[from David Ward and Olivier Zunz (eds.), The Landscapes of Modernity: New York City, 1900-1940 (Baltimore, 1992), 191-209. References omitted.]

     The New York subway straddled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first route, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company’s line, was conceived during the industrial depression of the 1890s, yet opened in the new century, at a time of prosperity and optimism. The subway was constructed by thousands of largely Irish and Italian immigrant laborers who worked mainly with their hands, not with machines, yet it became the world’s fastest rapid transit railway and a symbol of technological progress. It broke the transportation barriers of the industrial metropolis and stimulated the settlement of northern Manhattan and the Bronx. This immense physical expansion prompted planners to view the subways as an instrument for achieving the efficient city, where population would be dispersed from the over crowded core, and where residential neighborhoods would be segregated from manufacturing and commercial districts.

     But although the subway helped give rise to the modern city, it was embedded in a highly competitive political structure that had been erected in the nineteenth century. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the relationship between transit politics and metropolitan spatial expansion. Operated by private companies and regulated by government commission, New York’s subway was plagued by disputes over monopoly and route expansion during the progressive era. At the end of World War I, however, a financial emergency spawned by inflation made the subway the focus of more intense partisan and press conflict than before. As controversies erupted over the rate of fare, route expansion, and other issues, rapid transit became highly politicized. The politicization of the subways contributed to the adoption of a newer and seemingly nonpolitical transport technology, the automobile, that assumed transit's longstanding function of stimulating urban growth.

     The subway's fiscal crisis deepened during the Depression. Even though Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia brought the city's three separate subway lines under direct municipal control in 1940, rapid transit continued to be defined as a business that was supposed to support itself, rather than as a vital public service entitled to public subsidies. As the deficits mounted in the late 1940s, a group of conservative businessmen and realtors sought to create a special district government that would make the subways self-supporting and stop the political fighting. Established in 1953, the New York City Transit Authority insulated the subways from normal governmental channels, reduced the accountability of top elected officials, and made economy the highest priority. In so doing, the New York City Transit Authority set the stage for future financial disaster and physical deterioration.

     New York's original subway was built in response to two critical problems that emerged during the nineteenth century, rapid urban growth and awkward geography. By 1900, the city had 3,437,000 inhabitants and ranked as the world's second-largest city. New York's geography was poorly suited to its explosive development. The city is an urban archipelago that sprawls across several big islands; that is divided by formidable waterways like the upper bay, the Hudson River, and the East River; and that centers on the splinter-shaped island of Manhattan, thirteen miles long and two miles across at its widest point and with only twenty-three square miles of territory.

     This combination of extraordinary population growth and arduous geography made urban transport a high priority (see Figure 8.1). By 1890, New York City boasted the world's most comprehensive mass transit system. With 94 miles of elevated railways, 265 miles of horse railways, and 137 miles of horse omnibus lines, New York had more total mileage than London, even though the British capital contained nearly three times more residents. New Yorkers averaged almost 300 mass transit rides per capita in 1890, compared to only 74 rides for each Londoner. But New York's transit network was nevertheless inadequate. The elevated railroads were already overcrowded in 1890, and the construction of new routes or extra storage yards was precluded by space limitations, especially in the financial district on the island's southern tip. Moreover, the els were too slow to stimulate the development of northern Manhattan.

     The solution required an underground railway. On January 31, 1888 Mayor Abram S. Hewitt, the son-in-law of merchant Peter Cooper and a wealthy iron manufacturer, proposed the construction of an advanced rapid transit railroad. Hewitt envisioned a railroad that would go from City Hall in southern Manhattan to the annexed district be yond the Harlem River and be capable of fantastic speeds of forty or fifty miles per hour.

