Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/354

 The Giant Task of the Subway Diggers in New York

��By Charles Phelps Gushing

��IS there anywhere in New York to- night a cross section of street-life more dramatic in contrasts than the bit of Broadway in front of the Metro- poHtan Opera House? The (ireat White Way is gay, thronged, and gHttering. The opera is just over; crowds in even- ing clothes, silk-hatted and the bejew- cled, are pouring out to their waiting limousines. There, as in past years, the pageant of wealth parades — but this sea- son with a difference. The sidewalk and the pavement of Broadway are now rough planks, and from below this rum- bling floor the shrill tattoo of a drill re- sounds upon rock. Picture this cross section :

Above that plank floor, the silks and jewels and glittering lights; below it, in half-darkness, a squad of laborers in greasy overalls, stained with sweat and mud, risking their lives to build another subwav.

��New York rarely gives a thought to its thousands of sappers and miners.

"Building another subway,'' it says. "Wish they'd hurry and get it over. They've torn up half the town."

So a khaki army in the subway trenches hurries, by day and by night, risking life and limb like soldiers. The peril of the job is a story in itself, not to be told in a paragraph. Suffice it, for the present, to say that only a few yards farther down the same street one person was killed and three persons were wounded a short time ago when a layer of "rotten stone" slipped into the subway ditch and half a block of the floor of Broadway follow'ed it.

Transj^orting Three Billion People in a Year

The average resident of New York has very little comprehension of the vastness of these great engineering operations. Is the human mind able to picture

���The simplest method of building a subway, known as the "cut and cover" method. If the entire length could be built with open construction, the engineers would have a comparatively sim- ple task. The twisted vertical steel rods are the reenforcing members for the concrete walk

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