Chapter 01. First Suggestions of Rapid Transit

Previous

Index

Next

Fifty Years of Rapid Transit · James Blaine Walker

Chapter I

First Suggestions of Rapid Transit.

LIKE other great conceptions the rapid transit idea was born during the Civil War, but it is impossible to account for it on any theory that it served a war purpose. The trans-continental railroad and telegraph grew directly out of the demand for better communication created by that great struggle. The demand for rapid transit came from the development of New York City and its growth northward, just as the demand for elevators came from the development of buildings and their growth skyward. The elevator also was a production of the Civil War period. Both were incidental, however, and in no way related except by time to the conflict of arms. By the year 1860 buildings had grown to so many stories that stairways became inadequate, and the city had pushed so far to the North that the busy New Yorker demanded some quicker mode of conveyance from his home to his office than was supplied by the horse-drawn vehicles of the period.

It is really remarkable how many great things were either accomplished or initiated during the Civil War, when one might suppose that the energies of the whole people would have been so absorbed in the mighty struggle that there would have been little opportunity for the conception of new projects. Yet one finds the period singularly prolific of notable advances in art, science and material progress. This development was so marked that it attracted attention even at the time. For instance, in an editorial on the revival of the Atlantic cable project, the New York Herald of June 11, 1864, remarked:

"Whoever shall undertake hereafter to present a philosophic history of these times will be compelled to linger over and to emphasize the fact that, during the bloodiest epoch in their national career, the progress of the American people in social and political enterprise outstripped that of any previous period from the founding of the Commonwealth."

The writer then cites the electric telegraph completed across the continent, the new railroad to the West, the generous contributions to the starving in Ireland and to the suffering operatives in England, the revival of ocean subsidies and the establishment of the postal money order system.

Rapid Transit in New York had its birth in the year 1864, when the armies of Grant and Lee were contending for the final mastery. The city then lay mostly below Twenty-third street. Harlem had been "discovered" and a few, venturesome pioneers had built homes there. The great majority of the citizens, however, dwelt south of Forty-second street. Some of the north and south avenues were not even opened north of that street. Many of the streets were unpaved, and citizens ploughed through mud and dust to reach the crude horse car or the crowded omnibus. A six-story building was a "skyscraper", a trip to Albany on the steam trains took a whole day; national banks were a novelty; the Brooklyn Bridge was unborn; electric lighting was only a dream and the Government was just establishing the money order system.

To the present generation the New York of those days seems much more remote than the time would suggest, so rapid has been its growth and so many have been its achievements. The city has been practically rebuilt in the meantime, and the "sights" of that era have been well nigh forgotten. Then the Fifth Avenue hotel, at Twenty-third street and Fifth Avenue, was the new uptown rival of the Astor House, down at Broadway and Vesey street. Both now have been destroyed, the former to make room for a modern office building, the latter to permit the building of the Broadway subway.

It was a time when women wore hoop-skirts; when Barnum's American Museum and Niblo's Garden flourished; when Maggie Mitchell was making herself famous in "Fanchon" and negro minstrelsy was in its glory; when the Academy of Music was the home of grand opera, and Brignoli, Zucchi and Massimiliani sang in "I Trovatore" and other early Verdi operas; when Theodore Thomas was building up his famous orchestra and giving "symphony soirees" at Irving Hall. It was the year which saw the re-election of Abraham Lincoln as President and the admission of Nevada as a State of the Union.

The city had become a metropolis, but its metropolitan life was just beginning. In spite of war prices its people had plenty of money and lavished it on all kinds of pleasures. The newspapers commented on the gaiety of the winter season, the extravagance of the women and the expensive restaurants, of which Delmonico's set the pace. In one editorial it was stated that women of fashion thought nothing of paying $100 for a bonnet; yet the paper criticized the omnibus companies for raising their fares from six to ten cents and the theaters for preparing to increase the price of admission beyond fifty cents. It was the day of fractional currency, or "shinplasters", when a man had to look twice to tell the difference between a bill for three cents and one for a half dollar.

