A Matter of Tunnels
The question of Sohlberg adjusted thus simply, if brutally, Cowperwood
turned his attention to Mrs. Sohlberg. But there was nothing much to
be done. He explained that he had now completely subdued Aileen and
Sohlberg, that the latter would make no more trouble, that he was going
to pension him, that Aileen would remain permanently quiescent. He
expressed the greatest solicitude for her, but Rita was now sickened of
this tangle. She had loved him, as she thought, but through the rage
of Aileen she saw him in a different light, and she wanted to get away.
His money, plentiful as it was, did not mean as much to her as it might
have meant to some women; it simply spelled luxuries, without which she
could exist if she must. His charm for her had, perhaps, consisted
mostly in the atmosphere of flawless security, which seemed to surround
him--a glittering bubble of romance. That, by one fell attack, was now
burst. He was seen to be quite as other men, subject to the same
storms, the same danger of shipwreck. Only he was a better sailor than
most. She recuperated gradually; left for home; left for Europe;
details too long to be narrated. Sohlberg, after much meditating and
fuming, finally accepted the offer of Cowperwood and returned to
Denmark. Aileen, after a few days of quarreling, in which he agreed to
dispense with Antoinette Nowak, returned home.
Cowperwood was in no wise pleased by this rough denouement. Aileen had
not raised her own attractions in his estimation, and yet, strange to
relate, he was not unsympathetic with her. He had no desire to desert
her as yet, though for some time he had been growing in the feeling
that Rita would have been a much better type of wife for him. But what
he could not have, he could not have. He turned his attention with
renewed force to his business; but it was with many a backward glance
at those radiant hours when, with Rita in his presence or enfolded by
his arms, he had seen life from a new and poetic angle. She was so
charming, so naive--but what could he do?
For several years thereafter Cowperwood was busy following the Chicago
street-railway situation with increasing interest. He knew it was
useless to brood over Rita Sohlberg--she would not return--and yet he
could not help it; but he could work hard, and that was something. His
natural aptitude and affection for street-railway work had long since
been demonstrated, and it was now making him restless. One might have
said of him quite truly that the tinkle of car-bells and the plop of
plodding horses' feet was in his blood. He surveyed these extending
lines, with their jingling cars, as he went about the city, with an
almost hungry eye. Chicago was growing fast, and these little
horse-cars on certain streets were crowded night and morning--fairly
bulging with people at the rush-hours. If he could only secure an
octopus-grip on one or all of them; if he could combine and control
them all! What a fortune! That, if nothing else, might salve him for
some of his woes--a tremendous fortune--nothing less. He forever
busied himself with various aspects of the scene quite as a poet might
have concerned himself with rocks and rills. To own these
street-railways! To own these street-railways! So rang the song of his
mind.
Like the gas situation, the Chicago street-railway situation was
divided into three parts--three companies representing and
corresponding with the three different sides or divisions of the city.
The Chicago City Railway Company, occupying the South Side and
extending as far south as Thirty-ninth Street, had been organized in
1859, and represented in itself a mine of wealth. Already it
controlled some seventy miles of track, and was annually being added to
on Indiana Avenue, on Wabash Avenue, on State Street, and on Archer
Avenue. It owned over one hundred and fifty cars of the old-fashioned,
straw-strewn, no-stove type, and over one thousand horses; it employed
one hundred and seventy conductors, one hundred and sixty drivers, a
hundred stablemen, and blacksmiths, harness-makers, and repairers in
interesting numbers. Its snow-plows were busy on the street in winter,
its sprinkling-cars in summer. Cowperwood calculated its shares,
bonds, rolling-stock, and other physical properties as totaling in the
vicinity of over two million dollars. The trouble with this company was
that its outstanding stock was principally controlled by Norman
Schryhart, who was now decidedly inimical to Cowperwood, or anything he
might wish to do, and by Anson Merrill, who had never manifested any
signs of friendship. He did not see how he was to get control of this
property. Its shares were selling around two hundred and fifty dollars.
The North Chicago City Railway was a corporation which had been
organized at the same time as the South Side company, but by a
different group of men. Its management was old, indifferent, and
incompetent, its equipment about the same. The Chicago West Division
Railway had originally been owned by the Chicago City or South Side
Railway, but was now a separate corporation. It was not yet so
profitable as the other divisions of the city, but all sections of the
city were growing. The horse-bell was heard everywhere tinkling gaily.
Standing on the outside of this scene, contemplating its promise,
Cowperwood much more than any one else connected financially with the
future of these railways at this time was impressed with their enormous
possibilities--their enormous future if Chicago continued to grow, and
was concerned with the various factors which might further or impede
their progress.
Not long before he had discovered that one of the chief handicaps to
street-railway development, on the North and West Sides, lay in the
congestion of traffic at the bridges spanning the Chicago River.
