Background
Robert Ridgway was born in Brooklyn, New York, the fifth son and sixth of seven children of Joseph Skidmore Ridgway, a lawyer, and Margaret (Stephens) Ridgway.
Robert Ridgway was born in Brooklyn, New York, the fifth son and sixth of seven children of Joseph Skidmore Ridgway, a lawyer, and Margaret (Stephens) Ridgway.
Business reverses forced the elder Ridgway to move his family to a farm in Green Brook, New Jersey, in 1875, with the result that Ridgway's formal education included only four years in public school in Brooklyn and practically ceased in his twelfth year.
His later career owed much to a friendship, begun when he was about seventeen, with the Rev. Walter C. Roberts, rector of Trinity Church in Cranford, New Jersey. A graduate of the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, Roberts became his guide, philosopher, and friend, aiding him in the study of geometry, trigonometry, and surveying and encouraging his engineering interests. Young Ridgway thus developed the habit of reading and self-education which to a remarkable degree made up for his lack of formal education.
He received honorary degrees from Harvard, Lehigh, New York University, and the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute.
Leaving home in 1882, Ridgway worked for two years as a railroad surveyor and locating engineer on the Northern Pacific Railroad in Montana Territory and Wisconsin.
His real career began, however, in 1884 when he was called back to New York City to work as a surveyor for the city Aqueduct Commission on the construction of the New Croton Aqueduct.
Since 1842 New York City had been provided with water by the old Croton System, the first major gravity water supply in the country, but this had long since proved inadequate to meet the city's growing needs. On the new aqueduct Ridgway acquired a fund of locating, surveying, and construction experience which was invaluable to him. Unlike the old Croton, which was a cut-and-cover construction close to the ground surface, the New Croton was in major part a far more direct deep-tunnel job; it thus afforded excellent schooling for an engineer whose career was to center in subway building.
Through Alfred Craven, with whom he had become intimately acquainted on the aqueduct work, Ridgway next obtained a position (1900) with the Rapid Transit Commission, which, under the leadership of William Barclay Parsons as chief engineer, was engaged in building New York City's first subway system. Here again his knowledge of construction and construction surveying enabled him to set up in the busy city streets the control points essential to the building of this great open-cut work - "Parsons' Ditch" as it was called.
Later he became division engineer, charged with the construction of the loop of the elevated railway at the Battery, the tunnel under the East River to Joralemon Street, Brooklyn, and the first Flatbush Avenue line. This was the first transit tunnel to be built under the East River, and the work also involved difficult subway construction in the streets of lower Manhattan.
When this first phase of New York subway construction came to an end, Ridgway turned to the great Catskill Water Supply System for the city, then getting under way, on which he was engaged from late 1905 to late 1911.
His reputation and abilities having been recognized by Jonas Waldo Smith, the chief engineer, he was given charge of the Northern Aqueduct Department, extending from the Ashokan Dam to Peekskill, much of it in tunnel and including the remarkable shafts and deep tunnel 1, 100 feet below water level carrying the supply under the Hudson River. As this work neared completion, Ridgway again returned to New York subway work.
He worked for a time on the projected independent "Triboro System, " plans for which were prepared by the State Public Service Commission, of which Craven was chief engineer. After much controversy, however, the Triboro plan was dropped, and contracts were entered into for the extension of the existing Interborough and Brooklyn-Manhattan systems.
Ridgway, assisted by a large corps of engineers, had general supervision of this difficult task. In 1921 he became chief engineer of the Transit Commission, continuing in this position after 1924 under the Board of Transportation. He thus presided over the building of the "Independent System, " one of the largest subway projects ever undertaken by a municipality.
He retired in 1933 at the age of seventy-one. Ridgway's expert knowledge had been called into service by other cities during these years. He served on a commission which made a study for a Chicago subway in 1916-17 and again thirteen years later.
He was consultant on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in 1927, on the Colorado River Board (Hoover Dam) in 1928, on the New York Midtown Tunnel in 1933, and on a proposed San Francisco subway in 1935.
He died in a hospital at Fort Wayne, Indiana, after being stricken with a coronary thrombosis on his way home from the ceremony of breaking ground for the Chicago subway. He was buried in Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, New York.
He was a member of a number of technical societies, including the Franklin Institute and the American Society of Civil Engineers, of which he was elected president in 1925 and was made an honorary member in 1934.
A man of sterling character, rather simple and quiet, almost reticent, Ridgway led by example rather than by dictation. He had a marked capacity for friendship and a remarkable memory for names.
He married twice. His first wife, Lillie Augusta Littell of Cranford, New Jersey, whom he had married on May 10, 1888, died in 1927. On September 15, 1928, he married Isabel Louise Law of New York City, who survived him. He had no children.