The New York Subway

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October 23, 2004

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

The New York Subway, 1904-2004

By JOE McKENDRY

One hundred years ago next Wednesday, at precisely 2 p.m., a wall of sound shook New York City from Battery Park to Harlem. Church bells and the sounding horns of ferryboats competed with the steam whistles of hundreds of power plants and the firing of salutes. Cheering citizens flooded the streets, creating what this newspaper described as a "carnival'' atmosphere that had the city "in an uproar from end to end."

The cause of celebration was the completion of the first section of the New York City Subway, a 9.1 mile route from City Hall to West 145th Street operated by the private Interborough Rapid Transit Company. New Yorkers, who had suffered from the traffic jams of a city with 3.5 million residents, could now travel beneath the crowds. Businessmen, who in those days before the telephone was ubiquitous had to meet clients face to face, traveled to meetings with newfound freedom. And residents of crowded tenements near their downtown workplaces were freed to move to the rapidly growing suburbs along the subway route.

Proposals for a New York subway had come as early as 1865, when Hugh B. Willson, a Michigan businessman, laid out a plan to construct a tunnel for steam trains from the Battery to Central Park. Three years later, an inventor named Alfred Beach secretly built a 350-foot-long test tunnel beneath Broadway that used a giant fan to propel tube-shaped cars. But not until 1894 did the Legislature approve the bond issue for a subway, and work began in March 1900 on perhaps most complex civil engineering project in American history.

Much of that responsibility fell on the shoulders of the chief engineer, William Barclay Parsons. He decided that most of the tunnel would be built just below street level using a method known as "cut and cover" that had been employed in the Boston subway three years earlier. Manhattan, however, had far more underground water, sewage and gas pipes than Boston, and in many places the island's nearly impenetrable Manhattan schist bedrock reached street level.

Under Parsons' plan, picks and shovels were used to loosen and remove the earth, exposing the utility lines, which were disassembled and re-routed. Wooden bracing held back the earth as workers installed a concrete floor and steel supports, and began building the walls with a single row of brick followed by a layer of hollow ceramic blocks. After a waterproof layer of tar-soaked felt was applied to the ceramic blocks, the walls were finished with a layer of concrete. The tunnel roof was built by shoveling fresh concrete over arch-shaped wooden molds that were kept in place between the parallel roof beams until the concrete set. Track beds were filled with crushed stone, and workers secured rails to wooden ties with iron spikes. Once the concrete roof was complete, it was covered with a waterproof layer of tar-soaked felt, and the road was rebuilt overhead.

Because the subway route needed to follow a reasonably even grade despite the uneven topography of Manhattan, substantial parts had to pass through stone. Rock tunneling was notoriously dangerous, so Parsons brought in miners from Colorado, Pennsylvania, Ireland, Scandinavia, South Africa and elsewhere to help with the most difficult section: a two-mile stretch from 158th Street in Washington Heights to Hillside Avenue in Fort George. When trains started running in it in 1906, it was the second-longest rock tunnel in the United States, behind only the Hoosac Tunnel in western Massachusetts.

As this illustration shows, it was a complex operation:

(A) Holes drilled into the rock were filled with explosives and detonated.

( Large pieces of blasted rock were broken down to a manageable size and loaded into carts.

© Sidewalls and floors were built by shoveling concrete against a "traveling" wooden mold.

(D) Boards were placed over wooden bracing to hold the shape of the tunnel's concrete arch as it set.

(E) Workers shoveled concrete against the boards until the arch was complete. Once it had set, the bracing was slightly lowered and the boards removed, then the entire traveling structure was rolled to the next section.

(F) Fresh concrete was delivered to the face of the tunnel and hoisted to the workers above.

(G) Donkeys hauled away the "spoil" in wooden carts.

Stations along the route, 28 in all, were brightly lighted and decorated with intricate tiles to create a welcoming atmosphere for a public that held doubts about underground travel. Some believed the air could cause respiratory problems; others claimed that staring at the lights in the tunnel while riding caused an irreversible condition called "subway eye." Nowhere was the decorative spirit more on display than at the old City Hall Station, with its grandiose vaulted ceilings and chandeliers that exemplified the craftsmanship that went into the entire subway project.

For all the excitement on opening day, it didn't take New Yorkers long to revert to their jaded selves. On Oct. 28, the day after the subway opened, The Times reported: "Men on the trains were quietly getting out at their regular stations and going home, having finished what will be to them the daily routine of the rest of their lives. It is hard to surprise New York permanently."

Joe McKendry is the author and illustrator of the forthcoming "Beneath the Streets of Boston: Building America's First Subway."