The article
Dug by Hand
1On the afternoon of October 27, 1904, a crowd filled the street outside City Hall in Lower Manhattan. Bands played, and factory whistles blew across the city. At 2:35, Mayor George McClellan stepped into the front car of a train in a new station beneath the street. The plan was for him to start the train and then hand the controls to the motorman, the worker whose job was to drive it. Instead, the mayor kept driving, most of the way uptown. New York City’s first subway was open.
2The line ran 9.1 miles and had 28 stations. It went north from City Hall to Grand Central, turned west under 42nd Street to Times Square, and then ran up Broadway to 145th Street in Harlem. At seven o’clock that evening, the public was let in. More than 100,000 people paid a nickel each to ride that night. Many of them wore their best clothes.
3Before the subway, New Yorkers got around on horse-drawn streetcars, which were slow and crowded, and on elevated trains. The elevated trains ran on iron tracks built above the avenues, on tall posts. They were faster, but they were loud, and they kept sunlight from reaching the street below. Then, in March 1888, a great blizzard shut the city down. Snow piled up in drifts twenty feet high. Streetcars were left where they stopped, and the elevated trains could not run. City leaders were convinced: New York needed a railroad that the weather could not stop.
4The question was who would pay for it. Building a railroad under the streets would cost more than any private company wanted to risk. In 1894, after years of argument, a plan was approved. The city would pay to build the tunnel, and the city would own it. A private company would build it, supply the trains, and run them, and in return it would keep the fares. In 1900 the city signed the contract with a builder named John B. McDonald. A banker, August Belmont Jr., put up the money behind him, and in 1902 Belmont formed the company that would run the trains: the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, or IRT.
5Digging began on March 24, 1900, with a ceremony at City Hall. For most of the line, the builders used a method called cut-and-cover. Workers tore up the street and dug a deep trench. They built the tunnel inside the trench, with a steel frame and walls of concrete. Then they covered the tunnel over and rebuilt the street on top of it. That is why most stations on the old line sit just a short flight of stairs below the sidewalk. Where the ground was solid rock, as it was under parts of midtown and much of upper Manhattan, the tunnel had to be blasted out with dynamite.
6At least 7,700 men did the work. They were Italian and German immigrants, Irish Americans, and African Americans, and they built the subway almost entirely by hand, with picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows. Many of the Italian workers were hired through a padrone, a boss from their own community who found them jobs and took part of their pay.
7The work was dangerous. On January 27, 1902, a wooden shed full of dynamite caught fire at Park Avenue and 41st Street, near Grand Central, and exploded. Five people were killed. The blast wrecked the front of the Murray Hill Hotel across the street, and broken glass lay in the streets for blocks. A few months later, the contractor in charge of that same section was killed by falling rock in the tunnel he was building. In all, at least 44 people died building the first line, and thousands were injured.
8The subway changed where New Yorkers could live. Before, most working people had to live close to their jobs, and the neighborhoods near downtown were packed. Now a worker could live in upper Manhattan and ride to work downtown in less than half an hour. The trains reached the Bronx in 1905 and Brooklyn in 1908. Farms and empty lots at the ends of the lines filled with apartment buildings.
9The fare stayed at a nickel for 44 years, until 1948. Today a ride costs $3, and the system has 472 stations. The next time you walk down the stairs to a train, remember that the tunnel under your feet was dug by hand, by people who were paid little, and that some of them did not live to ride it.
