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The Rumble That’s Lasted for 100 Years

NY Times March 19, 2004 By RANDY KENNEDY

Even in the world of yellow journalism, the headline was
the kind usually reserved for a horrible crime or a scandal
at City Hall, not a career decision by a maddeningly
sedulous civil engineer.

Bannered in big letters across the front page of The New
York Journal on Dec. 1, 1904, the headline screamed:

“Engineer Parsons Quits! Crazed by Suicide.”

Then again,
the man in question, William Barclay Parsons, was no
ordinary engineer. And the mission he had completed only a
few weeks earlier, the building of the New York City
subway, was no ordinary feat of engineering. In fact, in
the early years of the 20th century, it made him arguably
the most important public figure in the city, sought after,
feted nightly, consulted like a Delphic oracle and quoted
in newspapers more often than the mayor. And when he
resigned from the Rapid Transit Commission, it was
front-page news in many of the city’s papers, even though
he had always promised he would step down after the first
leg of the subway was completed (not, as William Randolph
Hearst’s Journal speculated sensationally, because of his
anguish over a suicide in the mass-transit leviathan he had
just created). The story of Parsons and his outsize
determination is the thread that winds through an
exhibition looking back at 100 years of the subway, opening
on Tuesday at the New York Public Library’s Science,
Industry and Business Library. It is one of the first of
what will probably be dozens of historical presentations
marking the subway’s centennial over the next few months.
(The subway opened from City Hall to Harlem on Oct. 27,
1904.)

The Rumble That’s Lasted for 100 Years

NY Times - March 19, 2004 - By RANDY KENNEDY

Even in the world of yellow journalism, the headline was
the kind usually reserved for a horrible crime or a scandal
at City Hall, not a career decision by a maddeningly
sedulous civil engineer.

Bannered in big letters across the front page of The New
York Journal on Dec. 1, 1904, the headline screamed:

“Engineer Parsons Quits! Crazed by Suicide.”

Then again,
the man in question, William Barclay Parsons, was no
ordinary engineer. And the mission he had completed only a
few weeks earlier, the building of the New York City
subway, was no ordinary feat of engineering. In fact, in
the early years of the 20th century, it made him arguably
the most important public figure in the city, sought after,
feted nightly, consulted like a Delphic oracle and quoted
in newspapers more often than the mayor. And when he
resigned from the Rapid Transit Commission, it was
front-page news in many of the city’s papers, even though
he had always promised he would step down after the first
leg of the subway was completed (not, as William Randolph
Hearst’s Journal speculated sensationally, because of his
anguish over a suicide in the mass-transit leviathan he had
just created). The story of Parsons and his outsize
determination is the thread that winds through an
exhibition looking back at 100 years of the subway, opening
on Tuesday at the New York Public Library’s Science,
Industry and Business Library. It is one of the first of
what will probably be dozens of historical presentations
marking the subway’s centennial over the next few months.
(The subway opened from City Hall to Harlem on Oct. 27,
1904.)

As such, the library’s show sets just the right
introductory tone. The city’s fascination with its subway
has always had less to do with trains and tracks, facts and
figures, and much more to do with the people who built it,
who keep it running and who confound the laws of physics
every day by squeezing into it like circus clowns into a
Volkswagen.

The library’s exhibition - assembled with help from the New
York Transit Museum, the Museum of American Financial
History, the engineering firm Parsons Brinckerhoff and a
private subway memorabilia collector, George Cuhaj -
provides a succinct, well-edited look at the subway’s
100-year sweep, especially as it affected the riders and
changed the city around them.

There is a rattan subway seat, evoking the system’s more
genteel, late-Victorian origins. There is a
porcelain-coated handle or “strap” - hence the term
straphangers. There is a rare 1928 subway token from Mr.
Cuhaj’s collection that remains as evidence of an ill-fated
effort to raise the subway fare to 7 cents from a nickel.
(The tokens were minted in anticipation of the 7-cent fare,
but it was never approved. The fare remained a nickel for
almost 44 years, one of the most politically sacrosanct
facts of city life.) There is a copy of the sheet music for
“The Subway Glide,” a popular ragtime dance tune written in
the subway’s early days, whose chorus offered these
instructions for performing the dance aboard a moving car:

Rush in, crush in, reach for a handle strap
Then turn
right around and flop in a lady’s lap.

