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New York's Secret Subway: The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit
Hardcover
Transportation GeneralGeneral ArchitectureGeneral United States History
Publisher Price: $35.00
ISBN13: 9781642833652
Publisher: Island Press
Published: Sep 30 2025
Pages: 288
Weight: 1.20
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.30 Depth: 9.10
Language: English
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 the Battery to Harlem. Air pressure would shoot passengers up and down the island in clean, quiet carriages. But Beach was up against the operators 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, a visionary inventor and entrepreneur, against the oafish tyrant Tweed, the exemplar of 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 seemed destined to become the second city in the world with a comprehensive subway system, after London. Unfortunately, political lethargy and greed would conspire to deny the city a subway for another thirty years.2 different editions
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