Between the street ends that abutted on it and connected the two sides
of the city ran this amazing stream--dirty, odorous, picturesque,
compact of a heavy, delightful, constantly crowding and moving boat
traffic, which kept the various bridges momentarily turning, and tied
up the street traffic on either side of the river until it seemed at
times as though the tangle of teams and boats would never any more be
straightened out. It was lovely, human, natural, Dickensesque--a fit
subject for a Daumier, a Turner, or a Whistler. The idlest of
bridge-tenders judged for himself when the boats and when the teams
should be made to wait, and how long, while in addition to the regular
pedestrians a group of idlers stood at gaze fascinated by the crowd of
masts, the crush of wagons, and the picturesque tugs in the foreground
below. Cowperwood, as he sat in his light runabout, annoyed by a delay,
or dashed swiftly forward to get over before a bridge turned, had long
since noted that the street-car service in the North and West Sides was
badly hampered. The unbroken South Side, unthreaded by a river, had no
such problem, and was growing rapidly.
Because of this he was naturally interested to observe one day, in the
course of his peregrinations, that there existed in two places under
the Chicago River--in the first place at La Salle Street, running north
and south, and in the second at Washington Street, running east and
west--two now soggy and rat-infested tunnels which were never used by
anybody--dark, dank, dripping affairs only vaguely lighted with
oil-lamp, and oozing with water. Upon investigation he learned that
they had been built years before to accommodate this same tide of wagon
traffic, which now congested at the bridges, and which even then had
been rapidly rising. Being forced to pay a toll in time to which a
slight toll in cash, exacted for the privilege of using a tunnel, had
seemed to the investors and public infinitely to be preferred, this
traffic had been offered this opportunity of avoiding the delay.
However, like many another handsome commercial scheme on paper or
bubbling in the human brain, the plan did not work exactly. These
tunnels might have proved profitable if they had been properly built
with long, low-per-cent. grades, wide roadways, and a sufficiency of
light and air; but, as a matter of fact, they had not been judiciously
adapted to public convenience. Norman Schryhart's father had been an
investor in these tunnels, and Anson Merrill. When they had proved
unprofitable, after a long period of pointless manipulation--cost, one
million dollars--they had been sold to the city for exactly that sum
each, it being poetically deemed that a growing city could better
afford to lose so disturbing an amount than any of its humble,
ambitious, and respectable citizens. That was a little affair by which
members of council had profited years before; but that also is another
story.
After discovering these tunnels Cowperwood walked through them several
times--for though they were now boarded up, there was still an
uninterrupted footpath--and wondered why they could not be utilized.
It seemed to him that if the street-car traffic were heavy enough,
profitable enough, and these tunnels, for a reasonable sum, could be
made into a lower grade, one of the problems which now hampered the
growth of the North and West Sides would be obviated. But how? He did
not own the tunnels. He did not own the street-railways. The cost of
leasing and rebuilding the tunnels would be enormous. Helpers and
horses and extra drivers on any grade, however slight, would have to be
used, and that meant an extra expense. With street-car horses as the
only means of traction, and with the long, expensive grades, he was not
so sure that this venture would be a profitable one.
However, in the fall of 1880, or a little earlier (when he was still
very much entangled with the preliminary sex affairs that led
eventually to Rita Sohlberg), he became aware of a new system of
traction relating to street-cars which, together with the arrival of
the arc-light, the telephone, and other inventions, seemed destined to
change the character of city life entirely.
Recently in San Francisco, where the presence of hills made the
movement of crowded street-railway cars exceedingly difficult, a new
type of traction had been introduced--that of the cable, which was
nothing more than a traveling rope of wire running over guttered wheels
in a conduit, and driven by immense engines, conveniently located in
adjacent stations or "power-houses." The cars carried a readily
manipulated "grip-lever," or steel hand, which reached down through a
slot into a conduit and "gripped" the moving cable. This invention
solved the problem of hauling heavily laden street-cars up and down
steep grades. About the same time he also heard, in a roundabout way,
that the Chicago City Railway, of which Schryhart and Merrill were the
principal owners, was about to introduce this mode of traction on its
lines--to cable State Street, and attach the cars of other lines
running farther out into unprofitable districts as "trailers." At once
the solution of the North and West Side problems flashed upon
him--cables.
Outside of the bridge crush and the tunnels above mentioned, there was
one other special condition which had been for some time past
attracting Cowperwood's attention. This was the waning energy of the
North Chicago City Railway Company--the lack of foresight on the part
of its directors which prevented them from perceiving the proper
solution of their difficulties. The road was in a rather
unsatisfactory state financially--really open to a coup of some sort.
