The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (20 page)

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ON MAY 28, 1886,
a letter arrived at Whitney’s home at 1731 I Street in Washington’s Northwest District that proved how important a man he had become.

“My marriage with Miss Folsom will take place at the White House on Wednesday (June second) at seven o’clock in the evening,” President Cleveland wrote to his close confidant. “I hardly think that I can creditably demean myself unless you and Mrs. Whitney are present to encourage and sustain me in the new and untried situation. May I expect to see you both on the occasion?” Cleveland had been courting Frances “Frank” Folsom for years. She was the daughter of Oscar Folsom, his former law partner from his time in Buffalo. Oscar Folsom had been killed in a carriage accident and left Cleveland in charge of his estate, asking him to help his wife raise their then-twelve-year-old daughter, Frances. By the time Cleveland was elected president, she was an attractive brunette in her early twenties and he was rotund with thinning hair and approaching fifty. Still, their relationship evolved from paternal to romantic, and they traded letters for years until the spring of 1886, when he proposed in the mail and she accepted.

On June 2, beginning at 6:30 in the evening, William and Flora Whitney joined the other cabinet couples as they were ushered into the Blue Room at the White House for a small intimate ceremony. Flowers, ferns, and palms, all from the White House greenhouse, decorated the floor, and John Philip Sousa, the marching music king, led the Marine Band in the Wedding March. The engaged couple, with no ushers or bridesmaids leading them, descended the stairs together, with the bride leaning on Cleveland’s left arm, and they stopped beneath a chandelier covered in flowers in the Blue Room. He wore a stately tuxedo, but all eyes were on his young bride, who wore an elegant white satin dress with a long silk veil, fifteen-foot trail, and low neckline and adorned with real orange blossoms. A brief ceremony led by the Presbyterian minister Reverend Byron Sunderland was understated, and it ended with him placing his hand over the clasped hands of the couple.

“Grover, do you take this woman whom you hold by the hand to be your lawful wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of wedlock?” the minister said.

“I do,” the president answered, and he then fussed into his waistcoat pocket for the wedding ring and slipped it onto her finger.

The minister repeated the question for the bride, and she, too, answered in a clear voice with no hesitation. “I do.”

“Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder,” Sunderland said in conclusion, and the only wedding that has ever been held in the White House was complete.

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WHILE FLORA WHITNEY WAS PREGNANT
with their fifth child in the fall of 1886, her husband was deeply immersed in the matters of the navy and plotting his takeover of the New York street railroads. What he was attempting was not illegal, but it was certainly unwise politically since it gave the appearance that Whitney was more interested in earning a fortune for himself in private enterprise than he was in repairing the navy’s image. Most of his visits to New York passed without any notice, as he was able to sneak in on the train incognito, hop straight into a carriage, hold meetings at his Fifty-seventh Street mansion, and return to Washington just as quietly. But when
The New York Tribune
and
The Times
got wind of his repeated visits to New York, they began a crusade to publicly embarrass him.

“The Secretary of the Navy has spent much more time in this city recently than the general public is aware of,”
The Tribune
wrote, “but he has not been occupied with naval business.” It reported that he was solely in town to pursue his plan to seize control of Sharp’s Broadway railroad. “Mr. Whitney was in town a week ago yesterday, although few New Yorkers discovered it. He did not proclaim his presence on the house-tops.” Instead, he huddled in his home with Ryan and the rest of the Philadelphians, focused entirely on Jake Sharp.

They knew that they could never build a complete transit system in New York if they controlled only the streets running across the island and not the boulevards that ran down the middle as well. “The system could not be perfected with crosstown lines alone,” Widener argued at a public meeting in 1886, “and no trunk line could be used with so much advantage to the system as that of the Broadway and 7th Avenue roads.” Broadway, in particular, was to New York what Market Street was to Philadelphia. And all five of the men knew that whoever controlled the busiest thoroughfare in any city controlled the city itself. In the mid-1880s, in New York, that was Jacob Sharp.

