Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [742]
Not surprisingly, Tweed reacted crankily to competition from Alfred Ely Beach, editor-publisher of the Scientific American, who in 1868 had slipped a bill through the legislature permitting him to install an underground system of pneumatic tubes using compressed air. Beach claimed they would blow letters and parcels between Wall Street and a planned new post office at City Hall, but in fact he intended blowing people to and fro. From the basement of Devlin’s clothing store at Murray Street, Beach had workers dig a nine-foot-wide tunnel twenty feet below Broadway, smuggling out the dirt after dark, that ran one block north, to Warren Street. Next, to ensure the popular acclaim that would overwhelm resistance from corrupt politicians, Beach installed a gas-lit entryway, a platform with frescoed walls, settees, and a grand piano, and a luxuriously upholstered twenty-two-person car. In February 1870 a huge rotary blower began propelling passengers smoothly back and forth—a public relations triumph that drew four hundred thousand riders that year, at twenty-five cents each. Nevertheless, the combination of Tweed’s opposition, protests from powerful Broadway landlords who feared for their buildings’ foundations, technical difficulties, and reluctance of private investors to undertake the enterprise led to its demise.
Charles T. Harvey had better luck. Back in 1867 he had received legislative permission to erect an experimental single-track elevated line on a half-mile stretch of Greenwich Street (just north from Battery Place). By June 1868 Harvey’s scheme was precariously operational, with cables attached to stationary engines shuttling a car back and forth. Harvey was ruined in Jay Gould’s Black Friday, but three years later, after several corporate reorganizations and abandonment of the pulley system, steam locomotives of the New York Elevated Railway Company began regular service along the single elevated track that ran up Greenwich and along Ninth Avenue to the 30th Street station of the Hudson River Railroad. For all its flaws—the engines belched sparks and inundated pedestrians below with ashes—the elevated railroad had proven its practicability. The future seemed rosy to uptown Manhattan’s promoters, with the disturbing exception of the competitive behemoth rising across the East River.
BOSSES, BOOSTERS, AND BRIDGEMAKERS
Brooklyn was booming. Most new development still closely hugged the waterfront, especially industries with large land requirements; Havemeyer and Elder’s mammoth sugar refineries; Appleton’s printing and bookbinding establishment near the Navy Yard, manned by six hundred workers; Williamsburg breweries, far larger now than before the war; Mayor Martin Kalbfleisch’s Bushwick Chemical Works; the score of refineries in Greenpoint along Newtown Creek, like Charles Pratt’s, which processed oil shipped east by rail and floated to their front doors. Around these giants hundreds of smaller concerns clustered: in 1865 Brooklyn had five hundred factories; by 1870, a thousand; by 1880, over five thousand.
Residential districts near the waterfront also did well. The Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill complex expanded farther into South Brooklyn (today’s Carroll Gardens) in these prosperous years. But interior territories near the new Prospect Park languished. Back in the 1850s Edwin C. Litchfield had assembled a seven-acre stretch of land that sloped downward from the crest of Prospect Hill. Construction of Prospect Park in the 1860s gave him hope that he could lure wealthy families into buying large plots and constructing grand urban