A Historical Curiosity Of New York

By the Mid-19th century, Manhattan was experiencing an untidy gridlock. As a rapidly growing population squeezed onto the narrow island, pedestrians and horse-drawn conveyances jammed the streets. Every horse potentially donated as much as 10 pounds of manure to the roads daily.

Alfred Ely Beach, like many of his contemporaries, believed in technological fixes. He envisioned a way to relieve his city’s transportation problem: Travel underground. Beach thought that an air pressure-driven subway would provide a solution, a larger version of pneumatic tubes that delivered mail and small packages in London.

In 1868, Beach took an indirect route to realize his pneumatic subway. He sought the government’s permission to build an experimental pneumatic package delivery system of two tunnels — each less than four and one half feet in diameter. The state legislature granted the charter. Then, Beach requested and received an amendment to allow construction of a large tunnel that would contain two smaller tubes.

Historians suggest that Beach had first requested permission for two small tunnels to evade the notice of those who ran New York City: William M. Tweed and Tammany Hall. Boss Tweed and his group collected fees from owners of private streetcar lines and planned to expand operations with an elevated railroad.

The Beach Pneumatic Transit Company leased the basement under Devlin & Co., located across the street from City Hall. After enlarging the basement, workers cut a tunnel with a hydraulic shield, originally designed by French-born British engineer Marc Brunel and modified by Beach. Hydraulic rams drove the barrelshaped device, which ground the earth. At night, wagons carted away bags of soil.

By January 1870, Beach’s crew had constructed a 300-foot brick-lined tunnel that started at Warren Street and Broadway and ran under Broadway to Murray Street. The true purpose of the passage escaped notice. The New York Times reported that the tunnel had an interior diameter of eight feet, which would be divided to form a double line of pneumatic tubes.

Amidst unfounded speculation that the tunnel undermined the streets above, the city government attempted to halt construction. To raise support for his pneumatic subway, Beach opened the unauthorized railway on February 26. Visitors were pleasantly surprised: “Such as expected to find a dismal, cavernous retreat under Broadway,” reported the New York Times, “opened their eyes at the elegant reception room, the light, airy tunnel and the general appearance of taste and comfort in all the apartments.” The subway’s depot boasted a water fountain, chandeliers, paintings and a grand piano.

A cylindrical car shuttled visitors between stations. Illuminated with zircon lamps, the car had oval windows at each end, plushlined seats and floors of oiled wood. Air pressure drove the car. A steam engine powered a blower that could deliver 100,000 cubic feet of air per minute. The artificial gale blew the car at a speed of 10 miles an hour. To slow the car, operators reversed the blower when the car reached the midway point. Switching the direction of air flow also produced a partial vacuum that allowed atmospheric pressure to propel the car back to the first station.

Throngs of enthusiastic visitors paid 25 cents for a ride on the subway, a sum that Beach donated to charity. Within the first two weeks, sales totaled almost $3,000. Encouraged by the public’s response, Beach campaigned for an amendment of his company’s charter to extend the subway uptown for about five miles. The state legislature eventually passed it. During the same session, they also approved a Tammany-backed bill for an elevated railroad. On 1 April 1871, Governor John T. Hoffman vetoed the Beach Pneumatic Railway bill.

Beach did not give up; he continued to lobby for his subway. In 1873, he tried for the fourth time. By now, Boss Tweed had been removed from power. The legislature approved the bill, and Governor John A. Dix signed the bill into law. Before he could start on the railway, the stock market collapsed. Beach’s company had already experienced trouble in attracting support. After the Panic of 1873, investors disappeared. The tunnel served as a shooting gallery, a storage vault and then it was sealed.

The Beach tunnel had become one of the historical curiosities of New York. Newcomers to town knew nothing about it, but long-time residents remembered it from thirty years earlier. A Times editor remarked in 1912 that the tunnel was so nearly forgotten that it has since been ‘rediscovered’ about once in every ten years by some writer of special articles on ‘old New York’. There was glaring evidence of the tunnel in the form of a large grate in City Hall Park near Murray St. Any passerby could tell that something was down there. But who would recognize it as an air vent for a pneumatic railway tunnel?

