The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (42 page)

But that night, when he was found by reporters imbibing at the Hoffman House, one of New York’s oldest hotels, McDonald was nothing short of arrogant in believing that he, not Onderdonk, was the man for the job. “I expect to get the contract,” he said. “I have made arrangements for the necessary bonds and I can have the work started inside of thirty days from now if the commission promptly awards the contract.” McDonald overlooked one detail in his assumption. His bid was certainly the lowest. And he was unquestionably qualified to build the subway. But while he was a wealthy man, he was not nearly rich enough to afford the $7 million the commission required of the winning contractor. Unless he could raise the money, he would never be allowed to put a shovel in the ground. And considering that Onderdonk was in no better financial position than McDonald, once again New York’s subway was in peril.

Not surprisingly, given such an enormous issue, rumors started to fly the moment the bids were unveiled. There was talk that Onderdonk had approached McDonald in the days before submitting their bids and asked him to team up and submit one bid together and that McDonald replied that he preferred to go it alone. There was also gossip that after the subway was built it would be turned over to the powerful Metropolitan Street Railway Company, so that it could have total control over the streets and the subways and provide more seamless rides for passengers transferring between the two systems. But the day after the commission opened the bids, Orr, the commission’s president, received a letter quashing that suggestion, from none other than the man behind the Metropolitan, William C. Whitney.

“My Dear Mr. Orr,” Whitney wrote on January 16. “I cannot begin this day without offering to you and your associates my sincere congratulations upon the success of your long labor … The Metropolitan Company, I promise you, will do all in its power to aid the work.” In the letter, Whitney also assured Orr that the Metropolitan company “has no connection with nor responsibility for either bid. The credit of undertaking this great work belongs to others, but we will aid them in all ways possible.”

With that reassurance, the Rapid Transit Commission needed less than twenty-four hours to award the contract to McDonald. And Orr quickly put to rest another rumor, one that suggested if the Tammany-connected contractor did not win the job the subway would never get built. “Absurd!” Orr said. “Politics has had no consideration in this matter. The board in its wisdom decided that Mr. McDonald’s bid was the better. That’s all there is to it.”

It was the better bid. But when he received word that he had won the subway job, McDonald was uncharacteristically silent. What only he knew at that moment was that the banks he had lined up to back his bid had, without any warning, dropped him. They had been told by the men from the Metropolitan Street Railway group, mainly Whitney and Ryan, that the subway was a dangerous investment unless the city awarded the contract in perpetuity rather than for a fifty-year term. The banks listened, and were convinced that a subway was a financial loser, and they backed away.

McDonald had made a bid for a $35 million job, and now suddenly he had no way of putting up any significant money toward it. Perhaps that’s why, after receiving such joyous news, McDonald released no comment. He had ten days, under the commission’s rules, to find $7 million to put down. While reporters scurried about town to find the burly Irishman, he enjoyed a quiet dinner and drinks at the Hotel Savoy before returning home to his apartment in the Dakota flats on the Upper West Side. He had no time to waste. He began lining up meetings with some of the wealthiest financiers in the city.

*   *   *

AUGUST BELMONT JR. WAS
the spoiled son of one of the richest bankers in America. The young Belmont attended the Rectory School in Hamden, Connecticut; Phillips Exeter Academy; and Harvard College. When he was caught one time dousing people with water who were walking beneath his dormitory window and another time howling at the moon at five o’clock in the morning, he was merely scolded politely. But rather than punish him, his father essentially bribed him to behave better, buying him a sloop called the
Ariel
for about $1,000. Private tutors helped August Jr., but he bored easily and graduated Harvard only with the help of a last-minute cram session for his final exams. For his graduation and birthday, his father gave him two hundred shares of the Bank of the State of New York, a present worth $25,000. When August Belmont Sr. died on November 24, 1890, with an estate estimated as high as $50 million, there was no doubting who would take over his affairs. And his son’s interests soon expanded beyond his father’s.

