New York City boomed after the Civil War. People came from all over, from other continents, and two million of them squeezed into a sliver of an island eleven miles long, mostly on its lower half. The result was an enormous traffic jam that impeded any kind of travel.
Horse-drawn trolleys moved at about three miles per hour with frequent interruptions from horse-drawn carriages. A healthy horse left ten pounds of manure daily on the cobblestone streets. There were no street lights so vehicles banged into one another. The streets and sidewalks were also jammed with pedestrians. A blizzard in 1888 shut New York City down completely. It was "Bedlam", as one writer put it.
One of the first proposals, by an inventor named Alfred Beach, was to build a pneumatic subway under Broadway with a giant fan at the end. It would suck cars on rails one way or the other by creating vacuums. The British had already built an underground in London, basically a railroad with the locomotive driven by steam and it seemed more practical except that passengers couldn't tolerate the exhaust and cinders. Beach began building his vacuum tube under Broadway at night to escape the notice of Boss Tweed, the corrupt moneybags who ran the city.
Beach's 1878 tunnel was only a few blocks long but it was a splendid demonstration of his goal. The car was upholstered and lighted with chandeliers, a vast improvement over anything available above them. There were goldfish swimming in the fountains at each end of the tunnel. When it became public, the project was vetoed (twice) by Boss Tweed. In any case a pneumatic subway could only manage one car and then only for a short distance. The tunnel was reduced first to a shooting gallery and then sealed.
In the 1890s, with a reform mayor in charge, a financier named August Belmont organized funding for the building of a tunnel that ran from City Hall to Grand Central Station, then splitting into two branches and heading north under the river to the Bronx. Building a tunnel under the Harlem River was demanding of the chief engineer, William Barclay Parsons, and of the men. It was dangerous work using steel pipes. A brilliant engineer, Parsons was sent abroad to study the technology used in Europe -- London already had its Underground and Paris its Metro. Germany was starting to build one, the Stadtbahn. There, Parsons saw electric trains at work. Electricity was a marvel at the time and was replacing other forms of energy in cities.
In 1900 Parsons broke ground for the subway in New York, widely celebrated with church bells, ship's whistles, and fireworks. It was named the Interborough Rapid Transit system, or IRT. It annoyed the hell out of New Yorkers during construction. Everything seemed to be torn up and one lady on elegant Fifth Avenue complained that she could hear the vulgar language used by the workers.
Most of the workers were immigrants. The most dangerous positions were tunnel workers ("sandhogs") who were paid $6 per day. Several were killed. As construction expanded to Brooklyn, dozens more died. One guy's survival sounds like a miracle. He was working in a compressed air cylinder deep beneath the East River when the overhead failed and blew out. Ceegan was sucked up into the hole, blown through the mud and sand of the East River, and regained consciousness floating on the water.
It was finally opened in October, 1904, attended by great pomp. The financier Belmot had his private entrance and opulent private car. Each stop was not only functional but artistically decorated. The subway was jammed and relieved street traffic but as often happens there was a great demand for more miles of track, which brought the city to what had been farm land. Edgar Allen Poe had lived in a little rural cottage in the Bronx in the early 1800s. By 1907 he wouldn't have recognized it.
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