For instance, London's Underground began about 50 years before New York's...here is a little snatch of history from Time Out magazine about the London beginnings:
The story began with Charles Pearson, the first in a succession of underground visionaries. It was he who first proposed the notion of ‘trains in drains’ in 1845, when the railway was a relatively new invention (the first steam passenger service only opened in 1830). Pearson, instrumental in the removal of the anti-Catholic inscription on the foot of the Monument, was a progressive and a pioneer – his persistence helped persuade the House of Commons to approve a bill in 1853 to build a subterranean railway between Paddington and Farringdon.
The reason such a hare-brained, experimental scheme received approval was one of necessity. London roads were suffering from terrible overcrowding and the mainline railways all stopped on the fringes of the West End and City thanks to a Royal Commission of 1846 that declared central London a no-go area for railway companies. A method of linking the mainline stations of Paddington, Euston and King’s Cross was needed, and Pearson’s plan fitted the bill. He helped raise the finance from private investors and the City of London, and excavation began in 1860, with a shallow trench dug beneath Euston Road and then covered over. Thousands of poor residents were displaced in the process.
The Metropolitan Line opened for business on January 10 1863, clocking 30,000 passengers on the first day. A celebratory banquet had been held the previous day at Farringdon. Pearson was not among the guests, having passed away the previous year. Another absentee was Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, who was approaching his 80th birthday, and said he wanted to spend as much time above ground as he possibly could (he died two years later).
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| Park Royal's rudimentary station in 1907 Image courtesy London Transport Museum (www.ltmuseum.co.uk) © Transport For London |
Well, back to New York....where the story was pretty complicated.
As I remember it, there WAS one ill fated attempt to build some kind of pneumatic system subway in the 1880's, but the real story began much later and depended upon the will of some of the local tycoons and social movers and shakers of the day...who had finally decided the time had come for New York to have its underground rail system, too.
The following is from a webisite called Subway New York and shows with drawings how all the underground work was done-- guess they could not figure out a way to get photos done back then!
Oh, and they had disasters and explosions back then too...but given the limited technology of the day, what they were able to accomplish is kind of astounding.
The NYC subway, we have to note, was only possible too because of the huge pool of immigrant laborers, many from Italy, who were willing to put up with conditions people would not accept today.
Finally, this is probably the longest article I have ever run! So you may want to skip through it as you need too...
Building New York's Subway (1903)
Station at Columbus Circle, in course of construction. The steel work is here shown in place, and the concrete roof, floor, and walls are finished. The walls are not yet faced with glazed tiles, and the station work is unfinished. Drawn by C.A. Vanderhoof.
Century Magazine · October, 1902 · pp. 894-907.
By Arthur Ruhl. With Pictures By Fernand Lungren And C. A. Vanderhoof.
Daylight was half a mile or more behind. In front a narrow arched passage, so low that the jagged roof just grazed one's head, followed a thin vista of hazy electric lamps farther into the solid rock. The heavy air was chilled with the breath of the under earth, and every now and then from under the tramway ties, or out of the indefinite darkness, came the drip-drip-drip and gurgle of water.
A thudding murmur in the distance suddenly grew more insistent and distinct. The shapes of men, of a swinging crane, of a tram-car mule, appeared under the flare of torches. The reverberations, locked between the narrow walls of rock, swelled into the deafening pounding of a steam-drill. Then a glimmer of daylight revealed the mouth of the shaft, and a moment later, clambering up into the open, I found myself in the lazy warmth of a summer afternoon and blinking at the velvet verdure of Central Park.
Now, the designers of that great underground railroad which is to bring Harlem within fourteen minutes of the City Hall and to extend for more than twenty-one miles just beneath the upper cuticle of New York City proper and the borough of the Bronx-- not to speak of the extensions which are yet to be built to Brooklyn-- would very earnestly explain at this point that tunneling, in the strict interpretation of the word, forms so small a part in the construction of the road that one may rightly speak of it only as a covered way. The motive for this distinction of terms is that those who know all about the new subway do not want those who know nothing about it to get creepy notions of dampness and "cellar air" and such lugubrious things, when some of the most characteristic features of New York's underground road, as compared, for example, with London's "Tuppenny Tube," are its nearness to the surface, its dryness, its airiness, and its light.