     Hewitt claimed that state-of-the-art rapid transit would ensure that New York retained its position as the dominant metropolis in North America. New York was running out of space to house its residents, and only high-speed, high-capacity transport could spur the development of the unsettled territory on the Upper West Side, in Harlem, and on Washington Heights as new neighborhoods for the middle class and the skilled working class. Hewitt contended that rapid transit would broaden the municipal tax base and underwrite vital public works—wharves, docks, new streets—needed to guarantee the city's supremacy over rival seaports like Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Baltimore. He predicted that rapid transit would promote "the future growth of this city in business, wealth, and the blessings of civilization" and confirm "its imperial destiny as the greatest city in the world."

     Hewitt's sweeping view of rapid transit's priority had ramifications for the relationship between government and business. Previously, transit had been regulated by franchises: the municipality granted a private company the right to use a public right-of-way, and the company owned, built, and operated the route. Although this franchise system had not seriously impeded the onmibuses, horse railways, or elevated railways, Mayor Hewitt understood that his rapid transit rail way would be another matter, due to its great cost. Accordingly, the mayor advanced an idea for combined government and business development, later known as the Hewitt formula, whereby the municipality would finance and own the line and a private company would build and run it.

     Although the Tammany-dominated Board of Aldermen rejected Hewitt's plan, his conclusion that subway financing required a different framework was prescient. For when the Rapid Transit Commission of 1891 followed the tradition of minimal government by soliciting bids in December 1892 for a 999-year contract for the private construction and operation of an underground railway, investors proved to be wary of this risky project and did not make one serious bid for it.

     This impasse was resolved when one of New York's most powerful business organizations, the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, adopted the Hewitt formula. The merchants who led the Chamber of Commerce thought that "real rapid transit" would solve two problems. Mayor Hewitt had already identified one problem, the unification and development of the metropolitan economy through the settlement of northern Manhattan and the annexed district. The second problem involved traffic congestion. Manhattan's long, narrow shape funneled trolleys, lorries, and carriages onto busy north-south arteries where speeds averaged no more than five miles per hour.

     In 1894, the Chamber of Commerce drafted a bill incorporating the Hewitt formula. This measure easily passed the Republican-led legislature and was enacted in law in May 1894. The Rapid Transit Act of 1894 gave the Chamber of Commerce power over subway planning, primarily to prevent Tammany Hall from siphoning off municipal funds. Five of the eight members of the new commission were prominent businessmen; four of these businessmen-commissioners were named in the act itself, and the fifth, serving ex officio, was the president of the Chamber.

      Six years later, the Rapid Transit Commission (RTC) selected financier August Belmont as the franchise holder. The president of his own investment bank and the American agent for the Rothschilds, Belmont signed a contract (known as Contract No. 1) on February 21, 1900, to build, equip, and operate the railway for a period of fifty years, renewable for another twenty-five Inaugurated on October 27, 1904, New York's first subway, a twenty-two-mile-long route of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), went up the east side from City Hall to Grand Central Terminal, then across Forty-second Street to Times Square on the west side, and then up Broadway through the Upper West Side to Ninety-sixth Street, where it divided into two branches that continued into the Bronx (see Figures 8.2 and 8.3).

     The Interborough was the first subway in the world with a separate set of tracks for permanent, two-way express service. At speeds that reached forty miles per hour, the expresses became the fastest urban transport mode in the world. Three times faster than the els and six times faster than the trolleys, the subway remade the face of the city. Along with Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal, the subway pulled retail businesses like department stores north to midtown from their old cluster south of Twenty-third Street. The IRT also transformed Times Square into a spectacular entertainment district. Its legitimate theaters, vaudeville palaces, restaurants, nightclubs, and, later, its movie houses depended on the subway to carry huge numbers of passengers to their doors. Equally important was the fact that the IRT was open twenty-four hours a day, giving Times Square a reputation as a place that never closed.

