The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway by Most Doug

Author:Most, Doug [Most, Doug]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

Part Three

TRAGEDIES, TRIUMPHS

10

BIDDING TO BUILD HISTORY

THEY GATHERED AT 11:30 IN THE MORNING on March 20, 1895, a group of about twenty men in the small downtown office of the Boston Transit Commission. Eight months had passed since the rainy day in July when voters approved the combined subway and elevated plan. Now it was a sunny Wednesday with spring just around the corner. When the door to the room opened, all eyes turned to the large tin box being carried into the room by B. Leighton Beal, a former newspaper editor who had recently left the business to become the transit commission’s secretary. With one swoop, Beal hoisted the box up and turned it over, and in dramatic fashion twelve large envelopes flew out onto the table at the front of the room. Beal neatly stacked up the envelopes right next to another stack, this one of twelve smaller envelopes. The smaller ones each contained a $5,000 certified check, for a total of $60,000. The larger ones contained the figures that would decide in whose hands the citizens of Boston would place the building of the first section of their subway.

Sitting at the front table were the commission’s five members, led by George G. Crocker, a likable gray-haired, clean-shaven lawyer and former president of the Massachusetts State Senate. Of all the commissioners, Charles H. Dalton had the most important role. A former parks commissioner, his presence was supposed to reassure those who feared that the subway would destroy trees all over the Common. There were 150 trees in the park standing over portions of the subway route, and 57 of those were too tall to be uprooted and transplanted, while many others were young and just taking hold. It was always assumed that many trees would have to be sacrificed for the subway, but Dalton’s hope was to restore the Common to its full beauty.

The other men in the room with the commissioners were strangers to one another, but they were all too familiar with this process. They had come to find out if their bid, which required a $5,000 check just to be eligible, might win them the contract to build the first section of the Boston subway. These were not the twenty- and thirty-year-old tough Boston Irish laborers who would soon be putting in nine or ten hours a day and taking home $1.70 per shift for their sweat. These were businessmen, the contractors who would hire the laborers, and they were some of the most respected contractors from the East Coast.

All of them were well aware of the stakes as the meeting got under way. This was no $10,000 sewer job. The subway was projected to cost $5 million, a figure that included $3.5 million for constructing approximately 10,000 feet, or 1.8 miles, of tracks, plus $1.5 million to purchase the land needed for the stations. The most expensive purchase by far was the old Haymarket Square railroad station, which was no longer being used by the Boston & Maine Railroad and which cost the city $750,000.

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