by Jill Jonnes
CONQUERING GOTHAM
ALSO BY JILL JONNES
Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse
and the Race to Electrify the World
South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of
an American City
Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of
America’s Romance with Illegal Drugs
CONQUERING GOTHAM
A GILDED AGE EPIC:
THE CONSTRUCTION OF
PENN STATION AND ITS TUNNELS
JILL JONNES
VIKING
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1311, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2007 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Jill Jonnes, 2007
All rights reserved
Illustration credits appears at the end of this book.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Jonnes, Jill
Conquering Gotham: a Gilded Age epic: the construction of Penn Station and its tunnels / Jill Jonnes.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-1889-1
1. Pennsylvania Station (New York, N.Y.)—History—20th century. 2. Tunneling— New York (State)—New York—History—2oth century. 3. Railroad stations—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. 4. Historic buildings—New York (State)
—New York—History—20th century. I. Title.
TF302.N7J66 2006
385.3'14097471—dc22 2006050171
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For John Ross, Clare Romano Ross,
and Tim Ross
“Rich, hemm’d thick all round with sailships and steamships, an island sixteen miles long, solid-founded…
The countless masts, the white shore-steamers, the lighters, the ferry-boats, the black sea-steamers, well-model’d
The down-town streets, the jobbers’ houses of business, the houses of business of the ship-merchants and money-brokers, the river-streets…
City of hurried and sparkling waters! City of spires and masts!
City nestled in bays! My city!”
—Walt Whitman, “Mannahatta,” 1881
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
PART I. HOW SHALL WE REACH GOTHAM?
1. “We Must Find a Way to Cross”
2. Haskins’s Tunnel and Lindenthal’s Bridge
3. “The Ablest Man This Railway Ever Produced”
4. “The North River Bridge Matter”
5. “A Severe Disappointment”
6. “It Might Offer the Solution”
7. “Get a Little of the Tenderloin”
8. “Crooked and Greedy”
9. “Someone in the Penn Is Leaking”
10. “The Town Is On Fire”
11. “We Shall Make Our Fight Aboveboard”
12. “Ugly Rumors of Boodle”
PART II. THE CROSSING
13. “We Are Not Making a Mistake”
14. “A Work Unsought”
15. “Drilling of First Hole”
16. “The Shield Is Ready to Be Shoved”
17. “Slow Progress Has Been Made”
18. “Disturbed about North River Tunnels”
19. “Would Mr. Cassatt Be Resigning?”
20. “Death Stalks Alongside Them”
21. “The Shields Have Met Exactly”
22. “The Only Railroad Statesman”
23. “New York City Shaken”
24. “The Way Is Stony and Wet”
25. “Officially Declare the Station Open”
26. Coda
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliographic Notes
Index
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Busy maritime traffic on the North River in 1898.
West Street in Manhattan.
An 1880 illustration of Haskins’s tunnel project.
Alexander J. Cassatt as a young man.
Thomas A. Scott, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, 1874–1880.
The torched Pittsburgh PRR yards after the 1877 Railroad Riot.
Alexander Cassatt riding at Cheswold.
The PRR’s Philadelphia Broad Street Station.
PRR President Frank Thomson, 1897–1899.
Samuel Rea as a young PRR employee.
George B. Roberts, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, 1880–1897.
Ferryboat plying the North River.
Gustav Lindenthal’s North River Bridge design in 1890.
The Gare du Quai d’Orsay.
New York saloon at the turn of the century.
New York night life in the Gilded Age.
New York Democratic boss William Croker.
New York Republican boss Thomas Platt.
The route of the PRR’s North River tunnels.
Board of Directors of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company.
New York mayor Seth Low, November 5, 1901.
Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst in 1904.
A political cartoon about the tunnel franchise fight.
The Board of Engineers.
Schematic drawing of the two PRR tunnels under the North River.
Architect Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead & White.
Stanford White.
House wrecking on 32nd Street.
The cleared site of Pennsylvania Station looking east.
Little locomotive hauling cars full of station site debris.
Assistant engineer James Forgie stands in the center of the Greathead shield.
Tunnel showing Hudson River silt.
View of South Tunnels.
Penn Station site, and Ninth Avenue and the Elevated.
PRR President Alexander Cassatt (ce
nter) on an inspection tour.
Alfred Noble, Charles Jacobs, Charles Raymond.