     The express trains unleashed the largest housing boom in city history. As late as 1900, one-third of the building lots on the Upper West Side—a huge area of approximately 200 blocks that stretched from Fifty-ninth Street to 110th Street and from the Hudson River to Central Park—were unimproved. The far west side-from Amsterdam Avenue to the river-had been particularly neglected due to poor transport. By drastically reducing commuting time, the IRT stimulated the construction of housing and retail stores there. The Upper West Side, close to midtown and lower Manhattan and offering short journeys to work, became an upper- and middle-class district with luxury apartment buildings. Broadway replaced Columbus Avenue (along the route of the Ninth Avenue elevated) as the Upper West Side's premier shop ping boulevard, and areas along the IRT express stops—like Sherman Square, at Seventy-second Street—became commercial hubs.

     Land on the Upper West Side had already been subdivided, but the southern Bronx was so distant from the built-up area that much of its property was still held in large, unbroken parcels as farms, country estates, or charitable institutions. Speculators like Charles T. Barney, the president of the Knickerbocker Trust Company and the brother- in-law of William C. Whitney, assembled huge tracts and had an un usually great impact on the spatial patterns that unfolded there. Due to the economic pressures on speculative builders and the existence of a ready market for low-income housing, the most common form of building in the Bronx became the new law tenement, a relatively high-quality structure offering better living conditions than the squalid old law tenements of Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. For sixteen to twenty dollars per month, residents could rent a brand-new apartment containing two bedrooms, a combined living room-dining room, a kitchen with hot water and a gas range, and an interior toilet and bathtub. Although the poorest New Yorkers could afford neither the rents nor the time for commuting, the Bronx was a possibility for most semiskilled and skilled workers. Thousands of New Yorkers migrated to the Bronx after 1904 and settled in solidly ethnic neighborhoods like East Tremont and West Farms.

     From 1905 to 1920, the population of Manhattan above 125th Street increased 265 percent to 323,800 and the population of the Bronx grew 150 percent to 430,980. These new neighborhoods funneled more and more riders into a subway that was already overflowing. The sub way had been designed to hold 600,000 passengers daily, but its aver age daily traffic surpassed the 300,000 mark in November 1904 and its planned maximum capacity of 600,000 as early as October 1905.

      In March 1905, a committee of the Rapid Transit Commission (RTC) unveiled a proposed $250 million expansion program for new subways intended to relieve this overcrowding. But August Belmont, satisfied with the company's 8 percent profit and heeding the industry maxim that "the profits are in the straps," flatly rejected this plan. The RTC, which had counted on cooperating with the Interborough rather than confronting it, thus found itself in deep trouble. Even though the RTC had been conceived as a new institutional response to the problems of the industrial metropolis, the concentration of private economic power revealed its shortcomings. The Rapid Transit Act of 1894 prohibited the city from launching its own subway, and, in effect, gave the IRT control of an important service. The RTC's futility was accentuated when the Interborough Rapid Transit merged with the Metropolitan Street Railway on December 22, 1905. The Interborough thus eliminated its only rival for control of the island's transit lines, became unchallenged master of its street and elevated railways and New York's only subway, and won veto power over new underground railways.

      Strong press reaction against the Interborough-Metropolitan merger strengthened the hand of municipal reformers who wanted to replace the Rapid Transit Commission with a powerful regulatory commission. Many progressives saw rapid transit as a means of achieving two major goals, antimonopoly and urban dispersal. First, they were alarmed because the IRT wielded monopoly power over a vital service under the terms of a "cast-iron" contract that did not allow for adequate regulation. Second, they sought improved transportation so that immigrants could escape from crowded urban slums to new neighbor hoods on the outskirts. By 1910, Manhattan was among the most congested urban districts in the world. Forty-nine of every 100 New Yorkers lived in Manhattan, which had an average population density (161 people per acre) far above that of Brooklyn (32.5), the Bronx (15.6), Queens (3.8), and Staten Island (2.2). In Manhattan's most thickly packed neighborhood, the Lower East Side, population densities exceeded 700 people per acre. In addition to residential crowding, 70 percent of New York's factories were concentrated below Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. This industrial metropolis was a chaotic landscape where residences were intermingled with cigar shops, garment factories, and laundries, and where the streets were jammed with children, pushcarts, and vehicular traffic.

