by Jill Jonnes
McKim, in his usual fastidious way, considered all the ins and outs of his station design and then advised: “There is one space which particularly suggests itself…the head of the flight of steps leading from the Arcade into the General Waiting Room.” McKim proposed “a niche out of reach and considerably above the line of the eye, designed to contain an heroic figure which would be seen by all entering the Station on its main axis, as well as from the Waiting Room…its elevated and retired position, while being seen by all, would escape the charge of conspicuousness, which above all things would be distasteful to Mr. Cassatt.” To Rea, it seemed most apropos that Alexander Cassatt could keep a benevolent eye on the millions of railroad passengers arriving and departing from the station he did not live to see.
With McKim’s health still wobbly, William Mead shepherded through the commission for the Cassatt statue. He engaged, for a twelve-thousand-dollar fee, Adolph A. Weinman, the New York artist already sculpting the station’s gigantic stone statues of robed women, allegories of Day and Night, and stern eagles that would flank each of the giant seven-foot clocks decorating the four main entrances. In March, Mead asked the PRR if Weinman could have “both a heavy and a light overcoat of Mr. Cassatt’s, a cutaway coat, vest, pair of trousers, as well as a pair of shoes. If he could also have a collar it would be useful. I think Mr. Rea had a certain type of coat in mind which Mr. Cassatt usually wore.” Mead suggested he and Weinman meet with Lois Cassatt “for any suggestions she may desire to make.”
Meanwhile, the board of engineers still could not agree about the necessity of screw piles, nor was there consensus about whether the tunnels would keep settling until they cracked. But even as the board clashed over these dilemmas, the other phases of the gigantic enterprise were falling gratifyingly into place after six hard years. By mid-March, after so many travails, the mood was ebullient when the remaining three East River tunnels connected well before Moir’s formal affair at Sherry’s. The workmen in Tunnel B, “not to be outdone by those in ‘D,’ procured a rag doll representing a lady and sent it through the [aligning] pipe…heralding it as the first lady to make the trip. This doll was preserved, framed and presented by the contractors as a souvenir to the engineers in charge of this tunnel.”
For the hundreds of engineers and sandhogs who had struggled through so much disaster and uncertainty, these triumphant early months of 1908 were a fitting time for sentiment, pride, and souvenirs. The East River sandhogs bestowed a munificent gift upon their boss, Ernest Moir, veteran of the original ill-starred Hudson River tunnel, who had reappeared at the East River tunnels’ darkest hour to lead his sandhog troops to glory. The gift was an impressive model air lock measuring “two feet six inches long and…nine inches in diameter. The interior is lit by electric lights, and compressed air is supplied by pumps. There is a miniature hospital bed…There is also a chronometer inside the little room; also pressure gauges.”
Much to Ivy Lee’s delight, he was allowed to organize a press tour for journalists (“should be men who can stand an air pressure of 34 pounds”) to witness the actual breakthrough for the northernmost and final East River tunnel, Tunnel A. “In the mud and the mist and the drenching fog ahead,” wrote one Philadelphia reporter, thrilled to be walking under the river from Manhattan in one of the infamous, off-limits tunnels, “we could see the glint of the shield that had traveled from Long Island City, and we could see that the two powerful engines were only 18 inches apart. The jacks were started, the shields quivered and shook, they moved forward like caterpillars, resting on their tails, and soon they touched all round the circumference, but for an impertinent rock lodged in one corner.
“Jimmy Sullivan was for blowing the thing to smithereens, but Moir said, ‘No bulldozing, boys, now, least of all when we have got the East River, backed by the Atlantic Ocean, just where we want ’em.’ Quietly he plotted the destruction of the rock, and together we climbed into the Long Island shield while both gangs cheered the completion of the work.” It was a deliriously thrilling and historic moment. As thanks, the workers were given two days paid vacation.
