Conquering Gotham

by Jill Jonnes

  When the station’s massive doors opened officially for business at 9:30 p.m., mobs of curious but well-behaved citizens and a few bona fide train passengers streamed inside. All were suitably awestruck when they emerged into McKim’s monumental General Waiting Room. The play of light and shadow in McKim’s high curved ceilings and pillared walls was evocative and deeply poetic. “A Frenchman standing beneath the dome of the splendid waiting room sobbed aloud because such a ‘beautiful affair’ was ‘just a railway station,’” the World reported, “while friends explained to him that in this commercial country commerce is idealized in art and beauty.”

  The citizens of Gotham embraced the magnificent station as their own, with many proudly declaring it one of the wonders of the world. “In thousands they flooded the acres of its floor space,” wrote the reporter from the Tribune, “gazed like awestruck pygmies at the vaulted ceilings far above them, inspected curiously the tiny details of the place, so beautifully finished, on their own level, and pressed like caged creatures against the grill which looked down upon subterranean tracks, trains and platforms.” What particularly struck the Tribune reporter as he watched the awed and curious crowds swirling about McKim’s masterpiece was the building’s ability to absorb this much humanity and hoi polloi, such opening night bedlam, while retaining its magisterial calm and dignity.

  Elsewhere in the terminal a bemused reporter for the Herald watched jaded New Yorkers turn into veritable rubes as they spent their Saturday night testing out this new civic space. Fellows in rakish derbies strolled into the men’s waiting room and plopped into the deep leather-cushioned seats or drifted off to puff cigarettes in the men’s smoking lounge. A few had their shoes shined, while many citizens stopped to stare at the statue of Alexander Cassatt. Women in the latest huge beribboned hats dined in the Ladies Café, inspected the arcade shops, and strolled down to see the trains. Everyone, it seemed, had to get a drink of the free ice water at one of the 158 fountains and line up to ask questions of the inundated PRR clerks at the information booth. The Corinthian Room and the café were mobbed and noisy as New Yorkers sampled the PRR’s famous cuisine.

  By ten o’clock, many passengers and families had boarded Pullman sleeping cars departing early Sunday morning to points south and west, but few considered retiring to their berths. They milled about on the platforms and visited the General Waiting Room again to crane their necks up at the coffered ceiling and study the mural maps. There was just too much excitement and hubbub to settle in to sleep. Some bought newspaper extras and shook their heads at the somber details of the horrific factory fire over in Newark. Twenty-three young seamstresses at the Wolff Muslin Undergarment Company had died in the roaring flames, roasted alive, while another forty were injured throwing themselves desperately out the windows of a firetrap of a building with useless fire escapes. The details were gruesome, with some jumping girls holding hands as they leaped, only to be impaled on a fence surrounding the property.

  As midnight neared, thousands of New Yorkers made their way onto the skylighted concourse to be there when the first PRR train pulled out at 12:02 a.m. In truth, it was just a local five-car accommodation train going to South Amboy, crammed with those wanting to make a small piece of history. Many suburbanite theatergoers (just in from the Bijou, the Lyric, and the Casino) streamed on, chattering, and installed themselves in the green plush seats, luxuriating in a trip home that entailed no ferry. Onboard, amid the excited crush of passengers was William Atterbury, Cassatt’s protégé now ascended to PRR fifth vice president. Veteran locomotive engineer Leon Bedman leaned out the side window of the DD1 as, at 12:01, conductor Henry Orner yelled “All Aboard!” and waved his lantern. With that, the doors closed and at 12:02 precisely they were off, sailing out on the electrified tracks into the open train yard before whooshing under the North River, rushing through the well-lighted tunnel, and emerging from the Bergen Portal to roll across the marshes of the Jersey Meadowlands and on to Manhattan Transfer. There, while the steam locomotive was exchanged for the electric, many New York passengers debarked to wait for the next train into Gotham.