In the beginning it had been considered unprofitable, so thinly
populated was the territory they served, and so short the distance from
the business heart. Later, however, as the territory filled up, they
did better; only then the long waits at the bridges occurred. The
management, feeling that the lines were likely to be poorly patronized,
had put down poor, little, light-weight rails, and run slimpsy cars
which were as cold as ice in winter and as hot as stove-ovens in
summer. No attempt had been made to extend the down-town terminus of
the several lines into the business center--they stopped just over the
river which bordered it at the north. (On the South Side Mr. Schryhart
had done much better for his patrons. He had already installed a loop
for his cable about Merrill's store.) As on the West Side, straw was
strewn in the bottom of all the cars in winter to keep the feet of the
passengers warm, and but few open cars were used in summer. The
directors were averse to introducing them because of the expense. So
they had gone on and on, adding lines only where they were sure they
would make a good profit from the start, putting down the same style of
cheap rail that had been used in the beginning, and employing the same
antique type of car which rattled and trembled as it ran, until the
patrons were enraged to the point of anarchy. Only recently, because of
various suits and complaints inaugurated, the company had been greatly
annoyed, but they scarcely knew what to do, how to meet the onslaught.
Though there was here and there a man of sense--such as Terrence
Mulgannon, the general superintendent; Edwin Kaffrath, a director;
William Johnson, the constructing engineer of the company--yet such
other men as Onias C. Skinner, the president, and Walter Parker, the
vice-president, were reactionaries of an elderly character,
conservative, meditative, stingy, and, worst of all, fearful or without
courage for great adventure. It is a sad commentary that age almost
invariably takes away the incentive to new achievement and makes "Let
well enough alone" the most appealing motto.
Mindful of this, Cowperwood, with a now splendid scheme in his mind,
one day invited John J. McKenty over to his house to dinner on a social
pretext. When the latter, accompanied by his wife, had arrived, and
Aileen had smiled on them both sweetly, and was doing her best to be
nice to Mrs. McKenty, Cowperwood remarked:
"McKenty, do you know anything about these two tunnels that the city
owns under the river at Washington and La Salle streets?"
"I know that the city took them over when it didn't need them, and that
they're no good for anything. That was before my time, though,"
explained McKenty, cautiously. "I think the city paid a million for
them. Why?"
"Oh, nothing much," replied Cowperwood, evading the matter for the
present. "I was wondering whether they were in such condition that
they couldn't be used for anything. I see occasional references in the
papers to their uselessness."
"They're in pretty bad shape, I'm afraid," replied McKenty. "I haven't
been through either of them in years and years. The idea was
originally to let the wagons go through them and break up the crowding
at the bridges. But it didn't work. They made the grade too steep and
the tolls too high, and so the drivers preferred to wait for the
bridges. They were pretty hard on horses. I can testify to that
myself. I've driven a wagon-load through them more than once. The
city should never have taken them over at all by rights. It was a
deal. I don't know who all was in it. Carmody was mayor then, and
Aldrich was in charge of public works."
He relapsed into silence, and Cowperwood allowed the matter of the
tunnels to rest until after dinner when they had adjourned to the
library. There he placed a friendly hand on McKenty's arm, an act of
familiarity which the politician rather liked.
"You felt pretty well satisfied with the way that gas business came out
last year, didn't you?" he inquired.
"I did," replied McKenty, warmly. "Never more so. I told you that at
the time." The Irishman liked Cowperwood, and was grateful for the
swift manner in which he had been made richer by the sum of several
hundred thousand dollars.
"Well, now, McKenty," continued Cowperwood, abruptly, and with a
seeming lack of connection, "has it ever occurred to you that things
are shaping up for a big change in the street-railway situation here? I
can see it coming. There's going to be a new motor power introduced on
the South Side within a year or two. You've heard of it?"
"I read something of it," replied McKenty, surprised and a little
questioning. He took a cigar and prepared to listen. Cowperwood,
never smoking, drew up a chair.
"Well, I'll tell you what that means," he explained. "It means that
eventually every mile of street-railway track in this city--to say
nothing of all the additional miles that will be built before this
change takes place--will have to be done over on an entirely new basis.
I mean this cable-conduit system. These old companies that are
hobbling along now with an old equipment will have to make the change.
They'll have to spend millions and millions before they can bring their
equipment up to date. If you've paid any attention to the matter you
must have seen what a condition these North and West Side lines are in."
"It's pretty bad; I know that," commented McKenty.
"Just so," replied Cowperwood, emphatically. "Well, now, if I know
anything about these old managements from studying them, they're going
to have a hard time bringing themselves to do this. Two to three
million are two to three million, and it isn't going to be an easy
matter for them to raise the money--not as easy, perhaps, as it would
be for some of the rest of us, supposing we wanted to go into the
street-railway business."