However, bemoaned the reporter for the New York World, relishing all the drama of the drippy, shadowy iron tubes where men had struggled and died to penetrate these antediluvian depths, “The millions of people who will use these tunnels in getting to and from their business will see nothing of them but a blur at the car window, and will scarcely realize that they are passing through tubes which have proved to be the most difficult of any driven, nor will they comprehend the stupendous nature of the labor that has been expended in their construction.” All those future Long Island Rail Road commuters whooshing through these hard-won tunnels would know only that swift trains made possible their family’s move from a crowded, expensive apartment building to a home of their own, with trees and a garden for the children.
On the morning of April 1, as a steady rain began, Ernest Moir left a telephone message for one of the PRR officers about his elaborate dinner, detailing its many courses, planned toasts, talks, and vaudeville entertainment. Consequently, Moir was disappointed to learn later that afternoon that Rea had been summoned to Pittsburgh to the bedside of his dying mother. Before leaving, however, he had dictated a message of congratulation for the party. Such was the occasion that PRR president James McCrea and vice president Green would both journey up from Philadelphia to attend.
Moir’s dinner, however convivial, was almost certain be a far more sedate affair than the gigantic bash Charles Jacobs had thrown at Sherry’s in March 1907 for the four hundred men involved in finishing the long-aborning McAdoo tunnels. That evening, following the usual flowery speeches and cigars for all, a Sand Hog Band decked out in yellow oilskins had mounted the stage under the crystal chandeliers to torture the banqueters by caterwauling on tin instruments, imitating the sounds of air blows, foghorns, and tunnel explosions. The jeering, boisterous audience expressed its appreciation first by tossing “rolls, then pickles, and within a few minutes the place was in an uproar with 400 tunnelers pelting the Sand Hog Band with loaves of bread, chunks of beef and other things handy on the tables. The army of waiters became frightened and ran pell mell from the great dining hall, but Chief Engineer Jacobs restored order.”
Samuel Rea departed his Bryn Mawr home in a rush, anxious to reach Pittsburgh and his mother, Ruth Moore Rea. As his wood-paneled PRR parlor car rumbled through the Alleghenies, the engineer in Rea appreciated the notable reductions in his road’s grades and curves. He also worried, for his was a coal-carrying road and once again labor unrest and wildcat strikes were roiling the Pennsylvania coal mines. The morning’s papers wrote of twenty-five thousand men out. As for Rea’s ailing mother, he was quite resigned to her death—“it is be expected”—for she was eighty-eight years old.
In truth, Rea was more concerned about his grown son, George, twenty-eight, a civil engineer, married and a new father. For almost a week, George had been down with the grippe, a malady his mother, Mary, feared he had contracted working in his father’s New York tunnels. After graduating from Princeton in 1904, George Black Rea had joined the large army of junior engineers toiling away in the PRR’s New York Extension. Because their only son had suffered rheumatic fever when young, the Reas still worried about his health.
In Pittsburgh, Rea debarked his train to find winter, for snow, accompanying a cold wave, had howled in, briefly making the Smoky City white. Over at Duquesne Gardens, crowds filled the second annual Automobile Show, covetously eying new models of Franklins, Packards, Raniers, and Maxwells. The Ford Motor Company (“More Than 20,000 Fords Have Been Sold”) boasted that its utilitarian six-hundred-dollar black roadsters were “equal in value to any car at double the price.”
Rea drove through the elegant precincts of Shadyside to the Kenmawr Hotel, hoping as he neared Mrs. Rea’s suite in the Italianate villa residence on its terraced grounds that he was not too late. Rea found his mother failing but alive and spent the next several days by her side. Then, on
Monday April 6 at four in the afternoon, Ruth Moore Rea died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Two days later, soon after he had bid his mother farewell, a telegram arrived from home in Bryn Mawr. Rea opened it, glanced at the message, and felt a wave of misery. Many men had lost their lives working on the PRR’s tunnels and terminal, and now, in an unspeakable sacrifice, George, his son, had joined their ranks. Alfred Noble had noted to Rea just the previous year, “Long continued work in compressed air is very serious in its effects, the men all show them.” If any one knew the exact number dead from working on the PRR’s New York Extension, they did not speak it out loud. Now, his own son had joined those largely anonymous fatalities. Worse yet, from an illness contracted in the poor, always damp air of the PRR tunnels. It was as cruel a blow as could befall any loving father. For five years, men working for the PRR’s contractors had died from the bends, from floods, blowouts, collapsing headings, and in careless dynamite explosions and fires. Not quite two months earlier, three more men had died in the North River tunnels from yet another mishap with dynamite. All those men had families—mothers, fathers. Some had wives and children. And all had been mourned. Now he and his wife and daughter-in-law would join the bereaved. He thought of William Baldwin, the LIRR’s president, dead too young of cancer. And his own dear chief, Cassatt, whose big and courageous heart had simply stopped beating. But most wrenching for him, his own son.
