by Jill Jonnes
Now at work on designs for the New York depot, McKim came up—as requested—with Pennsylvania Station sketches that featured an eighteen-story hotel. But he was determined to dissuade Cassatt from building a skyscraper atop his station, for McKim had never designed a skyscraper and he did not care to begin now. In subsequent meetings with his new client, relates Moore, “McKim argued that the great Pennsylvania Railroad owed the Metropolis a thoroughly and distinctly monumental gateway. Into his contention he threw every bit of that persuasiveness, all of that daring imagination, all that knowledge of world precedents, that made him irresistible. Of course he was fortunate in having a practical visionary like Mr. Cassatt to deal with.”
After all, hadn’t Cassatt already resited the Washington, D.C., station in part for aesthetic reasons? And while Mary Cassatt was not famous in America—in 1899 the Philadelphia Ledger wrote of her, “She has been studying painting in France and owns the smallest Pekingese dog in the world”—McKim well knew that the PRR president’s sister was a serious artist. She had painted important murals for the 1893 World’s Fair, exhibited with the Impressionists, and advised a number of serious art collectors, including her brother. Cassatt was a businessman and engineer, but he, too, savored beauty and refinement in his houses, paintings, gardens, grounds, and horses, and, most important, in his own railroad. McKim had found a like-minded soul in Cassatt, a corporate titan who cared deeply what his passengers would experience when they stepped forth into his new terminal, a railroad king who wanted to bestow upon New Yorkers something truly magnificent, a monument worthy of his road and their city.
Cassatt was won over. But not solely for McKim’s aesthetic reasons. When the PRR considered the requisite engineering and foundation required for a tall hotel and office building over the station, it discovered a tall building would have “cut out two or more tracks, equivalent to one-tenth of the terminal, and filled that space with numerous large columns which would have impaired the future efficiency of the station…The Pennsylvania’s directors felt that they could not cover the ground with anything more rentable than the present structure without making the railroad business a secondary feature.” Cassatt was also worried about interfering with a third and fourth North River tunnel he expected would need to be built later. It was decided that no hotel tower or skyscraper would mar McKim’s monumental gateway.
Over the decades of his distinguished career, McKim had admired and absorbed a wide range of Old World influences. “Confidence,” he once said, “comes not from inspiration but from knowledge.” Pennsylvania Station offered an unparalleled opportunity to distill the most noble influences into this, his greatest work, even as he kept in mind the practical demands of great crowds of travelers and trains. Recalled his friend Charles Moore, “While McKim had pinned over his designing table pictures of the facade of the Bank of England, and the Bernini colonnade enclosing the piazza of Saint Peter’s, while he kept in mind the Roman baths and basilicas, and while he used the Roman Doric in all its stately simplicity, nevertheless he built what looks like a railway station—a monumental bridge over the tracks, with entrances to the streets on the main axis and on all four sides—a feature unique among the railway stations of the world, affording the maximum of entrance and exit facilities.”
McKim was a man with very certain ways of doing almost everything. When he was ready to create a new building, he “liked to sit down at a draftsman’s table,” recalled one draftsman from the firm, “usually in his hat and immaculate shirt sleeves, and design out loud; the room reverberated with architectural terms: Cyma Tecta; Cyma Reversa; Fillet above; Fillet below; Dentils; Modillon. He was the most convinced authoritarian I have ever encountered.” McKim did not draw himself. “Instead he would talk his way through a design, instructing a draftsman to draw a line and then, after much thought, tell him to erase it and draw it somewhere else. Often he would have a line redrawn many, many times.” Such irresolute perfectionism, of course, drove some in the office mad.
When Alexander Cassatt first saw McKim’s design for Pennsylvania Station, a majestic Doric temple, it must have stirred pleasant memories of his own trip to Italy with Lois the year he had retired. For McKim’s classical design had its origins in his magical eight days in Rome with the McMillan Commission, when the summer sky had been indescribably blue, the Italian sunshine hot and golden, and the men immersed in places beautiful, hallowed, and ancient. McKim’s dear friend Charles Moore recalled the pivotal [moment] as that afternoon “at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome…McKim’s wildest dreams never gave him visions of opportunity to build in the stupendous manner. That afternoon it was simply artistic impulse that led him to hire the willing but astonished workmen to pose among the ruins to give scale and movement—movement, because in all his designing McKim ever had in his mind’s eye the people, men and especially well-gowned women, who would sweep up and down his broad staircases. So the hours were spent in the luxury of visiting the halls and basilicas of Rome, purely for the enjoyment of the stupendous works of the past. And yet, within a twelve-month, both architects [Burnham and McKim] were planning buildings [for Alexander Cassatt’s railroad] that rival the Baths of Diocletian and Titus and the Basilica of Constantine.”
