The City Beneath Us: Building the New York Subway

Work gang caulking and tightening bolts on Manhattan side of the East River tube. October 4, 1907. Collection: New York Transit Museum

New Yorkers — and many visitors — think they know all there is to know about the subway. But how many know what went into building the system, which ranks among the greatest engineering and construction achievements of the 20th century? The New York Transit Museum’s new exhibition “The City Beneath Us: Building the New York Subway,” gives even the most knowledgeable New Yorkers fascinating insights into this monumental effort.

Photos from the Museum’s extensive collection, many of which are on public display for the first time, document the construction process, through the innovative “cut and cover” method of tunneling and the challenges of Manhattan’s difficult terrain.

Building the subway was a complex engineering and construction effort. Every stage had to be planned and recorded in minute detail. Long before ground was broken, routes were carefully surveyed and mapped. For each proposed section, provisions were made to limit the disruption to the lives of local residents, businesses, and the city’s infrastructure. Potential obstacles, whether above or below-ground — from buildings, light poles, and el supports, to manholes, cellars, and vaults, to the intricate tangle of gas and water mains, sewers, telephone and electric lines — had to be considered, charted, worked around, protected, diverted, or removed.

Photography played an essential role in this endeavor. For legal and insurance purposes, skilled photographers documented site conditions before, during, and after construction on every subway line. The photographers recorded construction progress at periodic intervals. Each image was numbered, captioned, and verified by a “witness.” Working with large-format view cameras, the photographers produced thousands of pictures, originally on 8-by-10-inch glass plates, and later film, negatives. The resulting prints are crisply focused, finely detailed, well composed, and often strikingly evocative. What the photographs capture is more than just construction scenes — buildings, tunnels, laborers, tools, equipment — but a great public work and city, above and below ground, in the course of transformation.

The New York Transit Museum is also producing a special Centennial celebration book, The City Beneath Us: Building the New York Subway, published by W.W. Norton & Company and featuring a portfolio of rare photographs from its collection of more than 150,000 photographs. The current exhibit presents a selection of these images, newly printed as digital enlargements made from vintage photographs and original negatives.

The New York Transit Museum, one of the city’s leading cultural institutions, is the largest museum in the United States devoted to urban public transportation history and one of the premier institutions of its kind in the world. The Museum explores the development of the greater New York metropolitan region through the presentation of exhibitions, tours, educational programs and workshops dealing with the cultural, social and technological history of public transportation. Since its inception as a temporary exhibit in 1976, the Museum has grown in scope and popularity.

The New York Transit Museum is located at the corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn Heights and is open Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Admission is $5 for adults, $3 for seniors and children 3 to 17, and free for children under 3. For information and travel directions call the Museum at 718-694-1873 or visit mta.info/mta/museum.

Housed in a decommissioned subway station, the recently renovated Museum features a permanent exhibition of vintage subway and elevated train cars, a working signal tower, and a gallery dedicated to surface transportation from the early 1800s through the 21st Century.