The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (6 page)

But when the Erie Canal opened for business on October 25, 1825, all of that began to change. It connected New York’s Hudson Valley to the Great Lakes region, reducing the time to move freight from the city to the upper Mississippi Valley from twenty-six days to six days and transforming Gotham into the hub of the nation’s imports and exports. Between 1820 and 1870, three out of every four immigrants who came into the United States entered through New York, and by 1880 New York City’s population had exploded to 1.2 million. The canal also drove an emotional wedge between New York City and Boston, at the time the first and fourth largest cities in the country. When Massachusetts decided that instead of following New York’s lead in building waterways, it would focus on building railroads, it was like the small brother telling the big brother it was time they went their separate ways. And the big brother built up some resentment. When Massachusetts invited New York’s governor to the opening of yet another railroad in 1851, the invitation was declined in a threatening tone. “We have seen you invading our soil, filling our valleys, boring our mountains at some points, leveling them at others, and turning your steam engines loose upon us to run up and down, roaming at large throughout our borders,” New York’s governor wrote back. “I must warn you to pause and take breath before making fresh tracks upon our territory.” Massachusetts and its capital city would not listen. And decades later, when it came time to resolve their urban congestion woes, Boston would again follow its own instincts rather than mimic what New York had done.

Meanwhile, with each new wave of immigrants arriving in the second half of the nineteenth century, squeezing everyone into the fingernail of the island of Manhattan became impossible, and the city’s newest arrivals pushed their way north. Walking was soon no longer an option to get everywhere. The horses would feel the strain, too. And those rivers and bays that surrounded Manhattan, separating it from New Jersey, Brooklyn, and the bucolic Hudson Valley, were suddenly obstacles that needed to be bypassed so the growth could continue. Ferries were too slow. Suspension bridges were just beginning to be built. New Yorkers were about to learn that there was only one direction to look to ease their city’s congestion. Down.

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IT HAD TO BE
the strangest dinner party ever thrown. Beneath the streets of London on Saturday evening, November 10, 1827, crimson velvet drapes covered the brick arches; two long tables covered in white tablecloths filled the floor space; large, handsome candelabras lighted with portable gas provided the light; and the British army’s uniformed Band of the Coldstream Guards supplied the music, playing their favorite sounds from the romantic German opera
Der Freischütz
. More than a hundred men came together for a banquet beneath the streets of London, not so they could celebrate the unusual tunnel they were digging, but to try to reassure the skeptical public that it would be safe to come down there once it was finished. At one of the tables sat British royalty. At the other table sat a hundred anonymous bricklayers and miners, or navvies as they were known. They were not the bottom of the working class, but rather the top of it, honest, independent, well-compensated men who wore tall and sturdy laced boots and kerchiefs in their shirts. They were also not ones to miss an opportunity to get drunk at someone else’s expense, and so on this night they bent their sore and bandaged fingers around glasses of warm beer mixed with gin and allowed themselves a rare evening of merriment away from the daily grind and grime. When the festivities wound down, the workers raised a special pickax and spade, along with their glasses, and shouted out a toast to the man who had dared to construct the tunnel.

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ALMOST FROM THE DAY
he was born in 1769 in Normandy, Marc Isambard Brunel’s life was one adventure after another, filled with rebellion, bankruptcy, jail, and inventions. When his father pushed him to become a priest, Brunel refused and spent his teens sketching and earning a measly living painting. After just three lessons in trigonometry as a teenager, Brunel astonished his teacher by vowing to determine the height of the church spire in their town. His mind worked faster than others’, and he began to show the same prodigy-like qualities as a European peer of his born a decade earlier. Sadly, their lives and accomplishments did not overlap for long. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died at age thirty-five, leaving the world to wonder how much more he might have achieved in a full life. Perhaps he would have found the same success in his later years as Brunel did. Brunel drifted from Paris north to the city of Rouen in his twenties, and then one summer’s day in 1793 he hurried to catch an American ship bound for New York, only to discover on board that he had lost his passport. No matter, for when the authorities asked for his papers, his calligraphy and architectural skills saved him. “Having borrowed a passport from one of his fellow passengers,” Brunel’s biographer wrote, “he soon produced a copy, so admirably executed in every minute detail, even to the seal, that it was deemed proof against all scrutiny.” His forged passport worked, and Brunel soon found work in upstate New York as a land surveyor. It was there that he had the fortune to meet the recently resigned U.S. treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton. Brunel flourished with Hamilton’s assistance, and before long he had been hired as the chief engineer for New York City. During this time he designed a two-thousand-seat playhouse on Chatham Street in New York and he very nearly designed one of the most important buildings in American history. Brunel’s drawings for a new capitol building to be constructed in Washington impressed the judges of a $500 prize offered by Thomas Jefferson, but his design was deemed too expensive to build and the winner was a late entry by a little-known physician, painter, and amateur architect. Brunel stayed on as New York’s chief engineer until he felt the pull of home, and on January 20, 1799, he set sail for England.