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I have chosen to begin a visit to the subway in the branch that leads away from One Hundred and Fourth street and the Boulevard, and actually does tunnel under Central Park, to point out a bit more easily than could be done in some other places the contrast between the upper and the under cuticle of Manhattan, and the ignorance which the average uninquiring citizen of this town is likely to be in of all the hidden toil and turmoil that is constantly going on to provide for his comfort.
He is accustomed to take most things for granted and to neglect to accord wonder to the material achievements of his town, except to enlighten the mind of an occasional country relative. This is an attitude which he would find more difficult to maintain if he understood the personal, almost human, quality which these big things possess for many of those who know them only as among the facial characteristics of the great city they have never seen, or if he felt the personal quality which they equally possess, for many of those who live beside them. In the imagination of the average untraveled son of the prairies who has never seen the skyline of Manhattan, it is much to be doubted if the Brooklyn Bridge or the elevated railroad is not quite as vital and human as, let us say, the Few Hundred or the Hon. Richard Croker. Many a prose vignette of Manhattan would have done just as well for Boston or Philadelphia had it not been for the presence of the "L" trains and their squealing brakes, while one's fancy can scarcely conjure up a printed picture of wintry New York which did not have its trail of steam from an L locomotive swirling about the heads of Christmas shoppers. And here is this great new hole-in-the-ground, stuffed with one knows not how many potential reactions on the life and the look of the town, and yet every day we ride over miles and miles of it with scarcely more than a languid musing as to the likelihood of dynamite explosions, or a peevish interest in magic devices by which contractors manage safely to support the pavement over which we ride, the L structure, or whole sheaves of underground pipes.
This Rapid Transit Subway, to give it its official name, is an underground railway running along the backbone of the narrow island of Manhattan, and, as now being built, extending on into the borough of the Bronx: From its southern terminus to the branch at One Hundred and Fourth street it will consist of four tracks, the outer two of which will be used for local trains, the inner two for expresses. From One Hundred and Fourth street, which is seven miles from the southern terminus, the main line with three tracks, of which the middle one will be used for express-trains, continues northward seven miles more to Kingsbridge, while a branch line of two tracks will swing off to the right, pass under the Harlem River at Bronx Avenue and One Hundred and Forty-fifth street, and thence on to Bronx Park and the Zoo, also a distance of seven miles. The local trains will be run at an average speed of fourteen miles an hour, stopping at stations one quarter of a mile apart, just about as the present elevated trains are operated; while the express-trains will have stations only about every mile and a half and be capable of attaining a speed of at least thirty miles an hour.
It is now fourteen years since the first bill providing for this underground railroad was sent to the New York legislature. In this time, so amazingly have the needs of the Greater City expanded that even with the Brooklyn extension, which was added to the original plan, the new subway, far from solving the problem, is only the first of many other similar systems which must be built in order even tolerably to dispose of the abnormal passenger traffic which at certain hours and at certain points on the narrow island reaches an excess of congestion to be met with in no other city in the world.
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The great subway begins down by the City Hall, and it was into the plaza in front of that beautiful old building that the Hon. Robert A. Van Wyck, mayor of the city, inserted the official pickax in March, 1900, and thereby began the work of excavation. The bronze tablet which was immediately placed over the spot used to be surrounded morning and night by patriotic citizens who gazed down at it as though they were looking at Niagara, until it was presently removed to a contractor's shed, where it spent last summer waiting for the City Hall station to be done. The plaza itself has endured equal vicissitudes, now looking like a mining-camp, now roofed smoothly over, as when Prince Henry came and the escorting cavalry clattered gaily over the planking.
Although the City Hall station is intended to be rather the show station of the line, with its symphonic curves of roof and platforms and track,-"not a straight line in it," as one admirer has observed,-the main terminus and down-town station is a stone's throw away, over by the old Hall of Records and in front of the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. Both local and express trains will run to and from this station, and down its stairways late in the afternoon and early in the evening will pour part of the thousands who block the Third and Sixth Avenue L trains and the surface lines on their way up-town and to Harlem and the Bronx. Eventually the four-track route will extend straight on down to South Ferry and the end of the island, and thence by tunnel to Brooklyn, but at present the southern terminus is the City Hall. Curving out to the right from the four-track line, under the mayor's office in the City Hall, under the Post Office and some of the buildings of Newspaper Row, and thence back to the up-town track, is a single-track loop which is one of the most interesting engineering devices of the subway. This loop is designed to receive the down-town trains as fast as they come in from the north, and to bring them around to the up-town tracks without the delay of switching. When the line is completed through to South Ferry, a train may be run off the main track and around the loop, or it may be continued straight on, and as the loop is made to pass beneath the down-town track as it curves around, a grade-crossing is avoided and one of the more important tasks of constructive engineering which the subway presented is solved.
