REDISCOVERING THE SILVER BULLET :
IT’S A BIRD, IT’S A TRAIN, IT’S THE AMAZING NEW YORK SUBWAY!
Dig it: I’m typing this from inside a hole in the ground. I do it most days: trundling along like a chipmunk in a network of tunnels, reading a book or typing up notes. Sometimes I gaze out of windows that look out on sooty tunnel walls, racing very close to the bullet-proof glass. Twice a day, those windows fill with a wide vista of water and skyscrapers: that’s when we ride over the Manhattan Bridge. Occasionally it hits me like an acorn bouncing off my ear: this is uncommonly miraculous, and it didn’t always just exist. People do not naturally zip through burrows underground.
It’s hard to work up amazement at every ride, but New York City’s subway system deserves it. This year marks one hundred years since the subway opened on October 27, 1904, catapulting the city’s history forward in so many ways beyond simple transport. This birthday begs the question: how did this miracle of urban transit design actually come about? And could we ever dream of doing it again?
1. THE TOPHATS DECIDE THE FUTURE
Getting from A to B in turn-of-the-century New York was tough. In 1900, 3.4 million people lived here, mostly crammed not-so-chummily below Fourteenth Street, on one-eighty-second of the city’s land area. Horse-drawn omnibuses and elevated trains clogged the streets and the sky overhead. Everybody—politicians, business magnates, newsboys—knew an underground subway like London’s or Boston’s would ease the crush and further the power of New York’s seaports by making it possible for New Yorkers to live far from their workplaces.
The burning question was money. In the era of laissez-faire capitalism and corrupt Tammany Hall politics, it was unthinkable to expect government to fund and carry out such a massive construction project. At the same time, no top-hatted financier would sign on for a $36 million construction project, regardless of the profit potential. The legal wrangle ended in 1900, when financier August Belmont signed Contract No. 1 with the City of New York. The city paid all construction costs and officially “owned” the subway, albeit with little power to regulate it. In return, Belmont’s corporation, the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT), leased the franchise from the city, paid all the operating costs, and set out to make a fat profit.
2. GO SANDHOGS!
New York Transit Museum’s historian Joe Cunningham sums up the project in homegrown Brooklynese: “This was a huge, stupendous engineering job, period. First you built the tunnels, but then you still had to make it all work. You had to design signals; cars that moved at close intervals through dark tunnels, at very fast speeds; a new power supply, electricity—you had to bring all this together and make it work in just two or three years.”
Chief engineer William Barclay Parsons had his work cut out for him. The first subway line started at City Hall, at the southeastern tip of Manhattan, and bisected the island diagonally to 145 th Street in the Upper West Side. Along this route Manhattan’s geology and elevation changes dramatically. Parsons chose to tunnel close to the surface to save money, but his crews still had to contend with Manhattan schist, a type of rock that combines extreme hardness with a tendency to decay, making tunneling through it both strenuous and unpredictable.
Over 12,000 men, mostly Irish-, Italian- and African-Americans, worked at this murderously difficult task. The cut-and-cover method sounds simple but involved a nightmare of inconvenience and detail management. It began with digging a huge hole through a packed urban street, redirecting all kinds of underground utility pipes overhead, and then laying planks of wood over it for traffic. Workers shored up nearby buildings with wooden beams as buttresses and steel spikes driven into their foundations as reinforcement. Then massive cranes rolled up, dropping 3000-pound steel I-beams into place as the tunnel’s skeleton. Workers sealed the framework with steel bolts, cement and caulk, and then covered the entire tunnel with dirt.
As work moved uptown through higher elevation, the subway line had to stay roughly at the same latitude. As Cunningham notes wryly, “You wouldn’t want a subway to be an underground roller-coaster.” Deep tunneling through these areas called for a more delicate, dangerous set of steps. A steel tube, called the shield, was inched forward, three feet at a time, into bedrock using hydraulic pumps. Excavators readied the rock for dynamite blasts, using steel mats and timber shaftways to absorb shock and prevent tunnel collapse. Drillers bore holes into the bedrock, an engineer dropped lit dynamite into each of them, and workers cleared the area while a warning whistle blew. After the blasts, workers crushed any boulders with compressed-air drills, scooped up the crushed rock, or spoil, into buckets that were ferried out via tramway. As if dynamite, flying rock and the threat of collapse weren’t enough dangerous on-the-job fun, you could also run across an underground lake by surprise and flood the tunnel. So workers dug drainage ditches along the way that funneled water into reservoirs called sumps. Each worker had to move 50 wheelbarrows of spoil a day; eventually all that rock was used to expand Ellis Island and Governor’s Island. If you had no special skills but liked crushing rock in the hot stench underground for $1.50 a day, welcome. The “sandhogs” crews could always use a few more like you.