Brunel began to tinker, first on a writing and drawing machine, and then on a contraption that measured out pieces of thread and wound them into small balls of cotton. The cotton balls were soft and elegant, although exactly what purpose they might serve was not entirely clear. Had Brunel patented his machine, there is no telling the fortune that might have come his way. Instead, he failed to act, and the machine was widely adopted and used, and he received not a penny for his contribution. One bad business break after another eventually landed him in serious debt, and in 1821, Brunel, with a wife and three young children at home, was jailed at King’s Bench Debtors Prison. It was a humbling and humiliating experience.

Just before his imprisonment, Brunel, by now fifty years old, had sketched out in detail an enormous, cast-iron, circular device. He called it a shield, and in his patent application he described it as a machine for “forming tunnels or drift-ways underground.” There was nothing else like it. With hydraulic presses rotating it and propelling it, this shield could push forward underground, excavating dirt and rock while supporting the ground above the hole that it dug. The shield, Brunel believed, was the future of tunneling, but from behind bars there was little he could do with it.

In a letter that he wrote to authorities, Brunel begged for his release. He explained that he had refused offers in prior years to leave England to help another country with an engineering crisis, because his loyalty to his new homeland mattered most to him. “If I see honourable and personal employment here,” he wrote, “you may be assured that I shall not be wanting in zeal, but shall devote my future services and talents for the benefit of this country.” Every day he remained imprisoned he grew more dejected about the time away from his family. He wrote an emotional letter to his close friend, Lord Spencer: “My affectionate wife and myself are sinking under it. We have neither rest by day nor night. Were my enemies at work to effect the ruin of mind and body, they could not do so more effectually.”

As Brunel’s depression deepened, the Duke of Wellington finally recognized the good that Brunel could do for their country. The duke ordered that the five thousand pounds Brunel owed be taken from the Treasury and used to free Brunel of his liabilities. In a gracious letter of thanks, Brunel wrote to the duke on August 21, 1821, and promised that the only way he could express his gratitude was in “preparing plans for the service of the British government.” As it so happened, the duke had just the project for him.

On February 18, 1824, a group of men gathered at the City of London Tavern in the Bishopsgate neighborhood. With its low ceilings, flagstone floors, roaring fires, and cavernous dining room that could seat 350 people, it was one of London’s most popular restaurants. It was also an appropriate place to make history. That evening, after a long round of toasts, the Thames Tunnel Company was created. Its mission: to build the world’s first tunnel for vehicular traffic and to do it directly beneath the Thames River.

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TRAFFIC IN LONDON WAS AT
a standstill, particularly across London Bridge. Thousands of people were crossing the Thames River daily either on the bridge or by ferry, but the waits became interminable, and the merchants downtown were helpless as they lost business to the round-the-clock congestion. The city needed a thoroughfare to connect the two banks of the Thames, for pedestrians and for a steady line of carriages, too. A bridge was the obvious solution, but London already had those. Brunel proposed something bolder. Using his patented shield, Brunel suggested that he and his nineteen-year-old son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, would burrow a tunnel under the bed of the Thames. Until then, whenever workers had bored underground, the edge of a river had always marked the end of the line. It was a river, after all. Where else was there to go? Brunel dismissed that defeatist attitude.
You go under the river, that’s where you go
.

