A Short History of the Boston Subway

Public transportation spans almost four centuries in Boston. It began early with the Winnisimmet (Chelsea) Ferry making a three-mile run from the end of Hanover Street to Chelsea at Winnisimmet Street before they were named. Services ran from 1631 to 1917, both the earliest and longest run of any ferry service in America. The Ferry was always privately owned, though regulated by the City.

Bridges sprung up during the 1700’s, inviting more land travel, and a public stagecoach was launched in 1793 from Boston to Cambridge over the West Boston Bridge, now the Longfellow. In the 1820’s, the new “omnibus” was pressed into service. This horse-drawn “bus” was longer than a stagecoach with doors at both ends and seats arranged vertically instead of cross-wise. While stagecoaches took express routes, the omnibus made stops.

The old omnibus was reengineered as a “horse car” to run on rails in 1856 and tracks were laid from Bowdoin Square, Boston across Cambridge Street into Central Square, Cambridge. Horse cars spread quickly and twenty private horse car companies were in operation by the late 1800’s. Fierce competition, overlapping services and unregulated fares resulted in the West End Consolidation Act of 1887 to bring all lines into one operation as the West End Street Railway.

Horsepower had been in use for thousands of years. There were 8,000 horses in service in Boston, each line using 11 horses a day. They required about four tons of oats and hay a year and what goes in must come out: they each produced between 15 and 30 pounds of manure a day. Walking downtown required a great deal of care and on hot, humid, summer days the stench and flies were overwhelming. For a small fee, however, sweepers would clear a path for pedestrians to cross the streets.

The horses fared no better. Purchasing new stock prevailed over the high cost of food and shelter, so they were literally worked to death. Dead horses in the street were not uncommon and the average streetcar horse’s life expectancy was less than two years.

The West End Railway turned to a new electrification system developed in Richmond, VA instead of cable cars used in other large American cities like San Francisco. By 1889, the first electric streetcar ran from the Allston Depot past Coolidge Corner into Park Square. Operations spread quickly across the whole metropolitan area and in time 5,600 streetcars would pass the corner of Tremont and Boylston every 24 hours.

Electric streetcars travelled twice as fast, a whopping 10-14 MPH, and horses gradually disappeared from Boston streets. The horses continued to haul private carriages and commercial wagons into the 20^th century. Even into the 1950’s, they hauled garbage in Boston and neighborhood vendors selling produce and crabs from horse-drawn wagons would call out, “Apples! Peaches! Cherries! Bananas!”  The constant sparks from the connecting cables to overhead wires on the streetcars inspired a fanciful poem in 1892 called “The Broomstick Train” by Oliver Wendell Holmes. It is best read aloud.

 

“Come here, you witches! Come here!” says he, -- “At your games of old, without asking me! I’ll give you a little job to do that will keep you stirring, you godless crew!”

They came, of course, at their master’s call, the witches, the broomsticks, the cats, and all; He led the hags to a railway train that the horses were trying to drag in vain.

“Now, then,” says he, “you’ve had your fun, and here are the cars you’ve got to run. The driver may just unhitch his team, we don’t want horses, we don’t want steam;

You may keep your old black cats to hug, but the loaded trains you’ve got to lug.”

Automobiles were not put into mass production until the early 1900’s and the average Bostonian did not own a horse and carriage; so, the electric trolley was twice as fast as most could travel. Even at 15 MPH, an increase of only 5-7 MPH enabled workers to live further away from work where housing and land were more affordable. Suburbs and commuting were born.

Sam Bass Warner described a tale of two cities in 1962 with his Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston: “The creation of a two-part city, an old inner and a new outer city, a city of slums and a city of suburbs, a city of hope and failure and a city of achievement and comfort - this remains the central event of the 1870-1900 era”.

Compared to horse-drawn vehicles which could be stopped by the wave of a cane or umbrella at plodding horses, streetcars were unstoppable and began to dominate the streets. Electrified buses using the same overhead wires were still seen into the 1950’s. 

The increasing congestion from surface lines converging on too few downtown streets and the dominance of streetcar traffic over pedestrians eventually caused a public outcry. A new Transit Commission responded with plans for new systems at the turn of the 20^th century, both above and below ground. Their plan of 1894 created the Boston Elevated Railway, the BERY or “EL”, as a private company. After a number of legal battles, the BERY took possession of the lines in 1897, capitalized at ten million dollars with stocks issued using the vignette shown above.

A ground-breaking ceremony was held in 1899 and in the next two and one-half years, 7 miles of track, 10 elevated stations and a huge power generator were built. The Main Line El ran through the City from Dudley to Sullivan Square, south to north along the present Orange line. Excited passengers in their Sunday finest boarded cars for the first time in 1901 at both ends, excitedly passing in the middle. Eventually, 52 different streetcar lines carried up to 325,000 people a day.

