Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [838]
Whitney drew a group of Philadelphia millionaires into the Cable syndicate and easily topped Sharp’s bribe to the aldermen, coming up with $750,000, but stumbled in offering only half in cash and the rest in bonds in the new company; the politicos accepted Sharp’s all-cash incentive. Whitney recovered quickly, however. Announcing that had the franchise been sold at public auction he would have offered the city a million-dollar annual rental for it, he demanded an investigation of exactly why the aldermen were planning to give it away for a feeble forty thousand. In the ensuing uproar, an inquiry led to the indictment and conviction (or flight to Canada) of many of the now infamous “boodle” aldermen (their leader got nine years’ hard labor in Sing Sing). Sharp himself was sentenced to four years in the slammer, but the Court of Appeals reversed the verdict on technicalities and ordered a second trial, which Sharp avoided by his timely demise in 1888.
Whitney, Ryan, and the Philadelphians, left in possession of the field, consolidated their control over New York’s surface transit system. They organized a holding company, the Metropolitan Traction Company, at the suggestion of Francis Lynde Stetson and their chief legal counsel, Elihu Root. (Of him Whitney reputedly said: “I have had many lawyers who have told me what I cannot do; Mr. Root is the only lawyer who tells me how to do what I want to do.”) Using the techniques of national merger makers, the Metropolitan began buying, leasing, or conquering the independent horsecar companies, issuing vast amounts of heavily watered stock as it went. By 1897 it would control nearly every line in Manhattan.
As fast as they were acquired, Whitney and Ryan welded their roads into an integrated system. They instituted highly popular free transfers that finally made it possible to travel long distances for a nickel. They also understood that true rationalization required mechanization: the horse would have to go. By 1892 they had, at great expense, installed a cable line along Broadway. Powered by a steam engine in the basement of the handsome new nine-story Cable Building at Broadway and Houston, two endless steel strand loops ran, taut and humming, just below street level, one down to Bowling Green, the other up to 36th Street. Once a motorman gripped the cable, his streetcar was jerked along at thirty miles per hour, far faster than horses.
There were problems, however. Speed couldn’t be varied at corners, so cars whipped passengers around spots like Dead Man’s Curve at Union Square, gongs clanging wildly. Accidents—which were frequent—required stopping the belt, halting traffic all along the line. And when the forty-ton cables broke, which was often, they were not easy to replace. In short order the experiment would be declared a failure. Further problems emerged when George Gould, who succeeded to control of Manhattan Elevated when his father died in 1892, proceeded to declare war on the Metropolitan, a struggle whose consequences would reverberate into the next century. Most disturbing of all, while the street railway franchises proved enormously profitable to their owners, the city received virtually nothing by way of financial return, and speculators like Gould had no interest in promoting orderly and planned development in advance of existing settlement.
Still, for all their drawbacks, the city’s combined transport facilities helped weld Manhattan and its surrounding suburbs into an integrated regional economic unit. The Manhattan Elevated carried 75.6 million passengers in 1881; by 1891 it