by Jill Jonnes
The Board of Engineers: (left to right) Alfred Noble, Charles Jacobs, secretary Alexander Shand, Samuel Rea, George Gibbs, Charles Raymond.
Always a stickler, General Raymond had little patience with lesser scientific minds and brusquely reminded others (often long after the fact) of the many instances when his judgment had been right. What few present knew was that this brilliant but difficult man was slowly but surely losing the sight in his remaining eye to a cataract. Already, he could not properly appreciate the wonderful views from the PRR’s aerie, could not clearly see the river busy with ships or the skyscrapers further uptown.
Charles Jacobs, the English tunnel expert, was of course one of the five members of Cassatt’s board of engineers. He was, however, absent, for his steamship was late arriving from England, where he had spent his Christmas holiday in London with his wife. And then there was Alfred Noble, who started life as a farm boy, served in the Army of the Potomac, and then trained as a civil engineer. Based in Chicago, he was celebrated for building deepwater works all over the West, including a number of major Mississippi River bridges. A past president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Noble was an endearing man, treasured for his self-possession and practice of “the simple homely virtues of truth, honesty, industry, and human kindness.” In an era when many inflated their Civil War status and heroics, Noble wryly identified himself as part of “The great Corps of Privates.” When asked what made a good soldier, he observed, “Ability to withstand hunger, fatigue, and hard marching were very essential qualities, but to be a good runner was also often a very useful attribute.” Some years earlier, Noble had played an active role in the Nicaragua Canal Commission.
Also present for the first meeting that cold gray Monday was William H. Brown, the PRR’s longtime chief engineer, a career railroad officer who had supplied the hard data for many an earlier scheme for entering Gotham. With his thick graying beard and precise ways, Brown had something of the air and appearance of a biblical prophet. Certainly engineering was almost a religion to him, a science that he savored in all its minutest details. Then there was Gustav Lindenthal, disappointed promoter of the now-forsaken North River Bridge; he would depart the board at the end of 1903 before construction began but would play a key role later.
Not until April was the board’s final (and youngest) member appointed. This was the handsome George Gibbs, forty-one, an electrical engineer employed by Thomas Edison at his Pearl Street Station in the early historic days of electrification. Eventually Gibbs had gone into the coming field of electric traction, formed his own company, and then sold it to Pittsburgh industrialist George Westinghouse. The two became friends and collaborated all over Europe on building the new electric subways and trains. Now a partner at Westinghouse, Church, Kerr & Company in New York, the charming Gibbs would oversee all matters electrical. Each of these expert engineer consultants would be paid the then-princely sum of twenty-five thousand dollars a year.
At that very first January meeting, these eminent engineers were instructed to scrutinize the feasibility of every aspect of the PRR’s monumental entry to Gotham. “Procure all additional information that may be needed,” Alexander Cassatt wrote in a letter read aloud by Samuel Rea, “sparing neither time nor any necessary expense in doing so, for I am sure it is not necessary for me to say that, in view of the magnitude and the great cost of the proposed construction, and of the novel engineering questions involved, your studies should be thorough and exhaustive, and should be based upon absolute knowledge of conditions.” “The main consideration,” General Raymond would later write, “being safety, durability, and proper accommodation of the traffic. No expenditure tending to insure these conditions was to be avoided.”
The big challenge, and a constant source of concern, were the underwater tunnels. The first huge problem was how to build them through glacial silt that Engineering News described as “about the most treacherous material through which submarine tunneling has ever been attempted…the silt is so yielding and semi-fluid in consistency that it is quite doubtful whether an ordinary cast-iron-lined tunnel would not be distorted and fractured by the movements of the trains.”
Ten years earlier, when Samuel Rea had officially contemplated the PRR’s various options and concluded a bridge was the best solution, he had bluntly asked, “Can a proper tunnel be constructed through the silt formation which is there encountered [in the North River] that will, after completion, withstand the rack and wear and tear of heavy trains passing through it at high speed? Would not the structure ‘work’ under the action of heavy trains? We have no precedent to go by, as all subaqueous tunnels of like construction are through a different formation than is found at New York. Therefore, it is largely a matter of speculation.” A typical PRR passenger train replete with many comfortable Pullman cars weighed seven hundred tons. Cassatt envisioned hundreds of such trains pounding through the tunnels into and out of Manhattan every day.
In fact, while the problem of burrowing the tunnels under these two busy waterways was a serious one, the real specter haunting these venerable engineers as they met repeatedly during these years was the possible failure of the tunnels after vast millions had been spent to build them and the great terminal. As Charles Jacobs explained, the old Haskins tunnels, bedeviled by so many troubles, “led capitalists and engineers to believe that, owing to the very soft nature of the [North River] ground, a tunnel could not be built that would be sufficiently stable to withstand the vibration due to heavy traffic.” Jacobs had convinced Alexander Cassatt that the New York tunnels were possible by designing and patenting a reinforced “tunnel bridge,” whose supports would descend all the way to the river’s bedrock. Many doubted this would solve the problem, and in certain private clubs amidst swirls of after-dinner cigar smoke, men murmured sotto voce that Cassatt’s project was nothing short of reckless.