Morning and night the hordes of clerks and stenographers and business men who fill the offices of down-town New York have poured across Newspaper Row and City Hall Park with scarcely a glance at the labor progressing underfoot that is going to bring them so many minutes nearer their work in the morning, and at night so many minutes nearer their play. I recall one day, however, when several hundred of them, with equal enthusiasm, gave up almost all of the precious noon hour to tell the subway men just what to do and how. A team of white horses had been drawing a load of green bananas across the chute which had hemmed in the car tracks along Park Row. A wheel slued, the fence gave way, and a second or two later one of the big white horses was lying on his side across a gas-pipe over the subway ditch, like a sack of oats flung over a rail fence. With rare equanimity of temper and only an occasional kick the animal allowed his legs to be tied together and the canvas sling to be put about his belly, and presently, after three or four men had worked for an hour, and some hundreds had shrieked advice, a derrick which happened to be near was brought into requisition, and, with everybody cheering, the animal was hoisted up bodily and set on his feet on the pavement. Horses have fallen clear to the bottom of the subway ditch and have been hoisted out unhurt; others have not been so lucky. People have fallen in many times, and burglars have jumped in and escaped their pursuers. A rather suggestive comment on the liveliness of existence in New York's streets during the building of the subway was the remark of one of the workmen who officiated at this episode that in every section-shed such a sling or else one of the mats used to hold down flying rock in blasting was kept in readiness for just such emergencies.
From the City Hall up to Thirty-fourth street, where real tunneling began, the excavation has all been done from the surface, and any citizen who took the trouble during the last summer to step from his car and peer over the subway fence along this part of the route could grasp the salient features of, the subway construction.
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On account of the abnormal pressure of traffic at certain places in certain hours, a maximum of speed and a maximum of facility in operation were the first essentials. For this reason anything like London's Tuppenny Tube, with its slow-moving elevators carrying passengers far below the street-level, was out of the question. The road was therefore planned to run just beneath the surface of the streets, and as the stations are now built, it is decidedly nearer from the sidewalk to the subway platforms than to the platforms of the elevated road. If the disturbance of street traffic and pipe-lines which this scheme involved meant a maximum of inconvenience in construction, it also meant a maximum of convenience and cheapness in operation when the work was completed.
Another marked characteristic of the Rapid Transit Subway, as distinguished from most other underground railroads, is that the principles of the modern sky-scraper are applied in its construction, the roof and sides being supported by steel frames composed of transverse steel beams and light steel columns. With a cement floor and the sides and roof made waterproof and even damp-proof, and then lined with cement, the interior of the tube when completed will, as a matter of fact, look like solid whitewashed stone, but, as in the case of the sheathing of the sky-scraper, this will be only a shell. The elimination of grade-crossings and the insertion of "islands" between the tracks at the various express stations, so that by the means of raised passages passengers may transfer from local to express trains, and vice versa, at will, are other noticeable features of the design. It is by such a scheme that the engineers hope to attain a maximum of speed and carrying capacity. Neither the plan nor the carrying of it out in steel and blasted rock could be spectacular. It is rather a task requiring vast patience and the ability to simplify a mass of intricate details.
The work of steam-drills and traveling dumping-cars and the methods of supporting myriads of undermined pipes, all of which has been visible for a couple of years to every one who rode up-town from the Brooklyn Bridge in a Fourth Avenue car, have been about what most people have noticed in the construction of these lower and more prosaic parts of the subway. Few know that in order to cross Canal street, which at the subway grade is below the tide-level, a sewer which drained a greater part of the lower East Side into the North River had to be carried clear across the island in the opposite direction and into the East River. Quite as few ever heard of Aaron Burr's waterpipes, which were unearthed as the excavations proceeded up Elm street near Reade. These pipes, which were laid in 1799, to supply "the city of New York with pure and wholesome water," were merely logs with a longitudinal hole bored through the center of each and hollowed at one end and sharpened at the other, so that they could be fitted one into the other, just as glass tumblers may be piled. The story goes that the wily Burr inserted a "joker" in the act providing for his water company, by which he was able to break the monopoly then held by the Bank of New York and the New York branch of the United States Bank, and found a bank for himself and his friends. The bank thus organized is one of the well-known city banks to-day, and Burr's water-pipes, as dry as bones these many years, were tight and seemingly as good as new when they were uncovered. The unearthing of "Cat Alley" recalled, to those who remembered, the time when the sidewalk rendezvous of actors, called "the Rialto," was along Houston street, a day no less interesting than Aaron Burr's, if less classic.
