A Century of Subways: Celebrating 100 Years of New York's Underground Railways

Chapter 1: August Belmont and His Subway

1 August Belmont and His Subway The subway that opened in the City of New York on the afternoon of Thursday, October 27, 1904, was of modest proportions when compared to the massive rail rapid-transit system that would be carrying New Yorkers on their appointed rounds a hundred years later, on Wednesday, October 27, 2004. In 2004, for example, there are important north-south trunk lines in Manhattan —four-track subways allowing both local and express service —under Eighth Avenue, Seventh Avenue, Broadway, Sixth Avenue, and Lexington Avenue. Add to this a modest but separate two-track north-south subway under portions of Sixth Avenue that is part of the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) system, three crosstown subways that intersect the north-south trunk lines while remaining separate from them, a difficult-to-describe loop line through the financial district in lower Manhattan, various feeder routes into the north-south trunk lines, and, finally, segments of a new two-track subway under Second Avenue on the East Side that was begun some decades ago, abandoned and left incomplete in the face of fiscal constraints, but stands on the verge of being activated again, and one has a sense of how popular the single line that opened in 1904 eventually became. In October 1904, when service was inaugurated on New York’s first subway, the route its trains followed was located entirely on Manhattan Island. In 2004, subways in New York serve four of the city’s five boroughs, and there are no fewer than thirteen twotrack crossings of the East River between Manhattan and Long Island and four separate crossings of the Harlem River linking Manhattan with the Bronx. Because of this growth and development, contemporary accounts of the New York Subway understandably—and quite properly—focus on its totality and speak in terms of the overall 2 A CENTURY OF SUBWAYS system’s three divisions, the IND, the BMT, and the IRT. There is, however, a discreet identity to something called the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, the corporate predecessor of today ’s IRT Division and the entity that inaugurated subway service in New York in 1904. The Interborough and the IRT deserve attention on their own terms. Contract One and Contract Two A quarter-century before New York inaugurated service on its first subway line in 1904, a quartet of north-south elevated railways was built to link business districts in Lower Manhattan with residential neighborhoods to the north. Constructed entirely with private capital, protected by franchise contracts authorized by state legislation enacted in 1875, and with trains powered by small steam locomotives, this first form of true rapid transit to serve New York City included lines over Second Avenue and Third Avenue on the East Side, Sixth Avenue in the center of Manhattan, and Ninth Avenue on the West Side. The Second Avenue and Sixth Avenue lines were part of an enterprise that was eventually known as the Metropolitan Elevated Railway Company , while the lines over Third and Ninth Avenues were managed jointly as the New York Elevated Railroad Company. In 1879—before the Metropolitan’s Second Avenue Line had even been completed, in fact—the two elevated companies were merged into a single system called Manhattan Railways, and it was also at this time that financier Jay Gould entered the New York elevated picture, a man whose manipulation of railroad securities had triggered a full-blown financial panic in 1869. As described by historian David McCullough, in his acquisition of the Manhattan elevated lines Gould’s plan was ‘‘to harass and intimidate the existing owners at every opportunity, drive the stock down below its true value, then begin buying.’’1 Under Gould—perhaps even despite him—the four Manhattan elevated lines became an important element of mass transport in New York City during the final quarter of the nineteenth century.2 In 1891, Manhattan Railways added a third elevated company to its expanding empire: the Suburban Rapid Transit Company, AUGUST BELMONT AND HIS SUBWAY 3 whose route extended northward from the banks of the Harlem River into the central Bronx—or the ‘‘Annexed District,’’ as it was often called in the 1890s. Suburban operated its first train in 1886 and provided connections at its southern end to both the Second Avenue and the Third Avenue lines. Once acquired by Manhattan Railways, Suburban became a northward extension for both Second Avenue and Third...