The following essay on role model Alfred Ely Beach was written by Aaron Goldstein, a middle schooler, enrolled in City Congregation’s Bar/Bat Mitzvah program. Students spend a year and a half researching their heritage, values and beliefs, and write on a Jewish subject of their choice, their major project. The process improves both the student’s writing and critical thinking skills, as well as his/her self confidence and overall maturity.
A role model is a person you look up to and want to be like. A hero is someone who does something to help other people that usually requires bravery or shows outstanding qualities. As my hero/role model I chose Alfred Ely Beach, who is known for making New York City’s first underground subway. In my opinion he is both a hero and a role model. He is a hero because he introduced New York City to underground transit. He is a role model since he has many qualities that I would like to have.
Alfred Ely Beach was born in 1826 in Springfield, Massachusetts. After moving to New York, his father, Moses Yale Beach, started the New York Sun. Alfred Ely Beach worked at the newspaper, and sold extras on the street corners.
At 20 years old, Beach bought Scientific American, a struggling newspaper about the growth of technology. He owned it for 50 years until his death in 1896. Other than editing newspapers, he spent much of his time creating inventions. He tore down one invention and made it better, or created a whole new invention. One example: he built a typewriter for the blind that earned a gold medal at the Crystal Palace in 1856.
The most famous invention of Alfred Ely Beach was a tunneling shield used to build New York City’s first subway. New York City had terrible rush hour traffic problems. In the mid-1860s, the horse was the most common motive power for railways. Steam engines were possible, but underground it was not easy to properly ventilate them. Beach’s attention was caught when, across the Atlantic Ocean, Thomas Webster Rammell built a pneumatic railway outside London. This air-powered railway would expand and speed up the distribution of mail in London. Beach began experimenting with air to create a pneumatic subway.
At the American Institute Fair on September 23, 1867, Beach showcased a prototype for his pneumatic railway. The tube was 107 feet long and six feet in diameter. A small train was pushed through this tube using air. The tube was suspended from the ceiling with iron loops. Over 75,000 people rode it. Beach wanted to continue this experiment into a real subway, but the leader of Tammany Hall, William M. Tweed, refused to let him build it because Beach wouldn’t give bribes to the political machine wielding power at that time.
In 1868, Beach received permission to build two small tubes to transport mail. But he was actually planning to build a passenger subway, one block on Broadway from Warren Street to Murray Street. It would start running east on Warren Street, then turn south onto Broadway for one block to Murray Street, where it would reverse direction at a dead end. To build this 300-foot tube he constructed a circular tunneling shield driven under Broadway by hydraulic pressure. A tunneling shield helps support and dig a tunnel.
To get underground, Beach used the basement of Devlin’s Clothing Store on the corner of Warren Street and Broadway. In the basement there was a beautiful, ornate room to wait for the train. There was one cylindrical car made out of wood. Beach wanted to show that his subway was better than all the horse-cars and horse-drawn buses aboveground. He made his subway more like a fancy house than a subway station. He painted the tunnel walls white to give a sanitary look, and inside the car the seats were cushioned. The subway opened on February 26, 1870. It remained open until a stock market shortage in 1873 prevented people from paying for it and ended Beach’s ambitious plan for a pneumatic subway.
This first subway inspired the electric 1904 Interborough Rapid Transit company, also known as the IRT, to build a subway from City Hall, close to the location of Beach’s pneumatic railway, to upper Manhattan and later the Bronx. This line expanded to the subway we know today. Many more lines were made, such as the Broadway Line, now known as the NQRW.
Many extensions were made to the subway over time. The lower Broadway line, the RW, from Canal Street to Lower Manhattan, was one of these extensions. In 1912, workers digging this tunnel near City Hall discovered the Beach Pneumatic Transit. The tunneling shield was still intact and the station well preserved. Before they buried the tunnel, the shield was rescued. It was donated to Cornell University, but its current whereabouts are unknown.
Alfred Ely Beach’s values are apparent based on his inventions. For example, one of his values is public transportation, because he saw the tremendous crowds of people on the streets of Broadway and decided to make an underground subway. He also might have valued the comfort of people because he made the subway underground. He did this because elevated railways were disrupting the street and street trolleys and railways were adding to traffic.
Other values of Beach are education and justice. In 1867 he donated money to build a school for freed slaves in Savannah, Georgia, called the Beach Institute. Its purpose was to provide manual training to newly freed African-Americans to help with assimilation into white society. The Beach Institute closed in 1915, but it is now an African-American cultural center. A separate school in Savannah, the Alfred Ely Beach High School, is still open. Education is a value that my family and I share with Beach.
In conclusion, Alfred Ely Beach built New York City’s first subway system and is both a hero and a role model to me. There are multiple values we have in common. In my opinion, Queens, where I live, is lacking in public transportation. Queens has the second fewest subway lines in the city, after Staten Island. In the future I would support more transit for the borough. Alfred Ely Beach also did many things to help the world beyond New York. New York City would not be the same today if it weren’t for him.
