Conquering Gotham

by Jill Jonnes

  On such a glistening spring day out upon the Hudson River, when the shore receded, and the primal feel of river and nature asserted themselves, a determined dreamer aboard the ferry could conjure up the ancient Ice Age whose brute geologic forces had gouged out Gotham’s incomparable harbor. That very New Jersey riverbank, that grimy jumble of rail yards, terminals, ferry berths, and ocean liner docks, backed by high palisades, had all been encased by a massive thousand-foot-high glacier, as had much of North America. The glacier’s pulverizing weight, edging gradually south, had crushed the land, heaving up hills and cliffs, its glacial advance down through the Hudson River valley scraping out an ever-deeper estuary that swept a hundred miles beyond present New York to the then Atlantic shoreline and an ocean ten thousand feet shallower than that of today.

  When the world began to warm an imponderable seventeen thousand years ago and ice sheets gradually melted and retreated, the oceans rose precipitously. What would become New York City was left encircled by marvelously deep, broad waters, and the glacially carved Hudson River ebbed and flowed for 170 miles with the ocean’s tides, its dark rippling currents separating the island of Manhattan from the wilderness of the mainland.

  On the ferry, Alexander Cassatt and his fellow passengers could feel the languorous river breezes freshening as the New York skyline grew steadily larger. On the bluest and calmest of days, Manhattan seemed but a stone’s throw away, and the ferry ride was a fifteen-minute interlude of nautical pleasure. Cassatt could now easily spot the shimmering gold dome of Joseph Pulitzer’s World Building alongside six of the new twenty-story skyscrapers that dwarfed such familiar landmarks as the steeple of Wall Street’s Trinity Church.

  Cassatt was painfully aware that while the lumbering ferries seemed wonderfully stolid they were not. The previous fall, right off this very Cortlandt Street slip, the PRR’s Chicago had been rammed by the crowded coastline steamer City of Augusta just after midnight and had sunk in minutes. Several passengers, a bootblack, and half a dozen teams of milk wagon horses had drowned.

  Today all went smoothly, the ferry engines slowing as the vessel nestled expertly into the railroad’s dock, where the oily river, full of refuse, “bits of wood, straw from barges, bottles, boxes, paper, occasionally a dead cat or dog, hideously bladder-like, its four paws stiff and indignant towards heaven,” lapped at the pier. The city’s urchins, indifferent to the river’s debris, could be seen cavorting and swimming, their yells and shouts blending in with the harbor noises.

  West Street in Manhattan where the ferries arrived from New Jersey.

  Alexander Cassatt and his fellow passengers streamed off the Pennsylvania Railroad ferry that morning, into the bedlam of West Street, which the New-York Tribune excoriated as “a whirlpool of slime, muck, wheels, hoofs, and destruction,” a cobblestoned maelstrom jammed with cabdrivers, express wagons, garbage carts, beer skids, and yelling teamsters steering their powerful horses around the clanging trolley cars. Here was a “waterfront as squalid and dirty and ill smelling as that of any Oriental port…[lined with] storage and cold-storage warehouses and large commission houses…whose closed iron shutters…look gloomy and forbidding.” Low corner saloons, dives that catered to the longshoremen and sailors from all over the world, were plentiful, and criminal gangs plagued the docks at night.

  Scruffy street vendors loudly hawked fresh coffee and roasted peanuts. In colder months came the oyster carts, offering juicy bivalves the size of your hand. Pedestrians were used to negotiating the towering piles of shucked oyster shells, one of the less disagreeable aspects of the city’s legendary filth. The sour, ever-present smell of horse piss permeating the air was tolerable at this time of year. What made all this intolerable to Cassatt was that the PRR’s perennial rival, the Vanderbilts’ New York Central, delivered its passengers straight into the city’s northern heart in its recently expanded Grand Central Station, uptown on East Forty-second Street. The frustrating truth was that the Pennsylvania Railroad, while rumored to control whole legislatures and certain U.S. senators, had not yet managed to overcome nature in the form of the North River, a fact rudely reaffirmed on every ferry journey to New York and thus a perennial “bitter trial.”