The first cars were painted red with silver gilt striping and slate gray roofs. The interiors were especially handsome with sky blue ceilings, heavily varnished African mahogany woodwork, seats upholstered in red and black, and hardware of solid bronze. Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, nephew of the Henry named on the Bridge above, designed the elegant stations. In those days women wore hats and gloves while men wore hats and suits in public and the elegant interiors of the trains resembled a moving Victorian parlor.

Over time, the huge steel overhead tracks became a noisy eyesore with trains screeching and rumbling as well as darkening and dividing the city. One could ride the El and look into a city resident’s windows or out at passengers in the cars rumbling by at night. Movies produced into the early 1960’s often focused on elevated trains as an icon for big city life.

BERY ridership and revenues declined after the new subway grew in popularity in the early 1900’s. The Atlantic Avenue Elevated was closed down in 1938 and the Orange Line running down the Washington Street Corridor closed in the 1960’s. The last stretch of tracks was taken down in 2004, leaving the El with a run in Boston that spanned the 20^th century.

The second Commission plan was the subway, opening in 1897. Excavation began in March, 1895, authorizing $7,000,000 in municipal bonds. The Commission granted a lease for 20 years to the West End Company with agreements to coordinate all lines above and below ground. The third plan included the Maverick Incline under Boston Harbor, the first underwater vehicular tunnel in the nation in 1904.

The engineering plans were a marvel, but subway excavation soon ran into a snag.  The Tremont Tunnel along the edge of the Old Common Burial Ground on Tremont Street unearthed the remains of 900 unmarked graves. The Boston Post published an article entitled, “Hideous Germs Lie in the Underground Air”, temporarily boosting the Anti-Subway League who opposed the project for fear of lost business. I.W. Sprague, a local undertaker, was quoted in the Post as saying, “I do not believe in a tunnel or subway. I expect to be a long time underground after I am dead, but while I live I want to travel on the earth, not below it”.

The crisis passed and excavation continued, carefully negotiating the underground utilities. Most of the earth was hauled off by rail for landfill. Wooden horse carts hauled some of it as fill for uneven parts of the Common and Garden. The tunnels used granite and masonry walls, steel beams and brick arches and stretched one and two-third miles. The stations were more spacious than in Europe and, to relieve the gloom of being underground, the tunnel interior was painted white with stations lined in white enamel tiles.

Opening day came at 6 a.m. on September xx, 1897. Passengers flooded the stations at Park and Boylston and it was an instant success. In a city of one million (within a ten mile radius of the old City Hall) the subway would carry over two hundred million passengers annually by 1899; 200 rides per person each year. Above-ground traffic was so improved that one observer commented that it was like “removing a blockade from a river.”

The second phase of the tunnel ran from Park to the new Scollay, Adams, and Haymarket stations terminating at North Station, all completed in 1898 without a hitch. 

The stations were designed by distinguished architects like Wheelwright and Haven and Charles Brigham. Edmund Wheelwright designed Park and Boylston. Of old Boston stock married to old Boston stock and with the best architectural education, he also designed the Boston Public Library, Horticultural and Jordan Halls. Wheelwright was a founder of the Harvard Lampoon while a student and later designed the whimsical Harvard Lampoon Building.

Charles Brigham designed Adams, Atlantic Avenue and Scollay stations over a long and fruitful career. In contrast to Wheelwright he was self-taught as an architect, though also of old Boston stock, and apprenticed to the architect Gridley J. F. Bryant of the old Boston City Hall and Charles Street Jail. Brigham designed the original MFA in Copley Square with John Sturgis, the annex for the State House, First Church of Christ Scientist, and many others. He was also a pioneer of the “shingle style” homes along the coast of New England, especially at Newport.

The subway system expanded again in 1912 with the precursor of the Red Line, running from Park to Harvard and then south from Park into Dorchester. In 1925, the subway portion of the East Boston Tunnel line was retrofitted for high platforms and rapid transit services using a third rail and ran between Maverick and Bowdoin stations along the present Blue Line.

Boston Elevated Railway stock was purchased in 1947 and replaced by the Massachusetts Transportation Authority, or MTA, as a political subdivision of the Commonwealth. The railway was finally under state and public control.  The MTA oversaw a number of expansions until the MBTA or “T” was formed in 1964, expanding services from the original 14 cities and towns to 78 municipalities. Today, the MBTA operates the fifth largest mass transport system in the world across 3,244 miles and 175 cities and towns with 1.1 million passenger trips each weekday.