A picture of the city at that time is drawn by James Grant Wilson in his History of New York, a picture worth reproducing here to glimpse the condition of the community when rapid transit was first projected:

"The City stretched her limbs anew and began that progress which in a quarter of a century more transformed her from a struggling, provincial town into a metropolis. Three potent factors in that transformation were the introduction of the electric light, the use of elevators and the achievement of rapid transit, or rather the continued struggles toward rapid transit, the desired end receding as the means for attaining it proved successively inadequate.

"In order fully to appreciate the power of these factors,... we have first to remember what the New York of 1865 was. Above Forty-second street it could scarcely be said to exist, being only a dreary waste of unpaved and ungraded streets diversified by rocky eminences crowned with squatters' shanties. Railway passengers from the North still left their trains at Twenty-seventh and Thirtieth streets. Street railways were comparatively few, and there was no speedy and comfortable way of getting from one end of the city to the other. Below Eighty-sixth street there were in 1865 25,261 vacant lots. The grading of Madison avenue was still in progress, and the state of the city as regards transit facilities is set forth in a striking way by the hopeful language in which a pamphlet of that day speaks of the new street as likely to 'prepare the way for an extension of the Fourth Avenue Railroad' and thus give new access to the Park. Unable to get anywhere on Manhattan Island, people sought the suburbs and rapidly built up Southern Connecticut and Eastern New Jersey, with Long Island and Staten Island."

And here it may be well to state that 'rapid transit', as used in these pages, applies to transportation by trains inside of the city, as distinguished from the steam railroads which supplied rapid transit from and to distant points. In 1864 the steam roads offered the only quick mode of traveling, and to them, as the historian notes, was due the building up of the suburbs in Westchester county, N. Y., in Connecticut, in New Jersey, Staten Island and Long Island. In 1864 there were three of these roads running into New York City -- the Hudson River Railroad, the New York and Harlem Railroad and the New Haven Railroad. The former two are now parts of the New York Central system, while the latter still retains its individuality and name. In New Jersey there were the beginnings of the Erie, the Pennsylvania and the Northern Railway. On Long Island the Long Island Railroad ran to Islip, Oyster Bay, etc., and the New York and Flushing, the Brooklyn, Bath Beach and Coney Island and the Brooklyn Central and Jamaica railroads to the places named in their titles.

Street cars of the kind drawn by horses had been in use for many years. They were introduced in 1832, when the first car in the world to run on tracks was operated in Fourth Avenue between Prince street and Fourteenth street on the route of the New York and Harlem road. Originally a horse railroad, this line was changed to steam operation a few years later. About 1852 the horse car movement, which had languished owing to the bulky and unwieldy style of cars used, took on new life by reason of the improvement in the type, and by 1855 lines were in operation in Fourth, Sixth, Third and Eighth avenues. By 1864 the number of such lines had increased to twelve, and in that year they carried about 61,000,000 passengers. The population of the city then was about 700,000. Today (1917) in Manhattan and the Bronx (approximately covered by the old city) with four times the population, the street railroads carry in a year about 1,000,000,000 passengers, sixteen times as many as in 1864. In other words, while in 1864 every citizen on the average took about eighty-seven street car rides in a year, he now takes about 357. The age of rapid transit has not only multiplied the traveling facilities but enormously increased the usefulness of street car travel to the citizen.

Tradition has it that an ox cart was the first form of street transportation used in New York. In 1746, it is said, a line of such carts ran from the Battery up Broadway to Houston street. This form of transit, if it ever existed, proved too slow for the New Yorker, and early in the Nineteenth Century omnibuses were introduced. By 1850 Broadway was so crowded with these vehicles, operated by several rival companies, that the later notorious Jacob Sharp began his fight for a surface railroad in that thoroughfare. It took him thirty-five years to get it, the franchise having been granted in August 1884 by the "boodle" aldermen. According to figures compiled by Sharp in one of his campaigns for a franchise, about 230 omnibuses passed Chambers street going up Broadway and 240 down each hour. For thirteen hours his count, taken in August 1852, showed that 3,035 omnibuses and 4,719 other vehicles passed up, and 3,162 omnibuses and 4,723 other vehicles passed down Broadway at this point. This meant an omnibus service at thirteen seconds' headway.

