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"First Subway 40 Years Ago" (1912)

The New York Times · February 4, 1912

First Subway 40 Years Ago

Started in Lower Broadway and Trains Were to Run by Air Pressure

When the Degnon Contracting Company begins work on Section 2 of the Broadway Subway, for which the contract will probably be signed by the Public Service Commission this week, it will come across an interesting relic of the engineering enterprise of forty years ago, which has already performed a small part of the work for it. Underneath Broadway from Warren to Murray Street runs a section of tunnel eight feet in diameter and brick lined, with a smaller tunnel running up the surface and emerging in a grating just inside the grass limits of City Hall Park, north of Murray Street.

This was the beginning of the first subway ever constructed in New York City, and if tradition be correct somewhere in it has been immured for forty years one of the cars which is [sic] was designed to accommodate. It was constructed by the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company, the President of which was Alfred E. Beach. It received a franchise in 1868, and the object of the project was "to provide for the transmission of letters, packages, and merchandise in the cities of New York and Brooklyn and under the North and East Rivers by means of pneumatic tubes to be constructed beneath the surface of the streets and public places." The charter was amended in 1873 on a more ambitious scale, and the company was then permitted "to construct, maintain, and operate an underground railway for the transportation of passengers and property."

The stock of the company was fixed at $10,000,000, and its route from the Battery under Broadway to Madison Square, thence still under Broadway to Columbus Circle, with a branch under Madison Square and Madison Avenue to and udner the Harlem River. The 1873 charter stated that a two-track section from Bowling Green to Fourteenth Street must be finished in three years, and the rest five years thereafter.

Though New Yorkers never had the pleasure of being shot through underground space by blasts of wind, the work that was completed showed considerable engineering ability. The tunnel was driven under Broadway by hydraulic jacks two feet at a time, and the work was carried on so carefully that there was no obstruction of street traffic and passengers had no idea that they were being undermined all the time.

The New York Chamber of Commerce in a report on the tunnel in 1905 has this to say:

Early in 1870 the tunnel was thrown open for inspection, and a car was run from one end to the other, the object being to convince the public that the plans were safe and practical. But all of the work done failed of successful issue. Engineers of prominence were divided in their opinion as to the possibility of building an underground road through narrow streets lined with heavy buildings. Even in the seventies the Beach plans were condemned because it was thought that the tube could not be constructed under the street in front of such a massive structure as the Astor House. Since the methods were not endorsed by engineers, financial interests were chafy about investing money in it. Many believed that, if built, the returns would be insufficient to pay operating expenses and interest on the invested capital.

The capitalists and engineers of those days should not be too hastily condemned as short sighted. The needs of the people of our city for rapid transit increased greatly in the next thirty years; the population increased greatly; the city's wealth increased, and notable advances were made in the science of tunnel construction and of the movement of trains. A revolution was effected in the matter last named by the introduction of electric traction. We would have had no subway to this time if private enterprise had been felled upon.

What seems to have prevented the completion of the tunnel was litigation which reached a Court of Appeals decision in 1873, by which the franchised was upset on technical grounds. This litigation seems to have been instituted through fear of the effect of the tunnel operations on the stability of the Astor House. In the present subway contracts provision has been made not only for the present Astor House, but also for a forty-story building that some day or other may be put upon the site. It is provided that in burrowing under the Astor House the new subway shall have its foundations arranged in such a way that the foundations of a new skyscraper may be interwoven with them. Just as the foundation of the Times Building is adjusted to those of the present Subway, so will those of the successor to the old hotel, whenever it is put up, be interlaced with the foundations of the Broadway tube.