William Barclay Parsons

The career of William Barclay Parsons embodies a stirring story in our age of engineering progress. By most New Yorkers, Parsons will be remembered as the original designer of the Subway; but that was only one adventure. He smelt powder with our engineering corps in the Spanish war; fought his way through insurgent China, against official warnings, to survey the ground for the Canton-Hankow railway; served at the Cambrai front with Pershing’s command as early as September, 1917, when his engineering regiment beat off a German counter-attack, all but with picks and shovels. The few losses of that day were the first American casualties of the war. Parsons’ persistency had much to do with forcing, at the turn of the century, the long-deferred completion of New York city’s “Underground.” He did this through solving, one after another, engineering obstacles which were asserted to be insoluble; it was largely his personal achievement in that field which made possible the entirely successful opening of the first line from City Hall to Ninety-sixth Street, almost thirty years ago. But he was always planning for large construction enterprises, up to the very last. So rugged and resolute a personality was bound to adopt and to insist on views peculiarly his own. Perhaps because the Subway was a child of his own invention, he hated the Elevated. Not content with reciting the benefits to traffic and residents, if Sixth and Ninth Avenue could be disencumbered from that overhead monstrosity, Parsons sometimes hinted darkly that the Elevated was rusting away and some time would fall down. He warmly defended the Nicaragua route for the Isthmian Canal as against Panama. But, from first to last, he was a man of energy. Asked in his later years his idea of the basis for success, he replied: “I have utterly failed to discover any substitute for hard work; I know of no way to succeed, except by plugging.”

Alexander Dana Noyes
1933 Century Association Yearbook