Though solid rock is found at Union Square, where it is worked from the surface, real tunneling, through darkness and solid rock, begins farther up-town, at Thirty-fourth street. The short section of eight blocks from Thirty-fourth street under Park Avenue to the Grand Central Station has not shared that happiness which comes to tunnels as well as nations that have no history. It will remain long in the minds of the generation who saw it built as the "hoodoo" part of the tunnel. So persistently did a perverse fate follow the footsteps of the contractor who had this section in charge, even to his death from a fall of stone, that the happenings in these short blocks passed from tragedy almost to the point of burlesque, and I recall a paragraph printed in one of the papers in which a woman who happened to be present during a trolley-car smash-up in the depths of Harlem, one evening, was made to say, as she pulled the conductor by the arm: "I am a stranger in this dreadful city. Tell me, Mr. Conductor-oh, do tell me-are we now on Park Avenue?"
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Of the explosion of blasting-powder at Forty-first street by which eight were killed and hundreds endangered, about the only thing that can be said is that it might easily have been vastly more horrible. The carrying away of the subway roof, however, and the consequent fall of the fronts of several of the brownstone houses on the avenue just above Thirty-seventh street, was an episode which, were it not for one's sympathy for the ill-starred contractor, might well conduce to the gaiety of nations. The tunnel here burrows under the existing subway used by the Fourth Avenue surface-cars, and its floor is about sixty feet below the surface. It had been carried about half-way between Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth streets, at what was thought to be a safe distance from the stoop-line of the row of houses above. But the rock, apparently as solid as Gibraltar, lay in slanting strata, and one day, almost without warning, a huge section of one of these slanting strata simply slid diagonally from the easterly roof as a card slips out of a loosely shuffled pack. Every workman on the section was rushed to the spot in the hope that the damage could be repaired before it became apparent on the surface; but before the break could be properly shored, the areaways and front steps of the houses came tumbling down into the chasm. Parts of the front walls soon followed, and the crowd of idlers and nurse-maids and delivery-boys who gathered a few minutes after the first cave-in enjoyed the delectable experience of gazing into the very heart of each house, just as you look at an interior on the stage. One gentleman was in his bath-tub at the time. His valet burst into the room. "Quick! quick! You must get out of here, Sir!" cried that worthy. "There's been an earthquake, Sir, and the house is falling in!" "Indeed!" observed the gentleman with interest, and he finished his bath. He dressed himself, and loading his film camera and lighting a brier-wood pipe, he sallied forth, and when his wife's mother arrived on the scene from a distant part of town, whence she had driven at breakneck speed to save her child, she found her son-in-law standing on the brink of the chasm in front of his door-step, pointing down into it a film camera, the shutter of which he was working with the liveliest enthusiasm and delight. This teaches us that a bucolic equanimity may be preserved even on a metropolitan street beneath which a tunnel is building, and that nerves may be suppressed even in New York and in a somewhat neurotic age.
When the walls ceased to crumble away and the people had moved out of that block,-some of them, it was said at the time, demurely demanding both that the contractor buy their houses outright and that he pay their rent in new ones,- pipes were sunk from the surface, and watery cement was pumped down them to harden until the fallen rock was virtually restored. But fire and falling ruins were yet to descend on that unhappy section, and so timid was its contractor forced to become that when you visited it during the last summer, and saw the workmen pegging away under the acetylene lamps in the "waist" of the tunnel heading, you were likely to be reminded not so much of the strenuosities of engineering as of an operation in dental surgery.
