October 27 in History: Subway Beginnings and Unexpected Turns

On October twenty-seventh, nineteen zero four, the city of New York sent its very first underground subway train rattling out from City Hall, and almost every single person standing on the platform believed they were merely fixing a bad streetcar traffic jam. We know now, from our quiet perch looking back down the tracks of time, that they weren't just moving people under the pavement; they were inventing the modern vertical metropolis that shapes how millions of us walk, work, and breathe together every single morning. That sort of hidden momentum puts me in mind of our last visit together, when we watched the very first spade of dirt turn on the Erie Canal back on October twenty-sixth.

People scoffed at Clinton's Ditch then, just like folks down in Manhattan thought digging up Broadway for five solid years was sheer madness. But looking at October twenty-seventh across the span of the calendar, I tell you what, this date has a peculiar habit of catching folks entirely unaware while they're busily stumbling into the future. Out here on this porch above the creek, the water is tumbling along clean and cold over the limestone rocks, winding down through the holler toward the French Broad River. Down at the bend, an old heron stands still as a fence post, waiting on a crappie. And when you sit still long enough, dates on a calendar stop being numbers printed in red ink and start looking like switch-points on a main line.

October twenty-seventh is one of those switch-points. If you had stood in the crowds on that brisk Thursday afternoon in nineteen zero four, or in a hospital nursery in New York back in eighteen fifty-eight, or on a wooden deck in the Caribbean sixty-two years ago, you would have sworn you were seeing one small, ordinary human effort. You would have been dead wrong, and the record proves it every time. Let's wander back first to two o'clock on October twenty-seventh, nineteen zero four. New York City was busting at the seams with four million residents, horse wagons snarling the avenues, overhead elevated trains raining cinders on ladies' hats, and a mayor named George McClellan Junior.

McClellan took a solid silver controller handle crafted by Tiffany and Company, stepped into the cab of a brand-new subway car at the City Hall loop station, and he was supposed to nudge the throttle forward just twenty feet for the photographers. Well, McClellan got his hand around that polished silver handle, felt all those horses vibrating through the steel rail under his boots, and he refused to let go. He pushed that throttle wide open, running all the way up to One Hundred and Forty-Fifth Street, hitting forty-five miles an hour while the engineers behind him held on to their bowler hats and yelled into the dark.

That evening at seven o'clock, they opened the wooden turnstiles to the general public for a nickel a ride. Over one hundred and fifty thousand people jammed into those tile-lined tunnels before midnight. They stepped into those cars thinking they had bought a handy shortcut to get around horse manure and rain puddles. That was the immediate problem on their minds. What looked right to the engineers and the city planners then was simple mechanical relief: relieve the surface street congestion between lower Manhattan and Harlem. Nobody on that opening train had a clue that putting rapid transit deep beneath the bedrock was fixing to redraw the entire map of human society.

It took farmland in the outer boroughs and transformed it into neighborhood brownstones overnight. It made the skyscraper possible, because you can't pile fifty thousand office workers into a single city block unless you have a subterranean iron belly capable of swallowing them whole and spitting them back out at five in the evening. Now, while McClellan was joyriding beneath Manhattan, you have to rewind the clock forty-six years earlier, on this exact same date, to a quiet brownstone on East Twentieth Street. October twenty-seventh, eighteen fifty-eight, a frail baby boy named Theodore Roosevelt came into this world.

Now, I know how that sounds. But hang on. If you had walked into that nursery, nobody would have bet a plugged nickel on that boy surviving his own childhood, let alone reshaping a continent. Little Teedie had asthma so savage it felt like drowning on dry land. His father would bundle him into a carriage in the dead of winter and race through the midnight streets just so the freezing rush of wind would force air into his small lungs. The doctors warned his folks that his heart was weak, that excitement would ruin him, and that he ought to seek out a quiet, indoor desk life. That was the expert medical wisdom of eighteen fifty-eight.

What looked reasonable then was caution, soft blankets, closed windows, and gentle coddling. But young Theodore took a look at the world and saw it not as a sickroom, but as a boundless, noisy cabinet of curiosities. By age nine, after inspecting a dead seal head at a local fish market, he founded what he grandly titled the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History in his bedroom bookcase, preserving beetles, turtle shells, and bird nests. He stared down his physical weakness not with surrender, but by building an iron will in a gymnasium his father built him on the porch. When he finally took the oath of office as our twenty-sixth president decades later, October twenty-seventh suddenly looked like the birthday of the American conservation movement.

Roosevelt went on to preserve two hundred and thirty million acres of public lands. He signed into law five national parks, fifty-one bird reserves, four national game preserves, and one hundred and fifty national forests. If you have ever pitched a canvas tent beneath the giant sequoias, or watched the sunlight break across the rim of the Grand Canyon without seeing a billboard plastered across the rock face, you owe a quiet nod to that sick baby born on East Twentieth Street. And October twenty-seventh wasn't done handing out surprises in the realm of invention, neither. On this date in nineteen thirty-eight, a chemist's laboratory gamble went public when the DuPont company gathered several thousand women at the site of the upcoming New York World's Fair.

