A train leaves City Hall underground, and New York gets its subway
For a decade, New York had talked about building underground while its streets choked on horse carts and elevated trains. On the afternoon of October 27, 1904, Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. drove the first ceremonial train out of City Hall Station, and by evening the Interborough Rapid Transit Company opened the line to the public for a five-cent fare. The route ran 9.1 miles through 28 stations, north under Lafayette Street and Park Avenue to Grand Central, west to Times Square, then up Broadway to 145th Street. New Yorkers rode it in such numbers that within a decade 1.2 million people a day were riding the subway.
The IRT proved an American city could build underground at scale and make it pay its own fare, a model Boston and Philadelphia had only partly tested. Its success pulled Manhattan's Theater District uptown and pushed residential growth into the outer boroughs, and American cities began growing around transit lines instead of horse traffic for decades afterward.
QWho actually put up the money to build the tunnels, if the city wouldn't risk going it alone?
The construction contract went to the Rapid Transit Construction Company, organized by John B. McDonald, but the financing behind it came from August Belmont Jr., a financier whose family name was already attached to horse racing and banking in New York. Belmont's capital let McDonald's company take on the actual digging starting in 1900, while the city held the legal structure through its new Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, a body that by law included the sitting Mayor of New York City. The arrangement meant a private fortune built public infrastructure that the city itself would own and lease back out, a split McClellan's own board had engineered a decade earlier under the 1894 Rapid Transit Act.
QWhy did the subway route take such an awkward jog at 42nd Street instead of running straight up Broadway?
The Rapid Transit Commission itself admitted the problem in writing, calling the resulting path "the awkward alignment...along Forty-Second Street" in its own records. The detour existed because property owners and merchants south of 34th Street objected to tunneling under Broadway there, forcing Parsons's engineers to route the line east under Park Avenue instead, then cut west at 42nd Street to reach Times Square before turning north again up Broadway proper. The jog added distance and complexity to a line that otherwise ran in straight corridors, a compromise baked into the system before a single car ever ran on it. Commissioners accepted the detour as the price of building at all.
QHow much of the original line was built with four tracks instead of two, and why did that matter?
Between Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall and 96th Street, the original IRT ran four tracks side by side rather than the standard two, a design choice that let the system run express trains alongside local ones from its very first day of service. Riders heading further uptown could skip stops entirely by catching an express, a feature that let the subway outpace the elevated trains and horse cars it was built to relieve. That four-track stretch set the template for express service across the rest of the system as it expanded under the 1913 Dual Contracts, long after this original segment had become just one piece of a much larger network.