When, days into 1903, President Fowler of the New York, Ontario & Western Railroad defended Cassatt in the New York Times, writing, “I cannot believe that it is unduly adventurous or foolhardy to locate within [New York’s] constantly expanding borders a second [terminal],” Cassatt penned a grateful note, hoping Fowler’s opinion would have “a reassuring effect upon those of our friends, and I suppose there are a good many of them, who have doubted the wisdom of the project…We feel very confident we are not making a mistake.”
Both Gotham’s city fathers and members of the engineering world were thrilled by the coming of the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels. But there were skeptics aplenty, and they would be neither persuaded nor silenced. For decades, the Pennsylvania Railroad had been a well-run, prudent road, faithfully delivering its 6 percent dividend to tens of thousands of stockholders, many of them English. Now Cassatt was controversially leading the road into a monumental, Pharaoh-like expansion, and he would soon be seeking more than $100 million in new stock and bond offerings to pay for it. Conservative financiers and investors were appalled and antagonized at the hubris, risk, and sheer scale of his vision. They were not at all sure that mere engineers could overcome the perils that lay deep under two swift-flowing rivers.
And so it was that month after month during 1903, PRR stock sank steadily. By early November, the Tribune reported the stock down from $170 to “1121?2, its lowest level since 1898…the company might have difficulty in continuing its present dividends.” The Wall Street Journal discounted persistent rumors that the Rockefellers were attacking the stock with an eye to acquisition. The issue was that “Mr. Cassatt has condensed ten years’ work in two, and the magnitude of his operations has dazed people.” Cassatt had little patience for all this shortsighted naysaying. As he wrote Rea, “We are planning for the future, as we ought to do, and not for the present only, and if any persons are doubtful…they fail to appreciate the great strength of [our] corporation, and those who doubt that it will ultimately pay have little faith in the future of this country.”
As the New York Extension plans advanced, the safety of the tunnels was
inevitably paramount. In this new age of industrial marvels and machines, some of the most excruciating disasters of recent decades had been engineering failures. The terrifying railroad bridge collapse at Ashtabula, Ohio—a combination of bad design and substandard iron—consigned eighty-one mangled passengers to die trapped in an inferno of flames at the bottom of a snowy ravine. Moreover, the Ashtabula bridge had collapsed after eleven years of service, underscoring that a structure that worked at first was still not necessarily safe over time. Far more deadly and nightmarish had been the Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania, where a millionaires’ private fishing club’s badly designed and maintained earthen dam had ruptured after relentless rains, unleashing a towering torrent of water. This terrifying deluge, almost solid with deadly debris, roared down through the Conemaugh Valley, scouring, engulfing, and destroying more than two thousand souls.
On a regular basis, horrifying railroad accidents further underscored the fallibility of men and machines. Lest any member of this new PRR board of engineers forget this, just two days before their first meeting there had been a gory train wreck right in Manhattan. The engineer of an incoming New York Central White Plains train, failing to see the signals in the dark, smoky Park Avenue tunnel, had slammed straight into the back of the Danbury local, crushing its crowded last car and telescoping it into those in front. The pitch-black tunnel rapidly filled with smoke and echoed with such shrieks and groanings that rescuers groping their way through the dark and wreckage felt they had entered a charnel house. They were barely able to reach the panicked survivors. Fifteen passengers died gruesome deaths while twenty were badly injured.
With this catastrophic tunnel disaster fresh in his mind, Cassatt proposed that their river tunnels be single-track and have an innovative high side bench effectively hemming in the train. When E. H. Harriman, president of the Southern Pacific, had his secretary request information about the New York Extension, Cassatt, though he liked neither the railroad tycoon nor his tactics, wrote him personally to promote this high-bench innovation: “I think the section of the single-track tunnel will interest you…Accidents can only arise from two causes in single-track tunnels, either from a breakdown or from a tail-end collision. In either case we think the train will be held in place and that the sidewalks formed by the benches would not be obstructed, and also that telescoping would be prevented.”
And so, for these veteran engineers on Cassatt’s board of engineers, having decided on subaqueous tunnels, the present life-or-death conundrum was how best to actually build them under the two rivers. General Raymond and the rest of the board spent a solid year just soliciting engineering ideas and then sifting through all the alternatives, including many that “called for the construction of temporary structures in the rivers between the bulkheads,” all of these being dismissed “on account of the heavy river traffic.” Lindenthal teamed up with another engineer to propose a novel tunneling technique that involved freezing the ground first. In the end, the board concluded that the most logical method for tunneling through the silt was to use Greathead-style shields, designed by James Forgie, and compressed air. The shields, with their adjustable “doors,” allowed tunnelers to excavate before each shove forward, and guaranteed a marvelous degree of control.
