by Sam Roberts
By 1862, rumor had it that Vanderbilt again regarded the depressed price not only as an investment opportunity but also as a vehicle to outwit his on-again, off-again nemesis Daniel Drew. As Kurt C. Schlichting, a Fairfield University sociology professor, recalled it, Vanderbilt figured the Harlem’s fortunes would improve with a franchise for a streetcar line up Broadway. But Drew thwarted Vanderbilt’s strategy, probably by bribing the Common Council. Vanderbilt was undaunted. He continued to buy Harlem stock, which spurted to $150, and then he demanded $180—to the dismay of Drew and other short sellers, who were committed to deliver at $110 and therefore would lose $70 on every share they sold short.
Within a year, when Vanderbilt turned 70, he was president of the Harlem. Despite an occasional setback, such was Wall Street’s faith in his acumen that the stock price promptly rebounded. As if to celebrate, three months after the South surrendered at Appomattox, Vanderbilt and his son William H., the vice president of the line, accompanied General Ulysses S. Grant on the Chatham leg of the general’s well-deserved vacation to Saratoga on a train hauled, naturally, by a flag-festooned engine named W.H. Vanderbilt. At the end of the two-hour, 45-minute ride, a Times reporter pronounced the Harlem line “admirably adapted for rapid travel” and said it “afforded a rich treat to the tourist and lover of nature in the magnificent scenery to be found along the whole route.”
The first-class Harlem railroad Vanderbilt envisioned would remain elusive, though. Initially, the most tangible increase was in the commuter fares, to $50 for an annual ticket to Harlem, $75 to Bronxville, and $150 to the end of the line in Chatham. Service gradually improved so that by 1867 regular commuters included Horace Greeley of Chappaqua, who commented in his New York Tribune:
We lived on this road when it was poor and feebly managed—with rotten cars and wheezy old engines that could not make schedule time; and the improvement since realized is gratifying… With an underground track from the Battery to Harlem Flats, its passenger fares would be speedily doubled. Such a track 10 years ago would have kept thousands in our state who have been driven over to Jersey by the full hour now required to traverse the space between City Hall and the Harlem River. With a good underground railroad, the census of 1880 will credit Westchester County with a population of at least half a million, whereof at least 50,000 will visit our city daily.
Greeley’s demographic projection proved to be hyperbolic. Nonetheless, between 1860 and 1880, the population of Westchester and the southern portion of the county that would become the Bronx more than doubled. The railroad was mostly responsible.
HIMSELF: THE COMMODORE, CORNELIUS J. VANDERBILT, WHO SWITCHED FROM RIVER TO RAIL.
By 1851, the Hudson line reached all the way to Albany (actually, at first, to the ferry terminal in Greenbush). The New York train connected with the overnight express to Buffalo, a train that introduced the sleeping car—a vehicle so inferior that it inspired one rider from western New York, a carpenter named George Pullman, to devote the rest of his career to developing the perfect alternative. Whatever the defects of the sleeper from Albany, the daytime passenger business was booming. Within a year, the Hudson was claiming more than 1.1 million passengers annually.
On April 2, 1853, the state legislature authorized 10 New York railroads to consolidate into a single corporation. Ten days later, officers of the lines, including Erastus Corning and Russell Sage (a financier and often partner of Vanderbilt’s nemesis Jay Gould), met to organize the New York Central, which covered the 300 miles of central New York from Albany to Buffalo and was already growing connecting tentacles to Boston, New York City, and the Midwest. Corning, though lame and quite ordinary in appearance, was the Central’s preeminent personality (he accepted no salary, but his ironworks was awarded the exclusive contract to supply the line with track; in the 20th century, his great-grandson would serve as mayor of Albany for more than four decades). Once, a conductor failed to recognize him and barked, “Hurry up, old man; don’t be all day about it. The train can’t wait.” Corning insisted he was not personally offended but fired the conductor anyway. “I’ll keep no one in my employ,” he said, “who is uncivil to travelers.”
