Beneath the Streets of Boston: Building America's First Subway

Beckoning readers to explore the territory beneath Boston’s streets, Joe McKendry explores a century-old world when Beantown designed and created the country’s first subway. In stunning artwork and through a fascinating narrative, you will enter the subterranean realm of workers who dug miles of tunnels by hand. Using pick and shovels to create new routes, you’ll discover how these workers burrowed deep below Boston Harbor, under Beacon Hill and the Old State House, and built the Longfellow Bridge to carry the trains over the Charles River to the center of Cambridge. You’ll read lively first-hand accounts of the turn-of-the-century public’s perception of the underground public transportation, including their fears (expressed fantastically through the gruesome image of a fanged and tentacled “subway microbe”), and learn how the system served as a model for the rest of the country in its ability to relieve traffic, mitigate congestion (which was even more severe a hundred years ago than today) and get people anywhere they wanted to go for only a nickel.

Joe McKendry is a painter and illustrator whose work has appeared in over 100 publications worldwide, including the New York Times, the London Times, and Vanity Fair, as well as two books, Beneath the Streets of Boston: Building America’s First Subway (2005) and One Times Square: A Century of Change at the Crossroads of the World (2012). A native of Maynard, Massachusetts, Mr. McKendry teaches painting and illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design.