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  Two years later, the Mohawk & Hudson set another promotional precedent that would quickly spiral out of control in the railroads’ zeal to win converts to its cause: the first free railroad pass was issued to a public official, this one to Reuben H. Walworth, the chancellor of New York and the state’s highest judicial officer. By the time his post was abolished nearly two decades later, the practice had proliferated. Free passes had been accepted by state legislators and even minor local functionaries as a political entitlement. By the end of the 19th century, good-government watchdogs would be hard-pressed to find a public official who, one way or another, did not own railroad stock.

  THE FIRST RAIL LINE IN NEW YORK CITY also began operating in 1831, but with one big caveat. Its charter from the legislature specified that while it might parallel the Hudson, the tracks would have to be laid too far east of the river—between Third and Eighth Avenues—to threaten the steamboats’ passenger and freight monopoly. Moreover, the charter wrung from lawmakers in the capitol left little room for future competition with maritime traffic to Albany and on to the Midwest. It allowed for a double-track railroad from 23rd Street, but only as far north as the Harlem River. Even at the groundbreaking, though, on February 23, 1832, the line’s founders, including Thomas Emmet, whose younger brother, Robert, was the famous Irish revolutionary, barely concealed their ultimate goal. Before adjourning for toasts “drunk in sparkling Champagne with great hilarity and feeling,” John Mason, the railroad’s vice president (the president was dutifully attending to his day job as a congressman in Washington), acknowledged that “while the road’s principal objectives were necessarily local, the higher importance was to encourage the building of another road to Albany, which is intended to commence where the present road (our New York & Harlem) terminates at the Harlem River.”

  The railroad industry in America was still so primitive that the first iron rails had to be ordered from England. After a visit, Charles Dickens scorned some of the line’s early carriages as “great wooden arks.” And even before any track was laid, railroad officials realized that the terminus at 23rd Street was too remote from lower Manhattan. State legislators were importuned to grant an extension to the charter—but, pointedly, the extension was in the downtown direction, to Prince Street in what is now SoHo, and “through such streets as the mayor, aldermen and commonality might prescribe” (as a practical matter, that meant the railroad could be extorted by both state and city politicians). Another caveat was imposed after a locomotive boiler exploded, killing the engineer and injuring 20 passengers: no steam locomotives could be used to haul carriages south of 14th Street (by 1858, with the city bulging northward, steam power would be banned below 42nd Street). Only horsepower—literally—was allowed.

  When the first stretch opened on November 22, 1832, between Prince Street and Union Square, the carriages, each pulled by two horses, more closely resembled streetcars than a railroad. The one-way fare was a penny. Horsecars would proliferate in the city and operate until 1917, but at least the Harlem’s cars ran on rails—not on the deeply rutted unpaved avenues or jarring cobblestones, which prompted the New York Herald to describe a routine ride on a horse-drawn omnibus as “modern martyrdom.” (Only about 25,000 of New York’s 750,000 or so residents rode an omnibus daily by 1850, but the practice acclimated them to what the historian Glen Holt Jr. described, in transportation rather than sartorial terms, as the “riding habit.”) Unfortunately, the inaugural ceremony did not go off without a hitch. A miscommunication between the drivers of the cars resulted in what the railroad historian Louis V. Grogan speculated was the first recorded instance of a rear-end collision in America.

  This being New York, even the 12 mph horsecars provoked public controversy. (Below 14th Street the speed limit was a pokey 5 mph, about as fast as a hearty pedestrian could walk; the limit was rigidly enforced by an inspector, Henry Bergh, who would later found the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.)

  Moreover, cabbies objected to the competition (and after one protest meeting at Tammany Hall vandalized some of the company’s tracks). Storeowners feared the railroad would eventually usurp the entire width of Fourth Avenue (now Park Avenue and Park Avenue South), and landlords bordering the avenue, expecting an immediate bonanza in real estate values, worried instead that New York & Harlem would win further concessions from the city (which it did) and encroach upon their property. In 1833, the railroad purchased six parcels at East 26th Street and Fourth Avenue for a car barn and stables.

