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Document summary:
- Title: Pneumatic Tube System (New York)
- Author: Amanda Griscom
- Source: http://www.feedmag.com/streetlevel/ny3feat.html
- Copyright: Amanda Griscom/FEED
- Date: 6 December 2000
Pneumatic Tube System (New York)
IN THE EARLY 1870s, Manhattan was trying to figure out its intercity transit system: an elevated railway system, an underground metro, a street trolley? Of the dozen or so plans circulating, the only one the New York Times saw as holding any immediate promise was an elevated system designed by Dr. Rufus Gilbert, who had received authorization from the state legislature in June 1872 to begin construction.
Gilbert's scheme not only dispensed with horsepower (the mode of transport at the time), it went beyond the realm of stream power, proposing to whoosh riders uptown and downtown by the force of pneumatic air in circular cars, eight feet in diameter, through iron tubes. Hoping to make the system as stylish as it would be efficient, Gilbert encased the tubes in a series of ornate Gothic arches shooting twenty-four feet above the street from cast-iron Corinthian columns. To reach the tubes, passengers would step into one of the pneumatic elevators located at each station, spaced one-half mile apart.
The New York Times called it "an ornament to the streets - the pride and boast of the people riding along the line." But funding the project became impossible during the financial panic of 1873 and the depression that followed. The city opted for a less expensive proposal from the New York Elevated Company, which turned out to be a total failure. Still, pneumatic transit is now considered an utterly futuristic and highly efficient concept. A tangled skein of pneumatic tubes even fills the skies of New New York in Matt Groening's Futurama.