  Cassatt and his officers followed the crowds of commuters up Cedar Street, crowded with pushcart vendors and tea merchants, to the railroad’s skyscraper offices in the American Bank Exchange Building at the corner of Broadway. True, the New York Times had recently declared the Vanderbilt’s railroad terminal “one of the most inconvenient and unpleasant railroad stations in the whole country…the ugly structure has long been a disgrace to the metropolis.” But this was small consolation to Cassatt and his railroad, repeatedly stymied in their relentless thirty-year quest to reach Manhattan.

  A beautiful ferry ride like today’s could only briefly erase the vexatious reality that on many days fog swirled in from the Atlantic Ocean to shroud the Hudson River, bringing danger and delays. Then, recalled lawyer and developer William G. McAdoo, “Through the fog came a bedlam of mournful sounds, the deep bellowing of ocean liners, the angry screams of tugboats, the long, eerie cries of the ferry sirens that reminded one of sea gulls…It was picturesque, but most people…had no time for marine adventures. They were on their way to their daily jobs, or to catch trains, or to keep appointments.” In brutally cold winters the Hudson clotted up with thick ice and became almost impossible to navigate.

  With each passing decade, the situation became more untenable, more disastrous. In Cassatt’s lifetime, the metropolis of New York had become a marvel of the modern age. As the nineteenth century with all its industrial wonders—the railroads, the telegraph, the Atlantic cable, electricity, the new automobiles—became the twentieth, every citizen of New York saw that this water-locked city reigned supreme. Not only was it the world’s greatest port, Gotham’s powerful banks and rapacious Wall Street financiers—men like J. P. Morgan and August Belmont Jr.—were forces to be courted and feared. The city’s influential battling newspapers—the World, the Journal American, the Herald, the Sun, the New York Times, and the Tribune, to name but the biggest—were read across the land. The city’s infamous political bosses—the Republican Thomas Collier Platt, the thuggish Tammany chieftain Richard Croker—were key to any presidential election. Platt even temporarily rid himself of the reformer governor Theodore Roosevelt by foisting him upon President William McKinley as vice president. The city’s main avenue, Broadway, was a phenomenon in its own right, a phalanx of dazzling theaters, world-famous hotels, and stylish restaurants. Nearby was the iniquitous Tenderloin, Manhattan’s vice district. Book and magazine publishing, department stores, and a myriad of other enterprises fueled the city’s amazing prosperity and set the standard for the rest of America. This world-class polyglot city simply had to be reliably and conveniently connected to the nation it now dominated.

  Gotham’s visceral commercial energy was embodied in its new Wall Street skyscrapers, its jammed avenues and sidewalks, and above all, in its port. One journalist wrote of New York’s waterfront: “In daylight, dusk, and darkness, [the city] never halts or falters. Cargoes from every port from every nook and cranny of the world…are forever clearing or discharging at the wharves…Here on the South Street front is a veritable forest of masts.” Sicilian lemons, Brazilian coffee, Indian spices, fine West Indian wood poured forth from these holds. When the reporter looked northward on the Hudson River side of the port, he saw “the great Atlantic steamers beside long piers crowned with double storied sheds of corrugated iron…Rank after rank of castled stacks stretch away into perspective, each marked with the distinctive color bands of its company…The Bermuda docks end the ocean trade, and oyster and ice boats, tiny in comparison with the liners, crowd the docks and bulkheads.”

  All this power and prosperity acted as an irresistible magnet, and the population of the newly consolidated boroughs of New York City had swelled to three and a half million. Each day a tidal wave of workers, shoppers, and travelers poured in
to Manhattan, flooding the Brooklyn Bridge and the fleets of ferries coming from New Jersey, Staten Island, the Bronx, and Queens, crowding the commercial districts and pushing Gotham’s energetic cacophony to fever pitch. By 1901 Manhattan had become one of the most densely populated places on earth, a gilded city notorious for high-living millionaires, corrupt Tammany rule, thriving vice districts, and the fetid misery of the tenements and flophouses for the legions of the down and out.