FIFTEEN
“DRILLING OF FIRST HOLE”
Never had the United States experienced such material abundance as it did during these first years of the twentieth century. American factories, mills, mines, and farms churned forth tremendous volumes of coal, steel, oil, glass, garments, grain, cattle, hogs, fruits—a veritable tsunami of industrial and agricultural wealth. The Pennsylvania Railroad was overwhelmed. On Sunday January 25, 1903, Cassatt sat at a rolltop desk in his Rittenhouse Square mansion, pondering his road’s travails and writing a private letter to Henry Clay Frick, the PRR’s largest stockholder and a major customer. Cassatt lamented “the present unfortunate and mortifying condition of the road,” confessing, “The fact is we have reached the limit of yard & track facilities on several parts of the system, especially on the main line between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.”
One Pittsburgh reporter described rail yards “jammed with cars that could not be moved…thousands of workmen were idle for weeks waiting for materials that were rusting in cars blocked on side-tracks, within a few squares of their destination but inaccessible, and the owners of mills and of factories canceled orders, paid forfeits, and closed down their works.” Cassatt just hoped they would have no serious problems two days hence when President Roosevelt and his cabinet would travel on private cars via Pittsburgh for a meeting of the Republican League in Canton, Ohio.
The year 1902 had almost certainly been one of the most trying of Cassatt’s professional life. Not only had there been the galling political struggle with the Tammany aldermen over the franchise (thankfully won), but the PRR’s collapsing freight service had customers apoplectic. Finally, in early December 1902, as the winter weather worsened, Cassatt stunned the railroad world by crowning William Wallace Atterbury, thirty-six, the little-known superintendent of motive power in Altoona, the new and youngest-ever PRR general manager. An engineering graduate of Yale who started his PRR career as a three-dollar-a-week shop apprentice, the unassuming Atterbury, a master of detail and organization, set to work untangling the PRR’s freight business. But it was certainly too soon to see any major progress, as Cassatt candidly admitted to Frick.
And then there was George Gould, egged on by Andrew Carnegie to extend the Wabash Railroad into Pittsburgh, where five thousand manufacturers were desperate for reliable freight service. Cassatt was furious at this poaching, for he’d faithfully steered his road clear of Gould’s territory. All through 1902, Gould’s engineers and work crews hacked and blasted their way toward the industrial riches of the Smoky City at the prodigious cost of $380,000 a mile. In retaliation, Cassatt had first refused to renew the twenty-year Western Union contract providing the PRR’s telegraph service, then requested Western Union remove its poles and wires. Gould sued.
Two days after the PRR prevailed in the U.S. Court of Appeals on May 19, 1903, Cassatt dispatched an army of ten thousand Italian workmen along the PRR rails, armed with cross saws, axes, and wire cutters. In the next few days, they chopped down forty thousand Western Union poles and fourteen thousand miles of wire, inflicting $1 million in perfectly legal damage. Cassatt found the New York Herald’s headline sweet reading: “Western Union Is Staggered By Railroad’s Blow.” To rub it in, Cassatt further billed Gould fifty thousand dollars for the cost of the “work.” Even the PRR’s own corporate historians conceded, “This was probably as drastic an act of eviction as has ever occurred in railroad history.”
The year 1903, however, was shaping up well for the Pennsylvania Railroad. In Gotham, the PRR’s Tunnels and Terminal Extension was finally under way, and on June 24 another historic tunnel moment was imminent. It had been four months almost to the day since Charles Jacobs and Alfred Noble and their engineers had watched George Jump’s man pry up a floorboard from the forlorn lodging house at West Thirty-second Street and Eleventh Avenue. Now it was summer, that five-story building was demolished, and Jacobs and his top staff were assembled on the dirt floor of its old cellar, the site enclosed by plank fencing, the foundation stones creating a low wall. With the air surprisingly cool off the nearby river and the gray skies threatening rain, many of the engineers were attired in overcoats and carrying umbrellas. Aside from two young men sporting straw summer boaters, all the men wore their black derbies tilted at the jaunty angle befitting the momentous occasion.
