The Brutal Birth of the New York Subway

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]The New York Subway was born in blood, fraud, and a secret tunnel that no official map of the city ever recorded.

[00:00:08]In 1912, a crew of Italian sand hogs digging beneath Broadway [music] broke through into a chamber that should not have existed.

[00:00:18]Inside, they found a brick-lined cylindrical tunnel 312 ft long, ornate murals on the walls, a station with a fountain at one end, >> [music] >> and a single passenger car covered in 42 years of dust. Nobody on the construction crew had any idea what they were looking at. Nobody had told them that 42 years earlier, >> [music] >> in 1870, a man had built an illegal subway under New York City, >> [music] >> hidden it from the most corrupt politician in American history, and lost it again before any official record of the city ever acknowledged it.

[00:00:58]That tunnel is one piece of a story the official version of the subway does not include. The subway you ride today is the survivor of a war, a construction war that killed dozens of immigrants, a political war that took 50 years to settle, and a secret war that the man who started it lost.

[00:01:21]We walk through all three. Start with the man.

[00:01:25]His name was Alfred Ely Beach. He was the editor and co-owner of Scientific American magazine. He was an inventor.

[00:01:31][music] He was also living in a city where every public works contract had to be approved by William [music] Magear Tweed, the chairman of the Tammany Hall Democratic Party machine, the most corrupt political organization in 19th century America. Tweed controlled in 1869 [music] every transit franchise in New York City. He took bribes for every elevated railway permit, every horse car line, every proposed underground system.

[00:02:02]The price for getting any kind of permit was unknowable and unaffordable to anyone he did not personally favor.

[00:02:09]Alfred Beach had a working design for an underground pneumatic train, a tube in which a single car would be propelled by air pressure generated at one end.

[00:02:20]He had no chance of getting Tweed to approve it, so he did not ask.

[00:02:26]Beach got a permit from the state legislature in Albany to build a small mail tube beneath Broadway. [music] Two parallel narrow tubes carried letters under the street. That was the paperwork. Under that paperwork, Beach spent roughly 2 months in late 1869 digging in absolute secrecy a single [music] passenger-size tunnel 312 ft long and 8 ft wide with a waiting room that had a fountain, a piano, and chandeliers. He used a hydraulic tunneling shield he had patented himself.

[00:02:59]The dirt was carried out at night through the back doors of a clothing store on the corner of Warren Street and Broadway, whose owner he had paid in cash to keep his mouth shut.

[00:03:09]On February 26th, 1870, Beach opened the tunnel to the public.

[00:03:15]Thousands of New Yorkers paid 25 cents each [music] to ride a single block under their own city in a pneumatic car powered by a giant [music] industrial fan.

[00:03:26]Tweed found out. Tweed was furious.

[00:03:29]Tweed went to Governor John Hoffman, his man in Albany, and Hoffman vetoed every bill the legislature passed authorizing Beach to extend the line.

[00:03:38]Beach kept his single-block subway open as a curiosity for 3 years.

[00:03:44]The financial panic of 1873 finished it.

[00:03:47]The tunnel was sealed. The station was forgotten. The car stayed inside.

[00:03:54]42 years later, the sandhogs dug into it by accident. The car was still there, so was the piano.

[00:04:02]Beach lost his secret tunnel because the corruption defeated him.

[00:04:07]The corruption did not end with Tweed.

[00:04:10]It scaled.

[00:04:13]The first official New York Subway opened on October 27th, 1904.

[00:04:18]It was built and operated by a private company called the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, owned by a financier named August Belmont II.

[00:04:28]Belmont was the son of the man behind the Belmont Stakes. He had inherited a banking fortune and married into more of it. He built the subway because the city of New York had decided, after 30 years of failure, that it could not build a subway itself, and because Belmont was willing to put up the capital in exchange for a 50-year operating lease.

[00:04:50]That lease was structured to make Belmont and his investors rich at the expense of the city.

[00:04:56]They had no obligation to extend service into neighborhoods that did not generate immediate profit. They could refuse interconnection with other systems. They did.

[00:05:07]A second private company, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, was operating elevated and surface lines in Brooklyn at the same time and reorganized as the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation in 1923.

[00:05:21]By then, New York had two competing private subway operators running incompatible technology.

[00:05:28]The Interborough cars were 8 ft 9 in wide.

[00:05:32]The Brooklyn-Manhattan cars were 10 ft wide. The platforms were built [music] to match each company's cars.

[00:05:40]A passenger could not transfer between [music] systems without leaving the station and paying a second fare.

[00:05:46]In 1925, Mayor John Hylan, who hated Tammany Hall and hated Belmont specifically, started construction on a third system.

[00:05:56]The Independent Subway System, [music] the city-owned line, was built and operated directly by the municipality.