  WHAT BECAME PARK AVENUE WAS AN OPEN TRAIN YARD NORTH OF GRAND CENTRAL. THE YARD WAS SUNK BELOW STREET LEVEL AND FINALLY DECKED OVER.

  The reticence of the city fathers notwithstanding, the railroad was not about horses. It was about steam—even if steam, and the higher speed it allowed, was still considered unsafe and even unnatural. While the horse-drawn streetcar business would enrich other entrepreneurs for decades, it was the potential of steam power that had inspired George William Featherstonhaugh to organize the Mohawk & Hudson. Steam power was what John Mason and other officials of the New York & Harlem fully believed would redeem their investment in an untested route between bustling lower Manhattan and the bucolic precincts north of 14th Street, much less the even more pastoral outpost of Harlem. By 1840, while the New York & Harlem still owned 140 horses to haul its 36 carriages on lower Fourth Avenue, the line had also placed six wood-burning steam locomotives in service.

  Also by then, three developments foreshadowed the railroad’s future success. In 1834, a rock cut was completed through Murray Hill and the line was extended north to East 85th Street in Yorkville. Three years later, railroad engineers completed a 596-foot-long brick and masonry tube between 94th and 96th Streets under Mount Prospect, or Observatory Place. (It is the city’s oldest tunnel and still carries two tracks of the Metro-North Railroad.) The railroad was also extended farther south to Tryon Row, today the site of the Municipal Building in lower Manhattan.

  By 1839, just seven years after service was inaugurated, the fledgling railroad could celebrate the completion of its original agenda: nearly seven miles of relatively rapid transit from the city to Harlem. Regular service to 125th Street and the opening of a hotel there inspired the New York Herald to predict that “this and other improvements will make Harlem a fashionable rival to Hoboken, New Brighton and other summer resorts.”

  Another feat took no less finesse. Dawdling by Gouverneur Morris’s New York & Albany Railroad prevented it from laying tracks south from the Bronx into the New York & Harlem’s Manhattan territory. The line had frittered away its franchise and, in 1840, the legislature granted the New York & Harlem the right to bridge the Harlem River and, in effect, lay track all the way to the state capital—actually, to Greenbush, across the river, until a Hudson River railroad bridge was built in 1866. (So much for progress: today, Amtrak’s Albany stop is again on the wrong side of the river, in Rensselaer.)The Harlem line, originally confined by charter, but not by ambition, to the island of Manhattan, was poised to become the little railroad that could. By 1852, its tracks would stretch from New York’s City Hall nearly 131 miles north to Chatham and connect to the last 22 miles toward Albany.

  THE RAILROAD NOT ONLY FULFILLED A DEMAND. It created one. Brooklyn Heights is generally regarded as America’s first suburb (for the record, historians say the city’s very first commuter was Jacques Cortelyou, who surveyed New Amsterdam in 1660 for the Dutch West India Company and traveled to work from Long Island), but Brooklyn was reachable from Manhattan only by boat, which was undependable in bad weather. In winter, the East River might freeze for weeks at a time. Trains, in contrast, were considerably more versatile. They opened vast tracts of land to development, sending steel runners up the fertile plains of New York’s Hudson Valley and southwestern Connecticut, where the railroad would advertise “villa plots for sale” conveniently near stations. From those nodes, new towns and even cities would take root. Suburbanization was not unique to New York City. Railroads
also spread development beyond city lines in places like Boston and Philadelphia. Yet in New York, the tendrils of track seemed to proliferate farther from the city center and in virtually every direction.

  In 1843, the New Haven Railroad had reached its namesake city from New York. A year later, the New York Herald prophesied that within two decades “the line of this road will be nearly one continuous village as far as White Plains.” With Westchester’s population ballooning by 75 percent in the 1850s alone, an English traveler marveled that suburban homes were “springing up like mushrooms on spots which five years ago were part of the dense and tangled forest; and the value of property everywhere, but especially along the various lines of railroad, has increased by a ratio almost incredible.”