If Whitney and the others knew one thing, it was how to start a fire. And when Sharp, who by now was pushing seventy years old and dying of diabetes, pushed back against their efforts to buy him out, and even brazenly raised his asking price, they had their opening. New Yorkers became enraged at his refusal to consider a sale or to improve their way of life by allowing changes to the transportation system. Whitney’s group took advantage of the public ire and persuaded one of Sharp’s stockholders to file a lawsuit against him and demand access to review the company’s books. That suit became irrelevant when it caught the attention of the New York State Senate, which opened its own investigation into Sharp. And in a matter of a few weeks, Sharp was under fierce attack. His bribes to city officials were exposed, and the aldermen, branded as forty thieves, were publicly excoriated; some of them even fled for Montreal rather than face the possibility of a corruption trial and jail time. As for Sharp, when he too confronted the possibility of incarceration at Sing Sing, he finally caved. He sold to his powerful rivals all ten thousand shares in his Broadway & Seventh Avenue Railroad, valued at almost three million dollars, and, finally, Whitney had his prize. Broadway!

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FOR ALL OF THEIR GRANDEUR,
raw power, and beauty, horses were becoming a real nuisance as the chief mode of transportation in American cities. The biggest problem was that horses are useful for only three years of hard work, and the city’s streets were less forgiving on their legs than the soft dirt and grass of farmland. And then there was disease. In 1870, a mild panic erupted when a street railway driver named Michael O’Keefe died of a sickness called glanders. It is a bacterial disease seen in animals and is extremely rare in humans, but those who die from it are almost always found to have obtained it from a horse. The symptoms are obvious, and included rashes, lung infection, diarrhea, and enlargement of the spleen. O’Keefe’s death caused so much worry that he was buried immediately without an autopsy. Two years later, in October 1872, an influenza outbreak among horses in Canada quickly spread south into North America and caused much more widespread panic. Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, all across New England, and as far south as Louisiana and Florida and eventually Cuba all reported similar cases in which horses suddenly were too weak to stand in their stalls, much less pull heavy loads of several hundred pounds. In New York, more than thirty horses died every day during the outbreak. Those that did survive could be heard coughing violently for months. The Great Epizootic Outbreak, as it was called, struck thousands of horses and ground much of the country to a standstill. Streetcars disappeared from city streets or were just abandoned. Coal couldn’t be delivered to locomotives to provide their power. Firefighters could not respond to blazes. Soldiers in the army were forced to pull their own wagons when their horses broke down. It got so bad that in December of 1872 the Mexican government had to supply healthy horses to the United States.

The horse had served America well for half a century, but its time had come. The piles of manure they left behind—and a big horse could produce as much as fifty pounds of it a day—were no longer tolerated. City residents were tired of the smell. And while there was a time when a stable owner could make a hefty profit by selling horse manure to farmers, who used it for fertilizer, those days were gone, too. Bird excrement, or guano, along with man-made fertilizers, became more readily available, and the value of horse manure plunged. In 1860, the Second Avenue Street Railway in New York City could collect as much as $4.60 per horse for its manure annually. By 1885, that figure had dropped to $1.10, and some stable owners were losing money on manure because it cost them so much to cart away.

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AS MOST NEW YORKERS SLEPT
early on the morning of May 27, 1887, shouts cried out from inside a long building on the city’s west side, startling the night watchman standing guard out front. He recognized the voices of his own men, but he had no idea what was causing their panic. It was the start of an unimaginable tragedy that would essentially be over in six minutes, and it came only a few months after New Yorkers had celebrated one of the most thrilling days in their city’s history, the dedication by President Cleveland of the Statue of Liberty on October 28, 1886.

Even after the dramatic efforts of men like Alfred Beach and Abraham Brower at improving transportation on the streets of New York, the truth was that by the spring of 1887, fifty years after the first horse-pulled carriages started rolling through the city, very little had changed. Horses still ruled the day.

