In the nineteenth century, Manhattan's streets were so choked with pedestrians, horses, vehicles, and vendors that a trip from City Hall to Central Park could take hours. Alfred Beach had the perfect solution: build a giant pneumatic tube underneath Broadway from theBatteryto Harlem. Air pressure would shootpassengers up and down the island in clean, quiet carriages. But Beach was up against theoperators of the horse-drawn streetcars and the politicians in their pay, most conspicuously William M. Tweed, the notorious "Boss" of Tammany Hall. New York's Secret Subway: The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit tells a classic story of good versus evil, pitting the mild-mannered Beach, avisionary inventor and entrepreneur, against theoafishtyrant Tweed, the exemplarof corruption in the Gilded Age. It also tells the story of one of the most astonishing feats of engineering in American history, the surreptitious creation of the nation's first operational subway. New York seemeddestined tobecome the second city in the world with a comprehensive subwaysystem, after London. Unfortunately, political lethargy and greed would conspire to deny the city a subway for another thirty years. Yet Alfred Beach still proved conclusively the feasibility of undergroundrailways in Manhattan, and paved the way for modern masstransportation systems. Richly illustrated and populated with larger-than-life characters, New York's Secret Subway will captivate readers and provide historical context for today'sclashes between public interestsand powerful business and political groups. Algeo tells this amazing true story in full for the first time, and although it took place more than acenturyago, it will at times sound surprisingly familiar.
