One hundred years old this year, few things are as iconic of the city as the New York subway, the 24-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year, rattling, bustling, efficient, infuriating system that gives both motion and backbone to the city that never sleeps.
It is impossible to imagine the city without its subway. As the New York Times noted on day one of service, ?in two days it will seem to New York as if it had never ridden anywhere but in the subway.?
If there are 8 million stories in the naked city, then one or two of them must be Irish, and the birth of the subway through to its mid-century is a tale of arrival and advancement, of both the underground railway and the Irish in New York.
And the Irish connection does not end there. In October 2002, the formidable Transit Workers Union president, Roger Toussaint, strode out of contract talks for the city?s 34,000 subway and bus workers and boarded a plane for Ireland, homeland of the union?s legendary founder, Michael J. Quill.
?This is not a personal trip,? said Toussaint, a Trinidadian by birth and an immigrant like Quill. ?This is establishing ties for the bus drivers and subway workers of New York with an important, vital part of their legacy.”
Quill?s legacy was Irish, militant, uncompromising: in 1966, he welcomed Mayor John Lindsay to City Hall with a union walkout that lasted 12 days.
Today, African American and Caribbean immigrant members dominate the Transit Workers Union, though Quill is clearly not forgotten.
Irish Rapid Transit
But a more permanent Irish imprint on New York City is the subway itself, at least, its first line, the one inaugurated by Mayor McClellan, known as the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT), sometimes nicknamed the Irish Rapid Transit, and built by thousands of Irish (and Italian) immigrants, and running from the Battery to the Bronx.
Using the cut and cover method, most of New York?s subway tunnels are actually shallow trenches. A trench was dug in one city block at a time, the subway rails installed, and then the whole section covered over. The method allowed subway building to advance rapidly in New York.
For the 4.8 million people who ride the New York subway every day, it?s all about speed. During rush hour, with the system running normally, the subway?s express trains always trump surface traffic. The same fundamentals apply today as did in the 1890s, when New York?s subway planners set about their business: moving as many people as possible quickly and safely around the growing metropolis.
The New York Times was right in 1904: ?in two days it will seem to New York as if it had never ridden anywhere but in the subway.?
And once it was taken for granted, it is impossible to remember, as historians of mass transport such as Brian J. Cudahy point out, what a revolutionary system the subway was at the time. On the day it opened, Harlem residents marveled at the ride from 145th Street to Lower Manhattan: 15 minutes on the express train (New York?s is the only subway system in the world with express lines).
The increase in New York’s population, particularly in the period 1860-1900, was largely due to immigration from the poorest, most backward parts of Europe, Ireland included.
These immigrants usually headed for the Lower East Side, where they fell into squalid ghetto life, as the city?s great and good saw it, rife with poverty, crime and disease.
And this reinforced the newcomers in values, modes of conduct, and traditions that prevented their integration into American life while they remained prey to the corrupt system of boss rule — Tammany Hall.
Rapid transit, high speed trains running on underground tracks, would allow immigrants to populate the less populous parts of the city, upper Manhattan, the Bronx, Westchester County. Though no one called it such at the time, it was the subway that created the suburbs.
Thus would the immigrants, thousands of Irish among them, be integrated into mainstream American life. And it worked.
?A regular thing?
Integration of the subway into city dwellers? lives happened far faster, Cudahy notes. ?It was astonishing, though,? wrote a newspaper reporter on the evening of the subway?s first run, ?how easily the passengers fell into the habit of regarding the subway as a regular thing.?
The same reporter noted down some firsts, however, for posterity.
?The first man to give up his seat to a woman in New York’s subway was F.B. Shipley of Philadelphia,? the reporter wrote. ?The lady was good looking, but he said that made no difference — in Philadelphia everybody was polite.?
Then there was the tragic case of Henry Barrett.
?Barrett of 348 West Forty-sixth Street bought the third ticket at the Twenty-eighth Street Station of the Subway at the opening of business at 7 o’clock last evening, and walking down stairs took the first train at 7:02. At 7:03 he looked for his diamond horseshoe pin with fifteen diamonds for which he said he paid $500, and it was gone.?
And at 145th Street on the same evening, police sergeant John O?Brien probably had no time to think of the significance of his actions as he ordered his eight officers to draw their nightsticks.
Throngs had gathered to gawk in amazement at the first ever subway riders to emerge from the hole under the ground.
Soon, the push of the crowd was out of control on Broadway.
“For God’s sake get back, there are women here,? O?Brien yelled. The crowd paid no heed. His men with eight more reserves from the 152nd Street police precinct laid in with their nightsticks.
Patrolman Tom Costello had his coat ripped from shoulder to shoulder, the only casualty of the first subway scuffle, apart from a few bruised heads.
Within minutes, order had been restored and New Yorkers trying to enter the subway has learned a rapid lesson in subway etiquette: form a line.
At stations up and down Broadway, an ?election-night jam? gathered to greet the new system. Within 24 hours, however, it was as if the subway had always been there.
?It is hard to surprise New York permanently,? the reporter wrote.