by Jill Jonnes
McKim had not been there long when in mid-August 1909 he was stricken by a heart attack. “For a time,” reported the New York Times “his condition was critical, but it was believed now that he will recover.” Despite the cool and languid ocean breezes, “the serene sky and the white clouds and the friendly sea and the old horse and the dog,” the gentle ministrations of his beloved daughter and the matronly Bessie, Charles Follen McKim grew weaker and weaker. At one o’clock on September 14, 1909, with Margaret by his side, he died quietly in the Red Cottage. Like Alexander Cassatt, Charles McKim would never see his greatest work—the Pennsylvania Station—fully completed. McKim’s was the final untimely death among those great-hearted leaders who had planned the New York Extension to be a magnificent paean to a great city.
Now, almost a year later, fourscore of PRR officers and directors passed into the stillness of the General Waiting Room. Here the Philadelphians greeted the New Yorkers: General Charles Raymond, wearing bottle-thick eyeglasses and a plain black suit and bow tie; engineers James Forgie and George Gibbs; architect William Symmes Richardson of McKim, Mead & White; sculptor Adolph A. Weinman; and Gustav Lindenthal, serving happily now as chief engineer for the Hell Gate Bridge section of the PRR’s New York Connecting Railroad. Alfred Noble was away vacationing on the North Shore of Lake Superior.
About ten days earlier, Samuel Rea had proposed to President McCrea that “as we have determined, and determined rightly, that we will have no elaborate opening [of Penn Station], my suggestion is that we hold our dividend meeting early on August 1st, and then that we come over to New York and that you will unveil the Statue…This trip will be short and informal…As those present…will have been personal associates of Mr. Cassatt’s it seems to me that we can avoid elaborate arrangements or speech-making.”
Rea had expected Penn Station to be open by now, alive with passengers and hundreds of trains rolling in and out daily. But bitter strikes at the car factories had delayed delivery of almost a third of the PRR’s order of 1,988 fireproof all-steel passenger cars, without which the company would not begin using the tunnels. Now, as the hands of the huge waiting room clock moved ponderously to 2:30 p.m., the group quieted and arrayed themselves on the Grand Stairway facing Weinman’s sculpture of Alexander Cassatt. Still draped and hidden by a large cloth, the statue had been duly located, as McKim had proposed, in a special elevated niche.
“With the unveiling of the statue before which we stand, it is proposed, sir,” intoned PRR director Thomas Cuyler, nodding to President McCrea, “that you should officially declare the Station open…these massive walls and columns speak in their severe simplicity and majestic silence far more eloquently than human tongue could give utterance to.” Edward Cassatt tugged off the cloth, revealing an impressive bronze sculpted likeness of his father. Cassatt’s statue showed an imposing man, tall, dressed in an old-fashioned suit and great coat, his right hand touching a book of engineering blueprints, his left hand clutching his familiar derby, gloves, and walking stick. The sculptor, working from photos, had captured Cassatt’s laconic intelligence and power. The bronze plaque below was engraved with his name, title, and years as president, and the simple phrase: “Whose foresight, courage, and ability achieved the extension of the Pennsylvania Railroad system into New York City.”
Every man on that stairway must have marveled at it all, as the applause faded and they waited for the photographer to click away, capturing for posterity in a formal portrait this sentimental tribute and historic PRR occasion. The New York Tunnels and Terminal Extension had finally come to be, just as Alexander Cassatt had envisioned when he stepped off the S.S. Celtic almost exactly nine years earlier. As one engineer would later write, “When one considers the magnitude of this undertaking even after the engineering plans were approved and found feasible—the tremendous scope of the work, the purchase of the enormous amount of necessary property in the heart of a great city, the financing of the venture and the thousand and one other difficulties to be met and overcome—one cannot but admire and applaud the stout and brave heart of the chief whose foresight planned, whose splendid courage inspired, whose counsel guided and whose ability mastered it!”
