New York Goes Underground

HISTORY This Week

The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios

Society & Culture, History

4.5 • 4.2K Ratings

🗓️ 7 March 2022

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

March 12, 1888. There’s been a blizzard in New York. Wind, ice, and snow have brought the city to a halt. Stagecoaches are stuck, elevated trains are frozen. By the time the storm is over, 400 New Yorkers will die. The public outrage is severe, and many blame New York City’s faulty transportation network for the deaths. Suddenly, a solution that had been ignored in the past comes to the forefront – traveling under the earth. Today, the story of the New York City subway. How did an epic snowstorm drive the city to try a dangerous and daring idea? And why was the subway such a unique invention from the very start?

Special thanks to Concetta Bencivenga, director of the New York City Transit Museum; John Morris, author of Subway: The Curiosities, Secrets, and Unofficial History of the New York City Transit System; and Clifton Hood, professor of history at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and author of 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	The History Channel, original podcast.
0:05.2	History this week, March 12, 1888.
0:13.9	I'm Sally Hume.
0:17.8	New York City commuters wake up this morning to a once-in-a-generation lizard.
0:24.8	The wind will reach 85 miles per hour and it's flinging ice through the air.
0:29.8	People say the snow is like bullets or like carpet tacks flying at you.
0:34.9	One person describes seeing passers-by with their faces literally bloodied by flying ice.
0:42.9	It's hard to even walk across the street. A group of men find themselves together in a clump on 86
0:48.5	street trying to move forward but they're blown back again and again by the wind.
0:53.8	They finally get into a single-file line so that they can physically drag each other to the opposite
1:01.6	curb. If you want to get around by horse cart instead, good luck. They've been abandoned left
1:08.6	and right on New York City streets. So a lot of people head for the elevated trains.
1:16.5	These are normally quite reliable but today the trucks are so icy and the visibility is so
1:22.8	bad that it takes hours for the trains to go just a few blocks. There's a fatal crash on the
1:28.7	third avenue line. On the sixth avenue line, a train gets stuck on the track for hours.
1:34.3	And finally, all the trains are cancelled.
1:37.9	Historian Mary Cable describes what happened to one man who was waiting on a sixth avenue
1:41.8	platform for a train that never came. He decides to walk instead below the tracks where the snow
1:47.2	isn't quite so deep. As he goes, he feels something falling onto his hat and realizes that it's
1:55.0	sparrows, frozen solid, falling from their purchase on the girders of the elevated train.
2:01.9	He makes it one avenue and then he's lifted up by the 50 mile per hour wind.
2:08.0	He bangs his head on the train trussle, drops his watch and falls into a snowbank.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.