People in the Washington area like to complain about the Metro system, but after reading an account of how the rail line came into existence, it’s an absolute miracle we have one at all.

Zachary Schrag’s “The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro” is a fascinating look at the early political battles and rivalries between those who wanted a rail system and those who wanted to carve up the city with freeways.  Some of it gets into typical boring Washington minutiae with different committees represented by acronyms, but the overall work provides amazing insight into what Metro was supposed to be and eventually became.

There’s a lot of discussion of the design, particularly the stations, as well as the way they were constructed.  For much of the downtown portion, the building involved digging a giant hole in the street, pouring the concrete shell for the station, and putting the street back on top.  I had no idea.

For areas where rocky soil meant drilling instead, an early design for the stations included leaving parts of the rock exposed above the platform instead of the typical vaulted arch pictured above.

What I found particularly interesting was reading above the many trade-offs and changes that came during the design process.  For example, I’ve riden up the immensely long Dupont Circle escalators, but had no idea there was a reason for the station being so far underground.  Metro planners wanted the tracks to go on a bridge over nearby Rock Creek, but as Schrag writes, the National Park Service objected, meaning the train had to instead tunnel deep underneath.

The Park Service also didn’t want an escalator rising out of Farragut Square, a spot northwest of the White House where Metro wanted to build a transfer station.  That construction would have also meant digging up the square and moving its central statue for a few years.  Instead, the two lines that were to intersect remain separate, with stations one block apart.  At the University of Maryland, planners wanted a station on campus (which I could have used several times) but Schrag writes that the school objected, and now the station is a shuttle bus ride away.

Random fact: the font for the “M” in the Metro logo is Helvetica.

One of the most interesting characters to emerge in this story is Jackson Graham, an Army Corps of Engineers major general who led Metro during the construction.  Schrag recounts Graham’s very direct military style in trying to get things done, such as when a Metro planner brought up the awkwardness of naming the main transfer station “12th & G.”  Graham said he was open to a change.

“I’ll let you know,” the planner told him.  Graham gave him 20 seconds to come up with an answer.  The planner replied, “Metro Center.”  That’s what it is.

Schrag also tells how while the tunnels under the city were being built, Graham would ride through them on his dirt bike.

But there’s also the seemingly inconceivable view he had in making the system accessible for the region’s handicapped.  Original designs did not include elevators, and when proposals came to add them to stations — many with concrete already poured — Graham balked, suggesting people in wheelchairs could ride escalators.  He even went as far as taking a film crew to Dulles to demonstrate how this is possible.  Metro has elevators.

The final big piece of the story is what wasn’t built.  In Virginia, planners chose to route the trains to Vienna, instead of the commercial hub in Tysons Corner.  At the time, Tysons wasn’t what it is today, and only now that it has expanded far beyond the projected growth is Metro getting a new line through there.  The final station in that leg of extension sits just down the street from my house and is slated to open at the end of the year:

I had to laugh when Schrag talked about the way neighborhoods reacted to planned stations, particularly those with parking lots.  With this new station coming, I’ve seen so many comments on news stories warning about the disastrous effects it will have.  As Schrag writes about the original system, “Wherever WMATA planned stations with large parking lots, the neighbors complained.”

There’s so much more I could write about this book — I flagged 72 items — but I’ll just end with this example of what we often don’t know about the familiar world around us.  Metro named many stations after their neighborhood, but in some places, Schrag writes, that they invented names like Gallery Place.  I’ve been to this station/area a million times, and only when he pointed out that it’s named after the Portrait Gallery across the street did the “gallery” part click.  I never even thought about it.