The aligning of the North River tunnels.
Manhattan skyline, 1908.
A May 7, 1908, Harper’s Weekly illustration of the Ninth Avenue Elevated.
The PRR tunnel route from New Jersey to Long Island.
The construction of Penn Station in October 1908.
Penn Station’s General Waiting Room looking north.
Penn Station’s concourse in 1911.
The memorial statue of Alexander Cassatt in Penn Station.
Penn Station just before it opened in 1910.
Penn Station, incoming train.
Samuel Rea and Gustav Lindenthal.
The Hotel Pennsylvania.
The General Waiting Room in 1930.
The statue of Day in the Meadowlands.
PART I
HOW SHALL WE REACH GOTHAM?
As a Gilded Age United States of great fortunes and booming commerce enters the twentieth century, the rich, sprawling railroad empires—the nation’s first great corporations—are an unparalleled power unto themselves. None is more powerful than the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), its thousands of miles of track serving the nation’s biggest cities and monopolizing the industrial heartland. For thirty years the Pennsylvania Railroad has sought some means—other than its huge fleet of ferries from New Jersey—to bring tens of millions of passengers straight into water-locked Manhattan, America’s commercial heart and most important city. In 1900, there is no bridge or tunnel that spans the Hudson River.
In the first half of this epic history, PRR president Alexander Cassatt, a cultured, steely engineer, fights to find way to get his railroad across the mile-wide Hudson. Solution finally in hand, Cassatt and his railroad prepare to embark on the most monumental and consequent engineering feat of the age, an enterprise that will forever transform the physical and psychological geography of Gotham. And yet, Tammany-run New York’s most corrupt politicians and robber barons seek to derail his plans. Like President Theodore Roosevelt, Cassatt believes in an America of such dynamism and promise he sees no reason to truckle to “successful dishonesty.” When the battle is joined, it becomes yet another chapter in the ongoing war over whether the United States will be an honorable republic or a corrupt plutocracy.
ONE
“WE MUST FIND A WAY TO CROSS”
Alexander J. Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, arose from the plush chair in his Pullman Palace car sitting room, checking the time on his gold pocket watch. The train was slowing, approaching the railroad’s Jersey City station and ferry depot, and billows of steam smoke floated past. The black porter and chef bustled about, the aroma of good coffee lingered, and Tiffany lamps set the polished wood paneling aglow. Cassatt, well over six feet tall, wore a dark old-fashioned frock coat, vest, starched white high-collar shirt, and cravat. As he and several of his PRR officers debarked onto the platform they were enveloped by the sooty clangor of their road’s Jersey City Exchange Place Terminal. On this morning in late May 1901, the men strode briskly, joining the impatient tide of travelers and commuters in the new depot, which, with its cavernous, arched glass-ceilinged train shed, rebuilt after a bad fire, had been hailed by the New-York Tribune as “one of the handsomest and most commodious in the world.”
Uniformed porters maneuvered steamer trunks and valises, while a sea of dark-suited men sporting derbies and young women in Gibson-style shirtwaists and broad-brimmed hats hurried to board one of the railroad’s double-decker ferries, huge rumbling boats bound for Manhattan. On the lower decks, one could see and smell horses pulling express wagons and drays up the gangways, jostling into place. On the upper deck, the reek of locomotive coal smoke gave way to the pungent scent of the river. The gigantic ferries named for the road’s far-flung empire—the Philadelphia, the Pittsburgh, the St. Louis—were painted a signature Tuscan red, and emblazoned with the PRR’s proud keystone crest. As the commuter throng pressed onto the Cortlandt Street ferry, a sign admonished passengers: “Gentlemen will not, others must not, spit on the floor.” The freshening river breezes riffled Cassatt’s thinning sandy hair and drooping mustache as he angled to the front of the open deck, his intelligent blue-gray eyes calmly sizing things up. Cassatt’s aura of authority was tempered by a laconic reserve, a slight stoop, and hint of melancholy. Little known to the general public, Alexander J. Cassatt had long been viewed by his peers as the “most brilliant railroad official in this country.” With American railroads at the apogee of their importance and influence—the mightiest and, in some circles, most despised economic force in the nation—this was no small accolade. Cassatt, a veteran engineer and executive of immense talent, had reluctantly emerged two years earlier, in 1899, from seventeen years of pleasant retirement to take charge of the Pennsylvania Railroad, thus becoming one of the most powerful men in the United States.
