Newsweek‘s Brian Braiker on how the NYC subway system — mobile technology from an earlier era– made the city what it is today.
When the Dutch East India Company set out to build New Amsterdam in the 17th century, it was not as a religious settlement but as a business center. Then Alexander Hamilton decided that New York City was not going to be the agrarian society envisioned by the founding gentleman farmers of Virginia, but an economic engine driving the nation’s commerce and mercantilism. Gov. DeWitt Clinton, who served two nonconsecutive terms (1817-22, 1825-28), followed his lead — and built the Erie Canal. The canal was the very key to making New York’s port the country’s greatest, eclipsing Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia and Norfolk, and turning the city into a center for national commerce, as well as a gateway to the West. New York thus arguably owes its commercial success to one source: the ability to move goods and people from one place to another efficiently and en masse.
Enter the subway, which turns 100 this month. If anything truly revolutionized the way New Yorkers live, work and play, it’s the subway. On any given weekday, 4.5 million people travel on the 6,400 cars that run along 722 miles of track beneath the city’s five teeming boroughs. For all their complaints about it — the dirt! the crowding! the noise — the subway remains nothing short of the miracle it was when the subway opened in 1904.