From the Grand Central Station, where, of course, one of the main subway stations will be built, the road proceeds again by surface excavation west on Forty-second street to Broadway, and thence northward to One Hundred and Fourth street, where comes the parting of the ways. No one who has seen the subway pass beneath Forty-second street, the monument at the Circle, the elevated structure at Sixty-sixth street, and the surface car-tracks to the northward toward the Boulevard, needs to be told of the complex difficulties which have been met and solved along almost every yard of this part of the underground road. The first of the subway stations to be finished was that under the Circle, at the southwest corner of Central Park. At the time these lines were written it was the only one completed, and from it visitors to the subway gathered their impressions of that lightness and general cheerfulness which it was one of the main desires of the engineers to provide in planning the work. Not only light, but sunlight, pours into the place from the ground-glass sidewalk overhead, and with its walls lined in enameled brick and tiles, and the white cement tube of its subway stretching north and south ablaze with electric lights, this station illustrates how successfully this desire has been achieved. As it is not an express station, there are only the two long and spacious platforms next to the outside, or local, tracks, and the express-trains will whisk by on the two inner tracks without a stop. When I visited the station they were experimenting with enameled bricks and tiles of various colors to see which were most likely to arouse enthusiasm in the esthetic sense of the traveling public. "It reminds me," observed a foreman of that section, "of a cheap-lunch restaurant." The imagination staggers at the thought of higher praise than this. To those who are not familiar with the "unsurpassed coffee" refectories of the metropolis, it may be as well to explain that in these resorts survives for a modern age an oppressive cleanliness and a riot of onyx, glittering tiles, and enameled brick, which one is wont to associate with the baths of Pompeii and ancient Rome.
In the Circle, just below this station, rises the tall column on the top of which stands the statue of Cristoforo Colombo, given to New York by its residents of Italian birth. The subway passes directly under this column, and the difficulties and delicacies of the task of shoring up this monument while the excavation was going on were not lightened by the fact that the foundation of the column rested partly on rock and partly on sand. "His head is just one hundred feet above yours," said the foreman, as we stood on the tunnel floor.
The embarrassments which such landmarks as these have suffered in preserving their dignity during the exigencies of subway construction were plain to any one who saw the statue of Samuel S. Cox, "the letter-carriers' friend," in Astor Place, or who crossed Union Square, where the Father of his Country spent the summer pointing majestically to a tool-shanty and a pile of steel columns, while the rear legs of his horse were standing on the brink of a forty-foot chasm.
From the dividing-line at One Hundred and Fourth street a two-track branch, tunneling some sixty feet below the surface through solid rock, swings off to the right, to dip beneath Central Park, emerge at One Hundred and Tenth street and Lenox Avenue, and proceed thence to the Bronx. The problem that met the contractors in this part of the work was to pass under Central Park without disturbing a tree or a blade of grass on the surface, and the way in which they have succeeded is suggested by the opening paragraphs of this article. Tunnels were started at each end and worked inward, and when the last wall was broken down, the plumb-lines of the two headings showed only a quarter of an inch divergence. The conservative citizen who ventured into this section during the summer was lowered in a bucket into the sixty-foot pit at One Hundred and Fourth street, and the donkey-engine man had a way of letting this bucket drop like a plummet to within a few feet of the tunnel floor in a manner calculated to accelerate the pulses of the rider. From the bottom of this until one emerged, half a mile or more away, just outside the greenery of the Park, one was stumbling through nothing more or less than a narrow mine. But when this is completed, and the walls are arched smooth with concrete and are painted white, the subway passenger of the future, returning to his Harlem home of an evening, will probably never remember that sixty feet of solid rock are between him and daylight, unless he chances to look up from his paper as his train swings round the curve at One Hundred and Fourth street.
The main line, which, from One Hundred and Fourth street, consists of three tracks, proceeds by surface excavation to One Hundred and Twenty-second street, where a viaduct leads it for half a mile across the sudden depression of Manhattan valley, to plunge underground again at One Hundred and Thirty-third street. The contract as first let for this part of the subway called for a two-track road, but after the excavations had been partly made in some places, the concrete bed and steel superstructure had been built, and all was ready for the roof, it was decided to have a three-track road. The resulting labor and vexatious complications were almost as great as though the work had never been started. One of the contractors moved the walls of his tunnel back bodily. Another moved the walls and some two hundred feet of steel superstructure weighing over two thousand tons. Between One Hundred and Fourteenth and One Hundred and Twenty-first streets the deepest surface excavation had to be made. There is an average depth of about forty feet down to the tunnel grade there. The material removed was solid rock lying in slanting strata, and overhead was a trolley-car line, the time-schedule of which could not be interfered with. Such are a few of the things that had to be reckoned with and overcome in a part of the subway which the ordinary down-town New-Yorker knows nothing about.
