by Jill Jonnes
Moreover, Penn Station had been built to handle far greater numbers—a hundred million people a year—than the eighteen million being served in 1917. Consequently, President Rea found himself once again defending the whole Gotham enterprise from attacks: “The Pennsylvania Station,” he wrote, “instead of being a monument to inefficiency and waste and a white elephant, is a monument to foresight and the necessities of New York City and the whole country with which it does business…The station was constructed for the future.” Two years later, in 1919, Penn Station’s passenger numbers had almost doubled to thirty-four million, surpassing Grand Central Terminal, and vindicating the PRR’s belief that ever larger numbers would flow in and out of the nation’s greatest city.
On September 30, 1925, at Broad Street Station in Philadelphia, Samuel Rea, still tall and commanding, but more heavyset, his thick shock of hair almost white, walked into the opulent wood-paneled meeting room of his road’s board of directors, with its oriental carpet and carved mantel. Oil portraits of the previous eight presidents (all deceased) kept corporate vigil. The gathered directors no longer sported the fussy dark frock coats, high white collars, and silk cravats of old. The new corporate attire was the modern business suit, vest (with watch and chain), and tie. Outside, under a gray sky, the powerful locomotives screeched and rumbled as they came and went. How many times had Rea come into this room, suffused with the railroad’s history and so many memories of his own? Just nine days earlier Rea had celebrated his seventieth birthday and today he would officially retire. The previous April, Rea had given his valedictory speech to the shareholders at their annual meeting in the grand foyer of Philadelphia’s Academy of Music. On that occasion, Rea lamented that “We have had a continuous struggle to prevent the confiscation of the railroad investment and service by unwise, wasteful and hostile legislation and regulation which, happily, a fully informed public opinion has tempered.”
Today when he retired, as called for in the company rules, Rea would become the first PRR president ever to reach three score and ten and to leave this famously “killing” job in good health. His was a true Horatio Alger story, from humble beginnings fifty-three years earlier as a rod and chain boy to the twelve years he had just completed as the activist ninth president of the company. This had made Rea one of the nation’s most powerful men, for his railroad employed 165,000, carried an eighth of the nation’s freight, transported sixty-seven million passengers, and was valued at $136 million. And yet, marveled the Wall Street Journal, Rea possessed an “almost singular combination of modesty, steadfastness and unselfishness.”
Today was, of course, a day of sentiment and praise. The board of directors, arrayed around the highly polished doughnut-shaped wooden meeting table, honored Rea’s role as the steady guiding hand behind the New York Extension by voting to engage artist Adolph A. Weinman to create a second monumental bronze statue for Penn Station. This one would be of Rea and occupy the niche across from Cassatt. Back in March 1911, Rea had rejected a proposal to place a statue in that niche that would honor the project workmen who had perished, along with a plaque listing their names. No explanation was given. Perhaps he did not feel the sandhogs and other laborers merited the honor. Perhaps he preferred not to dwell on those who died building the company’s great work—because his own son had been among them. Rea’s wife, Mary, still wore black mourning. Or perhaps he felt the honor should be his, for he had been Cassatt’s right-hand man for the first five years and then seen the project through its darkest hours.
In the fifteen years since Penn Station had opened, there had never been any detailed public discussion of what had inarguably been the most anguishing struggle of Samuel Rea’s career: his decision—against the advice of three of his own outstanding engineers—not to attach screw piles to the North River tunnels. Time had borne out the wisdom of Rea’s choice, for the tunnels—constantly surveyed and watched—had proven to be completely safe. They had not, as had been Rea’s worst fear, continued to sink inexorably deeper and deeper into that ancient silt or shown any sign of strain. Instead, as the PRR’s own meticulous measurements showed, the tunnels continued to oscillate very slightly with the tide of the great river that flowed in and out high above them.
Like Rea, the North River tunnel engineers viewed that work as the highlight of their careers, a project of such magnitude and importance, so fraught with travails and triumphs, that they hated to part. And so, under the aegis of the Pennsylvania Tunnels Alumni Association of the North River Division, for years they threw merry, elaborate reunion dinners at Healy’s Restaurant on Columbus Avenue. Menus featured “Chicken Gumbo à la Terminal West” and “Grapefruit in Half Section apparently severed by some sharp instrument.” In the early days, Charles Jacobs and James Forgie had presided at these jolly soirees, winding up after many courses and cocktails, Roman punch, and other libations, singing the many verses of their own sentimental anthem, “Tunnel Days.”
