Paul Collins - Banvard's Folly - Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World

Explaining this decision to the public afterward, Beach held up the smallest of fig leaves:

The quickest and best method for construction for the two tubes was to ...

erect a masonry shell large enough to enclose both of the fifty-four inch tubes. It is a portion of this outer tunnel that has been erected; and as it has proved to be strong enough and large enough for the transit of passengers, the company laid down therein a railway track and provided a passenger car, for the purpose of temporarily illustrating, by an actual demonstration, the feasibility of placing an actual railway under Broadway.

As an explanation it was, like the rail line itself, marvelously convenient.

Boss Tweed was not amused.

Today William M. Tweed is a byword for machine politics and unbridled corruption. It is a reputation that is richly deserved: Tweed had his fingers in every pie in New York City, and in the space of a three years he and his minions siphoned away up to $200 million from city coffers, single-handedly tripling the city's debt burden. So even as the city and state dallied over the implementation of a mass transit plan, Tweed's men were sure that, whatever the outcome, they would all get their cut of the action.

Would-be railway companies eyed the city hungrily. Building New York City's light rail would be the largest public works project in U.s. history, and the rail construction contracts alone would be worth hundreds of millions. Tweed, who had already installed himself on the boards of a local railway company, a

gas company, a bank, and the Brooklyn Bridge Company, all while still serving as the mayor, had an unbeatable inside track to landing any construction contracts.

But then came Beach.

New Yorkers loved Beach Pneumatic Transit. City luminaries eagerly boarded the plush carriage for their 321-foot ride of the future, and visiting dignitaries came down to Warren Street to marvel at the station. Newspapers throughout the city were almost unanimous in their praise of Beach, and wondered if the solution to the city's transit problems had been found at last.

Tweed was appalled, and then flabbergasted, and then utterly furious. He and his men had stood to gain astronomical sums from rail contracts, and now some delicate-boned egghead publisher had yanked the rug out from underneath all of them. And, just to rub it in, Beach had dug out his illegal subway almost underneath Tweed's City Hall lair--a place already in danger of sinking into the earth under the weight of all its plundered loot.

Beach seized the moment, and the 1871 session of the state legislature saw him pushing a bill to allow him to extend pneumatic lines from the tip of Manhattan all the way up to Harlem, down to Jersey City, and out to Brooklyn.

At first, there was little Tweed could do to directly block Beach. Pneumatic rail was tremendously popular, and even a rapacious despot like Tweed knew that the public's fancy would not tolerate a frontal assault. Residents of both the East-Side Association and the West-Side Association had voted their support of the Broadway Underground Railway bill and circulated petitions around the city. Newspapers also supported the bill, and the Journal of Commerce made much of its most startling feature in a February 15, 1871, editorial: "There can be no good objection to the passage of the bill--one of the chief merits of which is, that the company ask no subsidy from the city, but are willing to pay the whole cost out of their own pockets." Not only was Beach's company scooping up the most important contract in the city's history, it was making every other company look bad in the process. Beach Pneumatic Transit had already spent $350,000 of its own money, $70,000 of which came out of Beach's wallet. The company was not, unlike nearly every other railway builder in the city, busy lining its pockets.

The opposition consisted of the usual suspects: Tweed, Astor, Vanderbilt, and an assortment of Broadway residents who feared for their mansions. They were, Beach complained, "an organized clique of opponents to this beneficent measure, consisting largely of rich men, who ride in their carriages, and don't want to be disturbed by fast railways." And, as with any major undertaking, a few naysayers were simply crotchety old men. "I have fought steam railroad projects in Broadway for the last twenty years," snapped one at a reporter "and I mean to fight them for twenty years more."

This kind of reasoning carried little weight in Albany, and on March 17, 1871, the assembly passed Beach's bill by a staggering margin of 102 to 11. Not long afterward, the senate passed it by 22 to 5. Now it was only up to Governor Hoffman to sign the bill into law. A hearing was set for March 30, and Beach showed up to plead his cause.

He was walking into a trap. Tweed was prepared all along; the governor was already in his pocket. That day, citing the possibility of damage to houses along Broadway, Governor John T. Hoffman dutifully bowed to his dread master the mayor of New York, and vetoed the bill.

Surely none of those at the offices of Scientific American could have imagined for long that they could take on Boss Tweed and simply get away with

it. And yet, they had dared to imagine it.

Beach--a sober and industrious man who never took a day off work in his life--would not be put off so easily by the infamous diamond-bedecked mayor.

He and his railway company pushed the legislature into approving the bill again the following year, and the company now wielded a fistful of engineering reports asserting that no damage would be done to any buildings. But Boss Tweed had his own kept man: Edward Tracy, the chief engineer of the Croton Aqueduct Works. Tracy issued a dire report on the Beach bill, predicting that sewer lines would need to be torn up, tunnels would flood, buildings would sink, and fifteen massive ventilators would have to project out of the street for every mile of pneumatic subway.

Citing Tracy's report, Hoffman vetoed the bill once again on May 1, 1872.

Amazingly, he claimed that much of the route in question didn't even need mass transit, accusing Beach of seeking "Possession of the valuable portion of Broadway ... where the facilities for transit are already many, making the great question of Rapid Transit through the whole length of the city secondary." Any Manhattanite not utterly appalled by Hoffman's reasoning would have found this claim hilarious.

And then came help from another funnyman--a cartoonist. Although a number of citizens appalled by Tweed's dirty dealings helped topple the mayor, Thomas Nast's cartoons for the New York Times effectively revealed to the world the vast scale of the extortion and skulduggery employed by the Tweed Ring. Tweed fell under indictment and was ultimately convicted for his myriad crimes; at one point, he even fled to Spain to avoid prosecution. There was a change in power in Albany, too: power passed from Governor John Hoffman to Governor John Dix.

This time, when the bill came up for vote again in the 1873 session, both the legislature and Governor Dix approved it. Beach's dream, it seemed, was to come true at last. But the very feature that buoyed the bill--all the money would come from the company, and none from the public--also cruelly sank it.

The year ended with a massive financial crash, the Panic of 1873; investment money dried up, and suddenly Beach and his company were left stranded.

When Boss Tweed finally died in 1877, the new mayor stubbornly refused to lower City Hall's flags to half mast. A great evil was now dead. But so was a great good--the Beach pneumatic line. And neither was ever coming back.

Pneumatic lines back in Europe were faring little better. As steam and electric trains improved, the advantages of pneumatics looked less overwhelming. Some mail lines collected seepage at the bottom of inclines, so that carriages rocketing through them would hit puddles that dashed water all over the mail inside. Air leakage bedeviled the systems, and the cost of maintaining them became harder to justify to post offices that, with the advent of instant communication via telephone, no longer had a market in carrying messages with the utmost speed.