New York’s Secret Subway: The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit

Journalist Algeo follows up When Harry Met Pablo with an engrossing chronicle of the life of Alfred Ely Beach (1826–1896), co-owner and editor of Scientific American, head of the nation’s leading patent agency, and an inventor in his own right. Algeo’s focus is on what drove Beach to secretly construct the first underground railway in Manhattan, along with the city’s first subway stop, replete with a grand piano and chandeliers. In 1869, Beach had taken on the task surreptitiously, with excavation proceeding at night, to evade Boss Tweed, the corrupt politician who essentially ruled New York and objected to an underground system as it would diminish his take of the profits from the city’s street-level horse carriages and omnibuses. However, these conveyances and the vast accumulation of manure they left behind contributed to unsanitary conditions and clogged the streets, making a trip from City Hall to Central Park take hours. Thus the ever-optimistic Beach was certain that his new invention would be so popular with the public once unveiled that even Tweed wouldn’t be able to stop his plans to develop his new tech—not traditional rail, but a pneumatic system, Algeo notes, evocative of Elon Musk’s proposed Hyperloop. Algeo explores Beach’s optimism and Tweed’s avarice as two halves of the same can-do coin. The result is an immersive view of 1860s New York as a hotbed of innovation and corruption. (Sept.)