The PRR board of directors was looking on this September day not just to the past, but to the company’s future. With Rea’s retirement, they elected W. W. Atterbury tenth president of the PRR. Promoted not quite three decades earlier by Cassatt to unsnarl Pittsburgh, Atterbury over the ensuing years had demonstrated great range and charm as an executive. Having started as a three-dollar-a-week shop apprentice, Atterbury prided himself on cultivating the best in everyone he worked with. During World War I, he had served in France, constructing railroads almost from scratch for the Allies and then running them, earning the rank of brigadier general. Today, Atterbury expressed his considerable pleasure at becoming president, saying, “I like to think that the Pennsylvania railroad has a soul and that its soul has been created out of the lives of men who devoted themselves to its service…the Pennsylvania Railroad has a great destiny.”
In a final gesture of appreciation to Samuel Rea, Effingham B. Morris bestowed upon the retiring president a personal gift from the board of directors, rare English silver plate made in London in the reign of Charles II. This was a most apropos memento because Rea, who so loved history, confessed “a weakness for studying old English silver craftsmanship and its distinctive hall marks of which there is a record for about six hundred years.” Further, he savored “the pleasure of constantly using these works of art.” During his presidency, Rea, now wealthy, had built a beautiful fieldstone mansion on 104 rolling acres in Gladwyne. He named this graceful Main Line estate Waverly. “Tramping and working about my home farm give me all [the exercise] I need,” he said during one interview, with wood chopping a favorite activity. Now, Rea looked forward to having more hours for tending his peach orchards there.
Whenever Rea spoke with reporters, he never wavered in his advice for the young and ambitious: Read! Books, especially biography and travel, he said, “give us insight into the lives of successful men and heighten the imagination and increase knowledge of other countries. If neglected by the young businessman, he will find himself lacking in culture, vision and balance of life. His sympathies will be narrow and selfish. He must stand for the best things in life and use his service, influence and money to advance them. The world gets nowhere with stand-patters or indifferent people.” A few years later, on March 24, 1929, Samuel Rea—who had thrown himself into Al Smith’s unsuccessful White House campaign the year before—died at home from a heart attack after a bout of the flu. He had believed deeply in his railroad and his country, and had relished working with the giants of his day, ushering in the astounding prosperity of the industrial age. He had outlived not just Cassatt, his revered boss, but also Charles Raymond, dead in 1913, Alfred Noble, who died a year later, and Charles Jacobs, who died in 1919.
Rea was a famously modest man, but it certainly would have pleased him to see the more than a thousand people gathered in Penn Station’s General Waiting Room on April 9, 1930, a fair spring day, for the unveiling of his statue. Even as crowds of passengers streamed by the Pennsy men commanding the Grand Stairway, great shafts of light illuminated M
cKim’s timeless space and organ music swelled up, deep notes slowly floating through the air. George Gibbs and Gustav Lindenthal, grayer, older, stouter, were both present, the sole remaining members of the original board of engineers. After a few words, they did the honors, pulling the cloth cover off the statue of their old boss and friend. Weinman had done Rea full justice. The sculpted Rea, wearing a modern business suit, overcoat draped over his left arm, fedora hat in hand, looked as vigorous in bronze as he had in real life. In his niche, he appeared to have just stepped in to look over the situation at the station. Like Cassatt, Rea was identified as an engineer by the blueprints clasped lightly in his right hand. The face was intelligent, considering. Two decades had passed since the unveiling of Cassatt’s statue on that hot August day in 1910. At that original ceremony, all the men then present could only marvel at the power of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the triumph of its entrance into New York, its radiant prospects.