"Yes, supposing," replied McKenty, jovially. "But how are you to get
in it? There's no stock for sale that I know of."
"Just the same," said Cowperwood, "we can if we want to, and I'll show
you how. But at present there's just one thing in particular I'd like
you to do for me. I want to know if there is any way that we can get
control of either of those two old tunnels that I was talking to you
about a little while ago. I'd like both if I might. Do you suppose
that is possible?"
"Why, yes," replied McKenty, wondering; "but what have they got to do
with it? They're not worth anything. Some of the boys were talking
about filling them in some time ago--blowing them up. The police think
crooks hide in them."
"Just the same, don't let any one touch them--don't lease them or
anything," replied Cowperwood, forcefully. "I'll tell you frankly what
I want to do. I want to get control, just as soon as possible, of all
the street-railway lines I can on the North and West Sides--new or old
franchises. Then you'll see where the tunnels come in."
He paused to see whether McKenty caught the point of all he meant, but
the latter failed.
"You don't want much, do you?" he said, cheerfully. "But I don't see
how you can use the tunnels. However, that's no reason why I shouldn't
take care of them for you, if you think that's important."
"It's this way," said Cowperwood, thoughtfully. "I'll make you a
preferred partner in all the ventures that I control if you do as I
suggest. The street-railways, as they stand now, will have to be taken
up lock, stock, and barrel, and thrown into the scrap heap within eight
or nine years at the latest. You see what the South Side company is
beginning to do now. When it comes to the West and North Side
companies they won't find it so easy. They aren't earning as much as
the South Side, and besides they have those bridges to cross. That
means a severe inconvenience to a cable line. In the first place, the
bridges will have to be rebuilt to stand the extra weight and strain.
Now the question arises at once--at whose expense? The city's?"
"That depends on who's asking for it," replied Mr. McKenty, amiably.
"Quite so," assented Cowperwood. "In the next place, this river
traffic is becoming impossible from the point of view of a decent
street-car service. There are waits now of from eight to fifteen
minutes while these tows and vessels get through. Chicago has five
hundred thousand population to-day. How much will it have in 1890? In
1900? How will it be when it has eight hundred thousand or a million?"
"You're quite right," interpolated McKenty. "It will be pretty bad."
"Exactly. But what is worse, the cable lines will carry trailers, or
single cars, from feeder lines. There won't be single cars waiting at
these draws--there will be trains, crowded trains. It won't be
advisable to delay a cable-train from eight to fifteen minutes while
boats are making their way through a draw. The public won't stand for
that very long, will it, do you think?"
"Not without making a row, probably," replied McKenty.
"Well, that means what, then?" asked Cowperwood. "Is the traffic going
to get any lighter? Is the river going to dry up?"
Mr. McKenty stared. Suddenly his face lighted. "Oh, I see," he said,
shrewdly. "It's those tunnels you're thinking about. Are they in any
shape to be used?"
"They can be made over cheaper than new ones can be built."
"True for you," replied McKenty, "and if they're in any sort of repair
they'd be just what you'd want." He was emphatic, almost triumphant.
"They belong to the city. They cost pretty near a million apiece,
those things."
"I know it," said Cowperwood. "Now, do you see what I'm driving at?"
"Do I see!" smiled McKenty. "That's a real idea you have, Cowperwood.
I take off my hat to you. Say what you want."
"Well, then, in the first place," replied Cowperwood, genially, "it is
agreed that the city won't part with those two tunnels under any
circumstances until we can see what can be done about this other
matter?"
"It will not."
"In the next place, it is understood, is it, that you won't make it any
easier than you can possibly help for the North and West Side companies
to get ordinances extending their lines, or anything else, from now on?
I shall want to introduce some franchises for feeders and outlying
lines myself."
"Bring in your ordinances," replied McKenty, "and I'll do whatever you
say. I've worked with you before. I know that you keep your word."
"Thanks," said Cowperwood, warmly. "I know the value of keeping it.
In the mean while I'll go ahead and see what can be done about the
other matter. I don't know just how many men I will need to let in on
this, or just what form the organization will take. But you may depend
upon it that your interests will be properly taken care of, and that
whatever is done will be done with your full knowledge and consent."
"All very good," answered McKenty, thinking of the new field of
activity before them. A combination between himself and Cowperwood in
a matter like this must prove very beneficial to both. And he was
satisfied, because of their previous relations, that his own interests
would not be neglected.
"Shall we go and see if we can find the ladies?" asked Cowperwood,
jauntily, laying hold of the politician's arm.
"To be sure," assented McKenty, gaily. "It's a fine house you have
here--beautiful. And your wife is as pretty a woman as I ever saw, if
you'll pardon the familiarity."
"I have always thought she was rather attractive myself," replied
Cowperwood, innocently.