[00:06:03]It was deliberately designed not to interconnect with the Interborough or the Brooklyn Manhattan.

[00:06:09]Three subway systems, three sets of cars, [music] three sets of platforms, competing managements actively sabotaging each others operations [music] whenever they could.

[00:06:20]The city finally bought the Interborough and the [music] Brooklyn Manhattan in 1940 after both companies had been bled white by the depression. The three systems were merged on paper.

[00:06:31]They were never fully merged in physical infrastructure.

[00:06:34]The reason you can ride an A train from Far Rockaway to Inwood today, but cannot take a number two train into Queens, is that the original tunnels were built to incompatible specifications by companies that were trying to put each other out of business. The corruption that started with Tweed produced a public transit system designed to fail at the seams between three competing capital interests.

[00:06:59]A century later, the seams are still there.

[00:07:03]And the men building the Interborough between 1900 and 1904 required on average about 7,500 laborers underground at any given time.

[00:07:17]Roughly 80% of them were immigrants. The largest groups were Italian, Irish, and Polish. They were called sand hogs.

[00:07:25]They were paid roughly $2.25 per day.

[00:07:29]They worked 10-hour shifts in compressed air, which is to say they worked in a closed tunnel where the air pressure was deliberately raised above atmospheric to hold back ground water and [music] prevent collapses.

[00:07:43]Compressed air gives you the bends.

[00:07:46]>> [music] >> It is the same disease deep-sea divers get.

[00:07:50]Nitrogen gas comes out of solution in your bloodstream when you decompress too fast.

[00:07:56]It hits your joints.

[00:07:58]It hits your spinal cord. It hits your lungs.

[00:08:01]Workers who finished a shift had to sit in a decompression chamber for 30 minutes or longer to let the gas come out of solution slowly.

[00:08:10]If they did not, they came out crippled, paralyzed, or dead.

[00:08:15]The Interborough used [music] decompression chambers.

[00:08:18]The decompression chambers were not always functional. Shift bosses sometimes hurried workers through to keep the schedule. Men who developed the bends were sometimes blamed for malingering and had their pay docked.

[00:08:31]The exact death toll for the original construction >> [music] >> is not known.

[00:08:36]Historical sources estimate between 50 and 120 deaths over the four-year build.

[00:08:43]Italian and Irish surnames dominate the surviving casualty records. None of those names appear on any monument in the city of New York. There is no memorial. There is no plaque at any of the original station entrances [music] acknowledging that the construction killed the men who built it.

[00:09:01]Every East River tunnel built before 1920 cost lives. The Joralemon, the Steinway.

[00:09:08]The bodies were not always recovered.

[00:09:10]Some workers were entombed in the concrete they died pouring.

[00:09:14]Italian workers wrote letters home. Some of those letters still survive in family archives in Calabria, Sicily, and Apulia. The letters describe water rushing in, walls collapsing, men trapped.

[00:09:28]The Italian language press in New York covered the deaths.

[00:09:32]The English-language press almost [music] never did. A subway worker in 1903 did not get to be in the photograph at the [music] ribbon cutting in 1904.

[00:09:43]He died in the tunnel and was replaced by a man whose name nobody recorded.

[00:09:49]The first time you took the train, you did not know any of this. The first time you transferred at 14th Street, [music] you did not know the gap between the platforms is a physical fossil of the war between Belmont and the [music] city.

[00:10:04]The first time you saw the City Hall Loop Station, you did not know it is one stop away from the spot where a secret pneumatic subway sat [music] sealed for 42 years with a horse car inside it.

[00:10:18]The first [music] time you cursed the Transit Authority for a delay, you did not know that the delay is the inheritance of three private companies that [music] built incompatible infrastructure on purpose. And of dozens of men with Italian and Irish surnames who held back water with their bodies in 1899.

[00:10:39]If your great-great-grandfather was a sandhog under Broadway in 1902. [music] If he worked the East River tunnel in 1899.

[00:10:49]If he was paid in cash by the Interborough and died of the bends without his family being notified, write the [music] name, the borough, the line he worked. We are building the only archive of these men that exists.

[00:11:03][music] Walk into the City Hall Loop Station today on a public tour since regular service has not [music] stopped there since 1945.

[00:11:13]Read the dates on the tile work. Look at the brass railing. Notice the Guastavino vaulted tile ceiling above the platform.

[00:11:21]Then, think about who laid those tiles.

[00:11:23][music] The Italian masons whose grandsons would, in 1977, see [music] the South Bronx burn and not be allowed to vote on any of it.

[00:11:34]The Irish sandhogs whose great-grandsons would be priced out of the apartments their families used to keep.

[00:11:42]The men under the city built the city.

[00:11:44]The city above them in 2026 does not know their names. 1.7 billion annual riders, zero plaques.