Tunneling to the Future: The Story of the Great Subway Expansion that Saved New York (review)

In 1928, looking back on the dramatic extension of New York City's subway system, which he had helped secure, George McAneny characterized it as "the city's physical salvation" (p. 268). In Tunneling to the Future, a colorful and detailed examination of the political and financial wrangling behind the single largest public works project in American history up to that time, Peter Derrick, archivist for the Bronx County Historical Society, concurs wholeheartedly with this judgment.

When the first short section of New York City subway opened, on 27 October 1904, it quickly became jammed with riders, inspiring hopes that private traction companies would compete for the apparently lucrative privilege of bringing New Yorkers a comprehensive system of rapid transit. The new subway also engendered hope among reformers that rapid transit would alleviate the problems associated with the city's vast, crowded, disease-ridden, and crime-filled tenement districts, particularly on the Lower East Side, which at the time recorded the highest population densities in the world. Such hopes proved unwarranted. From 1904 to 1909 business and government officials repeatedly failed to agree on a way to extend rapid-transit service at all, much less on the scale reformers envisioned. Meanwhile, the population kept growing.

Even after 1909, when a slate of protransit "fusion" candidates swept into power, a potent combination of politics, financial bickering, and anti-big-business sentiment dashed plan after plan for subway expansion. The turning point, according to Derrick, came in early 1911, when Manhattan Borough President George McAneny became "the acknowledged leader in making decisions about new subway lines" (p. 153). In a highly influential report, McAneny redefined the terms of debate by introducing what became known as the "dual system of rapid transit," a proposal in which the city—rather than the traction companies—would designate the new subway routes. If constructed simultaneously, as proposed, the dual system would open vast new expanses of all five boroughs to residential development and strike a serious blow against overcrowding.

Even though a broad public consensus coalesced in support of McAneny's proposal, leaders quickly ran aground on the same shoals that had caused previous plans to founder. With Tammany Hall supporting the Interborough Rapid Transit Company's demand for a guaranteed profit as the price for its participation, William Randolph Hearst's yellow press thundering against greedy traction monopolies and boodling politicians, and the Progressive reform camp divided and tentative, McAneny stepped forward to save his plan. He did so by convincing key members of the Public Service Commission and the city's Board of Estimate that they had a moral responsibility to use any means necessary to mitigate the city's worsening slum conditions.

Because constitutional debt limits blocked the city from building the dual system on its own, McAneny argued, public officials could only make good on their obligation by securing the best deal private business offered, even if in purely financial terms it seemed lopsided in business's favor. Once convinced, the city's leaders turned a deaf ear to popular criticism and signed the contracts approving the dual system of rapid transit—and thus effectively doubled the city's rapid-transit mileage, tripled its passenger capacity, and enabled hundreds of thousands of families to escape the tenements and build new lives in the "subway suburbs."

In explaining the struggles that produced New York's subway system, Derrick draws on a range of primary sources to reconstruct the intricacies of the numerous proposals, counterproposals, and political cul-de-sacs that preceded the dual system's successful implementation. An excellent section of photographs, several political cartoons, and numerous maps accompany the text.

Those interested in pursuing the links between the subway expansion and the growth of city planning, zoning, and housing reform...