bedrock, sits close to the surface. Cut-and-cover didn't work on it. So laborers had to blast and tunnel their way through the rock instead.

Mara: And the same crews went to work under a roof of blasted stone.

The Price in the Dark and the Tiled Light

Eli: October 24th, 1903, near the Fort George tunnel. A blast has just gone off, and the laborers move in. Their foreman thinks the schist looks stable. He shouts, 'Come on boys, let's get to work.' Shortly after, a boulder drops from the roof. It weighs about three hundred tons. Six men are killed instantly. Eight more are seriously hurt. Some accounts put the dead as high as ten.

Mara: The same uptown schist, looking stable right up until it fell.

Eli: Midtown had its own collapse. On March 21st the tunnel caved in under the east side of Park Avenue, between 37th and 38th Streets. The houses on that block were so badly damaged that the financier behind the company later bought almost all of the property, for about a million dollars.

Mara: Three years past the shovel, nobody yet knows if Parsons's tunnel can carry a city.

Eli: Then, New Year's Day, 1904. The mayor, a different man now from the one with the shovel, rides the tunnel from City Hall to Manhattan Street in Harlem, with the contractor, Parsons and city officials. They sit on three flat cars, towed by handcars worked by Italian laborers. One of them, speaking for all, refuses to stop: they have no coats, and stopping means catching cold. They bend to the handles and work like beavers all the way to 129th Street.

Mara: And on that ride Parsons showed off a trick. Station names repeat along the walls, trimmed in different colored brick. He explained that a rider who couldn't make out the signs would still know from the brick color whether he was near home.

Eli: Officials on flat cars is one test. A whole city in one evening is another.

Mara: That second test came in October 1904, with every color-coded station facing it at once.

October 27, 1904: The Silver Controller

Eli: October 27th, 1904, City Hall station. It was built as the line's showpiece: a curved platform under Guastavino vaulting, arched ceilings laid in tile, with brass chandeliers and skylights. The mayor, Parsons, the contractor and the transit commissioners give speeches. The mayor says, 'The spirit of New York built the subway, as it will meet and solve every problem in our municipal development.' Then he declares the subway open.

Mara: Parsons's ditch got a tiled ceiling.

Eli: Then the mayor takes the silver controller, the handle that sends electric current to the motors. When it's fitted, the company's general manager remarks, 'Doesn't fit very well.' The plan: the mayor starts the official train for show, then hands over to a company motorman, the driver who operates the train. Aboard are the contractor, Parsons and most of the men who made the subway real. At least eleven hundred invited guests ride the opening trains north.

Mara: Nine miles, 28 stations, promised as 'City Hall to Harlem in 15 minutes.'

Eli: He doesn't hand over. One account has him saying, 'No sir! I'm running this train!' He drives north from City Hall, under Park Avenue, west at 42nd, up Broadway. At one point he hits the emergency brake by accident, and the dignitaries go flying. How far he drove depends on the account: one says he gave up the controller at 103rd Street, another says he took it the whole way.

Mara: He seems so taken with the train that he ignored the handover plan.

Eli: At seven that evening the gates open to anyone with a nickel. A carnival crowd swarms the entrances with election-night noisemakers, straining the police. At 28th Street, the third man to buy a ticket takes the first train at 7:02. At 7:03 he reaches for his diamond horseshoe pin, the one he said cost him five hundred dollars. It's gone. One minute of public service, and the subway has its first reported theft.

Mara: And the crush kept building. By midnight the company had counted about a hundred and twenty-seven thousand riders, and some newspaper tallies ran higher. The Tribune reported 'indescribable scenes of crowding and confusion, never before paralleled in this city.' The trenches that once shut stores were now the place everybody wanted to be.

Eli: A young man in spectacles saw what was coming: 'Now here's a social problem. What kind of hog will the underground develop.' And under all that crowding was speed, which is Mara's part of the story.

Forty Miles an Hour and the Uncounted Cost

Mara: The speed was real. Trains ran at close to forty miles an hour. A trolley did about six.

Eli: An elevated train managed about twelve. So, three times the El.

Mara: All of it ran on electricity. The company's powerhouse could supply enough for 800 cars. That high-voltage power went out to substations about every two miles, which turned it into low-voltage direct current, a steady flow of electricity in one direction. The cars took it from the third rail, a live rail running alongside the track.

Eli: Power for 800 cars, and opening night still packed the vestibules.

Mara: From open trenches to the street put back, the company had spent forty million dollars on New York, and started earning it back at seven o'clock.

Eli: From a City Hall crowd grabbing souvenirs to one grabbing seats.

Mara: And Parsons, who watched that shovel go in, said later: 'When I look back now I am glad I was not older.' And: 'If I had fully realized what was ahead of me, I do not think I would have attempted the work.'

Eli: No accurate death toll was kept for the men who dug it, 1900 to 1904.

Mara: So there are things to watch. Whether archives ever turn up complete contractor casualty rolls for those years. Whether transit collections confirm that a rider named H.M. Devoe really bought the very first ticket at City Hall at seven. And whether police records settle if that stolen horseshoe pin held fifteen diamonds or weighed fifteen carats.

Eli: Opening night counted its riders down to the last person. Nobody ever totaled the workers who died making the ride possible.

Mara: For listeners curious about the excavation method, look into cut-and-cover.

Eli: Follow cities with us as transit reshapes life above and below ground.

Mara: That's it for today. I'm Mara.

Eli: And I'm Eli. Thanks for listening, and until next time on Angle.