  Back at Penn Station, at 12:50 a.m. the Washington Express pulled in from Philadelphia and points south with President James McCrea and several other PRR officers aboard, all come to experience firsthand this momentous occasion, the true opening of their company’s monumental gateway. As the passengers streamed off, many having attended the traditional Army-Navy game that afternoon, several rhapsodized to the Journal American reporter about what a relief it was not to find themselves facing the ferry ride, and after that, the drab prospect of getting a cab or trolley car at West Street. “The dense crowds at the rush hours, the delays, fogs, floating ice, and river collisions,” prophesied a New York Times reporter, “…will be remembered only vaguely.” These first arriving passengers were greeted by Stationmaster William H. “Big Bill” Egan, a man of massive physique and matching charm who had risen from freight brakeman to parlor-car conductor to stationmaster in Trenton, before ascending to his present Olympian responsibilities and a staff of 250. He possessed a soon-to-be-legendary courtesy and grasp of p.r. and fun.

  In contrast to the small gathering when Cassatt’s statue was unveiled back in August, the vast terminal now pulsated with life, filled with expectation and excitement as well as the smooth movement of the on-time trains and people and luggage. The PRR’s publicity bureau estimated a hundred thousand people were present that first evening. All that night and the next day horse-drawn carriages, chauffeured automobiles, and electric taxis swept up to unload and pick up the first train travelers through the North and East River tunnels. But those who came merely to see and savor this extraordinarily gracious public space greatly outnumbered actual travelers. Many who had “never been west of Eleventh Avenue” came to watch trains depart to such faraway cities as Chicago and St. Louis, and down to Port Tampa, Florida. The trains came and went close to clockwork.

  Among the swarming good-natured crowds that night stood Scotsman James Forgie, chief assistant engineer to Charles Jacobs and now a member of Jacobs’s New York firm. On Monday Forgie wrote to Samuel Rea, saying, “Yesterday I witnessed the inauguration of the traffic of the Pennsylvania Railroad from New York City by the North River Tunnels with feelings very different, I have no doubt, from those of the average spectator who went to see the opening of the Station.” There were few who knew better than Forgie the agonizing tribulations and commensurate triumphs of their arduous tunnel boring deep under the river’s ancient bed.

  “Therefore,” enjoined Forgie, “permit me to offer you my most hearty congratulations on the final attainment of the greatest engineering scheme of the age, to which you have devoted the past twenty years more or less—not a long time, considering the magnitude of the scheme—and for which, also, you are so greatly responsible.” Forgie acknowledged and alluded to their bitter differences on screw piles, “The subject of so much deep concern.” He ended with felicitations and best wishes. In truth, only time would tell if Samuel Rea had made the right decision, if the North River tunnels were safe. But on that wonderful day the tunnels worked and the PRR’s debut was near flawless. Samuel Rea’s wire to Charles Jacobs in London was the understated work of an engineer: “Station operating successfully.” The Pennsylvania Railroad had conquered Gotham.

  TWENTY-SIX

  CODA

  Alexander J. Cassatt and Charles Follen McKim had bequeathed to Gotham a magnificent monument in Pennsylvania Station, drawing inspiration from one great and ancient empire to create a modern temple of transportation worthy of their own ascendant American empire. Perhaps no one ever captured so beautifully the timeless essence of McKim’s architectural masterpiece as did Thomas Wolfe in his novel You Can’t Go Home Again, published posthumously in 1940: “Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time…. There was a superb fitness in the fact that the one which held it better than all others should be a railroad station. For here, as nowhere else on earth, men we
re brought together for a moment at the beginning or end of their innumerable journeys, here one saw their greetings and farewells, here in a single instant, one got the entire picture of human destiny. Men came and went, they passed and vanished, and all were moving through the moments of their lives to death, all made small tickings in the sound of time—but the voice of time remained aloof and unperturbed, a drowsy and eternal murmur below the immense and distant roof.”

