On February 26, 1870, the elite of New York stepped into the basement of Devlin’s clothing store in Tribeca and descended into a secret, unauthorized tunnel — one City Hall hadn’t approved and, by all accounts, hadn’t even been briefed on.
The evening was hosted by Alfred Ely Beach, a New York inventor with a showman’s touch. He designed the lavish “Under Broadway Reception” not just to unveil his clandestine pneumatic tunnel, but to dazzle the city’s tastemakers and power brokers alike.
“Beach spared no expense to impress the public,” writes Matthew Algeo in “New York’s Secret Subway: The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit” (Island Press, out now). “He furnished the waiting room with a grand piano, chandeliers, and a water fountain stocked with goldfish.” The subway car was “richly upholstered” and illuminated with zirconia lights.
Beach’s extravagant premiere wasn’t just for ego. He aimed to turn spectacle into legislation, leveraging public awe to force political action. Guests were asked to sign petitions “urging lawmakers to give Beach permission to extend the line, and thousands did,” Algeo told the Post in an exclusive interview.
Long before the petition, Beach had essentially conned officials into believing he was building a modest mail tube. Instead, he carved an eight-foot-wide, roughly 300-foot tunnel directly beneath Broadway. He bet that showing a safe, working line would be more convincing than pleading for permission. “It was intended merely to demonstrate the viability of his scheme—a proof of concept,” writes Algeo.
But, powerful business and political interests had no desire to see a subway beneath Broadway. The operators of stagecoaches and horse-drawn streetcars paid off political leaders like Boss Tweed to thwart Beach’s plans.
But the secrecy doubled as product design. Beach set out to make the experience so superior that public opinion would steamroll resistance. The pneumatic subway he unveiled on that February night in 1870 was cool, quiet, clean, and comfortable — the opposite of the slow, filthy omnibuses and streetcars. The plan was simple: Let New Yorkers ride it, then let their enthusiasm do the lobbying.
In a city smitten with mechanical fixes, Beach believed he’d built the machine to untangle Manhattan’s traffic mess. “It was a solution he believed in so deeply that he was willing to risk his reputation and his fortune — even incarceration — to achieve it,” writes Algeo.
Had the tunnel collapsed, he’d be remembered very differently.
“It calls to mind the Titan submersible that imploded in 2023 en route to the Titanic wreck,” Algeo told the Post. “The operators of the Titan pushed the envelope with tragic consequences. Beach’s subway was an engineering marvel but there was considerable risk in his strategy.”
The gambit drew scrutiny, especially after officials noticed the pavement above the excavation sinking by about nine inches. Charles Guidet, a contractor who had recently repaved Broadway, realized with alarm that “the street seemed to be sinking near City Hall,” Algeo writes. “He believed the strange goings-on underneath the Devlin building were responsible.”
The mayor said he’d noticed the same thing and told Guidet to investigate. Beach refused access, insisting the mayor had “no right to interfere.”
Beach never got beyond the proof-of-concept. The plush tube under Broadway remained a one-block demonstration. His petitions and press could not overcome the alliance of streetcar interests and City Hall, and the project stalled before it could be extended uptown.
Tweed’s countermoves helped bottle up Beach’s ambitions, but the Boss hardly came out unscathed. His push to revoke Beach’s charter went nowhere, and he couldn’t kill rival experiments like Charles T. Harvey’s elevated line.
In the end, New York didn’t get an underground network from Beach; it got a glimpse of what was to come. Thirty years later, the city finally broke ground on a true subway, with the first line opening on October 27th, 1904. Lower Broadway didn’t see a subway until 1918.
The pattern feels familiar. Today, big infrastructure still threads the same needle: permitting mazes, NIMBY firestorms, and legislative choke points that can strangle a working prototype as effectively as a bad blueprint. Beach proved physics wasn’t the obstacle; politics was, and often still is. From congestion pricing fights to cost-bloated megaprojects, the bottleneck is less the tunneling machine than the committee calendar.
Algeo compares Beach’s pneumatic system to Elon Musk’s Hyperloop. Both trade on the romance of sealed tubes, streamlined cars, and sparkling stations promising speed and cleanliness. The difference is technical and practical. Hyperloop hinges on far more complex systems — vacuum maintenance and magnetic propulsion — and its contemporary demos have sputtered.
The author quipped, “Beach built a complete working version of his concept, something that Musk has yet to do.”
The post Incredible secret subway predated NYC’s official subway by decades appeared first on New York Post.