They formally announced a miracle substance they had been quietly cooking up with coal, water, and air. They called it nylon. Before that autumn morning, if you wanted sheer stockings, you relied entirely on silk imported across the ocean from Japan. If you wanted tough rope for a ship's rigging, you needed hemp. The general public saw nylon as nothing more than cheap stockings that wouldn't ladder when caught on a chair leg. That was the hook DuPont used to sell it. But look at what nylon actually was: the world's first totally synthetic polymer fiber. Within four years of that announcement, every single scrap of nylon in the United States went directly to war: parachutes for paratroopers over Normandy, heavy cords for bomber tires, gliders, and surgical sutures.

A material invented so women wouldn't have to mend their silk hosiery ended up dropping entire airborne divisions out of the midnight sky. Now you stay with me here, because we have arrived at the switch-track where history came within an eyelash of flying straight off the rails into complete ruin. Saturday, October twenty-seventh, nineteen sixty-two. Folk who study the Cold War call it Black Saturday. If you were sitting on your porch back then, listening to the static on an old tube radio, you knew the world was holding its breath over Soviet missiles planted down in Cuba, ninety miles off Key West. President John F.

Kennedy had thrown a naval blockade around the island, and Premier Nikita Khrushchev was digging in his heels. On that Saturday morning, an American U-2 reconnaissance plane piloted by Major Rudolf Anderson Junior flew over the Cuban jungle. Anderson was forty-five minutes into his photography run when two Soviet surface-to-air missiles detonated behind his tail. The plane plunged, and Major Anderson became the only direct combat casualty of the entire crisis. Back in Washington, military advisers marched into the Oval Office and urged the president to launch an immediate retaliatory air strike on Sunday morning, followed by a full-scale ground invasion by Monday.

That looked like the only strong, logical move on the game board. At that exact same hour, deep in the warm waters of the Sargasso Sea, an American destroyer called the USS Beale detected a Soviet submarine, the B-59, lurking beneath the surface. The American ship began dropping low-intensity practice depth charges, basically sound grenades, meant to signal the submarine to come to the surface and identify itself. The crew inside the B-59 hadn't heard from Moscow in days. Their air-conditioning had failed, carbon dioxide was building up to toxic levels, the interior heat reached over one hundred and twenty degrees, and the men were fainting on the floor plates.

To the Soviet commander, Valentin Savitsky, those concussions pounding against the hull sounded like World War Three had already started up on the surface. Savitsky panicked. He ordered the crew to arm their ten-kiloton nuclear torpedo, a weapon with the punch of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Under Soviet naval regulations, firing that weapon required the unanimous agreement of three senior officers aboard. Commander Savitsky wanted to fire. The political officer, Ivan Maslennikov, gave his consent. Only one man stood between that firing switch and the end of modern civilization: thirty-six-year-old brigade chief of staff Vasili Arkhipov.

Arkhipov refused. He stood his ground in that sweltering, airless steel cylinder while the other officers shouted at him. He argued that the small explosions were signaling runs, not depth charges designed to sink them. He convinced the captain to surface the boat, signal the Americans, and await fresh orders from Moscow. Swear on my tackle box, that is the honest truth. The survival of every town in this valley, and every city from Chicago to Moscow, hinged entirely on one exhausted sailor saying no inside a tin can at the bottom of the ocean on October twenty-seventh. The outcome wasn't written down in fate. It could have gone the other way with a single nod of Arkhipov's head.

When we look back on all these moments from ten years down the road, or sixty years, or a century, what will we say about where we are standing right now? We tend to look back at history like it was a freight train locked onto a steel track, rolling toward a depot it couldn't possibly miss. We look at the New York subway and think, well, of course they built transit tunnels. We look at Teddy Roosevelt's parks and think, of course they saved the wilderness. We look at the Cuban Missile Crisis and figure common sense was bound to win out. That's the hindsight trap, friend. It makes the past look tidy and the present look hopelessly chaotic.

But it wasn't tidy at all. Mayor McClellan was just a man having a grand time with a shiny lever. DuPont was just trying to sell durable socks. And Vasili Arkhipov was just a tired man who refused to panic when everyone around him was losing their minds. We can already see the evidence of this in our own daily lives, even if we aren't naming it yet. We sit in traffic jams today, staring at red taillights, cursing the delay, forgetting that every transit system we depend on started as an unpopular hole in the ground that cost too much money. We walk through parks thinking the green grass was always guaranteed to be there, when the reality is that somebody had to fight like a badger against short-term profits just to leave the trees standing for their great-grandchildren.

Every single decision we make today, whether it is preserving a strip of creek-bank or choosing to pause and listen instead of pulling the trigger on a bitter argument, is a switch-point. Ten years from now, folks will look back at this exact autumn and see turning points that we are strolling right past without a second glance. The future isn't a pre-built line laid down by giants; it's laid down spike by spike by regular folks doing the best they can with the light they have. The fog is starting to curl up off the creek down yonder, and the air smells like fallen oak leaves and cedar smoke. The birds are settling in for the evening, and that old heron finally caught his fish and flapped off into the twilight.

Well. That is about the size of it for October twenty-seventh. I reckon I'll go put the kettle on and stir the stove. You take care of yourself until our next run down the line.