  Reaction of rural residents who overnight evolved into suburbanites was profoundly mixed.

  NOT LONG AFTER THE LINE linked the teeming city to country homes in Harlem, what would become the Bronx, and Westchester and to small Hudson Valley villages, a perceptive railroad superintendent remembered only as M. Sloat noticed a new class of customer: the repeat passenger, whose to-and-fro trips to work and home represented a potential marketing bonanza. Seizing the opportunity, the railroad originated an imaginative fare structure of tickets based not on a onetime passage or even a round trip, but on unlimited rides for six months or a full year at a steep discount from the single-fare rate. The full fare was commuted, and with one bold entrepreneurial stroke the railroad commuter—in name, at the very least—was officially born. The first-class fare between downtown and Harlem was $35 for 12 months; a second-class ticket, for $25, was good only during prescribed hours and on local trains. Even with the discount, annual commutation rates from Westchester were too high for most wage earners, which forged the county’s enduring identity as a verdant, affluent suburb. In a letter to the Times in 1873, a writer identified only as a blue-collar “brakeman” complained that given the high cost of commuting, “I confidently expect that, within the next 10 years, Westchester will be inhabited only by those who can afford to pay for the luxury, such as railroad directors, members of the Stock Exchange, and executors of large estates.” But as Kenneth T. Jackson recalled in his book Crabgrass Frontier, even before the Civil War “the southernmost stations at Fordham, Morrisania, Tremont, and Mount Vernon were becoming centers of middle-class residence.” Commuters’ dependence on a reliable railroad would become manifest.

  LOOKING SOUTH, A CHIMERICAL TELESCOPIC VIEW FROM THE 125TH STREET STATION IN HARLEM.

  The advent of the commuter also produced an immediate and not entirely surprising corollary: the commuter complaint. Early on, a coalition of Scarsdale commuters threatened to sue the Central because “the poor train service has so discouraged people seeking real estate just south of White Plains that it has caused the market practically to collapse.” The commuters complained that the haphazard service was especially hard on housewives. (Scarsdale riders griped: “It is almost impossible to keep servants, because they never know when they should have meals for their masters coming from New York, nor how long they will have to keep the meals warm.”)

  Similar complaints left commuters ripe for mockery. E.B. White perpetuated the stereotype in a 1929 poem:

  Commuter—one who spends his life

  In riding to and from his wife;

  A man who shaves and takes a train

  And then rides back to shave again.

  But commuter revolts mattered only when riders had an alternative. And suddenly, another railroad offered one. In 1847, the Hudson River Railroad Company had finally been organized, with John B. Jervis, who was instrumental in charting the original Mohawk & Hudson, as its chief engineer. Constructing a railroad adjoining the river—hemmed on the east by a steep embankment and punctuated by ponds that ebbed and flowed with the Hudson’s tidal clock and had to be either bridged or filled in—presented a challenge. Jervis cast the project as an environmental bonanza for the shoreline: “rough points will be smoothed off, the irregular indentations of the bays be hidden and a regularity and symmetry imparted to the outline.” (Some of the human impediments to construction were less obliging; the line paid $3,000 to settle property claims in upper Manhattan by John J. Audubon and $800 to Madame Eliza Jumel, a widow of Aaron Burr, “notwithstanding the defects” in her title.) But constructing a riprap river wall and leveling the flinty rock surface to lay gradeless track was an engineering challenge, not an operating one, and within two years the trains were running north past Peekskill from a terminal at West 32nd Street and Ninth Avenue (a route that would extend downtown to Chambers Street on Ninth Avenue, paralleling in some places the former elevated freight tracks that were transformed into what is now the High Line park).

