In the nineteenth century, Manhattan's streets were so choked with
pedestrians, horses, vehicles, and vendors that a trip from City Hall to
Central Park could take hours. Alfred Beach had the perfect solution:
build a giant pneumatic tube underneath Broadway from the Battery to
Harlem. Air pressure would shoot passengers up and down the island in
clean, quiet carriages. But Beach was up against the operators of the
horse-drawn streetcars and the politicians in their pay, most
conspicuously William M. Tweed, the notorious "Boss" of Tammany Hall.
New York's Secret Subway: The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit tells
a classic story of good versus evil, pitting the mild-mannered Beach, a
visionary inventor and entrepreneur, against the oafish tyrant Tweed,
the exemplar of corruption in the Gilded Age. It also tells the story of
one of the most astonishing feats of engineering in American history,
the surreptitious creation of the nation's first operational subway.
New York seemed destined to become the second city in the world
with a comprehensive subway system, after London. Unfortunately,
political lethargy and greed would conspire to deny the city a subway
for another thirty years.
Yet Alfred Beach still proved conclusively the feasibility of
underground railways in Manhattan, and paved the way for modern mass
transportation systems.
Richly illustrated and populated with larger-than-life characters,
New York's Secret Subway will captivate readers and provide
historical context for today's clashes between public interests and
powerful business and political groups. Algeo tells this amazing true
story in full for the first time, and although it took place more than a
century ago, it will at times sound surprisingly familiar.