By the year 1864 conditions had become intolerable. Broadway became unsafe for pedestrians, and we are told that the rivalry between omnibus drivers was so great that they recklessly drove over men, women and children in their haste to beat their nearest competitors to waiting passengers. In the rush hours the omnibuses were so crowded that passengers had to hang on to straps, as they were forced to do in the more crowded street cars. As omnibus fares were ten and the street car fares six cents, the latter carried by far the greater number of passengers. The newspapers of the period denounced the conditions and scored omnibus and car companies. Reckless driving, and crowded omnibuses were not the only grievances. The drivers were accused of swearing at passengers and giving them bad money or tickets in change. In its issue of October 2, 1864 the New York Herald savagely attacked the omnibus nuisance, and called upon the capitalists of the city to establish cab lines to relieve the suffering citizens. Here is a quotation from that editorial:

"Modern martyrdom may be succinctly defined as riding in a New York omnibus. The discomforts, inconveniences and annoyances of a trip in one of these vehicles are almost intolerable. From the beginning to the end of the journey a constant quarrel is progressing. The driver quarrels with the passengers, and the passengers quarrel with the driver. There are quarrels about getting out and quarrels about getting in. There are quarrels about change and quarrels about the ticket swindle. The driver swears at the passengers and the passengers harangue the driver through the strap-hole -- a position in which even Demosthenes could not be eloquent. Respectable clergymen in white chokers are obliged to listen to loud oaths. Ladies are disgusted, frightened and insulted. Children are alarmed and lift up their voices and weep. Indignant gentlemen rise to remonstrate with the irate Jehu and are suddenly bumped back into their seats, twice as indignant as before, besides being involved in supplementary quarrels with those other passengers upon whose corns they have accidentally trodden. Thus the omnibus rolls along, a perfect Bedlam on wheels.

"It is in vain those who are obliged to ride seek for relief in a city railway car. The cars are quieter than the omnibuses, but much more crowded. People are packed into them like sardines in a box, with perspiration for oil. The seats being more than filled, the passengers are placed in rows down the middle, where they hang on by the straps, like smoked hams in a corner grocery. To enter or exit is exceedingly difficult. Silks and broadcloth are ruined in the attempt. As in the omnibuses pickpockets take advantage of the confusion to ply their vocation. Handkerchiefs, pocketbooks, watches and breastpins disappear most mysteriously. The foul, close, heated air is poisonous. A healthy person cannot ride a dozen blocks without a headache. For these reasons most ladies and gentlemen prefer to ride in the stages, which cannot be crowded so outrageously, and which are pretty decently ventilated by the cracks in the window frames. The omnibus fare is nearly double the car fare, however, and so the majority of the people are compelled to ride in the cars, although they lose in health what they save in money. But it must be evident to everybody that neither the cars nor the stages supply accommodations enough for the public, and that such accommodations as they do supply are not of the right sort. Both the cars and the omnibuses might be very comfortable and convenient if they were better managed, but something more is needed to supply the popular and increasing demand for city conveyances."

A very convincing argument for rapid transit, but the writer concludes his editorial by urging the establishment of a cheap cab system. This is proof that the rapid transit issue was not a burning one in October, 1864. Forty years later the papers were writing the same kind of editorials, but in place of calling for a cab system they were hammering the Rapid Transit Commission for not providing more subways.

The disgraceful conditions on the omnibus lines above described, it seems evident, were promoted rather than alleviated by competition, for in those days Broadway was filled with rival omnibus lines. Is there not a lesson in this now for city authorities in considering the grant of motor [omni]bus franchises to several competing companies?

Previous

Index

Next