Anyone know what this was all about ? Supposed to happen about 1870 proppelled by air pushing car(s) ?
Dave?
It even was part of the plot for Ghostbusters 2…
This was the Beach pneumatic subway that was built pretty much as a technology demonstrator. Two stations about 500’ apart. Think it would be a challenge to make it work for a multi station line.
Upshot is that electric traction became practical less than 20 years later and was a much more practical power source for subways.
Predecessor to the Hyperloop. Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.oeg/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit
There was a very long, lovingly detailed account on the Web, with pictures, about the development of rapid transit in New York.
One significant block to Beach’s plan, for example, was A.T.Stewart’s resistance to a subway under Broadway, largely due to his borderline-illegal encroachment of ‘vaults’ for storage extending under that street.
Also covered are some of the wacky-in-retrospect extreme lightweight construction schemes for elevated railroads. The first of these, using an elevated cable to save the weight required by adhesion locomotives, will almost curl your hair!
I believe this was Brennan’s which is unaccountably gone from the current Web or his page at Columbia
http://www.columbia.edu/~brennan/
I will see if it is somewhere in the Wayback Machine… AHA! Here is a link to his Index, and clicking on the little blue chapter numbers brings up the actual chapter text…
https://web.archive.org/web/20070206224718/http://www.columbia.edu/~brennan/beach/index.html
Of all the ‘history that deserves to be remembered’ this effort of Brennan’s is at the very top of the list of best examples. Pass it along.
Here’s the corrected link to the Wikipedia article:
As I understand it, you can tour the Beach subway on occasion. It can be accessed from the basement of a building at one of the stations. It’s all still down there, they say. There are vaults all over NYC, none here in Toronto. I recall the NYPD’s now-disbanded Safe, Loft and Truck squad would investigate any crime involving a vault.
Incidentally according to Brennan (quoting Beach, who would likely know) a fire in early December 1898 wiped out all remaining traces of the original station, so if something has been redeveloped in the last few years it’s likely wholly a replica…
Just to make it clear, these weren’t ‘vaults’ in the bank sense, secure rooms behind lock and key. They were euphemisms for basements that extended not only beyond the building property line under the sidewalk (where later there would be sidewalk elevators) but physically out under the public street where they ‘shouldn’t have been’. Stewart had been a major ‘wheel’ in Auld New York since at least the latter 1820s and was not about to give up his ‘property’ so Beach could run tubes four abreast that would have required the whole street width to accommodate…
Another fun site on the general idea, including link to the podcast:
https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2020/02/first-subway-alfred-ely-beachs-pneumatic-marvel.html
It had never occurred to me that Beach owned Scientific American in those years!
Overmod- I am aware of the diff between a safe and a vault. I recall the sidewalk elevators and the glass blocks set in the pavement, indicating a vault. I wonder, are they still being built in new buildings?
Part of the justification for sidewalk ‘vaults’ was the glass-block skylighting reducing the need for expensive artificial ‘basement’ lighting. It has been a very long time since I have consciously noticed new construction with these set in, which leads me to wonder if there is some law like the setback law of 1924 (which gave us much of the ‘art Deco’ building shapes) that now keeps areas beyond the building line out of ‘subsurface rights’. There are certain to be answers; I just don’t know them. Perhaps there is a relative paucity of stores and businesses needing extensive basement storage accessible directly from the street.
The SUBWAY sandwich shop chain had (has?) wallpaper with a print of the 1870 Beech Pneumatic Subway in its stores.
I was in a vault once with my brother about 50 years ago. I saw the biggest rat trap I’ve ever seen in my life! I was sure glad to get out of there.
I guess there were and are vaults in Los Angeles as I’ve sen them in old films with the Three Stooges and silents with Buster Keaton.