New York's Secret Subway: The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit

In the nineteenth century, Manhattan's streets were so choked with pedestrians, horses, vehicles, and vendors that a trip from City Hall to Central Park could take hours. Alfred Beach had the perfect solution: build a giant pneumatic tube underneath Broadway from the Battery to Harlem. Air pressure would shoot passengers up and down the island in clean, quiet carriages. But Beach was up against the operators of the horse-drawn streetcars and the politicians in their pay, most conspicuously William M. Tweed, the notorious "Boss" of Tammany Hall.

New York's Secret Subway: The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit tells a classic story of good versus evil, pitting the mild-mannered Beach, a visionary inventor and entrepreneur, against the oafish tyrant Tweed, the exemplar of corruption in the Gilded Age. It also tells the story of one of the most astonishing feats of engineering in American history, the surreptitious creation of the nation's first operational subway.

New York seemed destined to become the second city in the world with a comprehensive subway system, after London. Unfortunately, political lethargy and greed would conspire to deny the city a subway for another thirty years.
Yet Alfred Beach still proved conclusively the feasibility of underground railways in Manhattan, and paved the way for modern mass transportation systems.

Richly illustrated and populated with larger-than-life characters, New York's Secret Subway will captivate readers and provide historical context for today's clashes between public interests and powerful business and political groups. Algeo tells this amazing true story in full for the first time, and although it took place more than a century ago, it will at times sound surprisingly familiar.


Author: Matthew Algeo
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 09/30/2025
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 8.60h x 6.00w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781642833652


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/21/2025

About the Author
Matthew Algeo is an award-winning journalist and author. He has reported from four continents for NPR News and written for major publications including the Atlantic, New York Times, and Washington Post. He is the author of eight books, including Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip, which Christopher Buckley called "utterly likable," and the Washington Post named one of the best books of the year.