In 1865 Hugh B Wilson, a Michigan man, proposed a New York City subway running between the Battery and Central Park. It was a time when underground railroads were beginning to make a stir. The London Underground had begun operating in 1863. Paris, Berlin and Budapest were preparing to build systems. Wilson was an experienced railroad engineer and his proposal was serious and substantial, but New York's legislators deep-sixed it They wanted no part of it mainly because they were under the thumb of boss Tweed, a corrupt politicians who, with his cohorts, was in the process of fleecing New York taxpayers of $100 million. Tammany was heavily invested in horse-drawn railroads and wanted no competition.

Dr. Rufuss Gilbert, a NYC surgeon saw rapid transit as a public health measure. It would allow the poor to move from crowded cities into the countryside. After having served in the Civil War he abandoned medicine to becoming a full time advocate of urban mass transit for America's cities. He founded an elevated line in NYC over which he however lost financial control.

Alfred E Beach believed he had a competitive idea in a pneumatic subway. But Tammany loomed as a threat for him too. He was aware that boss Tweed had got his paid for Governor Ruben Fenton to veto the approving legislation for Wilson's proposal. Beach therefore devised a way to get around this anticipated opposition. In 1870 he sought and won approval to build, what was ostensibly a two tube parcel delivery system for the post office. The eight foot wide tunnel was to run under Broadway for one block from Murray to Warren Street. Beach meant it to be a test subway. He gambled on winning popular approval before Tammany could squash this threat to its horse railroad investment. As it turned out, the Tweed Ring's opposition to Beach never materialized. Tammany was exposed and ousted in 1872. Beach in fact secured from Albany a charter to build an extensive pneumatic subway. But it was never built. Despite the test's innitial success the concept had serious technical flaws, and influential New Yorkers like Jacob Astor, Origen Vandenburgh and Cornelius Vanderbuilt snubbed the project.

When a new subway scheme was proposed in the 1880s Tammany was however, again a factor. The costly memory of City Hall corruption was yet fresh enough to make New Yorkers wary. They hesitated to entrust such a costly project to municipal officials. The potential of a new hog's trough of corruption spurred public demand that the subway be a non-government project.

As a private undertaking however, it could not find financing. Jacob H Schiff the banker explained that the real costs for a subway venture were too difficult to ascertain. The solution finally agreed upon was a subway to be built and operated by a private company but with financing from the city. This approach would in short order create a modern underground mass transportation system, at a reasonable cost and without scandal. It also entrusted the operation of the system to private hands. However, the municipality remained the subway's landlord. Politicians would thus ever have their finger in the soup and the subway would thus never be free from NY politics.

August Belmont was the winner of the first two contracts to build and operate the subway. He aspired to control the system as it enlarged. It was an era of industrial consolidation. Fear of "Trusts" however, was gaining throughout the USA even as Belmont was buying up transportation companies that might bid against him for subsequent contracts. Anxiety over a single corporate giant swallowing the whole of the city's mass transit stirred New Yorkers.

Political progressives in NY thus became Belmont's opponents and also of the Rapid Transit Commission which was seen, unjustly, as his lapdog. The reformers saw business interests pitted against the public welfare. In fact the RTC pushed plans for the development of the outer boroughs, like Queens which Belmont was reluctant to service. In the end a Dual System was instituted. The IRT was made to share the transit business and to compete with the BMT (originally called the BRT). Thus ended Belmont's hope for a monopoly.

As inflation began devaluing the nickel fare, maintaining that fare became a political cause. "Red Mike" Hylan won the Mayoral election of 1917 as an opponent of America's entry into WW I and a proponent of the nickel fare.

John F Hylan had worked his way up from track layer to locomotive engineer earning $3.50 per day. In 1897 he was operating a steam powered elevated train when it almost hit a company superintendent. The enraged official fired Hylan who felt he had not been at fault and who from then on was determined to bend the subway to his will. In the year of his dismissal Hylan received a LL.B degree from NY Law School. That was the first step on a road which, in 1917, put him into City Hall.

Mass transit was ever Mayor Hylan's top issue. He held himself up as the defender of the people against the plutocrats. He denounced the IRT and BRT as rapacious and selfish and ready to double cross the public. He became the principal proponent of a third subway system. It would be city owned and operated. Eventually it was born as the IND. But even dearer to the mayor's heart was the nickel fare. His 1921 reelection was grounded on the promise to keep the nickel fare and public ownership of the subway. All NY politicians would make that promise a political staple until the late 1940s.

The mayor's dream was public ownership of the entire system. However, only Albany could affect such a radical change. The mayor was even powerless with respect to subway construction. The Transit Commission, a state agency, held legal authority over rapid transit development. In its planning its sought to entrust all future construction to the IRT and BMT. By 1924 however, Governor Smith allowed the city to take control of the Transit Commission. Then began a push to create a new line. Mayor Hylan meant it to be city operated. However, instead of sending the tracks of this new line into outlying areas hitherto without access to IRT or BMT trains, the new IND line was created to compete with the existing private subways. The IND began operating in 1932. Building it proved expensive. It cost, per route mile, was 125% higher than had been the cost of the IRT and BMT. Its operating costs were also huge.

Fiorello LaGuardia, became mayor in November 1933, following the resignation in September 1932 of Jimmy Walker. LaGuardia remained committed to the nickel fare but he had no great confidence in mass transit. He thought trams old fashioned and wanted them removed, and believed the future lay with the private automobile.

LaGuardia transit policy centered on unification. He believed combining all three subway companies, the IRT, BMT and IND would allow for efficiencies which would again make the subway a paying proposition. Eliminating the private companies and creatng just one municipal system would, LaGuardia believed, make the subway fiscally self-supporting. The $23 million he got for the federal gov't for the IND was considered exceptional. He believed the city could run the subway efficiently, without subsidies, and at a profit, charging a nickel. Unification would be America's largest railroad merge. But it did not solve the subways problems. Its fiscal woes grew and its operation deteriorated.

In 1953, under Governor Thomas Dewey, the NY City Transit Authority (NYCTA) was created as a semi-independent public corporation. It was run by a 5 member board of directors appointed by the governor and mayor. Paul Windel, the businessman whose idea this reorganization was, had hoped to give the subway a more businesslike management free from political interference. That however was precisely what the system, at that point did not need. The new set-up relieved the governor and mayor of all responsibility, at the same time it distanced the Transit Authority from gov't coffers; this when bridges and highways were receiving billions. The subway's decline continued.





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