Life pressed relentlessly on and Samuel Rea with it. Three days after George’s death, the first of the Bergen Hill tunnels that would carry the PRR tracks from the Meadowlands down to the North River tunnels was to be blasted fully open. Ivy Lee was allowed to invite all the New York and Philadelphia reporters who had been clamoring (usually to no avail) to see the PRR’s manmade netherworld. By seven o’clock on April 11, a mild Saturday morning, a gaggle of journalists, engineers, and tunnelers had gathered in the shadowy rocky bore deep inside Bergen Hill, a musty, dank place. “At 7:05 o’clock the blast was set off, and as the smoke cleared there came a glimmer of light through the cracks in the dividing wall,” wrote the Times man. “This traprock, right where the tubes were scheduled to join had been found among the worst met by tunnel workers at any point of their labors, and has taken an average of three pounds of dynamite for every cubic yard of rock removed. So another blast was set and this time when the smoke cleared there was an opening large enough for the engineers to make their way through without much difficulty.”
With a shout, the engineers and tunnelers inside Bergen Hill, ignoring all the smoke, dust, and grime, clambered through the jagged hole, followed close behind by the crowd of journalists. After three years of around-the-clock work, the men were over the moon at being the first through. At that dusty moment, Cassatt’s dream had been fully realized. You could now enter a tunnel at Bergen Hill and, following it down under the North River, as the New York Times reported, “Walk from Hackensack Meadows to Long Island, but the Way is Stony and Wet.” More than five miles of PRR railroad tunnels, starting in New Jersey and ending in Long Island were now bored completely through. This moment of corporate and engineering triumph was nonetheless somewhat muted, for all knew of the tragedy that had befallen poor Samuel Rea, his wife, and young widowed daughter-in-law. The untimely death of George Rea was alleviated only by the fetching two-month-old granddaughter who understood nothing yet of her own loss. Samuel Rea and his wife, Mary, who from that day on wore black mourning, had buried their son in Church of the Redeemer, the same shady Bryn Mawr church cemetery where Alexander Cassatt lay.
Bergen Hill contractor William Bradley organized his celebratory dinner at Sherry’s for Thursday May 7 to honor Chief Engineer Charles Jacobs and his staff. On May 2, one of Rea’s assistants wrote Bradley saying his chief had received the “polite invitation,” but declined, “owing to the recent bereavement which has come to him.” On the very day of the dinner, Charles Jacobs had detonated the final blast opening the second Bergen Hill tunnel, signaling the completion of all the PRR tunnels. All told, almost four hundred tons of dynamite had been exploded to blast away—inch by inch and foot by foot—the Bergen Hill’s tough rock interior. As Rea wrote in a congratulatory note, “The Pennsylvania Railroad is now into New York City.”
The May 7, 1908, dinner at Sherry’s was exceedingly jovial. Jacobs, in formal dinner suit, waxed nostalgic, recalling, “On June 24, 1903, I had the honor of starting the first drill on the first piece of the work of this huge undertaking, viz.: the shaft at 33rd Street and 11th Avenue…Today I have had the extreme pleasure of firing the final blast that brought down the last heading of the North tunnel under the Bergen Hill, which will now enable an inhabitant of the United States to pass under Bergen Hill, the North River, New York City, and the East River and on to Long Island.” After a few more remarks Jacobs sat down to another wild burst of applause.
