Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [846]
It was Frank Sprague, an academically trained electrical engineer who’d worked for Edison then struck out on his own, who invented a superior motor and installed it successfully in Richmond, Virginia. In the late 1880s Sprague electrified New York’s Fourth Avenue street railway line between the post office and 86th Street. In the 1890s, driven by competition, first the Third Avenue line and then the Metropolitan Street Railway Company began the enormously expensive process of switching their motive power. The Manhattan Company, however, under Gould, Sage, and Morgan, refused to follow suit. Sprague had successfully tested a system for electrifying New York’s elevateds back in 1886, but the complacent monopoly proved no more willing to invest in installing the requisite six-hundred-volt third rail than they were in relieving crowding. The Manhattan would stick with steam into the next century, nearly a decade after Chicago had junked its heavy and dirty steam engines.
Brooklynites’ problem was not corporate recalcitrance but excessive zeal. Brooklyn streetcar companies, not hampered by Manhattanites’ abhorrence of high wires, strung power lines above their tracks. The first conversions were completed in 1890, and within five years trolleys had almost completely replaced horsecars throughout the city, an extremely mixed blessing. Horsecars clopped along at six miles per hour. Electric cars could hurtle through streets at a terrifying thirty miles per hour, carrying three times the number of passengers, but though they had the weight and power of locomotives, their brakes were still those of a horsecar. Worse, companies set out to maximize profits by increasing the number of trips required for drivers to earn their daily wage, forcing them to careen through streets at near maximum speed. The result was carnage. By 1895 trolleys had killed 105 and maimed 407, most of them children, and become a symbol of random death. Calls for the municipalization of transit companies would grow steadily.
There were calls as well for the municipalization of the power supply. Once bourgeois neighborhoods and homes were wired, street and domestic lighting in Manhattan diffused at glacial pace because electric lighting was treated as a commodity, not (as in some European cities) a subsidized public service. Poor streets and outlying areas like Harlem would remain gas-lit until well into the twentieth century, and a blend (in William Dean Howells’s words) of “the moony sheen of the electrics mixing with the reddish points and blots of gas” would long characterize the Manhattan nightscape. Working people couldn’t afford electricity in their houses—a bulb alone cost a dollar, half a day laborer’s wages—or gas either: kerosene lamps remained their mainstay for illumination, and kerosene or coal stoves served for cooking and heating.
Gas itself grew more expensive as the industry grew less competitive. During the 1880s Manhattan’s many gas companies, panic stricken at the arrival of electricity, moved to conglomerate their operations. Primacy of place was seized by the Consolidated Gas Company (1884), a holding company organized by H. H. Rogers of Standard Oil, with backing from William Rockefeller and National City Bank. Consolidated Gas gained sufficient complete control of the marketplace to jack up prices— 25 percent in 1885 alone—and deliver poorer quality gas, while paying high dividends on wildly overcapitalized stock. William Rockefeller also gained a power base in Brooklyn’s gas industry, and once again the price went up and the product declined.
Substantial gas users such as hotel owners grew