Did You Ever Hear About the First New York Subway?
It was built in secret
The New York subway system that we know opened in 1904. But it was not the first subway.
Alfred Ely Beach owned a new magazine called Scientific America. There was so much traffic on Broadway, he came up with the idea of an underground railway. It would use an enormous fan to propel the rail cars and suck them back through a tunnel. It was called the Beach Pneumonic Transit.
The commissioner of public works William Tweed had to approve the plan for the underground system Beach wanted to build. Tweed’s main income was from city transportation. Beach knew of the corruption in that department, so he claimed that it was going to be a mail delivery system so it would not be seen as competition. Tweed approved the project.
Beach and a small group started digging a tunnel under Broadway at night and hid the dirt in the basement of a building Beach had bought for that reason.
Just before its completion, the press somehow heard about it and made it public. However, the single tunnel was built in 58 days and it opened as planned, carrying more than 400,000 passengers the first year.
Tweed was incensed and refused to vote for any future expansion of the subway. Tweed eventually went to prison for his…
