What if New York City had built a subway 30 years earlier and it had taken just minutes to ride across the city in a pneumatic tube?In NEW YORK’S SECRET SUBWAY: The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit published by Island Press, award-winning author and public radio host Matthew Algeo tells the riveting, real-life story of Alfred Beach, a visionary inventor who constructed America’s first operational subway, in secret, beneath the streets of 1860s Manhattan. Beach’s pneumatic railway was clean, fast, and decades ahead of its time, but in Gilded Age New York, innovation had a formidable enemy: Boss Tweed, a corrupt political kingpin. What followed was a clash of engineering genius and political sabotage, one that reshaped the future of mass transit.

Algeo brings this vivid chapter of history to life with vivid characters, scandal, and timeless themes such as the war between private vision and public corruption and the question of who really gets to shape a city. Perfect for readers interested in urban history, political drama, engineering marvels, and the early roots of America’s transit battles, it has been praised by Publishers Weekly as “…an immersive view of 1860s New York as a hotbed of innovation and corruption.”