*   *   *

A SECRETARY ARRANGED THE
historic meeting. By the time John B. McDonald sat down with Belmont in January of 1900 to strike a deal, it was as if they were meant to do business together. Both men were short-tempered and cocky. And Belmont’s princely life no doubt forged a bond between himself and McDonald. They both enjoyed drinking, sailing, fishing, golfing, and horses.

In a series of meetings the two men held, it became clear that McDonald needed more than a loan. He needed Belmont to put up the $150,000 certified check and to bankroll the entire project. The two men struck the historic agreement that would make New York’s subway a reality, although Belmont, not a humble bone in his body, would not exactly view the agreement as an exercise in compromise. Like any shrewd businessman, Belmont told McDonald he was not going to simply hand over his money. He wanted power in return for his investment. The plan called for the city government to hand over to the contractor $37.5 million to pay for the construction costs and the land necessary for the station terminals. So Belmont agreed to organize a syndicate, which he later called the Rapid Transit Subway Construction Company, to raise the money and to pay for the subway construction, which McDonald would lead. And, because the Rapid Transit Commission also required the contractor to run the subway after it opened, Belmont set up what he called the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, or IRT. Last, McDonald agreed to spend his own money to build and purchase the subway cars, signals, and other miscellaneous equipment, which the city would buy back at the end of the lease. It was a straightforward agreement that made perfect sense. The builder would build. The banker would bankroll.

As to the question of what would power the subway trains, that debate was no longer in doubt. Steam was ruled out. Cable was too expensive and prone to break down. Electricity was the only sensible choice, and the reason was, once again, Frank Sprague. This time, New York, not Boston, would be the beneficiary of his genius.

Sprague was on the verge of perfecting a breakthrough even more significant than the one he had achieved in Richmond back in 1888. Sprague’s latest technology was called multiple-unit control. The reason those trolleys had struggled so mightily to climb that hill in Richmond during that dramatic midnight run was because the front car was pulling the dead weight of the passenger cars behind it. But Sprague was never satisfied with that. It seemed so inefficient and sluggish. He spent the 1890s working on something he called multiple-unit control, where each car has its own electric traction system and can be controlled by a single motorman at the front of the train to work with other cars as a unit. So successful was the multiple-unit train that General Electric, which had tried to beat Sprague to the same idea and lost, would buy it from him.

On January 30, with all the major decisions in place, Belmont announced his involvement in the New York subway with a terse statement.

“Yes, I am Mr. McDonald’s financial agent,” he said in a brief appearance.

Three weeks later, on February 24, 1900, a few minutes after 10:30 in the morning, August Belmont walked into the offices of the New York City comptroller. He was soon joined by Mayor Van Wyck, McDonald, Parsons, and the members of the Rapid Transit Commission. Belmont handed over one million dollars in certified checks and the other required securities and bonds. It was precisely 10:49 in the morning when a gold pen was produced and the signing of the subway contracts began. One by one, papers were passed around a long table and signatures were affixed to contracts and receipts. The final man to sign was McDonald, who had been sitting quietly, beaming. When it was his turn, he stepped forward, accepted a round of applause, and turned to Belmont.

“Here is the gentleman who gives me the privilege of signing this contract,” McDonald said. And then he sat down and signed. A debate that had been raging in New York City for half a century, since the day in 1849 when
Scientific American
published Alfred Beach’s article proposing a subway beneath Broadway, was put to rest in a proceeding that lasted all of eleven minutes. Or so it seemed. Belmont, it turned out, still had one last problem to resolve.

*   *   *

TO FULFILL ALL THE OBLIGATIONS
required by the Rapid Transit Commission, the owner of the subway also had to operate it for fifty years. Belmont was a banker. He did not own an actual transit company. McDonald was a builder. He had no interest in running a subway. “I am a contractor, not a railroad man,” he told the commission. “And I guess I had better stick to my business.”

