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

Chapter 5: The Legacy of the IRT

5 The Legacy of the IRT For the first quarter-century or so that the New York Subway was in operation, the general popularity of urban mass transit remained on the upswing, and more passengers rode America’s subways, els, and streetcars year after year.1 The extraordinary expense of building underground subway lines, though, meant that this unique and effective form of high-volume transport saw relatively little replication in the United States, even while public transportation itself was experiencing years of steady growth. As discussed in Chapter 2, Boston built a network of diverse subway lines that connected its downtown core with various residential neighborhoods on the city’s periphery. But it was Chicago that for many decades could claim the title of being the home of America’s second-largest rail rapid-transit network. Chicago While there was continuous talk during the early years of the twentieth century of building downtown subways in Chicago— Bion Arnold delivered a comprehensive subway plan for the city as early as 1902, for instance—in point of fact rapid transit, Chicago style, took the form of an extensive system of elevated railways , including a unique downtown delivery system for such trains that was known as the Union Loop.2 To this day, downtown Chicago itself is referred to as ‘‘the Loop,’’ although this usage predates the construction of the elevated loop in 1898 and was coined in reference to various surface loops that the city’s extensive network of street-running cable railways used to reverse direction and head back to their outlying terminals. When the Union Elevated Railway inaugurated revenue ser- THE LEGACY OF THE IRT 277 vice around the Union Loop on October 3, 1897—a month and some days after Boston opened its Tremont Street Subway—it was a unique undertaking. For one thing, the Union elevated company itself owned no rolling stock and operated no trains. Instead, it leased trackage rights over its 2-mile right-of-way around the city’s downtown business district to three other elevated railway companies, and trains of these lines provided service over Union’s facility.3 To the south of downtown Chicago, one found the right-of-way of the city’s oldest elevated company —the Chicago and South Side Rapid Transit Railroad Company , whose steam-powered trains carried their first revenue passengers in 1892.4 Due west of Downtown ran the right-of-way of the Lake Street Elevated, opened in 1893, while the Metropolitan West Side Elevated Railroad operated multiple lines that served neighborhoods both west and northwest of downtown Chicago. The Metropolitan operated its first train in 1895 and, unlike those of the two earlier L companies, its trains were electrified from the outset. These, then, were the three elevated companies that inaugurated L service around the Union Loop in the fall of 1897. A fourth company, the Northwestern Elevated Railway, whose lines extended northward from the loop, joined the older trio in the spring of 1900.5 The principal figure behind three of Chicago’s five L companies —Lake Street, the Northwestern, and Union Elevated—was Charles Tyson Yerkes, Jr., a man introduced in Chapter 3 as an important force in the construction of tube railways in London. Yerkes’s tenure in Chicago was a stormy one, and his role in the development of mass transportation there was not warmly regarded. Nevertheless, prior to his rapid-transit ventures in London , Charles Tyson Yerkes was heavily involved in the development of Chicago’s network of elevated railways.6 In 1924 Chicago’s four L companies—four, not five, because Union had been absorbed by the Northwestern in 1904—were unified as the Chicago Rapid Transit Company. Plans to tear down the Union Loop and replace it with a system of subways continued to be discussed in Chicago, but no action was forthcoming until 1938, when the availability of public works money from Washington prompted the city of Chicago to begin con- 278 A CENTURY OF SUBWAYS struction of two downtown delivery subways that would allow some but not all of the L trains using the Union Loop to be routed through the new tunnels. Initial estimates suggested that when both subways were complete, the sixty-eight peak-hour trains previously using the Union Loop would be reduced to thirtyeight . Both of the new subways were constructed with a north-south orientation, one under...