A camera expert (hired by Jacobs to document progress on his tunnels) directed the fifteen engineers to stand to one side of a set of rough wooden steps ascending a small platform in the middle of the sloping hardpan floor. From an adjacent fire escape, a small child watched curiously as Jacobs mounted the wooden platform, turned on a hand-operated compressed-air drill, and a great RAT-TA-TAT-TAT blasted out. The camera expert clicked, cursing the several men who at that moment moved for a better view of what the photographer later titled, “Drilling of First Hole.”
Jacobs saved this suddenly historic drill and, in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek gesture, had it silverplated and sent down to Cassatt at Broad Street Station, “with the hope that you may consider it as an interesting souvenir, inaugurating a work of such magnitude under your distinguished leadership.” They were launching what Engineering News hailed as the “most extensive and difficult piece of submarine tunnel work ever undertaken,” the first of the PRR’s tunnels under the North River. Jacobs and his engineers jammed into field offices at the renovated but still-decrepit old brick foundry next door on West Thirty-second Street. There the medical officers examined the hearts and lungs of the hundreds of sandhogs who would soon be working in shifts round the clock. Elaborate locker rooms were set up with special clothes-drying facilities, showers, and plenty of strong “tunnel” coffee for all those working down under the earth. In all four divisions—in New Jersey, on the East River, and on Long Island City—work was now launched.
Even as George Jump and the other contracted building wreckers were noisily clearing the terminal site, creating mountains of debris and sending rats scuttling for new homes, Samuel Rea and realtor Douglas Robinson were still struggling to acquire the final pieces of property they needed, trying to avoid the slower route of condemnation through the courts. As always, Rea and Robinson first consulted the PRR’s president about every purchase, in this instance about a strategic old brownstone at 233 West Thirty-third Street. “This is a very difficult property to deal for,” Rea wrote Cassatt on January 12, 1904. “It is owned by two old ladies and Mr. Robinson has never been sure whether he could close with them or not…He doubts very much whether we can get it for less than $70,000, which, of course, is exorbitant, when we consider that we only paid $27,000 for #231. I will be glad to have your views.” The stubborn old ladies got their price, making out far better than the Sire Brothers, “very unscrupulous” speculators who had snapped up a dozen properties they felt certain the PRR would want. By the time Robinson finally bought out the Sires, their carrying charges accumulating, they were grateful for a modest profit, and promised to buy no further buildings in the station vicinity.
President Cassatt, meanwhile, had decided to recoup some of their mounting land costs (and improve the neighborhood tone) by selling the large parcel between Eighth and Ninth Avenues to the U.S. Postal Service, then seeking a larger main post office in Manhattan. After all, the PRR trains carried 40 percent of the U.S. mail and a new post office structure (set atop the PRR’s train tracks), could be specially designed to make mail handling efficient. On February 9, 1903, Cassatt offered the site to the postmaster general, noting that McKim’s station would be “monumental in character and of very moderate height, [and is] of a style of architecture harmonious with the classic forms generally adopted by the Government, so that the two buildings ought to present a very fine effect.” Further, the PRR would be happy to sell the land at cost.
Cassatt contacted Senator Matthew Quay to enlist his influence in this quest, for any such post office purchase required congressional budget approval. Douglas Robinson, down in Washington on a family visit to his presidential brother-in-law, duly scouted out the prospects with the secretary of the treasury at a Friday night soiree. Robinson bluntly warned Cassatt in a letter the next morning: “400 Congressmen must be convinced that the government has found a gold nugget for nothing in the street.” Cassatt would have to “show that the Penna. R.R. is ready, to get the P.O., to lose a good many thousand dollars…you are the only one who can decide what loss to take.” Undeterred, by the summer Cassatt had an agreement in the works.
