| In 1912, workers digging to create the Broadway Subway, north of Murray Street in lower Manhattan, hit a brick wall approximately 21 feet (6.4 meters) below the street surface. Breaking through the wall, the laborers came upon a tunnel 9 feet (2.7 m) in diameter and lined with eight- inch- thick (20.32 centimeters) bricks. Two rails led into a midnight void, which, it would turn out, curved abruptly at 90 degrees, extending approximately 300 feet (91.44 m) to beneath Park Place. Most startling of all, the excavators, groping forward with shovels in hand, soon came upon the remains of a wooden car— a subway car. Obviously, someone had, a long time earlier, attempted to do what was now being done: build a subterranean transport system. The New York Subway of 1912 was, unmistakably, not the first to be dug beneath the city. Someone— at least on an experimental basis— had been there, done that, before. |