      The progressives launched a campaign to abolish the Rapid Transit Commission as a first step toward imposing tougher restrictions on the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. In May 1907, Governor Charles Evans Hughes and his reform allies succeeded in replacing the Rapid Transit Commission with a potent new regulatory body, the Public Service Commission (PSC).

       The PSC's strategy for mastering the IRT revolved around a 1908 proposal for new subways. This Triborough system, as it was called, would have 144 miles of track in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn (see Figure 8.4). Instead of being conceived as part of a unified system, these Triborough routes were laid out as a separate network that would be run by an independent private operator with no physical or corporate ties to the IRT. The reason for this design was that the PSC regarded competition between the Triborough and the Interborough as its main regulatory device. Although these progressives had moved beyond laissez-faire doctrines, most preferred a market solution to more active state encroachment and resolutely opposed municipal operation. The PSC insisted on competition even though it would divide the transit system into two parts, require riders to pay a double fare, and sacrifice scale economies. Triborough revealed the tension that existed between the reformers' goals of antimonopoly and urban dispersal. The PSC could not push its Triborough lines far beyond the edge of settlement because its independent subway might go bankrupt if they did not have enough traffic. With relatively little mileage slated for undeveloped areas, Triborough would not deconcentrate Manhattan's population.

      But the fatal flaw of the Triborough strategy was its dependence on the private sector. When the Public Service Commission asked in September 1910 for bids to build and manage Triborough, not a single offer was made. Investors feared potentially ruinous competition with the Interborough.

      So long as the Public Service Commission had pursued its unsound Triborough plan, August Belmont was convinced that there was "no danger of competition in the building of subways." In November 1910, however, President William McAdoo of the Hudson & Manhattan Company proposed his own subway. A lawyer and entrepreneur who had moved from Tennessee to New York in the early 1890s and become wealthy on Wall Street, McAdoo had recently opened two underground railway tubes that ran below the Hudson River between New Jersey and New York. Now he wanted to push his Hudson & Manhattan subway deeper into Manhattan and to the Bronx and Brooklyn. Reformers hailed McAdoo's plan for a bi-state, regional transit system that would provide competition with the IRT. But August Belmont neutralized this threat by submitting an expansion program that compelled the Hudson & Manhattan to withdraw its proposition rather than attempt competition with the IRT in the credit markets.

      Yet Belmont's monopoly was soon broken. In January 1911, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (BRT) joined the negotiations for new subways. The entry of the BRT enabled Manhattan Borough President George McAneny to advance a new approach to subway building. An ex-newspaper reporter who had assisted Carl Schurz with civil service reform and who had served as president of the progressive City Club, McAneny championed the new profession of city planning and sought to rationalize the urban environment. To McAneny, rapid transit was essential for replacing the chaotic industrial metropolis with a new more efficient city where the population would be dispersed to lower density districts on the periphery and where residential neighborhoods would be segregated from business and manufacturing zones. Subways would carry the residents of this ideal city from their homes on the outskirts to jobs in the core.

     Unlike many progressives, McAneny did not draw moral distinctions between business and government and deemphasized the anti- monopoly strain of reformist thought. Instead of opposing cooperation with the Interborough, McAneny hoped to integrate the IRT and the BRT in his program. He wanted to create two huge systems, each complete in itself, that would multiply the city's total rapid transit mileage, particularly in the outlying districts. McAneny's ideas were adopted by the Board of Estimate and by the Public Service Commission. On March 19, 1913, the PSC and the two corporations agreed to forty-nine-year pacts, known as the dual contracts, that doubled the length of the existing rapid transit network, increasing its single track age from 296 to 619 miles (see Figure 8.5). As with the 1904 IRT, the dual contracts extended beyond the built-up section, penetrating new territory in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and, for the first time, in Queens (see Figure 8.6).

