New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town; the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down. And how do people travel between them? On the IRT.
BEFORE THE IRT
Traffic in New York City today is a walk in the park compared to what it was in the mid-19th century. Back then, there were no bike lanes, and no bus lanes, no Walk/Don’t Walk lights at every corner. Instead, the streets (especially in lower Manhattan) were chaos—pedestrians, pushcarts, horse-drawn streetcars, wagons, and carriages fought for position on streets that had no traffic signals. Overhead, the elevated trains clattered. The pandemonium (and the fact that London had built an underground railway in the 1850s) got Scientific American publisher Alfred Ely Beach thinking about new transportation systems for New York.
DIGGING DEEP
The governor had already vetoed a bill permitting a subway for moving people, however, so Beach started the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company. And in 1868, he got the state legislature to grant him a charter to build a pneumatic tube for shipping packages. But that’s not what he built. Secretly, he had his workmen bore a 312-foot tunnel under Broadway near City Hall—the one block from Warren Street to Murray Street. The tunnel was just large enough for a 22-passenger subway car. The men dug for 58 nights, 21 feet below street level, using wagons with muffled wheels to haul away the dirt. Once the walls of the tunnel were bricked, the plush car would be pushed back and forth over the track by compressed air produced by a steam-powered, high-speed fan. Beach furnished the station with chandeliers, paintings, and even a fountain. It opened to the public on March 1, 1870, and by the end of that year, more than 400,000 people had paid a quarter each for a ride. The subway’s popularity did not, however, convince the politically powerful merchants of lower Broadway that an underground railway was in their interests. They feared damage to their buildings and a decrease in street traffic (in other words, customers). Beach kept trying until 1873, when he finally gave up and rented his tunnel first as a shooting gallery, then for storage, and finally just closed it.
Laid end-to-end, all of NYC’s subway track would reach to Chicago.
By the late 1870s, it was clear that New York City needed better public transportation. Steam-driven elevated trains seemed to be a more practical solution than underground trains, and for the next two decades, the Second Avenue, Third Avenue, Sixth Avenue, and Ninth Avenue Elevated Railways, run by private companies, dominated “rapid” transit. But subways were appearing in other cities (like Glasgow, Budapest, Boston, Paris, and Berlin), and support for an underground rail system in New York was growing.
LAYING THE TRACKS
In 1894, the state legislature appointed a Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners to figure out the best route for a new subway and to decide whether the state should build it or contract it out to a private company. The powerful merchants again shot down the under-Broadway option, so planners chose a route from City Hall, north on today’s Lafayette Street (then called Elm Street) and Lexington Avenue all the way to 42nd Street. At 42nd, the train would make a sharp turn west to Longacre Square (the precursor to Times Square, at the intersection of 42nd Street, Broadway, and Seventh Avenue). At Longacre Square, the train would turn north again and run all the way up to Harlem, a nine-mile ride in total.
But perhaps the engineers’ most stunning concept was to lay four tracks instead of two: an uptown express track and an uptown local track, plus a downtown express track and a downtown local track. In other cities, the subways ran on just two tracks, with no distinction made between local and express stops. And New York’s elevated trains often ran on single tracks, reversing direction with the daily commute. The new four-track IRT subway system allowed trains to run continuously all day long—more passengers could go more places at any time, and they could get where they were going much faster. Plus, the local trains also stopped at the express stations, making it easy for passengers to switch from express to local or vice versa. Today, commuters are so used to this system that it seems as if all subways were always meant to be that way, but the New York City subway system employed this versatile and convenient set up from the very beginning.
From 1777 to 1797, the first capital of New York State was Kingston.
Ultimately, the city gave the subway contract to August Belmont Jr., an extremely rich (and reputedly nasty) banker who could raise enough money to build the underground system—officially called the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) Company. The city kicked in $35 million for construction costs and another $1.5 million to buy the land for the stations. Belmont paid for the cars, rails, and other equipment, and when the system opened, he would pay an annual rent equal to the interest on the construction bonds. The IRT was, in essence, an incorporated private company with a 50-year lease to run the trains.
The method of building the subway was called “cut and cover”: workers tore up the street, dug down one story below ground, laid the track, and then covered the top of the excavation with an iron-and-steel roof that could be paved over. In this way, the IRT avoided deep, difficult tunneling and also made it possible for passengers to access the station platforms via only one flight of stairs.
The stations were designed to be well lit and beautifully decorated with tile mosaics in motifs that reflected their locations—for example, the beaver mosaics at Astor Place reminded riders of John Jacob Astor’s fur trading past. Many stations also featured different colors (white for Spring Street, blue for Bleecker, etc.), and the station names were clearly displayed on panels. Although it was certainly beautiful, the ornamentation had a practical purpose—it was there to help passengers recognize their stops if they missed the conductor’s announcement.
OPENING DAY
The IRT opened on October 27, 1904, an event celebrated all over the city and glorified in local newspapers. The crowd at City Hall, where the first ride began, numbered about 7,000, and more than 1,000 people crowded onto each of the two eight-car trains that would make the inaugural trip. In the lead train, Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. took the controls (with the IRT general manager at his elbow, his hand on the emergency brake lever) and off they went. McClellan refused to give up the driver’s seat until he had taken the train all the way to its last stop in Harlem.
The U.N. Headquarters stands on the former site of NYC’s oldest slaughterhouse.
IRT expected to carry 350,000 passengers a day, but the riding public took to the trains in even larger numbers. By the end of the IRT’s first year of operation, more than 600,000 people were riding the subway every day. By 1914, that number had doubled. Less than a decade after opening, the subway system was carrying almost a billion riders per year. Now New Yorkers could commute to jobs that were beyond their own neighborhoods, traveling the length of Manhattan in half an hour. And they could visit families and friends, parks and playgrounds, theaters and colleges. And as the system expanded, they could even move to the outer boroughs, which developed as quickly as the subway could reach them. The IRT (followed by the Independent Subway System and the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation) soon turned New York into the most cosmopolitan city in the world. And until 1948, the fare was only a nickel. (That year, it went up to a dime.)
• The New York City subway is the largest subway system in the world, with 659 miles of track, 468 stations, and 6,290 subway cars.
• Riding the subway reduces carbon emissions by 80 percent per mile, compared with a single occupancy car.
• About 4.5 million people ride the subway every weekday.
• Busiest subway station: Times Square, with 58 million passengers each year.
• Subway tokens were introduced on July 2, 1953. The iconic Y-cut was designed to make them identifiable by touch in your pocket. The Y-cut in subway tokens was removed in 1980 because lint caught in it was clogging machines.
• The Metrocard was introduced on January 6, 1994. The last token machines were removed on December 11, 1997.
• In 1985, the MTA started the Arts for Transit program, which has commissioned 125 works of art (murals, mosaics, and sculptures) for subway stations. The Music Under New York program also pays about 100 professional musicians to play in the subway stations, and yes, they have to audition—the ones who are there officially, at least.
Washington Irving gave NYC its first nickname: Gotham.