As Charles Raymond stood on the Grand Stairway, he felt a pang of melancholy that Cassatt was present only as a bronze statue. Raymond’s thick eyeglasses did not much help his near blindness. He could not see the magnificence of the station as the others did, but even the blurred sight of the statue stirred many memories of their collective effort. Living now out at the Water Witch Club in the New Jersey Highlands, Raymond had met many of the titans of his time, but he considered Cassatt “almost unequaled, owing to the breadth, originality, and decisiveness of his character.” Beyond Cassatt’s brains and brilliance, what had so touched Raymond about the man was that “his manner to his subordinates was so direct and simple that he seemed unconscious of his own superiority.” It was a rare quality that had endeared Cassatt to almost all who worked for him.
Charles Jacobs, with his job as chief engineer completed, was back in England, as he was every summer. Later that day Samuel Rea, first vice president since Green’s retirement a year earlier, wrote Jacobs, saying, “I am personally very sorry that you could not have seen this simple unveiling ceremony to our old chief, but will look forward to you being here in the Fall when the regular operation begins.” As for Rea, the moment Cassatt’s statue was unveiled he knew the face was too dark. Before the week was out he had Weinman lightening up the bronze patina. But all in all, Rea confided to an aide, “I am quite well pleased with the statue and like it more than ever.” Lois Cassatt would not have her first view until September.
The memorial statue of Alexander Cassatt in Penn Station.
The previous December at the annual formal dinner of the PRR’s board of directors, Rea had reminisced about the perils, pitfalls, and frustrations of their road’s prolonged forty-year quest to enter Gotham. An impressive, rugged figure as he entered his fifty-fifth year, his brushy hair and mustache gone salt-and-pepper gray, Rea reminded these powerful men of “the severe criticism—written and spoken—which rained upon the Company for a so-called needless and extravagant expenditure of money that would never bring any return directly or indirectly, but happily that is past…I for years had my doubts whether the present generation would fully appreciate this work, and more than once remarked [about this] to Mr. Cassatt…I am happy to feel, however, as the work is nearing completion, that people are beginning to see and appreciate what it really means…to have this extension into and through New York City, and a station erected there creditable to our system and well worthy of the greatest city of the country, if not of the world…Had it not been undertaken at the proper time, it would be practically prohibitive today by reason of cost and physical impediments. The whole work speaks for itself and will stand for all time as a monument to the Company, to the Directors and stockholders…[and] to the engineers in charge of construction and to the whole staff of the Pennsylvania Railroad.”
Rea acknowledged the project’s costs, heading now toward $111 million. But he assured the directors what they knew full well: “Every agreement [was] negotiated by the best talent we could secure, and every expenditure so scrutinized that adequate value has been obtained, and every dollar of this large sum has been regularly and properly disbursed and audited.” And so, as the evening grew later, Rea came to the end of his almost nostalgic review of the company’s many travails and triumphs in Gotham, saying, “It should be a great satisfaction to us to have lived to see the great work completed, and the anticipation of so many years realized.” But there was always, as Samuel Rea now said, “the sorrow ever present that Mr. Cassatt was not to see the completion of the work in which he took such a deep interest.” Unspoken was Rea’s other even greater sorrow and loss—his only son, George Black Rea, who had died as a junior engineer building those tunnels.
It was still pitch-black in the wee hours of Thursday September 8, 1910, and the night
air distinctly chilly, when a small group of men and women began to gather on the West Thirty-third Street side of Penn Station. McKim’s austerely simple classical walls made for a strange contrast with the worn tenements and shops across the street. Amidst the early admiration, already some architects and critics were grousing at the “archeological” quality of McKim’s work, while others would bemoan the heaviness and monotony of the great expanse of granite pillars. In June, the Architectural Record lamented “the sadness of the interminable fronts…A stranger set down before the Seventh Avenue front…would be apt to guess it a good substantial jail, a place of detention and punishment of which the inmates were not intended to have a good time.” And then there was the matter of the many blocks immediately surrounding the station that still looked raw and unfinished after all the years of demolition and construction.