On February 27, 1860, Corning was at Cooper Union in Manhattan to hear Abraham Lincoln deliver the speech that catapulted him to the Republican nomination for president. The next morning, according to some accounts, Corning visited Lincoln at the Astor House and offered him $10,000 a year to be the New York Central’s lawyer. “If Lincoln had accepted his offer,” Edward Hungerford wrote in Men and Iron, “he unquestionably would have declined the presidency of the United States.”
By midcentury, the Central owned 188 locomotives. Harper’s Weekly proclaimed it a “great and perfect work” and Horace Greeley’s Tribune anointed it “the Imperial New York Central Railway.” In New England and the mid-Atlantic states, groups of as many as 200 migrants at a time would heed Greeley’s advice to “Go West.” With stagecoaches and Erie Canal packet boats all but defunct by then, they went west on the New York Central, either on cars with sofas of cut velvet or, in the case of poorer Irish and German newcomers, in “emigrant cars” that one observer belittled as “just slightly better than box cars with benches.”
BY 1865, THE VANDERBILTS, father and son, owned both the Harlem and the Hudson. But not the Erie, which the elder Vanderbilt failed to acquire after being outmaneuvered by Jim Fisk and Jay Gould, who mysteriously produced $14 million worth of stock certificates and retained control. And not the Central, which chose to ship freight on the Hudson River Railroad in winter but defer to steamboats the rest of the year. During the winter of 1867, with the river solidly frozen, Vanderbilt pulled the plug: he severed the Central from all rail traffic between New York and Albany. Passengers and freight haulers who depended on the Hudson River Railroad were left to fend for themselves.
The steamboat lobby demanded a legislative investigation. Wasn’t it true, Vanderbilt was asked before an assembly committee, that he had some friends on the board of the fickle Central? To which Vanderbilt famously testified, “My personal friends, when they take such grounds as they did, I am afraid of; I am not afraid of my enemies, but, my God, you must look out when you get among friends.” Vanderbilt’s ploy worked. The Central begrudgingly capitulated. Vanderbilt became its president. And, by 1869 (the year he turned 76 years old and when the last spike was driven to complete the first transcontinental railroad), his Central absorbed his Hudson line.
“NOT ORNAMENTAL,” was how Henry Adams described the Commodore, a man who “lacked social charm.” A biography by a descendant, Arthur T. Vanderbilt II, recalled the Commodore’s predilection to spit streams of tobacco juice and fondle the maids at social events. Mark Twain attacked him for “superhuman stinginess” and suggested he perform a single charitable act to place “one solitary grain of pure gold upon the heaped rubbish of your life.” Gustavus Myers, a muckraker, wrote, “Each new million that he seized was an additional resource by which he could bribe and manipulate; progressively his power advanced; and it became ridiculously easier to get possession of more and more property… the mere threat of pitting his enormous wealth against competitors whom he sought to destroy was generally a sufficient warrant for their surrender.”
Vanderbilt was cunning and brutal, a combination that served him well in vanquishing enemies, real and imagined. Confronted by two whom he believed had cheated him and had betrayed his trust, he was merciless. “I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow,” he supposedly said. “I’ll ruin you.” He was also quoted as acknowledging, “I have been insane on the subject of money-making all my life.” His son William Henry Vanderbilt became the richest man in the world. He also inherited the old man’s charm. When a reporter asked about the possibility of lower fares for passengers, Vanderbilt barked that the railroad barely broke even on some routes, including the one between New York and Chicago, and maintained them only to keep up with the competition from the Pennsylvania.
“But don’t you run
it for the public benefit?” the reporter asked. To which Vanderbilt was quoted as delivering his immortal reply:
The public be damned. What does the public care for the railroads except to get as much out of them for as small a consideration as possible? I don’t take any stock in this silly nonsense about working for anybody’s good, but our own because we are not. When we make a move we do it because it is our interest to do so, not because we expect to do somebody else some good. Of course, we like to do everything possible for the benefit of humanity in general, but when we do we first see that we are benefiting ourselves. Railroads are not run on sentiment, but on business principles and to pay.
William’s father, the Commodore, once expressed a similar credo more succinctly: he neatly summarized Adam Smith’s ideas in testimony before the New York State Legislature in 1867. “I have always served the public to the best of my ability,” he said. “Why? Because, like every other man, it is to my interest to do so.”