  And yet all of Penn Station’s monumental grandeur could not compensate for certain intrinsic problems. When an ailing James McCrea retired early on November 13, 1912, Samuel Rea ascended to the presidency of the Pennsylvania Railroad still engaged in a herculean—but as yet futile—struggle to secure a West Side subway line for the station. If it were not so galling, it would be almost funny that in 1917, four and a half years later, Penn Station could boast a more convenient connection to Boston than it had to other parts of New York City. On March 9, 1917, Rea and Gustav Lindenthal dedicated the final piece of Cassatt’s dream, the Hell Gate Bridge across the East River (at 1,017 feet the world’s longest steel arch bridge) from Queens to Ward’s Island, thus completing the PRR’s New York Connecting Railroad to New England. On this red-letter day, the Seventh Avenue IRT was still not finished. Not until the next year, 1918, could passengers debarking LIRR and PRR trains finally step onto a Seventh Avenue subway from a Penn Station stop—sixteen years after Cassatt and Rea first requested such service and eight years after the station opened. So convoluted were New York subway politics, it would be yet another decade before the Eighth Avenue subway finally connected to Penn Station.

  Samuel Rea (right, in derby) and Gustav Lindenthal (left, white hair) dedicate the Hell Gate Bridge March 9, 1917, thus completing the New York Tunnels and Terminal Extension begun in late 1901.

  Not only did this early lack of real mass transit undermine the success of Penn Station, so did its inauspicious location. The Tenderloin neighborhood was no longer the raucous Satan’s Circus of old, but enough saloons, dance halls, and bordellos lingered on to make those West Side blocks seedy. When Rea tried to recruit real estate developers to upgrade and beautify Penn Station’s immediate vicinity, he was told by one realtor, “It is not a question of more transportation facilities (though these are always helpful) as much as the purifying of the neighborhood by the occupancy of the streets by respectable people doing business or living in hotels there.” Another potential developer pointed out to Rea that his own passengers did not care to linger in the vicinity, preferring to “take cars and escape almost as if the station were in a plague spot.”

  Unfortunately, the top PRR brass, being largely Philadelphians, failed to grasp that they would have to boldly lead the way as investors and even builders to transform the neighborhood into a worthy setting for their New York station. True, the PRR had, albeit with considerable difficulty, wooed the U.S. Post Office to build atop their tracks on Eighth Avenue. McKim, Mead & White’s attractive Corinthian temple, the new main branch of the New York Post Office, opened in December 1913. A quote from Herodotus about Persian couriers chosen by the architects and inscribed on its Eighth Avenue frieze soon became the agency’s unofficial motto: “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

  Cassatt and Rea had always envisioned their Pennsylvania Station as the catalyst for a neighborhood real estate boom: modern office skyscrapers rising on avenues busy with important men wearing top hats, fancy hotels and theaters displacing saloons, and smart shops, boutiques, and bustling cafés giving new polish to nearby blocks. They had hoped to see the city widen Seventh Avenue, along with Thirty-Second Street, creating a handsome plaza. But the PRR failed to control the requisite sites and Tammany, which still ruled Manhattan, was not about to bestir itself for corporate foes. Two years after the station opened, the Seventh Avenue Improvement Association complained that the PRR itself was stymying new development. Their overpriced and unsold holdings were sitting “vacant or covered with old rookeries…In the meantime the section south…was being built up as a loft or factory section. If the present situation continues, factory building will gradually close in on the station. When this happens Mr. Cassatt’s dream will have failed…For want of investing $10,000,000 or $15,000,000 of additional capital the Pennsylvania Railroad is impairing the value of the $125,000,000 already invested.”

  To its great and lasting detriment, as art historian Hilary Ballon writes, “The Pennsylvania did not see itself in the business of real estate development. Its business was the railroad.” Consequently, this rich and powerful corporate giant had not gained possession of sufficient adjacent territory—as had the Vanderbilts and New York Central around their terminal—nor did the PRR officers have the mind-set to aggressively and strategically use what they did own to reshape the surrounding district. As one developer upbraided Rea, “I find my endeavors thwarted at every step by the constant opposition of my [real estate] clients, because of your apathy as compared with the zeal and activity of the New York Central people.”