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THE FATHER PUT THE SON
in charge, and in 1826 their work began. Isambard Brunel was just twenty years old, a heavy smoker and Napoleon-like in stature, but his father entrusted him with the role of chief engineer on the project. The Brunel shield was an amazing machine, twelve linked frames made of cast iron, each twenty-two feet tall and three feet wide. Three compartments stacked on top of each other were able to hold and protect workers from falling debris. The compartments were fenced in on the sides and open in front, where the workers could stand and reach out their arms to work. A large screw on the shield’s bottom was turned to push it forward, and as it inched ahead, workers in the compartments efficiently bricked up the tunnel wall. Wheelbarrows carried the excavated mud to a long string of buckets that were lifted up a shaft. The process was smooth, but slow. On a good day, the shield pushed forward twelve inches at most, and each one was nerve-racking for the workers. The roof of the tunnel was just sixteen feet beneath the riverbed of the Thames, and that meant that water leaked and even flooded daily.

On May 18, 1827, around five o’clock in the morning, Richard Beamish, a twenty-nine-year-old Irishman working as an assistant civil engineer on the Thames Tunnel, noticed that as the tide rose, the ground in the tunnel seemed to come alive. Occasional bursts of diluted silt leaked in, but that was not unusual. The workers that arrived at six in the morning were reluctant to enter the tunnel, but the day passed uneventfully. As night arrived, Beamish anticipated trouble, and he removed his polished Wellington shoes for a pair of greased mud boots and shed his holiday coat for a waterproof one. It was well into the evening when Beamish heard one of his most powerful men cry out for help, and he sent an equally strong worker to find him. A rush of water suddenly burst into the tunnel and lifted the men up, and quickly the water level began to rise up their legs and reach their waists. Beamish feared for the men working on the shield, but they managed to scurry down and to reach the bottom of the shaft, where they could climb a staircase to safety. That’s when Beamish looked down the tunnel and saw a sight he would never forget.

“The water came on in a great wave,” he recalled. “A loud crash was heard. A small office, which had been erected under the arch, about a hundred feet from the frames, burst. The pent air rushed out; the lights were suddenly extinguished.” The men climbed the staircase in darkness, and as they reached the surface, they heard a hundred voices shouting. “A rope! A rope! Save him! Save him!”

Below, one old worker had been caught by the wave and was hanging on for his life. Without hesitating, young Isambard Brunel, whose father was out having dinner at the time and thus had no idea of the near catastrophe he was missing, grabbed a rope, slid down an iron pole in the shaft, helped tie the rope around his worker’s waist, and called for him to be hoisted up. Once he was up, the men conducted a roll call. “To our unspeakable joy,” Beamish wrote years later, “every man answered to his name.”

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SUCH GOOD FORTUNE WOULD NOT
last. On the morning of January 12, 1828, Beamish arrived around six and waited with the next shift while they downed some warm beer. Suddenly, a watchman rushed over to them. “The water is in! The tunnel is full!” Beamish grabbed a crowbar and broke down a locked door to a staircase that descended into the shaft. He had only gone down a few steps when Isambard Brunel, hurled up from the tunnel by the massive wave, landed in Beamish’s arms. “Ball! Ball! Collins! Collins!” Brunel muttered the names of men he had been with just seconds earlier, and now they were gone, along with four others who perished in the flooded tunnel. More than four thousand bags of clay and gravel were needed to plug the hole in the riverbed that had caused the disaster, but it almost did not matter. Calls for the tunnel to be sealed up poured in to Marc Brunel. The risk, the public cried, was not worth more deaths. But even though his own son was nearly killed and required months of recuperation from both a knee injury and internal wounds, Brunel insisted the work continue. “The ground was always made to the plan,” he said. “Not the plan to the ground.” But until more money could be raised, and the public reassured, Brunel and the Thames Tunnel would have to wait. A brick wall was erected in the tunnel, and it was turned into a tourist attraction for a small fee so that the tunnel company could at least recoup some of its costs. “The Great Bore,” as journalists derisively called the tunnel, was presumed dead.