Inventor Alfred Ely Beach opens New York City’s first subway line, a pneumatic demonstration project in a three-hundred-foot tunnel under Broadway.
Beach had permission to build a package-delivery tunnel under Broadway, but he secretly began work on a passenger-transit demonstration instead. A rush of air from a massive blower propelled the car. “When the blower is in motion, an enormous volume of air is driven through the tunnel, which drives the car before it like a boat before the wind,” Beach wrote. After only fifty-eight days of construction, Beach’s subway opened as a demonstration on February 26, 1870. Passengers entered the railway through a luxurious station in the basement of Devlin’s clothing store. The price of admission was a small donation to a home for orphans of Union soldiers and sailors from the Civil War.
The railway wasn’t actually operational on its opening day, because of an engine failure, but within a week, passengers began taking the short journey under Broadway from Warren Street to Murray Street and back. When Beach couldn’t get state funding for a complete subway network, he blamed infamous Tammany Hall ruler Boss Tweed. Wealthy Broadway landowners also helped scuttle the plan, fearing the tunnels would damage their buildings’ foundations.
But even if he’d gotten state approval, the financial panic of 1873 and the depression that followed would have prevented Beach from building his system. Because they cost less than underground lines, elevated lines gained popularity. The IRT didn’t begin underground public transit service until thirty-four years after Beach’s demonstration line opened.
No elements of Beach’s subway remain (despite its appearance in Ghostbusters 2). The station burned in 1898, and the tunnel was destroyed in 1912 during construction of a BMT tunnel. Today’s City Hall station occupies the former tunnel’s footprint.—KB