Brief Transit

We excavate the history we need, bend the past to colonize the present.

—Iain Sinclair, Rodinsky's Room

A well-dressed man sits at an oval window in a ruined wooden structure within a brick enclosure. A wavering trail of light maps his steps; the efflorescent bricks and the man's heavy coat suggest the place is dank and cold. It is an enigmatic and paradoxical image, combining repose with movement, dapper dress with decay, shadows with light. Further details serve to deepen the sense of mystery: the gentleman is Stanley Yale Beach, aeronautical editor of Scientific American, and he is sitting in a train car dead-ended into a tunnel dug beneath Manhattan thirty years previously, a tunnel that already looks impossibly ancient, like the tomb of some technophilic pharaoh.

The photograph, taken in early 1899, came about as a result of two elemental forces: fire and family. On the evening of 4 December 1898, a blaze broke out in a clothing store at the corner of Warren Street and Broadway in New York City. The fire was extinguished the following day, but not until early the following year were the remains of the gutted building finally cleared down to the subbasement level. A sealed-up door was found on the Broadway side of the site. It was opened to reveal a tunnel, its floor a little over twenty feet below street level, its path curving sharply to the right. This photograph was taken about 280 feet beyond that door, at the tunnel's end below Murray Street and Broadway. Beach was part of a group that had been invited to examine the tunnel: he was the grandson of the tunnel's builder.

The tunnel had been built in 1869–1870 by Alfred Ely Beach, owner and editor of Scientific American. In 1868, he had proposed the building of a novel transit system, a subway through which trains would be propelled pneumatically. Large fans would create a differential air pressure that would push or draw passenger cars designed to fit tightly in the system's tunnels. The scheme has a physiological resonance, suggesting seamless flow and circulation. It is also somewhat off-putting: the idea of riding in plush cars hissing through close tunnels is a touch smothering and restrictive—a kind of well-appointed claustrophobia. Anticipating that the prospect of being blown headlong through the bowels of Manhattan was likely to meet some resistance among New Yorkers, Beach went ahead and built a section of tunnel to demonstrate the idea's workability. He leased space beneath Devlin's clothing store at the southwest corner of Broadway and Warren Street, where he installed a large blower driven by a steam engine. He built an elaborate waiting room and boarding platform beneath the Warren Street sidewalk and dug a 294-foot-long tunnel, which took a sharp right turn out of the station and then headed beneath Broadway to Murray Street, where it ended.

Figure 1.

Stanley Yale Beach in the abandoned subway, 1899. (Benson Ford Research Center, The Henry Ford, Dearborn, Michigan. Reproduced with permission.)

The system was workable: over the following three years thousands of people descended into the station to take a ride. In 1875, the basement lease expired and the tunnel was re-purposed as a rifle range. In 1879, the tunnel was abandoned and sealed up. Finally, in 1912, it was destroyed to make way for the Brooklyn Rapid Transit system's City Hall station. Such are the bare facts. For more on the tunnel's history, readers are referred to Joseph Brennan's well-researched and hugely enjoyable web pages at http://www.columbia.edu/brennan/beach/index.html.

As the final section of Brennan's site makes clear, however, the subway's story does not end with its destruction. In fact, it seems the story is never done: like Zeno's arrow, it points to a conclusion that it never seems quite able to reach. Urban folklore is a powerful intoxicant—subterranean urban folklore perhaps the most potent of all. That, plus a heady concoction...