We stumbled on this one while digging through old Washington Times archives. On February 25th, 1912, just six weeks before the Titanic went down, the Sunday evening edition ran a headline: “Great Down Town Subway Planned for the Capital.”
A subway in Washington? In 1912?
By 1912, downtown D.C. was a tangle of steel rails and electric wires. Two private companies operated the streetcar network: the Washington Railway and Electric Company, which ran 109 miles of track stretching from Anacostia north through downtown and out to Bethesda and Silver Spring, and the Capital Traction Company, which operated 54 miles of track across the city. Thousands of cars ran every day, and at the busiest intersections near the Treasury, the White House, and Pennsylvania Avenue, the congestion had become genuinely dangerous. New York had opened its subway in 1904. Boston had underground streetcar tunnels since 1897. Washington, the nation’s capital, had nothing underground at all.
The District Commissioners decided to do something about it. Their proposal, described in the Washington Times on February 25th, 1912, called for a grand underground terminal at the intersection of 15th Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, New York Avenue, and G Street. That cluster of intersections sat right at the edge of the Treasury Department grounds, precisely where the most tangled streetcar traffic converged. From that central hub, subway tubes would radiate out along the most congested routes.
The plan was specific. Here is what the Commissioners outlined in their report to the Senate:
Establishment of a great underground terminal about the intersection of Fifteenth street, Pennsylvania avenue, New York avenue and G street.
Subway mains to lead out from this terminal for several blocks on each of the streets carrying car lines: Fifteenth street, Pennsylvania avenue, New York avenue, H street, G street, Fourteenth street, and Seventeenth street, on which the plan contemplates a new north south car line.
All cars are to be brought to this central terminal, both city and suburban.
Surface cars are to be entirely removed from the streets throughout the area covered by the terminal and radiating subways, thus relieving the congestion of traffic in that part of the city and adding greatly to the appearance and comfort of one of the most important sections of town, in the neighborhood of the Treasury, White House, and Judiciary square.
The projected cost was $5 million, which would be roughly $170 million in today’s dollars. That is not a staggering sum by modern transit standards. For context, both phases of the Silver Line to Dulles Airport together exceeded $6 billion.
Check out what the proposed lines looked like in a map published in the same article. The lines were densely clustered around the White House and Treasury, which was exactly where surface congestion was worst.
Look at the map and you can see this was really a streetcar subway, not a rapid transit system. The idea was to pull the existing surface cars underground at the downtown core rather than build an entirely new system. The routes did not extend far into the neighborhoods. This was a congestion fix for the blocks immediately surrounding the seat of federal power.
There was a serious complication. The streetcar lines were privately owned, and building competing government-funded underground service would damage the Washington Railway and Electric Company and Capital Traction Company badly. The proposed solution was to consolidate the two private companies and lease the new underground tunnel system to one of them. The operator, not the government, would run the subway. Whether that arrangement would have worked in practice is a different question, and Congress was not convinced.
Above ground: the 1912 streetcar map
To understand what the subway plan was trying to fix, look at what was already running on the surface. The map below accompanied the District Commissioners’ communication to the Senate on March 20th, 1912, only weeks after the Washington Times piece on the subway terminal. It was published as Enclosure No. 1 to Senate Document No. 441, 62nd Congress, 2nd Session, and shows every street railway line in the District along with the extensions the operating companies were asking to add.
The base of the chart is the Office of the Engineer Commissioner’s 1911 map of the permanent system of highways, with the rail lines drawn on top and the proposed extensions called out separately. The dense black tangle in the downtown core is exactly the congestion the underground terminal was supposed to relieve. Push out toward the edges and you can see how thin the network got beyond Mount Pleasant, Anacostia, and the lines running out past Tenleytown and into the Maryland suburbs.
The plan stalled in Congress, but the idea did not die. In 1913, Democratic Senator Joseph F. Johnston of Alabama introduced a bill to incorporate the Capital City Subway Company and authorize construction of the Washington subway system, to be connected with the existing surface lines. The company would have been authorized to charge five cents per fare or six fares for 25 cents.
A note on the record: the original version of this post listed the year of Johnston’s bill as 1918, but Senator Johnston died in office on August 8, 1913. The bill was introduced in 1913.
The District Commissioners came out against Johnston’s bill almost immediately, citing differences with their own 1912 report to Congress on what a subway should look like. But perhaps the most interesting opposition came from ordinary Washingtonians who wrote letters to the Times arguing that an underground system was a bad idea for a tourist city. People ride the streetcars partly to enjoy the view, they said. Take the cars underground and you take away the experience.
That argument sounds almost comic today, but it reflected something real about how Washington saw itself in 1913. The city was not yet the commuter-driven federal machine it would become. If you rode the Connecticut Avenue line out past Farragut Square on a clear morning, maybe you did not want to trade that for a tunnel.
Johnston’s bill did not pass. The Commissioners could not push their own proposal through Congress either. Washington stayed on the surface for decades more, and kept proposing underground rail through the Depression and into World War II. We have written about the 1944 wartime subway plan that would have been the largest in the country, and about the mid-1960s vision for Metro that looked very different from what was eventually built.
The streetcars themselves were gone from Washington by January 28th, 1962, eliminated as the automobile took over. Metro finally opened on March 27th, 1976, sixty-four years after the District Commissioners first put a subway plan on paper. Even opening day had a story worth telling.
As for the intersection of 15th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue where the grand underground terminal was supposed to go? It sits a block from the White House today, surrounded by federal buildings, tour groups on foot, and not a single streetcar in sight.
But there was a streetcar underground at Dupont Circle.