Most effectively, however, the show demonstrates the
meticulous resolve of Parsons and suggests that it
undoubtedly took someone with his kind of whiz-kid hauteur
to dig an underground train tunnel nine miles through the
world’s second most populous city - and finish the whole
thing in little more than four years.

As just one example of his thoroughness, the exhibition
includes a copy of Parsons’s still influential book,
“Engineers and Engineering in the Renaissance,” which he
left unfinished at his death in 1932. Among chapters about
Leonardo da Vinci and other of his forebears, he also
includes small, detailed examinations of sewers, street
cleaning and even street lighting during the Renaissance.

In many ways, Parsons - product of a prominent family, avid
collector, fearless traveler, only 45 when his underground
masterwork was completed - was the perfect embodiment of
his age. It was an age of endless urban optimism, in which
the city was building furiously up, out and - in his case -
even down. Times Square was about to be born in all its
incandescence.

The Public Library itself was rising over what had been the
Croton reservoir on Fifth Avenue. The Flatiron Building,
with its water-powered elevators, was brand new. The
Williamsburg Bridge, at the time the world’s largest
suspension bridge, had just opened. And in Luna Park at
Coney Island, patrons were paying a quarter apiece to climb
into a giant winged ship called the Luna III for a
simulated trip to the moon.

Inevitably, Parsons’s story recalls those of other
visionary three-named gentleman engineers of his era,
mostly notably Daniel Hudson Burnham, whose direction of
the magnificent World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893 was the
subject of Erik Larson’s best-selling book, “The Devil in
the White City,” published last year. It told the twin
stories of Burnham and a Chicago serial killer, Henry H.
Holmes, who built his World’s Fair Hotel near the
fairgrounds and used it to lure women to their torture and
death.

But while the Burnham story had a sinister counterweight,
showing the dark side of urban empire-building, the Parsons
story was always fairly well lighted and one-dimensional
(despite the occasional suicide-by-subway).

In fact, the subway’s chief engineer had a lot in common
with his creation. Both were relentless, efficient, often
quite boring and yet breathtaking in their accomplishments.
Clifton Hood, a subway historian, has written that while an
undergraduate at Columbia University, Parsons was known
among his classmates as “Reverend Parsons” because of his
humorlessness. Still, he served as class president, helped
found the student newspaper, held an oar on the rowing crew
and was captain of the tug-of-war team.

Later, in Parsons’s professional life, Mr. Hood wrote, he
“was hardly an amiable or engaging man, and he had little
personal warmth.” Yet he assembled around him a team of
talented engineers, whom one journalist said he led “like a
born general and diplomat.”

While form had a place in Parsons’s world - much of the
beauty of the subway’s decoration is shown in the
photographs in the library exhibition - function was
clearly predominant. The subway was the world’s first with
regular express service, and the digging for it was speeded
along greatly with the first extensive use of cut-and-cover
tunnel construction - essentially digging a trench and
putting a roof on it - instead of deep excavation.

Even at the ceremony at City Hall on opening day, as the
crowd wildly cheered Parsons and waved handkerchiefs at
him, he apparently managed to resist any urge to emotional
speechmaking, saying only this, with great precision:

“I have the honor and the very great pleasure to state that
the Rapid Transit Railroad from the City Hall station to
the station at 145th Street on the west side line is ready
and complete for operation.”

John V. Ganly, the assistant director for collections at
the library, who oversaw the subway show, said that Parsons
was apparently renowned for his practicality and precision
for the rest of his life. In going through some of
Parsons’s personal letters for the exhibition, Mr. Ganly
said, he found several from the New York Public Library
itself, which Parsons served as a trustee.

Mr. Ganly said he had assumed that the letters would all be
about the library’s aspirations and other high-minded
subjects. But some were about a much more earthly concern:
how to fix things when they broke.

“They were always asking him questions about the boiler in
the basement,” Mr. Ganly said, smiling. “They knew he was
an engineer.”

Randy Kennedy, a reporter for The Times, wrote a weekly
column about the subway for three years. The columns have
recently been collected in a book, “Subwayland: Adventures
in the World Beneath New York” (Griffin Paperback).

Original NYT article