It is a strange land north of Manhattan valley and west of Washington Heights- quite another country from the Harlem over the hill. Trinity Cemetery, smothered in verdure, rises on each side of the street beneath which the subway is laid, and the superstructure is set up where, only a few years ago, before the cut was made through the cemetery grounds, lay the graves of the dead. Here, too, was the fighting of Washington Heights, and the bronze memorial tablet marking the spot where breastworks were thrown up is not more than thirty feet from the tunnel walls. Everywhere are trees, -elms and soft maples,-arching in some places over the street, as they do over the main street of many an inland town. The coming of rapid transit will doubtless change all this, but if you should visit it now of a foggy afternoon when all out of sight is shrouded in mystery, it will give you a most extraordinary sensation of being in Manhattan and yet out of it -of being in dreamland or abroad.
The tunnel which dives into the solid rock at One Hundred and Twenty-eighth street is the longest on the line. At an average depth of one hundred feet below the surface it burrows through blackness for a distance of two miles with an unbroken roof, except at One Hundred and Sixty-ninth and One Hundred and Eighty-first streets, where elevators will carry passengers to and from the tracks. Except for the Hoosac Tunnel, there is no single tunnel so long in America. When I went down into the shaft at One Hundred and Sixty-ninth street it was difficult to fancy it looking as it will look, like the white and marbled station beneath the Circle, nearly six miles away. At the surface was a landing-stage from which every now and then emerged cars of broken rock. You stepped on the elevator platform, and down, down you went into the darkness and dampness of the pit, until, one hundred feet below, you struck bottom in a big cave with a few electric lamps glimmering against the walls and an air-pump forcing fresh air into the heavy atmosphere with slow, spasmodic coughs.
Along the tramway leading into the heading ambled the self-centered subterranean mule. When I ventured to make friendly overtures, he promptly swung about and decamped with all the adroitness which he would have used had he been nibbling thistles in the middle of a sunny meadow, and later, when the driver, in hitching him to the tram-car, gave the somewhat untechnical command, "Get in line, there!" he hopped to his place between the rails with just as much cheerfulness as though the command referred to a company drill and he had half a dozen team-mules to keep him from being lonesome.
It was in the tunnel just below One Hundred and Sixty-ninth street that another of those accidents occurred which is the price of every great achievement of engineering construction. Here again a slanting stratum became loosened, and slipping down, killed five of the men who were working beneath. I asked one of the workmen from just what part of the heading the rock had fallen. "That chunk of work," said he, cheerfully, pointing straight at the roof above us, "fell out just over where you're standing now."
From the end of the long tunnel to Fort George on the western line, and from the tunnel beneath the waters of the Harlem to Bronx Park on the eastern branch, the Rapid Transit road, as a railway, is scarcely enough advanced at this writing to require detailed description. These extreme northern sections are to be elevated structures, and passing as they do through what is now a comparatively sparsely settled part of the Greater City and not subject to the embarrassments of excavation through rock or beneath crowded streets, they can be, when once fairly started, rapidly pushed to completion. As yet little more than the foundations for the elevated pillars are laid. Already, however, the engines and generators, which will supply electric power for the vast traffic of the whole underground system, are being constructed, hundreds of cars similar to those used on the existing elevated, but heavier and of superior running qualities, have been ordered, and the general manager of the road is planning the automatic-signal system and arranging his time-schedules.
There are almost numberless details in this huge piece of work which cannot be touched on here. If you tell your friend Robinson that such-and-such a number of cigars are manufactured every year, he will forthwith begin to calculate how near they would reach to the planet Mars if they were placed end to end. You yourself, on the other hand, may be concerned more over the fact that, with a supply so great, the price is not cheaper, or that you do not get more of them. The opportunities for the Robinson point of view are quite unlimited in making a mental circuit from the City Hall to Fort George and the Bronx. The essential things for most of us to know, however, are what is going on to-day beneath our feet, and what, when the work is done, will be the result. Of the first of these we have here bad a few glimpses. The other, the builders say, the town will know, by next Christmas, almost a year ahead of contract time. A still more interesting question, perhaps,-that of the effect of this sudden increase in the ease and rapidity of transportation on the country at the city's edge, and of the other, paths of rapid travel which are destined to honeycomb the underworld of our narrow Babylon,-the morrow, our all too precipitate to-morrow, will answer.
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