Nowhere was that more evident than in the three-story structure that filled the entire block of Tenth Avenue between Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth streets. From the outside, it looked as solid as any block-long building in New York, brown brick stacked upon brown brick from the street to the roof. And it was only fourteen years old, built in 1873. Inside, however, wood beams were attached to the walls and scattered throughout the interior. And hundreds of individual stalls were filled with all the comforts necessary to keep the 1,230 horses that belonged to the Belt Line Street Railway Company happy. Each horse was a valuable piece of property, valued at $130, for a collective total of $154,000. That’s why there were four thousand bales of hay, five thousand bales of straw, and twelve thousand bushels of grain inside the stable. It was one giant inferno just waiting to be lit, and when smoke started pouring out of a first-floor paint locker, it was like taking a match to a cotton ball. In seconds, flames were licking across the floor and up the walls and across the ceiling.

The night depot master at the stable pulled the fire alarm, while other workers rushed up to the stables on the second and third floors and tried to shoo the horses downstairs into the streets. But when the flames spread, fueled by a brisk wind off the river, and it became obvious there would be no stopping them, the men fled and left their frightened animals behind, along with more than one hundred and fifty streetcars. Two of the stable workers couldn’t make it to the stairs in time and jumped out of the second story. By the time firefighters arrived, the scene was too hot and the flames too high for them to get near the building. The sounds from inside, of horses neighing and crying and bucking against their stalls, was agonizing for those on the streets. Meanwhile, the fire was growing out of control.

The firemen could not prevent the flames from leaping across Fifty-fourth Street and setting fire to the new six-story silk factory at the corner. From there, the fire kept on spreading, rustling awake the residents inside a row of tenement houses and flats east of the silk factory and forcing them to flee for their lives out onto the sidewalk. Because the fire quickly blocked their front door, many of them raced out the back, where firemen tore down fences to help them escape. Adolph Kruger’s liquor saloon, at the northwest corner of Tenth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, was next to go, and soon two entire blocks along Tenth Avenue were ablaze. When the fire threatened a shanty and some tiny wooden sheds filled by poor families along with their cows and horses on the north side of Fifty-third Street, firemen rushed over to get them out, too.

When the sun finally came up, Tenth Avenue looked like a Civil War battlefield, with dead horses strewn over three acres, charred streetcars, and arching streams from the fire hoses spraying into the ashes. The stench of burned animal flesh still wafted over the neighborhood when officials from the Belt Line Street Railway Company arrived to tally their losses. The catastrophe was staggering. Just 45 of their 1,230 horses made it out to safety. Of their 156 cars, 145 were destroyed, along with 3 track sweepers and 4 snow plows. The valuable straw, hay, and grain were all gone, not to mention five safes that contained more than six thousand dollars. The total loss just from the stable was calculated at $504,450, and when the neighborhood’s losses were added to that, the overall figure was well beyond a million dollars. The only brief moment of joy on the day after the fire came when the stable’s five pet cats crawled out of the rubble.

It rained the day after the fire, helping to douse any remaining cinders in the ashes of the stable. Also that day, the members of the executive committee of the Belt Line railroad met. Their purpose was not to bemoan what had happened but to look toward the future. They had quickly begun to buy more horses to keep their business operating, but, as
The Times
reported two days after the tragedy, the Belt Line officials recognized that horses were no longer a worthy investment. “There is growing public sentiment that big stables in a crowded city are dangerous nuisances,”
The Times
wrote. “Three kinds of propelling power will be tested by the Belt Line company if possible. They are the cable, the electric station, and independent electric motor systems. The promoters of all of these methods have been in contact with the company since the fire.”

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IT WAS PRECISELY THIS SORT
of problem that Whitney and his Philadelphia cohorts hoped to solve. While Whitney was in Washington, Ryan and the others incorporated a new operation they called the Metropolitan Traction Company. It served as an umbrella over the group’s assets, of which they soon had an abundance. Spending millions of dollars in only a few short months, the company bought out the Houston Street, West Street & Pavonia Ferry Railroad Company, the Chambers & Grand Street Ferry Railroad Company, the South Ferry Railroad Company, and others, all of which became one called the Metropolitan Street Railway Company. The Metropolitan Traction Company was not in the business of building or operating roads itself, but rather it served as a “holding company,” the first one in the United States, and it would become a model for the future of big business and financial empires.