     The dual system triggered development in the outer boroughs. Be fore 1913, what is now Jackson Heights, in Queens, consisted of open fields where crops grew and where there were only three roads. Although the Queensboro Corporation started to acquire land there in 1909, Jackson Heights began to boom when the IRT's Corona (now Flushing) line arrived in 1917. By 1925, Jackson Heights was an exclusive (and restricted) bedroom suburb offering upper-middle-class amenities like garden apartments, a golf course, and tennis courts. Other neighborhoods along the new subways experienced similar growth, including Elmhurst and Corona, in Queens, and Brownsville and Canarsie, in Brooklyn.

      The dual contracts decentralized New York City. Its total population grew by 45 percent from 1910 to 1930, but the number of people who lived in Manhattan declined by nearly 20 percent in that time. Manhattan's population density decreased from 161 people per acre in 1910 to 128.9 in 1930. During that period, the percentage of city residents who lived outside of Manhattan increased from 51 to 73 percent.

      At first, rapid transit planning for the 1920s followed the course of the dual contracts. Planners continued to advocate the rationalization of urban growth through city planning and to conceive of new subways as part of the BRT and IRT systems. For instance, in July 1920, Chief Engineer Daniel L. Turner of the New York State Office of Transit Construction Commissioner proposed a mammoth plan of 830 track miles of extensions to the BRT and IRT. Although Turner confined these lines to New York City, he later amplified his vision of—in his words—"suburban rapid transit" in the transit volume of the Regional Plan, which he cowrote. There, Turner foresaw the construction of the subways beyond the city limits into New Jersey.

      Turner's vision did not become reality. One reason for this failure was the rise of the automobile in the 1920s as a competing transport mode. Widely regarded as the embodiment of technological modernity because of its novelty, and viewed by many government officials and planners as neutral and nonpolitical because of its pattern of individual ownership, the automobile assumed mass transit's old function of stimulating new settlements on the outskirts.

       The positive appeal of the automobile was not the only reason for the failure of Turner's dream of suburban transit. His vision of rationalizing the city through subway construction was not accompanied by the development of new political structures for rapid transit. At the same time that semi-independent government corporations like the Port of New York Authority and later Robert Moses' Triborough Bridge Authority were building vehicular bridges, tunnels, and highways across state and local boundaries, the New York subway was becoming mired in partisan politics and in regulatory conflicts.

      The intensification of subway politics was largely accomplished by Mayor John F. Hylan, a fiery demagogue who was allied with publisher William Randolph Hearst and who served two terms in City Hall, from 1918 to 1926. Hylan exploited the deep popular antipathy against the subway corporations by launching a populist crusade to save the "people" from the "interests." Accusing the Republican-controlled state regulatory commission of being secretly in league with the sub way companies, Hylan denounced its proposals to reorganize the transit system through financial concessions to the companies and to ex tend the IRT and BRT subways as cynical exercises in "traction manipulation and traction chicanery" intended to bamboozle the public, save the bondholders, and raise the nickel fare.

      Hylan's critique of the Transit Commission's bailout attempts gained credence from the unanticipated results of the dual contracts. The dual contracts had sought to unite business and government in a community of interest. They had instituted an intricate profit-sharing agreement for dividing each subway company's gross annual revenues: First, the corporation would receive a preferential payment for fixed costs and profits, based on current earnings; then, the municipality would recover its charges for interest and sinking fund; and then, the company and the municipality would split the remainder in half.