  By midcentury, the Harlem was facing fierce competition from what one of its advertisements warned were the “dangers and disasters incident to a road running on the margin of a deep river”—namely, the new Hudson River Railroad. The railroad’s route proved to be a testament to the inevitable political ascendancy of rail over river. In a sense, though, it was less a matter of ascendancy than a case of meeting the enemy and discovering he is us.

  FROM HIS PERCH ON THE VIADUCT, THE COMMODORE PEERS THROUGH THE EXHAUST GENERATED BY “THE RAILROAD’S MOST POTENT ENEMY.”

  THE COMMODORE

  IN 1833, JUST AS THE NEW YORK & HARLEM RAILROAD was beginning service, a swashbuckling Hudson River boat mogul named Cornelius Vanderbilt boldly embarked on his first railroad trip. For a future railroad magnate, the trip could not have been more fraught with foreboding. The Camden & Amboy Railroad passenger car he was riding in rolled off an embankment in Hightstown, New Jersey. Vanderbilt was very nearly killed. He broke several ribs and punctured a lung. (If the accident alienated him from railroads in general, it also may have laid the groundwork for his later special antipathy toward the Pennsylvania, of which the Camden & Amboy was a component.) Needless to say, he was so unimpressed with the noisy, newfangled vehicle that even years later, when he was solicited to buy stock in the Harlem line, he would reply: “I would be a fool to sink my money in a business that sets out to compete with steamboats.”

  Vanderbilt was born in 1794 into a poor farming family on Staten Island, the great-great-grandson of a Dutchman who emigrated as an indentured servant from the village of Bilt in the Netherlands. He was 13 years old when Robert Fulton’s Clermont first steamed up the Hudson. Three years later, Vanderbilt was captain of his very own flat-bottomed and oar-equipped piragua, on which he ferried passengers between Staten Island and lower Manhattan. Two decades later, as George Stephenson was engineering his first steam locomotive in England, Vanderbilt was building his first steamboat, after successfully challenging Fulton’s monopoly on Hudson River shipping (first by landing at different piers to confuse the authorities).

  Steamboats were still profitable, but something happened in 1847 that may have soured Vanderbilt on his identification with their fate. His coal-burning namesake steamboat, Cornelius Van Derbilt, was defeated in a round-trip boat race up the Hudson to Croton Point. Vanderbilt didn’t abandon ships. But he also began investing in railroads. While he would forever be known universally as “the Commodore”—a self-styled sobriquet that celebrated his maritime coups—he was already gazing longingly on a new horizon and, by the late 1840s, was partnering with Daniel Drew, a devilishly clever sometime steamboat partner and Wall Street buccaneer. (Drew’s reputation for bloating his cattle by quenching their thirst before delivering them to market and later for outwitting Vanderbilt by diluting Erie Railroad shares would give rise to the term watered-down stock.) Their first acquisition was the Boston & Stonington, which not only didn’t compete with steamboats; it was practically in business with them. Its tracks provided the land link in the mostly maritime route between Boston and New York (in 1844, the Long Island Rail Road had begun carrying passengers to Greenport, where they would board the steamboat to Stonington, avoiding the hilly Connecticut land route riven by the wide-open mouths of d
eep rivers). But while the Boston & Stonington didn’t compete with Vanderbilt’s steamboats, other railroads did. And while the railroads were initially less luxurious and offered few amenities, they could navigate the route to Albany during the four or so months a year that the Hudson would freeze north of where the Tappan Zee now spans the river.

  Meanwhile, the New York & Harlem was falling on hard times. Its hilly inland route to the state capital—actually, only the 131 miles to Chatham, where it would connect with the future Boston & Albany—couldn’t compete with the Hudson Railroads’ water-level river route. Moreover, the line had been fleeced by one of its executives in 1854 and, in part, blamed Vanderbilt, whom the executive had inveigled into buying Harlem bonds. In the Panic of 1857, after Harlem stock plunged to $9 a share, Vanderbilt was invited in as a director (his stockbroker was Leonard Jerome, whose daughter would give birth to Winston Churchill).