The winter of 1888 was nothing like this winter. “Snow was the furthest thing from people’s mind,” said Doug Most, author of The Race Underground: Boston, New york, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America’s First Subway. “New York City, Boston, the entire Northeast was winding down one of the mildest winters on record.”
That all changed here on the evening of March 11.
"Bright sunshine turned to light rain and then started to come down a little harder," Most said. "The wind started kicking up. And nobody could have anticipated that hundreds and hundreds of people were about to die."
The next morning the rain had turned to a swirling, wet snow. By that afternoon, things turned more ugly than anyone could have imagined.
"Snow fell so quickly and just piled up so fast, wind gusts and everything — havoc," Most said. "The entire downtown district was essentially shut down. The snow was just beating them. They couldn’t move. People were found a week later in snow drifts. It just crippled the northeast."
In 1888, modern weather forecasting had yet to be developed, so there was no advanced warning of the speed and severity of the storm. Schools and shops did not close in advance. And people moved around the city on trains or horse draw street carriages. Everyone from shoppers to factory workers were stranded in the storm.
"The street carriages essentially were abandoned on the streets," Most said. "The drivers would take them out thinking they’d be able to move them through downtown through Tremont Street and Boylston Street and be able to move people about but eventually the carriage drivers just abandoned their vehicles right on the street."
Just months earlier, a street railway magnate named Henry Melville Whitney had proposed a radical idea to the Massachusetts state legislature: Move the street cars off the streets.
By the time it was over, all the telegraph wires were brought down. Railroad cars in and out of the city were completely crippled. Passengers and crewmen were stranded without food, water, or heat — with no way to communicate their position — in some cases for days.
The headline in the Boston Globe on the morning of March 13 read simply, in all caps, "CUT OFF."
All told, the storm was responsible for as many as 1,000 deaths along the east coast.
But from the tragedy came an unexpected: one of the most important innovations of the 19th century.
Just months earlier, a street railway magnate named Henry Melville Whitney had proposed a radical idea to the Massachusetts state legislature: Move the street cars off the streets.
"'We need to build a tunnel under Boston common,' which is of course where the tunnel exists today," Most said. "Those words had sort of never been uttered before."
And — at the time — they were met with skepticism. But following the epic storm, what once seemed radical all of a sudden seemed practical — even necessary.
"Cities decided that they could no longer be at the mercy of the skies, if you will," Most said. "They had to figure out a way to change that and that’s how the subway was born, largely because of this blizzard."
The movement to build an underground transit system immediately caught fire and within a decade, in 1897, America’s first subway opened for business, right here in Boston.
The Blizzard of 1888, the Storm that crippled the East Coast and helped pave the way for the T. And it all happened right here, 126 years ago this week.