The only way to start a transit company was to apply for a charter from the New York State legislature. It should have been an easy process for Belmont, considering that by this point there was near-unanimous support for the subway. But when Belmont began the paperwork to apply for a charter, he discovered that the men who owned the street railway companies, powerful and influential businessmen themselves who had forged deep relationships with the right politicians in Albany and the biggest banks in New York, were not exactly thrilled with the idea of a subway. To them it was competition. It would eat into their profits, and if it expanded into the suburbs, as was expected, it would probably destroy them in the end. When Belmont turned to the bonding companies and banks to support his financial commitment to the subway, institutions that had shown great willingness to work with him in the past, this time he could not find a single one to back him. The banks were either completely uninterested, or they demanded conditions he was unwilling to meet. At every turn, Belmont recalled later, “I found the door closed.”

Belmont knew that he needed a friend who, like him, recognized that this charter was too important to be quashed by petty businessmen who were too small-minded to realize that a revolution was at hand for their city. He needed someone who could quickly and quietly push his charter through the legislature and did not need to be credited. He needed someone who took pleasure in helping others get what they wanted, as long as he believed it was for the public’s good. But what he really needed was someone who knew how the street railways of New York operated, so that he could maneuver around them and get the charter to fulfill the subway contract. “I resolved to go straight to a man who was all powerful, or at least most influential with the powers that were, and I did,” Belmont reflected years later. “I went to that man, told him just what I was trying to do, what the project meant for New York and how certain influences were trying to prevent me from carrying it out. He promised his help and gave it.”

The man who delivered Belmont his charter, the man who cleared the final hurdle that allowed New York to finally get the financing for its subway, was William Collins Whitney.

Even though Whitney had briefly made his own play for the subway contract before it was awarded to McDonald, Belmont had a hunch. He reached out to Whitney for help. And he got it. It was a secret that Whitney took to his grave and was only revealed reluctantly by Belmont a decade later, when, under a courtroom oath, he was asked to tell the story about how he had finally received his charter.

*   *   *

ON THE FEBRUARY DAY
in 1900 when Belmont signed the contract, he had one employee, John Bart McDonald. They made an odd couple, the bald, belly-bulging Irishman who had worked hard labor his whole life and the trim, snobbish, spoiled German Jew born into a life of privilege. They, along with William Barclay Parsons, the young engineer who had the entire route mapped out on his blueprints and knew the formation of the island of New York down to every last pebble, were now being hailed as saviors and protectors of a project that seemed doomed time and time again. And they had thirty days to hire a crew and start digging. They would not have to look far.

The news that New York was about to build a subway spread fast. Two dollars a day for eight hours of work was good money for a laborer. Engineers, axmen, levelers, steelworkers, inspectors, cement mixers, masonry men, accountants, stenographers, diggers, and even messengers were all suddenly needed. At the Municipal Lodging House on First Avenue at Twenty-third Street, skilled and unskilled laborers from around the country began to flock in day after day in search of a cot to sleep on and a penny to earn. There would be thousands of men within a few days.

A three-room apartment in New York, which rented for eight dollars a month, could be divided among three, four, or as many as six workers to reduce the cost. A dozen eggs was going for twenty-five cents, about the same for three tins of sardines, while a dozen pints of beer could be had for a dollar fifty. At the saloons, drafts were five cents, whisky shots ten cents. With those basics, a group of immigrant workers could be quite content, as long as they had paychecks to purchase them.

As for McDonald, arrogant as always, he vowed that digging twenty-one miles of tunnel through the schist of New York would be no more challenging than any other routine job he had handled.

“Constructing the tunnel will be simple,” he boasted. “Just like cellar digging.”

15

PLAYING WITH DYNAMITE

MOSES EPPS AND EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
came from two different worlds at the dawn of a new century. Epps was a strong, twenty-five-year-old uneducated black man trying to support himself and to stay out of trouble in a time when racism was still very much a part of life in America. Robinson was a thirty-one-year-old white man with round glasses and a neatly trimmed mustache. He came from wealthy old English stock, studied at Harvard, and was on his way to becoming one of the country’s most distinguished poets with a letter of praise from President Theodore Roosevelt and a shelf full of Pulitzer prizes. His poems,
The New York Times
glowed, “stood out like poppies in a dandelion field.” In contrast, when given repeated chances to explore Epps’s life,
The Times
had little to say, describing him over and over as simply a “colored man.”