      But this profit-sharing plan rested on a foundation no firmer than expectations of continued revenue increases. The strong prewar performance of the Interborough, which had made profits close to 20 percent and dividends as high as 15 percent, led the municipal negotiators to assume that the new subways would earn large surpluses too. War time inflation undermined these calculations by reducing the companies' real income. In 1919, Interborough President T. P. Shonts complained that a ton of coal had gone from $3.22 to $6.07 and that labor costs had increased by $6 million, while the contracted nickel fare controlled corporate earnings. The Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (which soon renamed itself the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Company, or BMT) entered bankruptcy in 1919. As a result of inflation, the IRT's and BMT's preferentials consumed nearly all of the revenue, rather than just a fraction, as originally intended. By 1922 the municipality had not received any funds to cover its interest and sinking fund requirements, and was forced to pay for the interest charges on its bonds—over $10 million annually—out of the tax budget. This debacle strengthened press opposition to the IRT and the BMT and gave Mayor Hylan ammunition for his fight against the two companies.

      Hylan put his own stamp on rapid transit by building his own subways. In 1924, the state government transferred the power to develop subways to a new municipal agency, the Board of Transportation. Hylan intended a separate, municipally operated system that would rival the IRT and BMT and be "built, planned and operated to accommodate the transportation needs of the people. . . and not solely for the financial advantage of the operating companies." This Independent Subway System (IND), the third and last major stage of underground construction, was completed in 1940.

      As a separate system that would have to compete with the IRT and BMT, the IND's routes were primarily restricted to built-up areas that already had heavy traffic. Except for the Queensboro line, the IND did not extend to the outskirts; indeed, its Sixth Avenue, Eighth Avenue, and Fulton Street routes paralleled IRT and BMT elevateds. Unlike the first two stages of subway construction, the IND had little impact on residential expansion. One result of this changed locational pattern was that rapid transit began to lose a key constituency, the real estate developers who had supported the earlier subways in order to kindle property expansion. The failure of the IND to spur significant residential growth, along with the dual contracts' continuing drain on the City budget, prompted businessmen to reassess the importance of subways.

      To Mayor John F. Hylan also belongs the credit for making the five-cent fare a supreme political issue in New York City. With his refusal to grant the subway companies an increased fare, Mayor Hylan found a popular position that carried him to victory in his 1921 reelection campaign and begat an article of faith so sacred that no mayor risked raising it until 1948. "The five-cent fare is . . . not likely to be increased in the immediate or distant future," the U.S. Works Progress Administration's (WPA) famed New York City Guide observed in 1939. "The New Yorker is extremely sensitive on this point."

      The nickel fare made the 1920s and 1930s a golden age for subway passengers. The low fare enabled millions of poor New Yorkers to take full advantage of the city by traveling to City College, WPA jobs, or inexpensive concerts at Town Hall. The problem with the nickel fare, however, was that it deprived the private companies of income that was badly needed to maintain service standards, and that there was no corresponding effort to put new revenue into the system through direct municipal subsidies. By the 1920s, a nickel was no longer worth what it had been in 1904. The real value of the nickel fare dropped to 2.6 cents in 1919 and to 2.25 cents in 1920. The IRT and BMT remained in poor financial condition during the 1920s.

      The Great Depression crushed the Interborough and the Brooklyn-Manhattan. From 1928 to 1939, the rapid transit traffic of the BMT declined 23 percent and that of IRT fell 25 percent. In 1932, the IRT declared bankruptcy. By the early 1930s, the survival of the Interbor ough and Brooklyn-Manhattan as private companies, along with the physical integrity of the subway system itself, was in jeopardy.

      After entering City Hall in January 1934, Fiorello H. LaGuardia sought to reorganize the subways. To LaGuardia, reorganization was primarily an instrument for restoring the solvency of the City, which was in the midst of a severe financial crisis in 1934. He believed that the unification of the subways under direct public control would save millions of dollars by eliminating the dual contract preferentials and that the combination of the three separate systems into a single, more efficient network would put the subways on a self-sustaining basis. This conception of unification was critical. At a time when the municipality was no longer self-sufficient and when the national government was taking responsibility for urban functions such as relief, public housing, and highway construction, LaGuardia proposed to bring a rapid transit system that was losing money under City operation. Moreover, LaGuardia retained the existing definition of the subways as an enterprise that had to support itself, rather than formulating a new understanding of rapid transit as a vital municipal service entitled to government subsidy. Largely due to its history as a profit-making business, the subway continued to be perceived differently than the schools, water, fire, police, and sanitation.

