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FEBRUARY 1916

SUBWAYS SPREAD INTO QUEENS

Get into a conversation with a long time Queens resident and you're likely to discover a subscriber of the Long Island Star- Journal, a daily paper that informed the community about local and world news until it folded in 1968. A banner across the Star Journal masthead reminded readers that the newspaper's name came from the merger of the Long Island Daily Star (1876) and the North Shore Daily Journal - The Flushing Journal (1841).

Welcome to February 1916!

President Woodrow Wilson was keeping the United States out of World War I; it would not enter the conflict until April 1917. New York was busy expanding its transit system to accommodate its ever-growing population. To cross the river to Queens you could travel by ferry, trolley car or the new-fangled automobile, and now the subway's tracks were beginning to spread eastwards.

The Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) train ran from Jackson Avenue in Long Island City to Lexington Avenue and 42nd St in Manhattan. (This part of the line was known at the time as the Queensboro Subway.) At one minute past midnight on February 15, 1916, the guard on the train at Jackson Avenue slammed the door and announced loudly: "Hunterpoint Avenue next!"

The motorman turned on the current and service to the brand-new station began. Charles Cunningham, the ticket-seller, took his place in the booth at the same time. His first customer was a Star-Journal reporter who bought a ticket marked Q-HP-1. The ticket cost a nickel and the reporter, together with three other passengers, made the inaugural journey from Hunter's Point (as the station is called today) to Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street in slightly less than five minutes.

The trains on the Queensboro subway ran though the Steinway Tunnel, named after William Steinway of Steinway Pianos fame. As early as 1892, work began on a tunnel through which this farsighted magnate envisioned people crossing under the East River. According to nycsubway.org, for a brief period in 1907 electric trollies of the type called Brill cars ran through the tube and were such a novelty that people went to and from Manhattan just for fun!

Due to financial difficulties the tunnels were then sealed until 1915 when the IRT decided that Long Island City was ready for rapid transit rail service. A new, lighter type of car known as a "Steinway car" was designed to cope with the higher gradients on the Queens side of the river. The Jackson Avenue station (now called the Vernon-Jackson station) had been opened with much fanfare in June 1915. In November 1916 the new Courthouse Square station would open. These stations are still used today by riders on the 7 train. Service would be extended to Corona in 1917 using elevated tracks.

The connection of the outer boroughs and Manhattan by rapid transit was a crucial factor in the economic boom of the 1920s. But the building of the subway tunnels was not without its costs. Accidents and injuries were common among the tunnel builders, or sandhogs, as they were called. On February 21st the Star-Journal's headline read: "Astorian Tells of Remarkable Escape in Tunnel Blow-Out." Their reporter had just returned from interviewing a sandhog who had found interborough transit a bit too rapid for his liking on the previous Saturday, February 19th . He told readers:

"Marshall M. Mabey of Theodore Street, Astoria, {now 42nd Street} is the most thankful man in Queens County today and everyone who knows of his remarkable escape from death agrees with him that he has good reason to be thankful. He is the second man in the history of under-river tunneling who has ever had such an experience and lived to tell the tale."

Some years ago when the first rapid transit tunnel was being built from Manhattan to Brooklyn, a workman was caught in a 'blow-out' and forced through the mud of the river bottom to the surface. Within hours he was walking around looking for a drink. Mr. Mabey was not in this country then, but like all "sandhogs" he had heard about that case.

"One of the things I attribute my escape to," said Mabey, "is my thinking about that fellow who had such a narrow escape years ago. I determined, subconsciously, that if he could go through alive, I could do it too. I held my breath and nerved myself for the ordeal."

Mabey's accident happened near the foot of Montague Street, Brooklyn. He was attempting to plug an 18-inch opening in the Clarke Street-Old Slip tunnel at the time. "I found the air pressure was pushing me towards the hole, and I tried to save myself by grabbing the air pipes. I missed them, and then I felt myself being pushed into the hole."

"As I struck the mud it felt as though something was squeezing me tighter than I had ever been squeezed," he told the Star-Journal reporter. I was almost smothered. I am a good swimmer and I kept my mouth shut and came up to the surface. I had my big rubber boots on and they bothered me but I managed somehow to keep my head above the surface. Men threw me a rope and I held on until I was taken out of the water."

The Star-Journal reporter was particularly amazed that the sandhog had survived his ordeal without so much as a broken bone. Mabey was taken to the Brooklyn hospital and his condition improved so rapidly that he was able to go home Sunday afternoon. Outside of bruises about the hips and one leg, he is not injured much, although still rather weak from the shock of the ordeal and his immersion in the cold water of the river.

His fellow miners who came to visit him were interested that he had not suffered from the 'bends.' In work in which there is 23 pounds of air pressure, the amount that was being used in the tunnel where the accident occurred, the workmen are compelled to remain in the 'man-locks' 17 minutes before they are permitted to come into the open air.

The Star-Journal article included a profile of the lucky Queens sandhog. Marshall Mabey was 28 years old and a recent immigrant; not (as one might expect) from Ireland but from Gloucestershire in England. When Mabey moved to New York in 1910 his first big job was working on the tunnel of the Astoria Heat, Light, & Power Company from Casino Beach to Manhattan. The paper profiled him "as a typical English workingman, about 5' 5" in height, stocky in build, and muscular. As all of his trade he is an almost total abstainer." One suspects that Mabey might have had just a small snifter - to keep the cold out - after his truly remarkable brush with death.

That's the way it was in February 1916!

Compiled by Clare Doyle, Librarian, Greater Astoria Historical Society.