The mood today was far more elegiac. The nation was mired in a wrenching Depression, hard times such as had not been seen in decades. But the greater melancholy was that Samuel Rea and all those present had lived long enough to know that the glory days of the Pennsylvania Railroad and every other American railroad were over. Back in 1906, when Alexander Cassatt had bucked all his peers in supporting President Roosevelt on railroad regulation, he thought it a sensible way to deal with their competitors—other railroads. But now there were different competitors, and they were not shackled by regulation. “The ICC,” writes business historian Robert Sobel, “improvised, temporized, mediated, and in the end acted in such a fashion as to leave the industry starved for capital and on the defensive, at a time—on the eve of the automobile and aviation ages—when massive funding was necessary for improvements.” Shortly after Rea’s death, a survey of regular PRR passengers revealed their own declining opinion of “The Standard Railroad of America.” They complained of rude service in the stations and trains and poor food on the dining cars. General Atterbury, the last of the Cassatt men to rule the PRR, would survive only five years longer than Rea. Exhausted by the ardors of running his beloved road during the darkest days of the Great Depression, the general would step down in 1935, not yet seventy, and die soon thereafter.
For decades Americans had resented the power and arrogance of the railroads. Now, disgruntled passengers had a liberating alternative: the automobile. It is impossible to overstate the bracing, heady freedom, the delicious convenience of the motorcar. You came and went on your own schedule, self-sufficient, setting the heat and air to your own liking, stopping as you pleased, sharing your car with no annoying strangers who talked too much. Back in 1910 few imagined—certainly not the railroad kings like Cassatt or Rea—that balky expensive motorcars, largely the gleaming playthings of the rich, might ever become a reliable (much less competing) form of long-distance transportation. But then came Henry Ford and the Model T. It was true that as yet the nation had no real highway system. It was an ominous sign of the times for the PRR that the next (and longest) subaqueous Hudson River tunnel, the state-financed Holland Tunnel, dedicated on November 13, 1927, served only cars and trucks driving between New York and New Jersey.
If it had been hard to imagine the car as a competitor to the railroad, airplanes seemed an even more far-fetched rival. It was only after World War II that the true dimensions of the combined threat hit home. In 1958, the Pennsy and other railroads, which had long run their sprawling rail empires with private capital, spent $1 billion of their own funds for maintenance of their facilities and paid $180 million in taxes. That same year, the U.S. government spent six times that sum—$10.3 billion—building highways for automobiles, trucks, and buses, thus helping to siphon off rail customers. While the federal government built the forty-thousand-mile interstate highway system as part of national defense, the Wall Street Journal pointed out trucks were hauling more and more freight “with the roadbeds being supplied at public expense.” Government then spent yet another $431 million that year on the nascent airlines and airport construction. The PRR, which carried far more passengers than any other road, was competing on very unequal terms with its new taxpayer subsidized rivals. Moreover, the glamour and excitement once attached to private cars and luxurious trains hurtling to distant big cities or resorts, chic couples enjoying sunsets through the dining car windows, was shifting inexorably to cars and airplanes.
Back in 1939, railroads carried 65 percent of intercity passenger traffic. In 1945, when MGM set key scenes of the Judy Garland love story The Clock in the General Waiting Room, Penn Station handled 109 million passengers, an all-time peak. But when World War II ended, so did those huge crowds. By now the Lincoln Tunnel was also open, giving yet more motorists and buses easy entry to midtown Manhattan. PRR officials watched with alarm as their share of Penn Station passengers plummeted from wartime highs of forty-four million riders each year to a quarter of that. By 1960, railroads carried only 29 percent of intercity passenger traffic. A quarter of travelers were boarding sleek airplanes and soaring through the clouds to their destinations. The PRR saw their losses balloon to $70 million a year as they indignantly protested (to no avail) the double standard that had their postwar rivals operating out of brand-new government-built bus stations and airports, while the PRR struggled to pay New York City $1.3 million in taxes for Penn Station. It was absurdly unfair.
As for Penn Station, even back in 1937 the PRR knew it needed freshening up and refurbishing. At almost thirty years old its beautiful pink granite facades had grown dirty, its golden Travertine marble interiors dingy, and its walls cluttered with advertising and ill-conceived signs. Designer Raymond Loewy, who had so brilliantly redesigned the look of the PRR’s locomotives, proposed cleaning and painting the arcade, cleaning the General Waiting Room and lighting Guerin’s map murals, almost invisible under accumulated grime, then creating new drama by floodlighting both the arcade and the General Waiting Room. He thought the concourse skylight ribbings should be painted light gray rather than black. But in that Depression year, nothing came of his suggestion.