More and more people drifted up to join those waiting at the LIRR station, and a blue-coated police sergeant and seven traffic cops kept a close eye on them, ready for any unruliness. The crowd tensed as at 3:00 a.m. the doors to Penn Station’s (comparatively modest) Long Island Rail Road section swung slowly open, ready to receive these eager inaugural riders. Today was the first day of regularly scheduled service and the first train would soon be departing. The waiting crowd sprinted in to the ticket booth, each hoping to buy the first tickets for the historic first ride on the first train out of the new Penn Station and through the East River tunnels.
All were disappointed to learn that the pioneering first train, scheduled to depart at 3:36 a.m., was a two-car baggage train carrying chiefly newspapers. So the history-minded passengers made do with the Number 1702 departing five minutes later at 3:41 a.m. on Track 19 for Winfield Junction, whence they could connect with trains for Babylon, Hempstead, Whitestone Landing, and Port Washington. One passenger bestowed a congratulatory bottle of champagne upon LIRR motorman T. W. Fields, who would drive No. 1702. A gaggle of newspaper reporters, the stationmaster, his aides, and numerous porters gathered on the pristine platform to watch as, promptly at 3:41, No. 1702 glided out under Manhattan, the East River, and on toward its first stop at Long Island City. This new all-rail journey would cut in half almost every Long Island commuter’s travel time. The New York Times had devoted an entire special section on September 4 (crammed with real estate ads) to the opening of LIRR tunnels and the huge and inevitable suburban housing boom coming to the bucolic spaces of Long Island. With commutes so much simpler and shorter, the breadwinners of New York families could move their wives and children, now jammed into small apartments, out to the island’s fresh air and seashore. The great transformation of the New York region was about to begin.
Exactly one hour after the first LIRR passenger train had departed Penn Station, intimations of opening day trouble surfaced. Three veteran LIRR commuters, men holding monthly tickets, boarded the 4:40 a.m. New York-bound train in Jamaica, settling in as usual in the smoking car. When the LIRR conductor came through to exact the 14-cent day surcharge for the new (nonferry) service, the trio were outraged. One “argued with the conductor a while and finally handed over 15 cents, with the remark: ‘Keep the change—my contribution to the tunnels.’ Another man puffed his cigarette and offered to draw a check on the National City Bank for 14 cents. A third declined to pay anything and asked the conductor to put him off under the river.” Considering that the East River tunnels had just reduced their usual forty-four-minute commute to nineteen minutes, their tight-fisted chagrin must have seemed churlish.
At 8:30 a.m., middling disaster struck at Winfield. There had been “imperfect installation of a section of third rail which knocked the shoes off from two electric trains,” explained LIRR president Ralph Peters. “This stalled the trains, and it was necessary to get locomotives to pull them out of the way. The damage was repaired promptly,” but not before causing an hour’s worth of LIRR rush-hour trains to be ten to forty minutes late. All over Long Island on what turned out to be a September day of sunshine and breezes, country towns rejoiced with “tunnel” parades and festivities celebrating their speedier and more convenient connection to Gotham’s wealth and opportunity. But as village bands played, schoolchildren marched, and politicians speechified, chaos was building on the LIRR.
Longtime LIRR riders fumed at having to exchange their old commuter tickets for new ones (at the cost of an additional dollar) and again at having to pay new tunnel surcharges. “For some weeks past,” asserted the LIRR the next day, the company had used every endeavor “to inform its patrons of the new tariff…strange to say, very few patrons paid any attention.” But worse yet, commuters discovered all the old familiar schedules had been changed. Infuriated mobs of passengers besieged overwhelmed ticket agents at every station along the various lines, their ire rising yet further as the long waits to exchange or buy tickets caused them to miss trains. Riders of the Far Rockaway Branch learned their trains had disappeared from the schedule altogether. In the LIRR section of Penn Station, police had to quell outbreaks of fisticuffs among rival newspaper hawkers and other assorted thuggish vendors staking out valuable new sales terrain. All told, thirty-five thousand people rode the first LIRR “tunnel” trains, and many were mad as wet hens. The LIRR put the best spin on it they could: “There were no personal injuries to passengers or employes, and that is really the most important thing.” Matters improved steadily from there.
