New York's Secret Subway: The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit - Hardcover

$35.00

New York's Secret Subway: The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit - Hardcover

Name: New York's Secret Subway: The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit - Hardcover
Brand: BooksCloud
SKU: 9781642833652
Price: 35.00 USD
Availability: InStock

by Matthew Algeo

$35.00

Book Overview

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.
Yet Alfred Beach still proved conclusively the feasibility of underground railways in Manhattan, and paved the way for modern mass transportation systems.

Richly illustrated and populated with larger-than-life characters, New York's Secret Subway will captivate readers and provide historical context for today's clashes between public interests and powerful business and political groups. Algeo tells this amazing true story in full for the first time, and although it took place more than a century ago, it will at times sound surprisingly familiar.

ISBN	9781642833652
Author	Matthew Algeo
Publisher	Island Press
Genre	History, Technology, and Design
Format	Hardcover
Published	September 2025
Language	ENG- English
Pages	288
Weight	1.0 lb
Target Audience	Adults
Print Size	Standard Print

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