by Jill Jonnes
Later, Reeve asked one worker hospitalized with the bends what it felt like. “‘Like the jumping toothache and the worst kind of rheumatism,’ the sandhog answered. ‘If it hits you in the head you go daffy; in the stomach, it is like an awful colic; in the arms or legs, a painful numbness. Sometimes you are unconscious but more often you are keenly alive to the horrible pain.’” Like many another visitor to the world of tunnel building, Reeve wondered about the sandhogs who sought out such work. Yes, it paid reasonably well, but it was—he clearly believed—a hellish place to pass one’s days. And yet there were legions of sandhogs who prided themselves on their skills and labored over the years in one tunnel works after another.
Of course, the rare visitor to the North River tunnels wondered how the two advancing faces heading toward one another from opposite shores could meet up almost precisely. In fact, the bulk of Charles Jacobs’s engineers—the alignment corps—were dedicated to exactly this task: properly aligning the tunnels as they advanced to their midriver meeting point. Reeve was told it was a “simple problem of trigonometry…Every time a new ring is laid the whole tunnel is resurveyed and the results in the two approaching headings compared. If the comparison shows an error, the shield is steered to right or left, up or down, as required to correct it; segments curved to just the necessary degree are then inserted in the next ring.”
Jacobs’s second in command, James Forgie, had never worked a tunnel job that required such meticulous and relentless aligning, all a consequence of the treacherous North River silt. “With the tunnels in a constant state of movement, both vertical and lateral,” he explained in his Scottish burr, “and also showing constant alteration in shape after original construction, all of which movement had to be precisely measured and recorded both for the purpose of gaining an insight into the forces at work which produced such results, and also for the purpose of maintaining true line and grade at the working faces of the tunnel.” The North Star of all this aligning was a sixty-foot-high triangulation tower on the Jersey side.
Reeve, more than a little discombobulated by the Stygian tunnel, had little to say about the actual details of building, but the bookish secretary to Cassatt’s board of engineers, William Coupland, also garbed in the oversized yellow rubber boots, jacket, and hat, journeyed down to the slimy tumult of the shield area and watched with great fascination. He too stood on the wooden platform at the muddy face, engulfed by the noise and apparent chaos. He had arrived just as the shield was being shoved forward.
“A flat car containing two segments is run as close to the shield as possible,” wrote Coupland; “an iron chain is attached to the end of the revolving ‘erector’ and hooked on to one of the segments. This erector is then revolved, the segment pulled off the car and allowed to drop with a loud crash into the bottom of the ‘tail’ of the shield. Five or six men immediately jump down into the bottom with bolts and bolt this segment to the corresponding segment in the last erected ring. Another car containing two more segments has meanwhile been brought forward…This process is repeated over and over again until all the [thirteen] segments had been erected. The last segment to be put in place is the narrow ‘key’ segment. The whole gang then tightens up all the [127] bolts, and the shield is ready to be shoved ahead again.” When the sandhogs first started in the tunnel, the installation of just one such two-foot-six-inch-wide iron tunnel ring had taken as long as five or six hours. But by the time of this visit, some seasoned sandhog gangs had the installing of a ring down to a two-hour process.
Before the shield could be shoved forward again, all had to be properly aligned. From his platform Coupland watched through the clangor and shadows as one man climbed into the shield’s top compartment. He would control the shield, which would be carefully advanced by twenty-four jacks pressed firmly against the newly installed iron ring of the tunnel. The jacks, their position minutely calibrated, would be thrust slowly forward with a total pressure of thirty-four thousand tons. But first, four junior engineers, each with a foot rule, stationed themselves in the respective quadrants of the shield. As the jacks began to extend between the just-installed iron tunnel ring and the shield, the foreman carefully watched the readings on the four-foot rules. “As a result of those readings he calls out repeatedly instructions to the man in charge of the valves to turn off this one, and to open that one, so that by the time the shield has been pushed through the soft mud for the required distance of two feet six inches in order to permit the erection of one more ring, he knows that it has traveled on the line and on the grade he desires.
