Secret Subway Book

(Amazon.com) This is the incredible story of the visionary engineer who built New York City's first subway In the late 1860s New York was congested and dangerous, a place one terrified commentator described as "bedlam on wheels. "Alfred Beach, a multitalented young man, set out to solve the problem. Rather than just addressing the chaos on the streets, he looked deeper for a solution, into the very foundations of the city. He financed the subterranean project himself, and pledged his workers to secrecy. When the fruits of his plans were revealed the public raved about his new tunnel, single station and subway car.

Soon however, New York alderman William Marcy Tweed (Boss Tweed) intervened. Tweed was one of the most corrupt politicians in the history of the U.S., and nothing took place in his jurisdiction without his approval and payment of significant bribes. Beach tried to avoid submitting to Tweed's cronyism by seeking approval to continue his subway line from the state legislature. He succeeded but the governor of New York, controlled by Tweed vetoed the legislation. Eventually Tweed's corruption was made public and he was arrested, and sentenced to 12 years in prison. This should have been Beach's triumphant moment in the continuation of his new subway system, but just weeks after permission to extend his subway system was granted, the U.S. suffered the greatest economic depression it had ever faced. The Panic of 1873 was the death knell of Beach's pneumatic subway.

Between 1900 and 1904, a subway line powered by electricity was finally built in NYC. Workers extending that line cut right into Beach's tunnel, which remained intact. The station, tunnel, and car'except for the decaying wooden parts'were just as Beach had left them. To this day they lie buried beneath the city's streets, an interred monument to a dream cruelly killed by political greed and jealousy.

Comments
This is an absolutely fascinating story of what was accomplished by one man's vision and defeated by another man's greed. Alfred Beach was definitely a man ahead of his time.

The cover picture is eye-catching and like all National Geographic titles, the book is well laid out and progresses in a logical order. Unlike other National Geographic books the text comes off as a bit dry and there is a lot of text per page which would definitely discourage younger readers.
The illustrations are all in black and white sepia tones. Most are drawings, as photography was still a new art form, and photography underground proved difficult. The back of the book contains further reading sources and an index

Although the book is entitled "Secret Subway," there is a lot more information here on just the building of the subway. It starts with the growth of New York City in the 1800s into the largest populated city in the U.S., it's transportation problems, a brief biography of Alfred Beach and the founding of Scientific American magazine, the building of the subway, Boss Tweed, and the political and economic situations of 1870 that ruined Beach's funding for his new system. Anyone looking for "secret subway" information will find it sandwiched between the history of New York and Boss Tweed. Is this too much "other" information? Books have been written about Boss Tweed alone. Also, do we need so much information on The Scientific American and other inventors of the day?

For me, one of the most interesting parts of this story is the fact that Beach's pneumatic subway with its waiting station, the car and the hydraulic shield still lie buried underneath the city in a sealed off tunnel. Let's open this tunnel up and share it with the public for the engineering marvel that is was/is!

Beach's system was built on pneumatics. I would have loved to learn why pneumatics is not used today and what made it obsolete.

Amazon lists the age group for this book as 10 and up and I would agree. There is another picture book version of Alfred Beach and subway also entitled "Secret Subway" by Shana Corey, and I intend to read that as well.