  The sheer daily difficulty of getting in and out of Manhattan was creating more of these scabrous slums and choking the economy. All the railroads, except for the Vanderbilts’, came to an abrupt halt at the Hudson River. In Jersey City, there sprawled the terminals and ferry depots for the Pennsylvania and Erie railroads, as well as those of the New York, Ontario & Western Railroad, and the New York, Susquehanna & Western. The Central of New Jersey terminal sat slightly downriver in Communipaw and also served the Baltimore & Ohio, the Philadelphia & Reading, and the Lehigh Valley railroads. Upriver in Hoboken lay the terminus of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, while the New York, West Shore & Buffalo came into Weehawken. All told, twelve hundred trains a day steamed into the various New Jersey terminals. By 1901 the railroad ferries of six companies, carrying eighty million passengers a year, were part of the busy maritime traffic of the mile-wide Hudson River, negotiating its daily moods, shifting weather, tides, and currents.

  And so, when Alexander Cassatt agreed to ascend to the presidency of the Pennsylvania Railroad, his greatest ambition was to span that last watery mile across the North River and into Gotham, to transport his trains, at long last, in proper glory into Manhattan. As Cassatt told a fellow engineer while the two studied a map of the PRR lines, “I have never been able to reconcile myself to the idea that a railroad system like the Pennsylvania should be prevented from entering the most important and populous city in the country by a river less than a mile wide.”

  TWO

  HASKINS’S TUNNEL AND LINDENTHAL’S BRIDGE

  For decades, men of ambition had stood upon Gotham’s poorly maintained wooden piers to wonder how they might breach the beautiful and strategic Hudson River. Many nineteenth-century men had conjured up grandiose plans, but the first to act was a California capitalist named Colonel DeWitt Clinton Haskins. The colonel, having built railroads out west, dug mines in Utah, and studied caisson-built bridges, proposed an ingenious and promising approach: subaqueous tunnels.

  In 1873, Colonel Haskins’s vision, which called for digging two rail tunnels under the Hudson River from Jersey City to Morton Street, was sufficiently compelling to attract $10 million in capital. As soon as work began the next year, both the New York Central (determined to preserve its monopoly) and the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad (its Hoboken terminal sure to be eclipsed) sued. They were implacably opposed to the tunnels, but after five years of litigation, Haskins prevailed. As work began, the New York Times hailed the enterprise: “Of all the great improvements projected or dreamed of in and about this City, this is unquestionably the most important.”

  And so, on a cold, clear November day in 1879, Colonel Haskins’s company returned to work on its pioneering tunnels, this time digging a great, circular thirty-foot-wide working shaft near Fifteenth Street in Jersey City, one hundred feet back from the bulkhead line of the river. All through the fall, winter, and spring, gangs of men labored day and night, and had soon excavated the shaft straight down sixty feet. “It is built in the most substantial manner and is lined with a brick wall 4 feet thick,” reported one visiting journalist in the summer of 1880. “The bottom of the shaft is the level of the roadway of the tunnel, but…its bottom is now used as an immense cistern to contain the water and silt which is forced out from the head of the tunnel…The shaft contains an air-lock and a pair of engines used in forcing air and water into the tunnel.”

  Colonel Haskins had devised a patented system of pumping compressed air at a pressure of twenty pounds per square inch into the advancing tunnel to keep the pressure of the river and silt from crushing his nascent enterprise during construction. “That we have gone 300 feet into the river,” said Haskins to the skeptics, “demonstrates to my own satisfaction the practicability of the work and that the air will hold the earth.” Even so, there were frequent tiny “blows” in the still-raw parts of the tunnel as the river’s extraordinary pressure penetrated the highly porous silt overhead. The “blows” made a telltale hissing sound, and the amazingly simple solution was to quickly patch the oozing spot with silt and straw before water and slimy river muck burst through, bringing deluge and disaster.

  The New York Times reporter who came in mid-July 1880 to view the tunnel digging was given a suit of blue overalls, rubber boots, and a floppy hat. The young journalist then warily descended the ladder halfway down the brick-lined shaft where a “slippery blue black mud covered everything.” There loomed the air lock, an ominous boilerlike iron object, fifteen feet long and six feet tall, that was the sole entry to the tunnel works. With trepidation, the journalist and his guide stepped into the dungeonlike space of the air lock (lit only by a sputtering candle), and the heavy door with its thick bull’s-eye window clanged shut.

