History

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

ebook (EPUB via app)

50% off with code SPRING50

Sale Price:
$17.50/拢15.00
Price:
$35.00/拢30.00
ISBN:
Published:
Sep 30, 2025
2025
Illus:
Illustrations and photos.
  • Audio and ebooks (EPUB and PDF) purchased from this site must be accessed on the 快色直播 app. After purchasing, you will receive an email with instructions to access your purchase.
    About audio and ebooks
  • Request Exam Copy

In the nineteenth century, Manhattan鈥檚 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 鈥淏oss鈥 of Tammany Hall.

New York鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 Secret Subway will captivate readers and provide historical context for today鈥檚 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.