Gradually, as one block after another was demolished at the station site and carted away, wondrous broad vistas of summer sky and cloud opened up, especially with Thirty-second Street closed off. Where once hundreds of dingy buildings had lined tired blocks, all that was left was an enormous earthen rectangle marked by the uneven smaller square imprints of hundreds of old cellars. Here and there, only the fronts of condemned buildings had been sheared off when the day’s work ended, revealing warrens of small melancholy rooms with many aged patterns of wallpaper, scenes of who knew what joys and sorrows. And when the demolition men stopped their work in the evenings, a strange almost pastoral peace and quiet descended. To the east, the city’s skyscrapers, tall church spires, and big department stores now hovered like faraway jagged cliffs. At almost any time of day and evening, the curious came to peer over the plank fencing festooned with advertisements for tailors and new vaudeville shows. Clusters of men in black derbies and boaters, young women in Gibson Girl shirtwaists and hats, boys in their knickers, girls in their pinafores, all watched the many phases of the demolition and the gradual opening of this immense and unlikely urban plain.
The cleared site of Pennsylvania Station looking east.
For all the encouraging progress Cassatt and Rea had achieved on their monumental New York Extension and for all the satisfactions of the startling vista of the almost-cleared station site, the year 1903 had ended on an ominous note. On November 3, the Tammany Tiger roared back to electoral victory, deposing the honest, efficient, and effective Fusion mayor Seth Low, PRR ally and champion, after one two-year term in City Hall. The reason, explained journalist Lincoln Steffens, was simple: His Honor was a cold fish. “The appealing human element is lacking all through…His most useful virtues—probity, intelligence, and conscientiousness—in action are often an irritation…A politician can say ‘no’ and make a friend, where Mr. Low will lose one by saying ‘yes.’ Cold and impersonal…Mr. Low’s is not a lovable character.”
The grim, gray Tammany boss Richard Croker had largely retired to England with his ill-gotten millions, declaring as he departed on an ocean liner in the spring of 1902, “I am out of politics, and now I am going to win the Derby.” Charles F. Murphy, a former horse-car driver and saloon owner who had become mysteriously rich while commissioner of docks, emerged as new ch
ief sachem of the Tammany Wigwam. Famously taciturn, Murphy was also intelligent, canny, and far more progressive than Croker. Murphy persuaded the patrician congressman George B. McClellan, son of the Civil War general, graduate of Princeton and New York Law School, to run as the Tiger’s mayoral candidate.
Many respectable voters—especially the Germans who enjoyed spending leisurely Sundays with family and neighbors in the beer gardens—resented Low’s enforcement of Sabbath drinking laws. With Murphy ascendent, and memories faded of the Ice Trust scandal and vice run amok, all those voters in the tenement districts hankering after jobs or smaller forms of Tammany beneficence reverted in droves to the Tiger. George B. McClellan, a clean-shaven gentleman quite at home in a silk top hat, trounced the unlovable Low, 314,782 votes to 252,086.
Within days of the elegant McClellan’s election as mayor, a clerk at the PRR’s New York offices picked up the telephone and (as later reported to President Cassatt) was puzzled to be conversing “with a Mr. Gay, from New York, who said that Mr. Charles F. Murphy—whom he represented—would be very glad to see Mr. Cassatt the next time he was in New York.” Could Mr. Cassatt telephone said Murphy? He did no such thing. About a week later in Philadelphia at the Broad Street Station offices, William Patton was surprised by the unexpected appearance of Mr. James E. Gaffney, a rather rough-looking, large and fleshy fellow wearing a loud suit and derby. Patton readily recognized him as Manhattan’s Eighteenth District alderman, and one of Tammany’s ringleaders in the fight to defeat Cassatt’s winning the franchise.
Here in the PRR’s home offices, Gaffney was the soul of shameless affability. He had traveled down, he confided proudly to Patton, as the emissary of Mr. Charles F. Murphy. “Mr. Murphy would be very glad,” he suggested, “if Mr. Cassatt would give careful consideration to the bid made by the New York Contracting & Trucking Co., of which Mr. John J. Murphy—brother of Chief Murphy—is President…Mr. Murphy is very anxious to see these people get the contract if their prices are anywhere near right.” The Tammany Tiger was back in power.