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Full Description
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.