THE UNION PACIFIC AND THE SANTA FE would become romanticized cultural icons too. But the New York Central, which enjoyed the full energy and diligence of the Vanderbilts, would capture the imagination of the country like no other railroad. In one incarnation or another (by the 1920s, the New York Central Lines represented what were once 315 separate companies), the Central was responsible for innovations ranging from the lowly but beloved caboose (on the Auburn & Syracuse), from which crews oversaw mammoth freight trains snaking their way to market, to the J-Class 4-6-4 Hudson steam locomotives (immortalized by American Flyer and Lionel scale models), to the storied luxury of the 20th Century Limited, which whisked passengers between New York and Chicago. The water-level route from New York to upstate was the world’s first four-track long-distance railroad. The Central’s territory, beginning in the mid-19th century, the historian Alvin F. Harlow observed, “was producing men who did much to revolutionize the business of transportation.”
Their names remain a litany of railroad and related business titans: Henry Wells, a Batavia leather worker, and William G. Fargo, a freight clerk from Auburn; John Webster Wagner and George M. Pullman, who would become competitors in the sleeping-car business; George Westinghouse, who as a boy was bewitched by the railroad cars that lumbered past his home in Schenectady. At its peak before the middle of the 20th century, the New York Central’s tracks would stretch 11,000 miles across 12 states that were home to 50.3 percent of the nation’s population.
IN 1869, VANDERBILT WAS OPERATING two lines in Manhattan with two separate terminals. For his Hudson line, he desperately needed a downtown freight complex (passengers were accommodated at Chambers Street and West 30th Street). With few other vacant tracts available, he seized upon the fashionable St. John’s Park neighborhood in what is now Tribeca, a plot whose ownership would be contested for centuries. Trinity Church sold the four-acre parcel to the Hudson River Railroad (which held it until 1927, when it was razed for the Holland Tunnel exit). “Some New Yorkers who clung wistfully to the thought of open spaces with green lawns and stately trees here and there throughout their city protested, but they were laughed out of court,” Edward Hungerford later wrote. “The trees were razed, the park leveled, and workmen were laying the foundations of the new freight house almost before New York knew just what was being done.”
“THE PUBLIC BE DAMNED,” WILLIAM H. VANDERBILT, THE COMMODORE’S SON, MEMORABLY DECLARED.
A heroic, 12-foot-tall bronze statue of the Commodore (twice life-size) was erected on an ornate 150-foot-long and 30-foot-high metal pediment that depicted his mastery of river and rail. The sculpture, by Ernst Plassmann, was commissioned by Albert De Groot, a Vanderbilt crony and one of the Commodore’s steamship captains. It was not universally acclaimed. Scientific American belittled the Commodore’s sculpted overcoat as “ample to protect from frost a Siberian sledge driver.” The diarist George Templeton Strong wrote, “Have inspected the grand $800,000 Vanderbilt bronze. It’s a ‘mixellaneous biling’ of cog-wheels, steamships, primeval forests, anchors, locomotives, periaugas (‘pettyaughers,’ we called them when I was a boy), R.R. Trains, wild ducks (or possibly seagulls) & squatter shanties, with a colossal Cornelius Vanderbilt looming up in the midst of the chaos, & beaming benignantly down on Hudson Street, like a Pater Patriae—draped in a dressing gown or an overcoat, the folds whereof are most wooden. As a work of art, it is bestial.”
On the East Side, meanwhile, the Harlem’s main depot was becoming a dump. Built in 1857 and bounded by Fourth and Madison Avenues and East 26th and 27th Streets, it was the nation’s first “union” depot, welcoming passengers from multiple lines, in this case the New Haven. But it was congested. Adjacent property owners who had been promised they would reap the rewards of adjacency to modern transportation were instead vexed by noise, sparks, and smoke. (Among the most vociferous opponents of steam was the Murray family, namesakes of Murray Hill, and whose Quaker ancestor, Mary Lindley Murray, legend has it, hospitably entertained William Howe, the British general, in 1776 long enough to let defeated American troops escape to fight again.)
