The Off-Key Bard
History

This Day in History — New York City's First Subway Opens

On this day in 1904

On October 27, 1904, Mayor McClellan drove the first train from City Hall, and by nightfall more than 100,000 New Yorkers had paid a nickel to ride.

The Off-Key Bard stands in City Hall Park on an autumn afternoon in 1904. Aboveground, horse-drawn wagons, electric streetcars, elevated trains and thousands of pedestrians fight for the same crowded streets. Below them, an electric train waits in a vaulted, tiled station lit by skylights, and the mayor of New York is about to take the controls.

"New York has spent years trying to solve its transportation problem. Today, the answer begins running beneath its streets."

On October 27, 1904, New York City opened its first permanent underground rapid-transit line, operated by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT). The line ran 9.1 miles with 28 stations, from City Hall through Grand Central, west along 42nd Street to Times Square, and north to 145th Street and Broadway in Harlem. Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. took the controls of the first train at 2:35 p.m. and stayed at them from City Hall to 103rd Street. At 7 p.m. the subway opened to the public for a nickel, and more than 100,000 people paid to ride.

A City Too Big for Its Streets

The subway was not built because New Yorkers wanted a novelty. The city had outgrown its transportation. Manhattan's streets were jammed with wagons, carriages and streetcars, and the steam-powered elevated railways that had been carrying passengers above the streets for decades brought noise, smoke and shadow to the neighborhoods beneath them. The Great Blizzard of 1888, which dropped 22 inches of snow and disabled rail transport for days, helped motivate the push for underground transit.

The idea was not new. London's Metropolitan Railway opened on January 10, 1863, as the world's first passenger-carrying underground railway, built mostly by cut-and-cover and hauled by steam locomotives. Boston's Tremont Street subway opened on September 1, 1897, the first subway tunnel in North America, though it was built mainly to move streetcars off congested streets.

New York had its own early experiment. On February 26, 1870, inventor Alfred Ely Beach opened a pneumatic demonstration railway under Broadway, a single tunnel about 300 feet long from Warren Street to Murray Street. It drew crowds, but it never grew beyond that short stretch, and after the Panic of 1873 investors withdrew and it closed in April 1873. Its tunnel was sealed and was not rediscovered until 1912, when workers excavating for the Broadway Line broke into it.

Paying for a Tunnel

The political and financial obstacles were harder than the engineering. Abram S. Hewitt, mayor of New York from 1887 to 1888, is remembered as the "Father of the New York City Subway System," and he oversaw passage of the Rapid Transit Act of 1894, which provided public funding for the first line. The state legislature authorized it on May 22, 1894, creating a Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners to plan routes and either build the system or sell a franchise for it.

William Barclay Parsons served as the board's chief engineer and was responsible for building the line. John B. McDonald organized the Rapid Transit Construction Company, which signed Contract 1 on February 21, 1900, covering construction and a 50-year operating lease. August Belmont funded the construction company, and in April 1902 he incorporated the IRT to operate the line.

Ground was broken at City Hall on March 24, 1900, in a ceremony called "Tunnel Day."

Building Beneath a Working City

Most of the line was built by cut-and-cover. Crews opened the street, built the tunnel's walls and roof about 30 inches below the surface, and restored the roadway above, all while the city carried on overhead. Elsewhere the engineers used other methods. Tunnels under Murray Hill and Central Park were lined with concrete, deep bored tunnels cut through rock on the West Side Line in Upper Manhattan, and steel viaducts carried the line through parts of Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. A 1904 inspection report described the stretch between 157th and 169th Streets as rocky, with drills and mules still at work and about a year of work estimated to finish it.

The work was dangerous. On January 27, 1902, a wooden shed holding 200 pounds of dynamite exploded at 41st Street and Park Avenue, one block from Grand Central. It killed five people and injured many more. It was one of a string of deadly accidents on the project.

Electric Power and Four Tracks

The IRT ran on electricity rather than steam, which mattered in enclosed tunnels. Power came from the IRT Powerhouse through a third rail. Four tracks ran from Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall to 96th Street, which let local and express trains share the corridor. There were five express stations, at Brooklyn Bridge, 14th Street, Grand Central, 72nd Street and 96th Street, averaging 1.5 miles apart. Local stations averaged a quarter mile. At opening, eight-car express trains ran about every two minutes at roughly 30 miles per hour, while five-car local trains averaged about 16. The distinction between express and local service would become a defining feature of the system.

A Station Built to Impress

The most ornate of the 28 stations was City Hall. Rafael Guastavino designed it, with Heins & LaFarge as consulting architects, and it remains the only original IRT station in the Romanesque Revival style. It had Guastavino tile vaults, skylights and chandeliers. It was meant to show New Yorkers that going underground could be dignified, even beautiful.

Opening Day

The ceremonies took place at City Hall. Three special trains carried the mayor, city and company officials and guests. Sources differ slightly on the clock: History.com and Design World give 2:35 p.m. for the mayor's start, while nycsubway.org puts the formal opening at about 2:38 p.m. At 7 p.m. the line opened to everyone.

Crowds descended the stairways to ride, some because they needed to get somewhere and many simply to see it. Counts of the first evening vary. History.com says more than 100,000 people paid a nickel each, and the New York Times put the figure at 150,000. Whichever is right, the response was overwhelming. The next January, during a blizzard, the subway carried 360,000 passengers in a day, and by January 26, 1914 it carried 1,207,000 in one day.

From Manhattan to the Outer Boroughs

The original line served only Manhattan, but not for long. The West Farms Division reached the Bronx on July 10, 1905. A Brooklyn extension opened to Borough Hall on January 9, 1908, and reached Atlantic Avenue on May 1, 1908. IRT service reached Queens on June 22, 1915, when a shuttle began running through the Steinway Tunnel between Grand Central and Vernon Avenue.

The IRT soon had company. The first line of the city-owned Independent Subway System (IND) opened on September 10, 1932. The city took over the BMT on June 1, 1940, and the IRT followed on June 12, 1940, bringing the three systems under municipal ownership. The old IRT tunnels are narrower, with sharper curves and shorter platforms than the later lines, which is why that part of the system remains a separate division with smaller cars.

The Station That Closed

City Hall station could not keep up with the trains it helped create. Its tightly curved platform could be lengthened only enough for six-car trains, while the city wanted ten, and it sat close to the much busier Brooklyn Bridge station. Modernizing it would have been costly. It closed on December 31, 1945. The station was designated a city landmark in 1979 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. The Transit Museum has offered tours, which have been limited to museum members, and riders on the downtown 6 train can glimpse it as the train loops back uptown.

The system outlived its first station by a wide margin. Today, the New York City Subway operates 24 hours a day across a network of 472 stations, carrying the legacy of that first underground line into a transportation system serving millions of New Yorkers.

Beneath the streets, the engines rolled,
Through tiled halls and tunnels bold.
A nickel bought a quicker way—
And changed the city's life that day.

The first subway changed the practical meaning of distance in New York. A person could live farther from work, neighborhoods that had seemed remote came within reach, and the city could keep growing without everyone living within walking distance of its busiest streets.

The passengers who went down into City Hall station on October 27, 1904 were riding something new, and they were also at the start of a system that has helped define the city for more than a century.

Sources

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