  Finally, desperate to demonstrate their support for desirable buildings, the PRR helped underwrite the Hotel Pennsylvania, a comfortable business hotel that opened directly across from the station’s Seventh Avenue entrance, but not until January 1919. The 2,200-room hotel, also designed by McKim, Mead & White, became the city’s largest hotel, but possessed no great cachet. It was the PRR’s first and last foray into active development. Between the late arrival of the IRT subway and the even later opening of the Eighth Avenue IND, the seedy character of the nearby streets, and the timidity of the PRR’s own efforts, the blocks and avenues around Penn Station languished. No fancy skyscraper office buildings arose, nor fashionable hotels. The Penn Station neighborhood remained a disappointing backwater.

  As for Penn Station itself, New Yorkers harbored mixed feelings. They adored its glamour and grandeur, the sense it gave one of embarking on a magnificent journey. They loved the convenience of catching the all-Pullman Broadway Limited to Chicago or the Orange Blossom Special to Florida right from Manhattan, as well as the prospect of glimpsing a star like Charlie Chaplin or political bigshot being squired about by Stationmaster Egan, jovial and elegant in his top hat, gray spats, and trademark mahogany cane. (Reportedly, “Mr. Egan was the only man with whom the late President Coolidge ever spent three hours chatting.”) Travelers felt part of something momentous just by entering the station, important players in the great human drama.

  The Hotel Pennsylvania being built across Seventh Avenue from Penn Station.

  Amidst the crowds surging through McKim’s General Waiting Room, wrote Thomas Wolfe in You Can’t Go Home Again, “There were people who saw everything, and people who saw nothing, people who were weary, sullen, sour, and people who laughed, shouted, and were exultant with the thrill of the voyage, people who thrust and jostled, and people who stood quietly and watched and waited; people with amused, superior looks, and people who glared and bristled pugnaciously. Young, old, rich, poor, Jews, Gentiles, Negroes, Italians, Greeks, Americans—they were all there harmonized and given a moment of intense and somber meaning as they were gathered into the murmurous, all-taking unity of time.”

  For some New Yorkers, the glamour and rich human theater were offset by the station’s shortcomings. “The average traveler will be dumbfounded when he views the magnificent waiting room and concourse for the first time,” wrote railroad man John Droege in 1916, “but in more cases than a few the immensity of things and the magnificence will lose their luster when he has traversed the ‘magnificent distance’ from the sidewalk to the train or vice versa. It cannot be denied that this is a disadvantage.” This criticism struck such a nerve at the PRR that, true engineers that they were, they assembled detailed statistics on walking distances at numerous major train stations—including Grand Central Terminal—to prove that walking a thousand feet to catch a train at Penn Station was no worse (or not so much worse) than e
lsewhere. Another longstanding gripe among the natives was “The ambiguity of the many exits from the trains, some leading to the second level and some to the third.” This, wrote architecture critic Lewis Mumford, “is baffling to anyone attempting to meet a person arriving on a train.” Over the years, the PRR continually adjusted the station—making platforms longer, installing escalators—including one right up the center of the Grand Stairway. But they never really addressed these principal design flaws.

  The General Waiting Room in 1930.

  Ironically, the Long Island Rail Road, something of a stepchild in the original enterprise—it was allocated five of the station’s twenty-one tracks in 1910—turned out to be the more important source of passengers. In 1911, the first full year of operation, the LIRR carried six million riders. LIRR President Ralph Peters reported that in one year 7,793 houses were built along their lines in Queens and Long Island, forty factories, 773 stores, and 792 other buildings. By 1917, the number of LIRR riders had doubled to twelve million, making them two-thirds of Penn Station’s eighteen million annual passengers that year. The preponderance of suburban commuters at Penn Station was not just unanticipated, it was “a problem because the station, from track layout to support spaces, was not designed to serve commuter traffic. The large majority of users were confined to cramped quarters. They moved underground, from commuter shuttles to subways and streets, without cause to enter McKim’s uplifting vaulted spaces. Millions of people were using Penn Station, but not as McKim had intended and, more urgently, not as the Pennsylvania Railroad projected on their balance sheets.”