“Sometimes when the shield is being pushed forward, all of the doors in the front of the shield are closed tight, so that it pushed its way bodily through the soft ground. Usually, however, there is at least one door of the shield open, as this much facilitates its pushing. The mud streams in through this door in a semi-liquid mass like an enormous sausage. While the shield is moving forward and mud is flowing into the tunnel, cars are run up as near as possible on both tracks, and men who are not actually engaged in the shoving of the shield, shovel the mud into the cars as it pours through the shield. By the time the shield has advanced its stroke of two-feet-six-inches, half of the mud that was brought in has been usually cleared away.”
All this transpired amidst the heat, noise, and mess of the mud, which seemed to coat everything, including the men, who were caked dark and shiny with it. Once the last of the muck had been shoveled in the cars and whisked away, the flatcar with the iron lining segments reappeared and the whole deliberate process began anew. Several hours later, the sandhogs would be ready for another shove. When the Greathead shield penetrated another two feet six inches forward, once again, one segment after another of the eleven-ton cast-iron ring was swung into place and bolted to the previous ring. And so, ring by cast-iron ring, the tunnel pressed forward deep under the ancient glacial riverbed, looking more and more like some gigantic segmented snake. And every fifteen feet, the cast-iron tunnel segments included a special “bore segment.” This would allow the subsequent installation of screw piles that would attach the tunnel to the bedrock far below the silt, creating the tunnel bridge patented by Charles Jacobs. In sections where the tunnel passed between harder rock below and softer mud above, the tunnel rings were not iron, but steel.
What Reeve did not see or hear much about in his brief and uneasy tour were the vexing difficulties—albeit many of them anticipated—and outright disasters that Jacobs and his tunnelers had already encountered. One of the few actually reported in the press had struck back on February 14, 1905, yet another frigid morning in a brutal winter. Over in the PRR’s Weehawken yard, gangs of sandhogs, clad in the required yellow oilskin overalls, coats, and hats, and primed with tunnel coffee, crunched through recent snowfall to the mouth of the hundred-foot-wide tunnel shaft. The PRR’s rented property was a jumble of makeshift offices, air compressor buildings, mule stables, piles of iron ring segments to line the tunnels, mountains of wheat coal, and a cement plant. Above loomed the Palisades, their craggy heights crusted with snow and wintry trees. Jammed against the foot of the cliffs were the Erie Railroad’s long, narrow, noisome cattle pens, full of lowing cows. Along the riverfront sprawled the Erie’s train yard, old warehouse piers jutting into the Hudson. Manhattan hovered in the distance across the river.
As eleven o’clock approached, the sandhogs down in the North Tunnel were well settled in for another day of drilling, dynamite blasting, and mucking, making steady progress as they pushed to get under the river itself, where they would install the shield, the air locks, and begin the actual subaqueous tunneling. One of the men working on the top “heading” at the tunnel face inserted a stick of dynamite, and then retreated to set it off. They heard the muffled blast, and then as they sauntered forward, paused, sensing an unfamiliar sound, a muttering noise overhead in the earth. Alarmed, they retreated. The roof ahead began slowly crumbling, a soft muddy material squeezing through suddenly gaping holes. Then water burst forth, its gush
ing force explosive. Terrified, the sandhogs tossed aside their tools and raced for the shaft hundreds of feet back. Behind them, the face and then the raw pine-timbered tunnel itself were being engulfed in a dark slimy lava of mud and freshwater.
Up top, the engineers and contractors heard the muffled thunder of the collapse, and dashed from their offices into the blast of cold to witness over in the Erie yards an entire train being swallowed up by a fast-expanding sinkhole. The spectacular cave-in was described by a New York Times reporter, who saw “an immense circular hole…fully 50 feet across and as many deep. Inside are coal cars tilted at a dizzy angle, twisted rails, broken trucks, and one freight car overturned and lying with wheels up. The floor of the tunnel is about ninety feet below the track level at this point.” A shaken Erie engineer and his fireman told the Journal American’s man how they had been routinely moving a string of loaded coal cars over some switches in the yard when—to their terror—the rails and earth simply gave way beneath them, as if the gates to hell were opening. The two men flung themselves off the engine, as it plunged slowly into the gaping maw of the crater, dragging five more cars down behind it, and settling finally into a topsy-turvy train wreck. The brakeman disappeared into the muddy void with the cars.