The evening rollicked on, with sentimental toasts, Sherry’s excellent dishes and wines, raucous renderings of popular songs, silly skits, and jokes about the Tunnel Bowling League (pitting the Bergen Hill engineers against those of the East and North River tunnels), doggerel verse extolling their tremendous triumph, all culminating in a specially written song, “The Pennsy Tunnels,” sung to the well-known political song, “Tammany.”
All through that spring, the board of engineers continued to meet and dispute bitterly over the North River tunnels. On May 6, 1908, the board had convened for its 204th meeting. Not quite six years before, Alexander Cassatt had instructed these men to proceed always with “absolute knowledge of the conditions.” But now, despite their best efforts, General Raymond, Charles Jacobs, Alfred Noble, and George Gibbs all had to concede “it had not been possible to do so in every instance.” Two years had passed since General Raymond had journeyed to Bryn Mawr to alert Samuel Rea to the disturbing movements in the unfinished North River tunnels. Now, as they sat around the meeting table, they lacked the “absolute knowledge” that would allow a definitive decision. On the matter of how best to secure and protect the North River tunnels, these engineers could only offer their best professional opinion.
“In my opinion,” General Raymond had written months earlier in arguing against screw piles, “such supports will endanger the safety of the tunnel instead of insuring it…Construction of a satisfactory sliding joint [to attach the screw piles] will sooner or later bind or leak, or do both, introducing conditions that will be troublesome and dangerous.” But Noble, Jacobs, and Gibbs were still in favor of screw piles. The board remained split.
At the 204th meeting, a letter from Samuel Rea was read laying out all the reasons that “I have, after most careful consideration, reached the conclusion that piles, not being a necessity or advisable, we should not install them.” He then instructed “that the North River Tunnels be at once made absolutely watertight, or as nearly so as may be possible; and that they shall be lined with concrete, reinforced with steel to such extent as may be considered desirable by the Board, in such manner as to admit of the installation of piles thereafter if deemed advisable.” Soon, gangs of workmen down inside the PRR’s sixteen miles of completed tunnels would be busily coating the iron tubes with two-foot-thick inner walls of reinforced concrete mixed and minutely monitored by PRR engineers to ensure its absolute integrity.
Samuel Rea could only hope now that he and General Raymond were right in their professional opinions and that the calamity they all feared would not come to pass. They had exercised their best judgment in pursuit of making the North River tunnels safe. But the truth was that they would not know definitively if they were right until years in the future after the tunnels had endured the continual pounding of hundreds of trains day after day, week after week and year after year.
The PRR tunnel route from New Jersey to Long Island.
By the fall of 1908, New Yorkers were amazed at the grandeur arising on Seventh Avenue. For months, the gawkers and passersby had watched as a veritable army of men assembled the colossal steel shell, a resplendent silhouette that
bespoke the latest construction techniques. From the track bed, 650 steel columns rose up to support the massive structure that McKim had designed. But it was only when the men began to install the Milford pink granite facade that the station’s somber beauty and power appeared. As one majestic Doric column after another rose thirty-five feet into the air, they began to form a monumental Roman colonnade—fronting, of all plebeian places, Seventh Avenue. On a blue September day, one could now stand at West Thirty-third Street staring dreamily at the busy construction site and imagine onself transported to ancient imperial Rome. It was an odd but inspiring sight, to see suchrosy classical splendor materializing in the middle of Manhattan’s Tenderloin.
The construction of Penn Station in October 1908.
On February 21, 1909, the final piece of the stonework was completed on Penn Station’s Seventh Avenue facade. Now one could stand at the junction of Broadway and look west down Thirty-second Street to behold the unlikely classical vision of the station’s main entrance, a “great central pavilion” set off from the long front of Doric columns by its greater height and double row of ten columns. “Above the columns,” reported the New York Times, “is an entablature surmounted by a stepped parapet and sculptured group [Night and Day] supporting a clock with a dial 7 feet in diameter.” When the Brooklyn Bridge had been built decades earlier, the whole of Gotham could easily observe the steady advance of that beautiful behemoth. But most of the PRR’s New York Extension—the tunnels—remained out of sight. Only as the terminal began to rise in all its Doric glory did New Yorkers begin to realize that an immense change was upon them.