Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
- A visionary inventor proposed an underground transit system for New York City decades before one was officially built.
- Powerful political forces opposed his secret project, but he found clever ways to work around them.
- Despite early public enthusiasm, unexpected economic forces ultimately determined the project's fate.
This story is a collaboration with Biography.com.
It’s hard to imagine New York City without its robust and bustling underground transit system. Today, the twisting web of the New York City subway can feel like a second, albeit subterranean, city of its own.
But that wasn’t always the case. New York City wouldn’t have a proper underground transit system until October 1904, just over 40 years after London opened its famed Underground. In the U.S., both Chicago (1892) and Boston (1901) adopted rapid transit systems sooner than New York did.
But if the bureaucracy of New York City made the Big Apple a relatively late adopter of an underground transit system for a population that was massive compared to its rival U.S. cities, one particular New Yorker was technically ahead of the pack by decades—thanks to his own private efforts.
In the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, a man sought to secretly revolutionize urban transit. Doing so put him in the crosshairs of one of the most infamous power brokers in American history.
“What is it?” Alfred Ely Beach rhetorically asked in a column he wrote in a November 1849 issue of his magazine, Scientific American. “Nothing less than a railway underneath, instead of one above—railway life down stairs, instead of railway life up stairs.”
The article, titled “An Under-ground Railway in Broadway” is reproduced in Matthew Algeo’s recent history of Beach’s underground endeavor, New York’s Secret Subway. It’s written with the kind of “the future is here” entrepreneurial optimism that suggests just how ambitious such an idea was at the time. Beach was a pivotal figure in the history of American innovation, thanks to his cofounding of the Munn & Co. patent agency, which aided innovators like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. Even so, his proposal would read like a utopian vision if he hadn’t been trying to address a very immediate need.
In the 1850s and 1860s, New York City was a metropolis on the brink of bursting. Over those two decades, the population of the city grew from five hundred thousand to over one million people, and that increasing density wasn’t met with any transit innovation. The muddy streets were packed with pushcarts, horse-drawn carriages (including the large “omnibuses”), and even livestock, all of which commuters had to dodge if they opted to walk. Something needed to change.
But Beach’s initial proposal, from that 1849 article, was merely a second road, barely dissimilar to the one above it. “The plan is to tunnel Broadway through the whole length,” he wrote, “with openings and stairways at every corner.” His initial idea was that the cars below would be pulled by horses, just like those above, and that there would even be pedestrian walkways along the sides.
That plan changed, however, when Beach turned to an even more economical, and less equine, form of locomotion: air pressure.
In 1853, Englishman Josiah Latimer Clark installed a 220-yard system of pneumatic tubes between the London Stock Exchange and the Electric Telegraph Company, allowing letters and small parcels to pass between the two locations unencumbered, carried by pressurized air. A little more than a decade later, Alfred Ely Beach would demonstrate at the American Institute Exhibition in 1867 that Clark’s system could be used for more than just mail. Larger pneumatic tubes could be a form of mass transit.
Unlike so many wealthy innovators making big promises, Beach had actually worked out the how-to of his grand idea. What stood in his way wasn’t the practical. Rather, it was the political.
At the time, New York City was in the grip of Tammany Hall, a political machine that ran the city for most of the 19th and much of the 20th century. Holding immense sway over a voting base made up of the underserved, and offering a foothold in local politics to New York City’s growing Irish Catholic community, Tammany leader William M. “Boss” Tweed publicly positioned Tammany on the side of the working man while masking its own immense grift.
That extended to the very instruments of public transit, the horse carriages and omnibuses, that Alfred Beach sought to circumvent with his pneumatic system. Tweed and Tammany, and therefore the government in their grip, would offer no support to Beach’s transit ambitions, ostensibly pushing back against this progress with a “won’t someone think of the working man” argument. Tammany publicly pleaded in favor the proletariat who made their living from the then-current transit options. What went unsaid is how much revenue from these existing “working man” transit options went to line the pockets of the political bosses at the top of the system. “They aim simply at getting the most possible money, and giving in return the least possible accommodation,” the New York Times wrote in 1860, lamenting the state of New York City transit. “They have the traveling public at their mercy, and they practice upon it regular and systematic extortions, which no other community would tolerate for an hour.”
So Beach, knowing Tammany Hall opposed his proposal, did what only a man of his wealth and ambition could: he went ahead with it anyway.
Specifically, he lied to the city, obtaining permission to dig under Broadway solely for the installation of small pneumatic mail tubes. Once he got to digging, though, he set about on his actual mission, creating what Matthew Algeo described as “a demonstration of a pneumatic subway system underneath Broadway to prove it could be done.”
And he really did prove it.
In February of 1870, Beach demonstrated his secret project to the public. Spanning only 300 feet, beneath Broadway from Warren Street to Murray Street, the transit system was a thing of beauty, according to reports at the time. The station was replete with chandeliers, a grand piano, and even a fountain full of goldfish.
A sensation in the city, a vision of what could be, Beach’s subway attracted four hundred thousand riders in its initial operating year, each of whom paid 25 cents for the privilege (roughly $10 in 2016).
Yet this positive public reaction to Beach’s pneumatic transit system didn’t undo Tammany Hall’s opposition in a day, or even in a year. While there was a growing public push for the expansion of Beach’s underground transit system, the powers that be in the city pushed back, reciting their usual refrain that improving public transit would put transportation workers in the poorhouse. For Beach to win, he just had to keep holding out for public opinion to be so overwhelming that the political bosses couldn’t ignore it.
That strategy failed to account for the economy.
While Boss Tweed’s opposition didn’t help, what ultimately undid the dream of a pneumatic subway system was the Panic of 1873, referred to as the “Great Depression” until the even larger economic downturn of 1929 took that title away. The Panic was the result of wars, fires, and, ironically, rampant investments in above-ground railroads depleting bank reserves. The economic downturn caused by the Panic, which lasted from 1873 to 1877, hit New York City overwhelmingly hard. Investors in Beach’s subway pulled out, and though he was eventually able to secure long-sought permission from the city to continue building, there was no longer any money at his disposal to complete his vision. The small tunnel was sealed off, to be forgotten by time.
Decades later, in 1912, workers on the then-new BMT subway line were digging along Broadway and stumbled upon Beach’s tunnel. It had retained all its opulence, reports the New York Times, “piano and all.”
Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.