PallasNew York City Opens Its First Subway 4th grade · age 9
By Simit Patel · published October 26, 2026
Was New York City right to use the public's tax money to help pay for a subway that a private company (the Interborough Rapid Transit Company) would run and profit from?
Under what conditions do we owe financial support to other people in our community?
The Judgment Lab asks: What do we think about that? When we work on the Judgment Lab, our ultimate goal is to articulate our own principles and values in a thoughtful and respectful way.
As you learned in the reading, by the 1890s New York City was packed with millions of people. Workers needed to get from the outer boroughs — the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens — into Manhattan, where most jobs were. The streets were jammed with horses, wagons, and people. New Yorkers needed something better: a fast, cheap way to get around.
The city could not build a subway on its own, so it made a deal. The city would help pay for the subway using public money, and a private company would run the trains. A wealthy man named August Belmont and his company, the IRT, won the right to build and operate the subway. Thousands of workers dug through Manhattan's hard rock, and the project used huge amounts of steel and concrete.
When the subway opened on October 27, 1904, it was a big success. Thousands of people lined up to ride. Express trains moved people across Manhattan in just ten to fifteen minutes, and a ride cost only a nickel. Families who had been squeezed into tight neighborhoods could now think about living farther out, where there was more room. The Judgment Lab asks whether New York City was right to spend the public's tax money to help pay for a subway that August Belmont's private company would run and profit from.
The Judgment Lab asks under what conditions we owe financial support to other people in our community. Financial support means using money to help pay for something that benefits others, not just yourself. When New York City used tax money to help build the subway, that money came from regular people — shopkeepers, factory workers, and families — who paid taxes to the city. The general question asks us to think about when it makes sense for a community to spend its shared money to help others, even if not everyone will benefit in exactly the same way.
Was New York City right to spend regular people's tax money to help build a subway that a private company — August Belmont's IRT — would run and make money from?
Follow the steps below to complete this Judgment Lab. By the end of the lab, you will have decided whether you think New York City was right to use the public's tax money to help pay for a subway that a private company would run and profit from. You will also articulate and test your principles about under what conditions we owe financial support to other people in our community.
Step one
Generating claims
Was New York City right to use the public's tax money to help pay for a subway that a private company (the Interborough Rapid Transit Company) would run and profit from?
Yes
No
Step two
Articulating principles and values
Under what conditions do we owe financial support to other people in our community?
Always, never, or sometimes?
Principles
I think that we owe financial support to other people in our community when...
Values and beliefs
I think that because I believe that...
Step three
Testing principles on a new case
The Erie Canal
About eighty years before the subway opened, New York had a different big problem. Farmers who lived way out in western New York could grow plenty of wheat and corn, but there was no cheap way to get it to the city. Hauling goods by wagon over bumpy dirt roads took weeks and cost so much that most farmers could not afford it. A politician named DeWitt Clinton had an idea: dig a canal, a man-made river, all the way from Lake Erie to the Hudson River, so boats could carry goods across the whole state.
Many people laughed at the idea. The canal would be 363 miles long, and nobody in America had ever built anything like it. The United States government said no when New York asked for help paying. So in 1817 New York State decided to pay for the canal itself, with public money raised by selling bonds and collecting taxes from people all over the state. Thousands of workers, many of them new immigrants from Ireland, dug the ditch with shovels and horses over eight years.
The Erie Canal opened in 1825. It worked better than almost anyone expected. The cost of shipping a ton of goods from Buffalo to New York City dropped from about one hundred dollars to less than ten. Towns like Rochester and Syracuse grew up along the water, and New York City became the busiest port in the country. The canal charged tolls to the boats that used it, and the money went back to the state, which paid off the whole cost of building it within about ten years. The state, not a private company, owned and ran the canal.
Apply your principle to the new case
According to your general principle, was New York State right to use the public's tax money to build the Erie Canal? Why or why not?
From New York City Opens Its First Subway, a 4th grade history lesson on Pallas.