The opening of the LIRR section of Penn Station underscored an appalling oversight: There was not a single subway or elevated line connected to the PRR’s mighty terminal. More amazing, none was as yet even planned. As the PRR prepared to open the entire station, the nearest subway—August Belmont’s IRT—was four long blocks distant. The Ninth Avenue El and the more popular Sixth Avenue El were each a long block away. Only the slow-moving Seventh Avenue trolley car was close at hand. In infuriating contrast, the Vanderbilts’ Grand Central Station had been served for six years by the IRT, which had a subway stop conveniently under the terminal.
Back in early 1904, now-deceased LIRR president William Baldwin had warned Cassatt in a private letter that the PRR could guarantee subway service at the terminal only by taking control of the rival Metropolitan Subway. Cassatt, in a serious miscalculation, demurred. August Belmont pounced, bought the Metropolitan, and proceeded to reign for a good half-decade as the intransigent and wily Traction King (complete with his own private subway car, Mineola), blocking all rivals and any and all subway development that might eat into his fabulous IRT profits. As Manhattan came to be one of the most congested places on earth (“More people resided on this small, twenty-three-square-mile island than in thirty-three of the nation’s forty-six states”), transit politics became correspondingly more byzantine. Tammany under Boss Murphy, Belmont’s staunch ally, evinced as little interest as ever in serving the public. Finally, dire need and utter stalemate propelled the state legislature in 1907 to ram through a new state Public Service Commission dedicated solely to getting New York City’s subways built.
During all those years, Pennsy officers had exhorted, pleaded, demanded, and entreated Belmont, transit commissions, and city and state officials to do their civic duty and launch construction on a Seventh Avenue subway line to serve the city’s other big railroad terminal, their Pennsylvania Station. Said Rea, “This line on the west side of the city is imperatively needed…unquestionably it should be built at the earliest possible opportunity.” As of 1910, it had all been to no avail. Penn Station would open not only without a subway. It would open without even the prospect of a subway. All agreed this was a civic scandal. But no one had a ready solution.
The day after the LIRR inaugurated its train service into Penn Station, William Randolph Hearst’s Journal American jeered in an editorial, “How red are the flushes of the Public Service Commission as it comes trailing with empty hands…on this day of jubilee? Where is its tale of subways to match the Pennsylvania tubes and terminal…a work comparable in difficulty and magnitude to the building of the Panama Canal?
What can [the Commission] show for its three years of costly lucubrations and its vast acreage of blue-prints? Nothing but ample terminals for long trains of thought?”
And then there was the sorry state of the surrounding neighborhood. Later in 1910, Samuel Rea would write a long, detailed letter to the president of New York’s Municipal Art Society, regretting “the rather cheap character of the property adjacent to our Station, [we feel] this section of the City could be very much beautified by an architectural treatment of the entire surroundings, and the territory between Broadway and the Station, and Twenty-third and Forty-Second Streets, enlarged by new streets and traffic facilities to ease congestion…Little has been done for this section of the City…which badly needs improvement.” The lack of a subway only exacerbated this unfortunate situation. Without proper mass transit, the neighborhood would continue to languish, an inconvenient area with a bad reputation.
Penn Station just before it opened in 1910.
On the cold autumn night of Saturday November 26, 1910, following two months of elaborate dress rehearsals, the Pennsylvania Railroad was at last ready to run its Tuscan red passenger trains into the heart of Gotham. By nine o’clock, excited New Yorkers, bundled up against intimations of snow or freezing rain, were converging upon the station’s Doric colonnades. Outside and in, the terminal was brilliantly lit, ablaze with the electricity that made the tunnels possible.