Twenty years later, the station was filthier than ever and its grandeur badly faded. New Yorkers and modern architecture critics became scornful of the sadly neglected train station as outmoded. A half-hearted cleaning of the bottom ten feet led one New Yorker to liken the PRR officers and their station to “a small child who would wash his hands but never his wrists; either there should have been no cleaning at all, or the whole building should have been given a gentle washing.” Author Lorraine B. Diehl in The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station, describes how “the glass-domed roof in the concourse was darkened, grimy with soot. Broken windows were replaced with sheets of metal. ‘They didn’t take good care of it,’ said Archie Harris, a former baggageman for the old station…In the main waiting room the six lunette windows were clouded with dirt, and the Jules Guerin murals beneath them were little more than dark, colorless expanses.”
Now, the beleaguered PRR, which was openly talking about selling air space to build a skyscraper over the station to lessen its deficits, defaced McKim’s General Waiting Room with what came to be disdainfully called “the clamshell.” Designed by architect Lester C. Tichey and presumably intended to signal airportlike modernity, the monstrous crescent-shaped plastic clamshell served as the illuminated canopy roof of a highly visible new ticket counter, replete with television monitors and garish fluorescent light. Occupying the whole middle of the General Waiting Room and tethered with many wires to McKim’s monumental pillars, this modern excrescence mainly acted to “block access…to the concourse,” writes Diehl. Moreover, to make space for it, “both the ladies’ and the men’s waiting rooms were removed, and in a half-hearted gesture to the comfort of passengers who would no longer have anyplace to sit, the railroad installed a few benches in the concourse. To reach these, passengers were forced to take a labyrinthine path…It was during this time that automobile displays, fluorescent-lighted advertisements, and flashy glass-and-stee
l storefronts invaded the station.”
Critic Lewis Mumford could not believe his eyes when he saw the clamshell, which he denounced as “the great treason to McKim’s original design.” He wondered, “What on earth were the railroad men in charge really attempting to achieve? And why is the result such a disaster?” Mumford said one could only be grateful Cassatt was not still alive to see what his successors had wrought. “The only consolation,” he wrote innocently, “is that nothing more that can be done to the station will do any further harm to it.”
Desperate to raise money and indifferent to its own monumental gateway, the PRR promoted one plan after another to exploit the valuable air rights above Penn Station. In 1954, Lawrence Grant White, son of Stanford White and now head of McKim, Mead & White, heard that the PRR had secretly struck a deal and arranged to meet the developer. “I lunched yesterday with William Zeckendorf, who said that he was negotiating with the P.R.R. for the Pennsylvania Station in New York, with the avowed purpose of tearing it down and erecting a 30 story building upon the site. I had already told him at a previous dinner that I deplored tearing down such an important building, but was afraid neither I nor my firm could do anything to stop it; and that if it was to be torn down we should like, as architects for the P.R.R., to have some professional connection with the building that was to be erected…After an excellent lunch in his fabulous setting, he promised to keep us in mind.” That deal—Zeckendorf’s “Palace of Progress”—came to naught. Still, writers like Lewis Mumford clearly had no inkling even four years later, in 1958, that the PRR was actively seeking deals that required demolishing McKim’s station.
On July 21, 1961, the PRR finally announced with great fanfare that it had its deal, with developer Irving Felt. A new Madison Square Garden would arise above the station, a $75 million “entertainment center” featuring a thirty-four-story office tower, a twenty-five-thousand seat sports arena, a twenty-eight-story luxury hotel, parking garages, and bowling alleys. Nowhere did the article actually mention the necessary razing of Charles McKim’s great temple. (Oddly, newspapers had taken to identifying the station’s architect as the far more famous Stanford White.) By the time the PRR had its long-sought deal, Lawrence White had been dead five years, a devoted husband and father who had left behind a large brood of grown children. As for engineer Gustav Lindenthal, he had finally seen constructed what he had never ceased to promote—a bridge spanning the Hudson River. Alas, the handsome George Washington Bridge was not his design, and served only motorized vehicles. The dashing and cosmopolitan George Gibbs had been the final member of the board of engineers to go, dying in 1940.