Deep tunneling underwater was even worse. Take all the usual dangers and add to them the river’s pressure, threatening floods and the bends, a painful disease caused by rapid changes in air pressure. Engineers pumped compressed air into the tunnel to counter-balance the water pressure. Sandhogs waited in manlocks, sealed ante-chambers that were pressurized gradually to match the tunnel’s air pressure. Sandhogs could only work two stints of three hours each underwater, with a two-hour break in between; in the deepest digs, those stints shortened to half an hour.
At the end of the game came electricity and track work. Wooden “sleepers” or ties held the running rails. The third rail offered direct-current electricity from some of the world’s first electric-power plants. Cunningham finds the choice for electrical power a bold, prescient move for the times: much cleaner than coal, but still expensive for a profit-seeking venture like the IRT. “At the time, electricity cost twenty cents a kilowatt-hour,” he notes. “That’s the price of four good cigars, or dinner for one at a luncheonette.”
3. THE CRUSH OF SUCCESS
New Yorkers thronged to the subway from Day One—and from Day One, the subway strained to meet demand. Luckily, the four-track system meant that expresses and locals could run simultaneously at high speeds. But no sooner had the subway opened than the public clamor rose for more lines, wider car doors, and more frequent service. Signalling changed almost immediately in 1909, moving from the fixed-block system that spaced cars by equal distances, regardless of speed, to the time approach system, that allows cars to follow each other closely on a timer system.
Lines snaked across four of the five boroughs over the next 30 years. In 1940 two private transit corporations—the IRT and the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Company, or BMT—united with the city-run Independent (IND) lines, finally unifying the system.
Building the subway was jaw-droppingly important to modern New York. No skyscrapers, no fair labor, no twenty-four-hour-everything, no myths of alligators and mole people, no teams of baby breakdancers ranging through the cars. Grassy Longacre Square became Times Square overnight when the New York Times moved its offices near a subway stop, in a bid to hustle its papers uptown before the competition. Speculators overbuilt along subway lines, leaving Harlem’s elegant high-rises empty until landlords reluctantly invited African-Americans uptown. Skyscrapers bristled over the landscape of Manhattan, built on the shoulders of the city’s first mighty construction project and filled with people by the ever-growing subway. Brutal labor practices of the 19 th century gave way to unions forged during the subway’s development. In 1930, the height of the subway’s golden years, two billion customers rode the rails in a year—the same number of people on the entire earth.
4. DECLINE AND REBOUND
World War II came as a blow to the subway system. Cars and highway-building had captured the nation’s imagination and drew much of the government funding. In the 1950s New York’s subway system embarked on a series of upgrades: lengthening platforms to increase capacity, turning over the old fleet of cars, later adding air conditioning.
A classic case of too-little-too-late. The original five-cent subway fare had lingered for political reasons until 1948, driving the system into debt with no recourse to the highway-loving government. “The city ran into financial straits that slammed everything in the 70s,” says Cunningham, “so from the late 60s to the 80s they just did routine maintenance with skeleton crews.” Smeared in graffiti, plagued by car breakdowns and uncertain track work, perhaps the subway’s lowest moment came in 1982, when rider Bernie Goetz snapped and shot three boys to death, an expression of pure, mad frustration at the hassling conditions of the subway.
Through the 1990s, the city cracked down on graffiti and turnstile-hopping, while siphoning fresh funds to the subway to rebuild tracks, turn over the old '50s Redbird fleet, and extend even more platforms. The latest generation of cars, the R142 series, features automated announcements and more efficient, alternating-current electricity. The kicker for the future: The much-bruited Second Avenue line breaks ground by the end of 2004, after 75 years of debate.
The best utilities are always invisible. New York's subway isn't that—ask any native about weekend track-work and mystifying line switches—but mostly
it's 24 hours of pure bullet riding even through wild weather, fainting passengers, and packed Yankees games. At the end of our talk, Cunningham thanks me for paying attention to the engineering side of the subway’s design. “I like to hear that people care about this,” he offers, in that way New Yorkers can squeeze a little complaint into every compliment. “Usually people are all excited about the tiles. The tiles are nice, the tiles are very pretty <but>, do they get my train there on time?”
—Jude Stewart for STEP Inside Design,
November / December 2004
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