Terrified pedestrians and drivers risked life, limb, and their vehicles by crossing the Fourth Avenue tracks. Complaints were met by this rejoinder from a railroad representative (which could just as easily have been issued by a tobacco company a century and a half later): “Railroads being the great means of commerce should be encouraged, not obstructed, and if the fuel of the pipe or the smoke of the locomotive was to be considered a cause of nuisance, that the steamboats should be banished from our seas and rivers, or silenced whenever they come so near a city to be heard.”
Since 1830, though, New York City’s population had soared from 200,000 to 1 million. Vanderbilt envisioned a single station for all three of his railroads, one whose grandeur epitomized the transportation empire he was aggressively assembling and one so accessible that, even as Manhattan’s boundaries billowed, his primary passenger depot would always be central. He would build a station. The city would follow.
THE GRAND CENTRAL DEPOT, COMPLETED IN 1871. THE TIMES COMPLAINED THAT IT WAS NEITHER GRAND NOR CENTRAL.
THE DEPOT
YOU DIDN’T NEED A CLAIRVOYANT to predict the burgeoning value of New York Central stock, but that didn’t stop Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennie C. Claflin. Both sisters claimed the ability to see visions of future events, a distinct advantage for a Wall Street broker (and one that gave a whole new dimension to Marshall McLuhan’s maxim about the medium being the message). One investor later testified that when she asked his advice about stock purchases, Vanderbilt himself replied, “Why don’t you do as I do, and consult the spirits?” Woodhull and Claflin (whom Vanderbilt proposed to marry) apparently found their inspiration, instead, from a less evanescent source, one with a proven track record. When they opened their brokerage business on January 22, 1870, on Broad Street, a portrait of Cornelius Vanderbilt prominently adorned one wall.
Five days later, on January 27, 1870, the spirits were willing. Vanderbilt presided over the first stockholders’ meeting of the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad, capitalized at a dazzling $90 million. Three months later, the company paid a $3.6 million semiannual 4 percent dividend, which the Times breathlessly pronounced “the very largest single dividend ever paid in this country by any one great corporation or state.” The New York Central was no ordinary corporation and its president was no ordinary man. “The creation of the New York Central & Hudson River stands as a historical landmark,” T.J. Stiles wrote, “showing us where the era of big business—the Vanderbilt era—well and truly began.”
VANDERBILT INAUGURATED HIS ERA by introducing two customs borrowed from British railroads: every employee wore a uniform, and tickets were punched before passengers boarded their trains. But a great railroad required a great station of its own, so he built Grand Central Depot. It stretched 249 feet wide on East 42nd Street and north to East 48th Street. Some of the land on which it stood was already owned by the railroad and was used for storing cars and
as a “fuel factory,” where a treadmill powered by horses teased with a wisp of hay operated the machinery that cut wood to power the steam locomotives that ran north of 42nd Street. Horses still pulled the streetcars south of 42nd Street through the tunnel under what is now Park Avenue from 33rd to 41st Streets, which is still used by automobiles. (As late as the mid-1870s, the line’s stables on Fourth Avenue between 32nd and 33rd Streets could still accommodate 916 horses, and even that number was sometimes insufficient.)
The Commodore acquired the rest of the site, which was largely vacant or occupied by pastures and shanties, by negotiating with private landlords whom the 1850 General Railroad Law of New York State had placed under a crippling disadvantage: the railroads were empowered to appropriate property and let the courts appraise its value. When Peter Goelet, a member of the prominent real estate family, offered to lease Vanderbilt the block bounded by 46th and 47th Streets and Madison and Fourth Avenues, the self-confident Commodore replied, pointedly in the first person singular: “I never lease property—always buy.” On November 1, 1871, less than two years after ground was broken, his $6.4 million depot and rail yard opened for business.
The land and construction cost well over $100 million in today’s dollars, and Vanderbilt, who was 78 when it was completed, paid for the depot out of his own deep pockets. It was later revealed, however, that because he was well versed in the ways and means of Tammany Hall, the transaction inevitably involved politicians’ pockets too.