October 27 · This Day in America
At 2:35 in the afternoon, Mayor George McClellan takes the controls himself and will not give them up for miles. He is driving the first train of the New York City subway — nine miles, twenty-eight stations, City Hall to Harlem, carved beneath the streets of the most crowded city in America. The crowds had waited above for years while crews blasted and shored the tunnels by hand; some workers died doing it. Now the doors open to the public and one hundred fifty thousand people pour down the stairs in a single evening just to ride. A city that had been choking on its own surface — horses, trolleys, foot traffic — discovers it can move beneath itself, fast, in any weather, forever. The shape of the modern American city is decided in those tunnels. New York would never again be a place you crossed only on foot.
Source: www.gilderlehrman.org
Also on this day · 1858
He arrives in a brownstone on East 20th Street, asthmatic and frail, a child who can barely breathe through the night. His father tells him to make his body. He does — boxing, ranching, climbing, charging — and carries that ferocity into the presidency, the Panama Canal, the national parks, and a life lived, as he put it, at the full. The frail boy becomes the most exuberant American who ever held the office.
Source: www.nps.gov
“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much.”Theodore Roosevelt, 1899