      The LaGuardia administration's talks with the IRT and BMT were delayed by the intricacies of corporate ownership as well as by friction with Tammany Democrats on the state level who retained formal authority over unification. Finally, in June 1940, the City of New York acquired the properties of the Brooklyn-Manhattan and the Interborough for $326 million. The Board of Transportation then began direct operation of the largest transit system in the world, a huge network of nearly 1,200 track miles of railways and of 80 miles of bus routes that carried over two billion passengers per year.

      But unification did not cure the subways' fiscal ills or end the political battles over transit. In 1940, a progressive Republican lawyer, Paul Windels, initiated a drive to eliminate municipal operation. Alarmed by the rise of big government and determined to cut public spending, Windels founded several civic organizations that were supported by realtors and other businessmen who favored lower property taxes. Their chief target was the subway, which by 1944 required an annual debt service of $37 million and constituted the single biggest drain on the municipal treasury.

      Windels claimed that the transit imbroglio could be solved through the creation of a public authority. A transit authority would be independent of the other branches of government, and it would be run by efficiency-minded technocrats who could cut the deficits. Windels' model was perhaps the most successful special district ever established, the Port of New York Authority. Created by the states of New York and New Jersey in 1921 to rationalize the region's chaotic harbor facilities and originally limited to ports and terminals, the Port Authority gained financial strength due to its control of the Holland Tunnel's revenues. It used its solid bond ratings to become—according to Michael N. Danielson and Jameson W. Doig—"the most influential public development institution in the New York region."

      Paul Windels had served as assistant counsel of the Port Authority from 1930 to 1933, and he deeply admired it. Contrasting the Port Authority's success with the Board of Transportation's supposed failure, Windels argued that the practice of deciding weighty issues in an open forum jeopardized the public interest by putting the subways at the mercy of shortsighted politicians who played to the fickle crowd. Windels intended to put a stop to the convulsions over the nickel fare, the IND, and unification that had shaken New York ever since Hylan's tenure by stripping the subways from the mayor and the city council.

      Liberals protested that Windels' proposal was undemocratic. But the liberal opposition was compromised by the LaGuardia administration's prior definition of the subways as a business that was expected to support itself, rather than as a municipal service. When the New York City Transit System's operating deficits climbed from $1.2 mil lion in 1950 to an alarming $24.8 million in 1952, the pressure mounted for Windels' transit authority. In March 1953, the Republican-dominated state government established the New York City Transit Authority. One critic, however, had already questioned Windels' claim that a transit authority would be a panacea for the subways. In a scathing 1949 memo, master builder Robert Moses argued that the subways could not generate enough revenue for a transit authority to be genuinely independent. "We believe that the 'authority' method of financing is valid in several fields of public construction and management," Moses asserted, "but that gold bricks wrapped up as bullion will kill this device." He concluded that "such an authority is not practical" for the subways and that a transit authority would not repeat the successes of the Port Authority or his own Triborough Bridge Authority.

      Moses was right. The Transit Authority's formal powers were negated when the inflationary wave of the 1960s and 1970s led to mammoth operating deficits. Ill-suited to the political environment created by these losses, the Transit Authority could not avert the physical deterioration of the subways.

     Halfway through the twentieth century, New York's subways had finally acquired a modern political structure. Yet, underground rapid transit had already lost its social function as a spearhead of metropolitan spatial expansion and remained mired in deficits. Ironically, the Transit Authority was established just in time to preside over the subways' decline.