All about him was the luminous briny river air and ahead a wondrous sweep of sky and currents. Yet the very bodies of glistening water that encircled Manhattan and made the port city so rich were now starting to strangle her rambunctious growth. In 1901, only one major bridge, that marvel of grace and engineering, the Brooklyn Bridge, connected Manhattan to any other piece of land. Only one railway, the Vanderbilts’ New York Central Railroad, came directly into Manhattan, and that from upstate. The New York Central ran down the east bank of the Hudson River, across the narrow Harlem River, and into the heart of Gotham. For many decades, sole ownership of this wonderful monopoly had made the Vanderbilts America’s richest family, notorious for their churlish indifference to the well-being of their road’s passengers. The late, large William H. Vanderbilt—his mausoleum still guarded by Pinkertons around the clock against grave robbers—had summed it up neatly with his infamously imperious, “Let the public be damned.”
The other ten railroads serving New York, the world’s greatest port as well as the nation’s colossus of trade, finance, manufacturing, and culture, had had no choice but to build sprawling waterfront terminals on the industrialized New Jersey shore and to operate fleets of ferries across to Gotham. In typical corporate understatement, the PRR’s official historians noted that “The Pennsylvania, as the Central’s greatest rival, could not view this situation complacently.”
Alexander Cassatt found these ferry rides a galling reminder that, unlike its nemesis, the Central, the Pennsylvania Railroad, which prided itself on being the nation’s largest, richest, and best-operated road, still had no way to bring its trains into the commercial heart of the nation’s busiest seaport. Easy access to Gotham was arguably as important in the twentieth century as had been the building of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s or the great interoceanic canal now being proposed to cross the Isthmus of Panama. And yet, astonishingly, there was no definite plan. No bridge or tunnel of the magnitude needed to span the Hudson River had ever been built. But Cassatt could now console himself that he and his great corporation were actively considering building the gargantuan North River Bridge, the long-promoted solution of engineer Gustav Lindenthal and what would be the biggest bridge in the world. As Cassatt had confided to General William J. Sewell the previous spring, “We are now taking up the question of the construction of the bridge seriously.”
British politician James Bryce had been stunned by the princely power and influence of American railroads and the men—“potentates”—who ran them, writing in 1888, “These railway kings are among the greatest men, perhaps I may say are the greatest men, in America…They have power, more power—that is, more opportunity of making their personal will prevail—than perhaps any one in political life, except the President and the Speaker.” By 1900, the 185,000 miles of American rails equaled those of the whole rest of the world combined.
Alexander Cassatt, as the seventh president in the history of the Pennsylvania Railroad, intended to wield his corporate power to accomplish what no other man had yet done: He would somehow send the Pennsylvania Railr
oad across the mile-wide Hudson River and bring its elegant gleaming passenger trains triumphantly into the heart of Manhattan. “We stand on our last railroad tie within view of [Gotham] and cannot reach it,” he said in frustration. “We must find a way to cross.” He also intended to redress, some might say avenge, some long-festering corporate wrongs.
The ferry whistle shrieked, the powerful engines rumbled, and the behemoth ferry bearing Cassatt, his officers, and a thousand passengers began threading its way across the mile-wide Hudson, long known to sailors as the North River. Ahead, the sky enveloped the gray-green river, a wide panorama alive with maritime hustle. To starboard, an ocean liner attended by tugs steamed in from its Atlantic voyage, while all about sailed shabby workhorse sloops and huge six-and seven-masted schooners carrying loads of sand, bricks, granite blocks, and crushed stone.
Busy maritime traffic on the North River in 1898.
The Hudson River was vivid testimony to New York’s extraordinary economic boom. Coming downriver from Albany were palatial side-wheelers as well as tugs towing three, six, eight, even ten blue Erie Canal barges laden with ice, coal, and lowing cattle. Later in the summer these barges would bear the bumper harvests of Midwest wheat and corn to be stored in the city’s big dockside grain elevators before export overseas. The red, green, and olive passenger ferries lumbered back and forth, day and night, from shore to shore, as did the railroads’ “floaters” and “lighters,” huge wooden platformlike vessels (often complete with shed and rails) ferrying freight cars to rail yards for unloading in New York or continuation to New England. Some people never became accustomed to the odd sight of trains traveling slowly along atop the water.