The contractor, John O’Rourke, airily dismissed the huge crater to journalists as “not a serious accident, didn’t amount to much.” In fact, the huge lavalike irruption of soft, muddy earth had filled the tunnel to almost half its height for a distance of about three hundred feet back of the face. Charles Jacobs reported to Cassatt that “Fortunately, the mud did not fill the tunnel completely to the roof, making it possible to lay planks on its surfaces and thereby reach a point about 60 feet from the break, where a bulkhead was commenced on the night of the 14th.” In fact, it would take more than a month to reexcavate the tunnel and restore the Erie Railroad yard overhead to stability. As for the Erie brakeman, he was fished out, and escaped with just a broken leg.
SEVENTEEN
“SLOW PROGRESS HAS BEEN MADE”
Charles Mattathias Jacobs, fifty-four, chief engineer of the PRR’s North River tunnels, looked very much like what he was—a British man of empire at the zenith of a colorful and accomplished career. Supremely confident, calm, and commanding in appearance and manner, he was in the prime of his manhood, easily recognizable with a noble bald head, distinctive sweeping white mustachios, and intensely blue eyes. Of medium height, he had a barrel chest and powerful build from decades of active work. Dispiriting and dramatic engineering disasters were just workaday challenges to him.
“Mr. Jacobs is not an office engineer,” wrote one admiring reporter not long after the Weehawken tunnel cave-in. “He does not sit at his desk studying maps, charts, blue-prints and typewritten reports, and writing letters of instruction. He deals with real things and is out among his men. He holds frequent ‘councils of war’ with his assistants and foremen, and is ever ready to hear suggestions from any subordinate. ‘I do not want a man in my employ,’ he says, ‘whose opinion isn’t worth something.’ But when he makes his decision, it is expected to go—and it does go; and oddly enough, every man somehow feels it is the proper thing to do. Familiar at all times with every detail of the work and the man doing it, always clear-sighted, resourceful, enthusiastic, he inspires his men, who, from assistant engineers who share his inmost councils to the men who handle the spades and drive the mules, recognize in him a chief worthy to follow, who expects every man to do his duty. This helps to explain the remarkable success which Mr. Jacobs has had.”
Born in Hull, Yorkshire, to a “substantial” family, ninth in a family of fourteen, by age sixteen the privately educated Jacobs had been apprenticed to an English engineering firm, Charles and William Earle, specializing in ship and engine building. When Jacobs finished his five apprentice years in 1871, the Earles showed their faith in this young man by dispatching him first to the wilds of India and then to China to build a number of bridges. Upon his return from the Orient, Jacobs continued his training, going to sea for several years to earn a certificate as a First Class Marine Engineer. He then established his own offices at Cardiff, Wales, but worked much on the Continent and as far afield as Australia. As his reputation and commissions grew, he decided in 1887 to relocate to London, where he first worked on a subaqueous tunnel. Three years later, Jacobs had his fateful meeting with LIRR president Austin Corbin, who invited him to come to New York City to help solve various engineering problems, above all that of tunneling under the rivers encircling Manhattan. It was in that long-ago era that Jacobs had first met Samuel Rea and Alexander Cassatt and begun talking bridges and tunnels.
By early 1905, Jacobs was renowned in Gotham not just for the decade-old feat of completing the eight-by-ten-foot natural gas tunnel under the East River (the first subaqueous tunnel to reach Manhattan and the first built using a shield and compressed air), but a far more amazing and recent triumph. The previous March, Jacobs had completed what many had long and loudly concluded was impossible: the seemingly accursed Haskins tunnel from New Jersey to New York. Started in 1879, the Haskins trolley tunnel had for more than twenty years defeated every engineer and contractor who took it on. Its completion after two decades by Jacobs was testament to his originality, skill, and sheer perseverance. The opportunity (or challenge) presented itself in late 1901, just as Cassatt was launching the Pennsylvania Railroad’s great tunnel enterprise.