  For fifteen minutes, the men sat in the gloom as the air pressure gradually increased, a process the reporter likened to “torture.” Then the air lock door on the tunnel side (also with a thick round window) slowly swung open. The tunnel was a clammy, stygian space, illuminated by calcium lamps, smelling of human sweat and rank mud. In almost nine months, Haskins’s tunnel teams had burrowed deep under the river and had already advanced the north tunnel three hundred feet through the silt toward Manhattan. The sweating reporter and his guide advanced down a steep slope and slithered through a narrow opening into the north tunnel, where the air was cooler. Almost the entire length of the excavated twenty-foot-high tunnel was deliberately refilled halfway with dirt, intended “to furnish a brace to the brick-work, and allow the cement to thoroughly harden, until the tunnel is finished.”

  Far ahead, miners stood atop an earthen staircase picking and shoveling to create “a thin semi-circular opening at the top of the tunnel, only excavating enough at a time to admit of placing the top [round iron boiler] plates in position,” that were then welded together. As the top half of the tunnel advanced, other miners steadily excavated the lower half. As soon as the welders attached the top and bottom iron cylinder, the brick masons lined the iron cylinders with cement and a two-foot-thick layer of bricks. Even as he was feeling miserable, the reporter admired this daring subaqueous enterprise, finding that “Everything about the tunnel appeared solid and substantial.” He retraced his steps, endured the air lock, and returned gratefully to the fresh summer air, the sunshine, and river breezes. He sat for a while. The last visitor, in his haste to escape, had overexerted himself and fainted.

  An 1880 illustration of Haskins’s tunnel project under the Hudson River.

  Three days later, in the dark predawn hour of 4:30 a.m., fourteen tunnel workers, having completed their lunch break up in the night air, acclimated in the air lock and stepped into the outer chamber of the tunnel where twelve men were waiting to head up for lunch. Suddenly, they heard the telltale hissing of a breach in the chamber. The blowout in the still-unbricked vault was too big and fast to be plugged, and with a sharp crack, the heavy joists snapped like bamboo. Timbers, iron, and mud began engulfing the tunnel. Eight men frantically clambered back into the air lock, then watched in horror when their fellow laborers were overwhelmed by oozing mud and debris, pinning one man half in the open air lock door.

  “‘My God! The water is gaining on us,” said one, ‘what shall we do?’

  “‘Keep cool, men; keep cool,’ answered a voice from the river side of the tunnel.” It was their supervisor. As the water rose relentlessly about him and the others, he calmly instructed the men in the lock to pull off their clothes and stuff them around the jammed-open door to keep out the water. The water slowed but still rose steadily in the
tunnel and the air lock. Now their boss’s voice, sounding far away, commanded, “Break open the bull’s eye.”

  The men, naked in the air lock, the cold water rising toward their chests, hesitated, knowing if they broke the window on the shaft side, the others would almost certainly not escape.

  Again, their boss ordered sternly, “Knock out the bull’s eye; knock it out I say,” and then faltered, “and do what you can for the rest of us.”

  At that they smashed away at the thick outer bull’s-eye window, the cold water inching higher, lapping at their arm pits, then their necks. Then the air lock door burst open, pried open by rescuers. The eight men burst out into the shaft with the rush of water and waded helter-skelter toward the ladder. Up they stumbled to the surface, river water swirling just below and rising rapidly.

  Once out and safe on solid ground, they stood naked and mud-smeared, heaving as rain drummed down all around in the dark. Beside them the whole shaft filled with roiled river water, becoming a muddy pool. Below its surface, twenty of their fellow workers were entombed. As the wet dawn lightened the sky, a thousand relatives and friends, eerily quiet but for occasional weeping, ignored the lashing rainstorm to press in around this flooded grave. As the New York Herald observed, “Engineering skill had set at defiance the laws of nature, and nature had avenged herself.”

  Eventually, Haskins, undaunted, pumped out the tunnel, recovered the corpses, and recommenced work. After all, he would explain, “This tunnel scheme is a bona fide operation. I put a fortune in it myself, and seven years of labor…If the scheme is successful it will pay me; if it fails, I shall lose.”