Quite a hoopla is being made in respect of the 100th birthday this week of the New York subway, which today comprises 660 miles of track, provides 24-hour service to millions of riders a day, and is one of those marvels like Central Park or the Brooklyn Bridge. The anniversary plan, says the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, is for Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki to ride an antique subway car to the terminal at Grand Central from the old station at City Hall, which was the starting point of the opening, on October 27, 1904, of a 9.1 mile line of 28 stations that went up to Broadway and 145th Street. It was what the MTA calls the “first official subway system.”

The fact that there was an unofficial subway system illuminates one of the marvelous things about the history of the subway in the city. The unofficial line was only a block long and was built – try to imagine this today – in secret under the streets of New York by one of the owners of The New York Sun, Alfred Ely Beach. He carried out his scheme between 1869 and 1870 by digging a tunnel under Broadway from Warren Street to Murray Street. Beach’s bright idea was a private initiative, designed to prove feasibility, though his contraption was a pneumatic system, driven by a fan that blew the car in one direction in a tunnel and sucked it back in the other direction for the return trip.

It also triggered the first government meddling in the subway business, as an effort to expand Beach’s subway was torpedoed in Albany, apparently at the behest of Boss Tweed, according to accounts on the Internet. It’s a pattern that has held fast over the rest of the history of the subway’s 134-year history: expansion driven by private initiative, stunted by government control. The subways, after all, were built and constructed by private, profit seeking companies, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company. It was only during the vast expansion of government power from 1930 to 1940 that New York City got into the subway business and drove out the private operators.

As recently as the last few weeks, New Yorkers have discovered that the trains can’t be relied on when it rains. Projects like the no. 7 extension and the Second Avenue line in Manhattan linger on the drawing boards for decades without coming to fruition, and stations are encrusted with grime. The Clark Street station in Brooklyn was closed for months to “fix” the elevators, but the elevators still break down with depressing frequency. Stories abound of MTA boondoggles such as the $400 million headquarters at 2 Broadway, where a recent federal indictment says the mafia skimmed $10 million.

These columns haven’t given up on the idea that the way to fix the city’s subways is to bring back private ownership. Subways can be privately run profitably and efficiently, as experience in some Latin American cities and in Hong Kong have shown. We understand this idea isn’t much in fashion at the moment in New York. Our managing editor mentioned it to Mayor Bloomberg in the mayor’s inaugural interview with the Sun, only to be greeted with a derisive query about what mind-altering drug we might be smoking. Well, as we mark the New York subway’s birthday, our conviction remains that whatever solution to the city’s transportation problems presents itself, it will be from the spirit of private enterprise demonstrated so memorably by Al Beach.