William G. McAdoo, a young, ambitious Tennessee lawyer seeking his fortune in Gotham, had contacted Jacobs, who had long advocated completing the Haskins tunnels (to utter skepticism). The veteran engineer enthusiastically escorted McAdoo, tall, lanky, an almost Lincolnesque figure with striking bushy eyebrows, into the murky, half-flooded tunnel works on a gray October day. The two men, dressed in hip boots and yellow oilskin coats and hats, carried oil lanterns as they descended sixty feet down a dark vertical shaft. “As I entered the tunnel,” recalled McAdoo, “I had a powerful feeling of visiting a place I had known well many years ago…I was like a man who walks through a wrecked and dismantled house that he had lived in when he was a boy.” It was pitch black, but you could hear the moisture trickling off the tunnel’s old iron-plate walls. The narrow wooden boardwalk was slippery with oozing muck, and as the two edged carefully along, their lanterns cast “wavering, fantastic shadows. The gloom lay ahead of us like a long black section of nothing. When we spoke, it sent our voices back to us in metallic, unearthly echoes…The whole thing was so inanimate, so ponderous, and so lonely. It was not a ghost, or a skeleton, but a carcass. I felt as if I had seen the body of some long and enormously heavy animal that had lain down and died. Yet, from the moment I saw the tunnel I never doubted that I would get possession of it and complete it.” While Reeve had disliked being in the PRR tunnel, McAdoo expressed that strange affinity and fondness, an almost mysterious bond certain men felt when immersed in the nethermost bosom of the elements.
Jacobs was equally committed to salvaging the Haskins tunnel and proceeded to solve engineering problems that would have vanquished lesser mortals. Twice the tunnel “blew” and flooded. For eleven months, Jacobs’s men cautiously blasted and inched forward through a solid reef of rock. When they mercifully reached the end of it they encountered silt so porous they could not proceed. It just oozed through the shield in a glutinous mass. The ever-imaginative Jacobs decided to bake the stuff and sent in men with blowpipes. This ingenious solution worked and soon the Greathead shield was burrowing through plain old sandy silt, pushing swiftly ahead. “As soon as we began actual work,” wrote McAdoo, “the sleeping tunnel awoke from oblivion into the glare of publicity as lively as that which surrounds a new operatic star. Everybody was interested. The people of New York looked on and stared as the people of Egypt must have gazed at the building of the Pyramids.” (Of course, this being a tunnel, there was not much to see from the street.)
Once McAdoo and his backers in this $4 million cross-river venture saw they were truly likely to finish Has
kins’s old trolley tunnel between Hoboken and Morton Street, McAdoo had begun in early 1903 to seriously consider a second, complementary set of new subaqueous subway tunnels that would connect Jersey City and the Wall Street area. Knowing that these would siphon off passengers from the PRR’s lucrative Cordlandt Street ferry, McAdoo decided to sound out Alexander Cassatt on the matter. The new Penn Station would serve those traveling and commuting uptown, but did the PRR intend to consign all its downtown passengers to the vicissitudes of the ferries? And so McAdoo boarded the PRR ferry to Exchange Place and journeyed by rail down to Philadelphia. Debarking at Broad Street Station, McAdoo strode up to the second-floor offices for his appointment, navigated the various factotums, and entered Cassatt’s spacious office clutching his maps and plans.
The PRR president, attired in his usual black frock coat, dark vest with pocket watch, snowy white, high-collared shirt, and cravat tie, greeted McAdoo cordially. “My instinctive feeling for personality told me,” recalled McAdoo, “before I had been in Cassatt’s office five minutes, that any attempt at shrewd bargaining with him would not only be wasted effort, but might be harmful to my proposal. As a rule, great men do not haggle over details…The only way one can meet them on their own plane is by a frank and complete discussion of the subject in all its phases.”