And then there was the challenge of the proper grades for the vast system of tracks and tunnels. “The limiting features were: the elevation of the tracks in the station area, which are from nine to twenty-three feet below mean high water; the depth of the river bulkheads, for it was necessary to pass under or through their foundations; the contour of the river beds, for it was necessary to establish the tunnel sufficiently below the dredging plane to insure them against possible injury from anchors or sunken vessels and to insure ample cover to retain the compressed air during construction without incurring danger from ‘blow-outs’ and the rise and fall of the tide on the Hackensack Meadows—it being necessary for the water to drain away from the tunnel portals. The problem was solved so successfully that the grades to be surmounted are in all cases less than 2 percent or about 100 feet rise per mile. The enormous electric locomotives have no difficulty starting and accelerating a 550-ton train on the maximum grades.”
All these decisions were merely preparatory to the truly herculean task Cassatt had entrusted to his board of engineers: actual construction. These men were Cassatt’s generals, the leaders who would marshal armies of engineers, laborers, animals, and machines as they invaded the raw and perilous bowels of the ancient rivers and tamed them with civilizing tunnels. The tunnel sections underneath Gotham itself would present their own unique challenges, for the city’s subterranean and labyrinthine depths were perilous with unstable earth as well as manmade obstacles. Each of the engineers brought decades of real-world experience to these problems, whether gained in the remote wilds of India, Egypt, China, Mexico, or the American West, or in the most congested of modern cities. Imposing technological order upon unruly and complicated landscapes had been their life’s work and passion. Here in America’s greatest city, each would bring his talents and experience to bear upon the most monumental and complex civil engineering project of the time, the biggest since the Union and Central Pacific Railroads raced to link the young nation.
Each man would lead according to his strengths. The first section and most straightforward was the Meadows Division, which started in Harrison, New Jersey, outside Newark. The PRR’s chief engineer, William Brown, would direct the construction here of what would be known as the Manhattan Transfer, where the steam locomotives would pull in and pause for several minutes as powerful electric engines (still to be designed) were substituted for the trip into Manhattan. Brown would be in charge of installing the five new miles of double tracks heading toward New York, all to be laid atop a steep, built-up twenty-five-foot-high earthen embankment traversing the lovely but treacherous tidal wetlands. He would build a total of sixteen new railroad bridges, including a drawbridge, as his double set of rails passed over the tracks of ten other railroads, several turnpikes, and the Hackensack River, all enroute to Charles Jacobs’s North River Division.
Jacobs’s section commenced with the Bergen Portals, the lower cliffs of the ancient Jersey Palisades. Here crews would laboriously blast and drill two single-track mile-long tunnels through what they soon learned was exceedingly tough igneous basaltic traprock. The two tunnels would pass under Weehawken, descending steadily downward below the Erie Railroad yard on the river’s edge near “King’s Bluff,” where Aaron Burr had killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804. Jacobs would command battalions of workers, called sandhogs, in both New York and New Jersey, for he intended to push the two tunnels simultaneously from each shore, his respective teams vying to be the first to reach the midriver state lines far below the river’s tidal currents. There, so the plan went, the twenty-three-foot-wide cast-iron tunnels would be joined together.
Schematic drawing of the two PRR tunnels under the North River.
In Gotham, starting at Ninth Avenue where Jacobs’s two mile-long tunnels would emerge, George Gibbs and Alfred Noble would take over. This was the New York Station and Approaches Division. Noble would first oversee excavation of the twenty-eight-acre station site and track yards in the bowels of the Tenderloin, an undertaking so immense it would quickly be hailed as the local version of the Panama Canal. As the buildings were steadily demolished and cleared, the New York sky suddenly seemed wonderfully wide and spacious, a proper frame for this gigantic engineering enterprise, an enthralling show of ambition and derring-do. The excavation itself would entail a spectacular and startling sight for the constant crowds of spectators: the propping up of all of Ninth Avenue across the ever-deepening pit, including the IRT’s elevated tracks, which would come to seem like some oversized child’s toy with trains traveling overhead.
Once Noble had completed the gigantic hole and the station’s massive inclined concrete retaining walls, the debonair electrical engineer George Gibbs would lead construction of the actual seven-and-a
-half-acre subterranean train terminal, including installation of the enterprise’s novel and complex signaling and electrical systems. Gibbs was also responsible for erecting all the powerhouses providing compressed air for tunnel work and the electricity, the motive power, for the hundreds of trains that would eventually roll daily in and out of Gotham.
When trains left George Gibbs’s station section, they entered the East River Division, also the bailiwick of Alfred Noble. Noble would be pushing the two (double-track) underground tunnels crosstown toward the East River—a complicated matter of navigating beneath the city’s many sewer and utility pipes and brand new IRT subway line, and propping up the foundations of brownstones and large office buildings overhead. Just before diving under the East River, the two tunnels would become four single-track cast-iron tunnels (known as A, B, C, D) as they burrowed yet further down to pass deep under the heavily trafficked river, surfacing almost four thousand feet later in Long Island City. Two of the tunnels would carry the Long Island Rail Road, and the other two the PRR trains continuing on to the giant new Sunnyside yards in Queens, with room for four miles of train cars. Like Jacobs, Noble would push his four tunnels as fast as he could, with teams of sandhogs working toward each other from each shore. All these construction projects had to be coordinated and synchronized so that each advanced in time to complete the whole. The complexity and cost proposed were dazzling. And so, the PRR’s stock kept sinking.