In 1868 he managed to get past Tweed an inconsequential-appearing bill permitting him to establish an experimental pneumatic tube for moving mail. Then, toward the end of the year, with no more legal right than that, he went to work. He had rented Devlin’s clothing store at Broadway and Murray, and there, in the cellar, he began digging a tunnel, nine feet in diameter, that was to run a block uptown, to Warren Street, directly beneath Broadway.