The Tribune of October 4, 1903, carried a feature on ‘Oldtime Tunnels in This Borough and Brooklyn’, inspired probably by the impending completion of the first subway. In the City Hall Park, on the Broadway side, near the drinking fountain at the end of the wide walk leading past the front of the City Hall, is a grating over a large opening in the ground. It is rusted and shows little evidence of having been opened in a long time. It covers a large passageway, which, as one can see as one peers down between the bars, leads under the sidewalk and out under Broadway. One could easily enter the passage if the grating was lifted, for it is six or eight feet across and four or five wide. It leads to the terminus of an experimental underground railway which few recall in these days.

In 1904, the city opened its primary subway system, one powered by electricity. The Public Service Commission for the First District was established in 1907 to regulate public utilities in the city (the rest of the state was the Second District). A pressing need was to expand the new subway system and plan additional routes. Not only was the population growing fast, but ridership per person was growing faster. The Commission adopted a system of routes in 1908 called the Tri-Borough Plan, including a main line in Manhattan that ran in Broadway from the tip of City Hall Park to Ninth St, through private property to 14th St, and then in Irving Place and Lexington Ave to the Harlem River. The route was to be separate from the first subway, so that it would be open to bidding by any company. Once again an underground railway was proposed for lower Broadway. This time, at long last, it would be built.

During the next few years the Commission negotiated with the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (operator of the first subway and the Manhattan Railway elevated lines), the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, and the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad Company over routes and contracts. By 1911 a plan emerged called the Dual System, providing for two separate sets of routes for the I R T and B R T systems. The Broadway portion of the Tri-Borough main line was adapted into a B R T route that continued up Broadway to 45th St. Although operating contracts with the two companies were not signed until 1913, the Commission began awarding construction contracts in July 1911, proceeding as fast as the preparation of plans would allow.

When the Degnon Contracting Company begins work on Section 2 of the Broadway Subway, noted the Times on February 4, it will come across an interesting relic of the engineering enterprise of forty years ago, which has already performed a small part of the work for it. Underneath Broadway from Warren to Murray Street runs a section of tunnel eight feet in diameter and brick lined, with a smaller tunnel running up to the surface and emerging in a grating just inside the grass limits of City Hall Park, north of Murray Street. This was the beginning of the first subway ever constructed in New York City, and if tradition be correct somewhere in it has been immured for forty years one of the cars which it was designed to accommodate — a tradition just thirteen years old!

When workers broke into Beach’s tunnel while excavating a new branch of the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit. Here, they found a deteriorated rail car sitting on corroded tracks, a dried water fountain and a waiting room embellished with décor from the previous century. They had uncovered America’s first subway.

A party of officials from Degnon Contracting and the Public Service Commission entered into formal possession of the old pneumatic railway tube beside the City Hall Park on February 8, 1912. As reported in the Times, they went with lighted candles into the old tunnel from the ventilating shaft which comes up into the Park. They found the tube in excellent condition. The rails were rusted almost entirely away, but the brickwork was sound and dry, and the only discomfort came from a steam pipe which was escaping through a leak in the pipe. The one car that has been immured for the last forty years was a total wreck. Its woodwork is falling all to pieces, and even its wheels are gone. From this description it appears that the remains of the cars had deteriorated a great deal since 1899.

The visitors in February 1912 took ‘souvenirs’, details unknown and present whereabouts unknown. Perhaps they still exist in private hands. The officials were: Superintendant Morris of Degnon Contracting; and from the Public Service Commission, Travis H Whitney, Secretary; Robert Ridgway, Engineer of Subway Construction; Leroy T Harkness, legal; and D L Turner, J B Shipman and J H Myers, civil engineers.

The shield should have been preserved at Cornell. James Blaine Walker wrote in 1918, The University accepted it, took it to Ithaca, and placed it on exhibition in the museum of Sibley College, where it can be seen today.33 Sibley was the college of mechanical engineering, not civil engineering. No further record of the shield is known. The Sibley College museum was closed many decades ago. No one at Cornell now knows what happened to the first tunnel shield in America.

The closed car was partly preserved. Walker wrote, The remaining wood work of the car was brittle with dry rot, and some of it fell apart when removed. Enough of it was saved to assemble in the office of the Public Service Commission almost the complete end of the car. What happened to it after 1918 is unknown.

Phill Jones. New York's Lost Subway. History Magazine. June/July 2008.

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