Thursday, November 5, 2015

The Race to Be First: Subways and More

Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the November 5, 2015 edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.


We can be proud of many things in Massachusetts, especially those attributed to our fair city Boston. In Boston Firsts (2006), author Lynda Morgenroth describes forty of the “feats or innovation and invention that happened in first in Boston and helped make America great.”
  

Among the most admirable was the bravery of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment in the Civil War. Over 1000 African American men from Boston and beyond fought courageously as Union soldiers in South Carolina. Another first, of course, was the passage of the Same-Sex Marriage Law in 2003, leading the nation in marriage equality. The YMCA, Fanny Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cookbook, the USS Constitution, and the Public Garden are all Boston innovations.  Boston is also famous for inventions of shipping ice around the globe, the Boston Cream Pie, and the Gillette Safety Razor.

In the early 1700s, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston began inoculating patients against smallpox. The first surgery performed painlessly on a patient under the influence of the anesthetic, ether, was performed in Boston at one of its many famous hospitals, Massachusetts General Hospital in 1846.

Another medical first was a kidney transplant nearly a century later. Twin brothers from Rutland, Massachusetts came home from duty in the armed services at the age of 23. The younger, Richard, was dying from kidney disease. His brother, Robert, asked to give him one of his kidneys. The ethical questions of such an operation, putting one healthy brother at risk to save the life of the other, were debated. In the end, Doctors Joseph Murray and John Merrill performed the risky surgery at what is known now as the Brigham. Both patients did well, and although Richard died eight years later of recurring kidney failure, his donor brother Robert lived until 2010, dying at the age of 79.  Dr. Murray shared a Nobel Prize in 1990 for his life-long work transplanting cells and organs. Born in Milford, he died at the age of 93 in 2012.

Another Boston first was the opening of the Boston Subway in 1897. There were already underground railroads in other cities in the world, particularly in London, Glasgow, and Budapest. And there were elevated railways in New York and Chicago.

I invited author Doug Most to be a part of the Stuart R. Plumer Author Night Series, 2015-2016 on November 12 at 7 pm,   He will be here to describe the details of his book, The Race Underground (2014).  It’s the fascinating story of the “rivalry between Boston and New York” to build America’s first subway.

The story, of course, is full of political intrigue in both cities and the regional rivalry that spurred such fast advancement. Central to the story told in The Race Underground is that of two brothers living two hundred miles apart from each other. Henry Melville Whitney and William Collins Whitney were born in Conway, Massachusetts (today the town, just west of I91 and Greenfield has less than 2,000 inhabitants). In the late 1800s, older brother Henry and his wife lived in Brookline. Henry was successor to his father as president of the Metropolitan Steamship Company, linking Boston to New York on water.

Younger brother, William, served as Secretary of the Navy under President Cleveland. He resided in New York and rather than matching his brother’s career as an industrialist, he excelled in politics and finance. William died in his early sixties as a wealthy man. Older brother Henry lived another 19 years and died nearly penniless.

The Race Underground will soon be a part of the PBS documentary featuring subways in the American Experience. Doug Most spent many hours talking on film about a subject that fascinates him. He did, after all, spend five years researching and writing the story in the Race Underground. He spent countless hours in libraries and archives pouring over written accounts and records and studying photographs. While Most was born in Boston, he grew up in Barrington, Rhode Island. Both of his parents were from New York, and he admits he spent a confused childhood wondering which “sports teams to root for.”

Today, Boston is fourth in the United States for ridership of its rapid transit system. Over 174 million riders use the “T” that includes the blue, orange and red lines of 38 miles of track. There are 53 stations where 560,500 riders daily board the trains.

These numbers pale in comparison, of course, to the New York City subway with its 469 stations and 233 miles of track and over 9 million riders each and every weekday. Nearly 3 billion riders boarded the New York Subway trains in 2014. The Washington Metro and the Chicago “L” also beat Boston for ridership, but they cover many more miles of track by three times.

In a chapter titled “Breaking New Ground” in his book A City So Grand (2010), Stephen Puleo* describes the movement in Boston away from horse-drawn vehicles to an electrified railway that unclogged the streets.  In dedicating South Station in 1898, Mayor Josiah Quincy gave credit for the vision of so great a terminal to New England characteristics of courage and strength and enterprise. In doing so, Bostonians were also applauded for successes that marked an entire half-century of technological risks, advancements, and growth. (*Puleo is also the author of Dark Tide which chronicles the Great Molasses Flood in Boston on January 15, 1919.)

Even children’s books have captured the story of the race to build the subway. A Subway for New York (2005) by David Weitzman and Beneath the Streets of Boston (2005) by Joe McKendry tell simpler tales.

In 2012, the trustees of the Morrill Memorial Library set aside funds to honor retiring library trustee, Stuart Plumer.  Mr. Plumer served as a trustee for 33 years from 1979 until 2012. Author Doug Most is the second author to visit the library. Please call the Information or Reference Desks of the library to register for this program and learn more about The Race Underground.