By Tom Deignan

For any kid who grew up in Brooklyn, the subways were a central part of life, like it or not. 

Brian J. Cudahy grew to like the subways. He grew to like them a lot.

“This goes all the way back to kindergarten,” Cudahy said recently, before describing a maze of Brooklyn neighborhoods and subway connections which sent him to his grandmother’s house on days when she would watch him.

This year, New York City’s storied subway system celebrated its 100th birthday. Like the city’s Police Department and Catholic hierarchy, the subway system has long been associated with the Irish in New York. 

Who can forget the irascible Mike Quill, leader of the Transport Workers Union of America (TWU), the Irish immigrant with the thick brogue who brought the city to a halt in the 1960s, much to the chagrin of Mayor John Lindsay and other top officials?

For years the TWU was an Irish dominated union. But as Cudahy notes in his new book A Century of Subways: Celebrating 100 Years of New York’s Underground Railroad (Fordham University Press), the main workers on New York’s first major subway project, in 1904, were actually Italian.

Cudahy’s book is a fascinating tour through the history of New York’s subway system. Technically, the story begins on Wednesday, October 27, 1904, when the first subway cars rumbled from one downtown Manhattan stop to the next. 

Cudahy calls New York’s the world’s first subway system, though he acknowledges other cities had similar systems around the same time. 

What can’t be denied is that New York City laid the groundwork for a transportation system on such a massive scale. As Cudahy’s book also notes, other cities followed.

Indeed, along the way, Cudahy takes detours — or, if you will, transfers — and looks at transportation systems in Boston and London. Though New York’s subway story technically begins in 1904, Cudahy lays out the complicated backdrop though the story of one man: August Belmont. 

Belmont, in some ways, can be seen as the father of New York’s subway system. Cudahy even entitled his first chapter “August Belmont and His Subway.”

Along the way we learn that Boss Tweed and the Irish Democratic Machine in New York also played an influential, if at times dodgy, role in formulating the municipal plans which would ultimately produce a working system in 1904.

So, the subways have been around for a century now and Cudahy, 68, can proudly say he’s been studying and appreciating them for a good portion of their existence.

Cudahy — whose father’s parents came from Limerick and whose mother’s parents came from Tipperary — always kept his passion for New York’s underground railroad in the back of his mind. 

His father was a city firefighter but Cudahy, at one point, decided he heard a different calling and entered Cathedral Prep seminary school in Brooklyn.

It was through that institution that Cudahy, who holds Irish as well as American citizenship, also attended college. But when it came time to decide on a job Cudahy opted against the priesthood. He ended up teaching philosophy at Boston College.

But Cudahy’s love for New York and its subway system never went away. And in 1975, Cudahy got a phone call that would allow him to pursue his interest. He jumped at the opportunity, even if it wasn’t in his beloved Brooklyn.

A job opened up at Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority in Boston.

“I was going to take a two year sabbatical,” Cudahy explained. Then he was going to go back to teaching. 

Instead, he ended up working for the Boston transportation system. Then he moved on to Chicago, and then ended up working for the federal government in Washington. Cudahy now lives in Virginia.

Along the way he has written some of the most important books about urban mass transit systems, including Under the Sidewalks of New York, perhaps the definitive history of the New York system.

He has also spent time tracking down his Irish roots.

“I’ve visited there many times,” Cudahy says, referring to Ireland. “In fact, there is still a Cudahy general store in Limerick.”

Cudahy pauses, before adding, “At least it was still there last time I went.”

Well, at least Cudahy can always be assured that New York’s subways won’t be going away anytime soon.

(Contact Sidewalks at tdeignan@irishvoice.com.)