by Sam Roberts
A pair of court-appointed commissioners handed him Fourth Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets for a fire-sale price of $25,000 when the market price was closer to $350,000. Favoritism? Consider that just a year or two earlier, one of the Tweed ring’s Supreme Court justices had gone so far as to issue an arrest warrant for Jay Gould when he sought to prevent Vanderbilt from seizing control of the Erie Railroad. But perhaps the commissioners were unaware that the ring was no longer beholden to Vanderbilt, having undoubtedly succumbed to a better offer. So when the commissioners delivered Vanderbilt a bargain for the Fourth Avenue parcel in 1869, even Justice Albert Cardozo (the Tammany tool, whose son, the eminent jurist Benjamin Cardozo, proved how far an apple can fall from the tree) concluded that the deal was a sham that would “operate unjustly” to the city.
George Templeton Strong’s unvarnished review of the Commodore’s statue downtown might have been why Vanderbilt scrapped plans for a second such likeness. The Times said that another figure of the Commodore, this one also commissioned by his friend De Groot, weighing in at a half ton and flanked by a sailor and an Indian, was destined for the new passenger depot. Indeed, John B. Snook’s new American Second Empire–style building, clad in red pressed brick and cast-iron trim, left a huge niche at the third floor. “But the niche remained empty,” Christopher Gray later wrote in the Times—“perhaps the earlier japes had convinced Vanderbilt of the virtues of modesty.” (Shortly after the opening of Grand Central, the Times took him to task over repeated accidents in the open railroad yards to the north, saying that any tribute in bronze should also include “the dismembered bodies of men, women and children.”) The original massive statue of the Commodore finally came home to the viaduct around the south façade of Grand Central Terminal in 1929, where it still stands. “For now,” Gray wrote, “he stands a hostage, in a haze of exhaust produced by the railroad’s most potent enemy, the automobile.”
John B. Snook’s architectural imprint endures on the nation’s first department store, A.T. Stewart’s at 280 Broadway, and the cast-iron façades in what is now SoHo. Vanderbilt’s depot was billed as the nation’s biggest railroad station and, by one measure, was even larger than the world’s biggest, London’s Victorian St. Pancras, which had opened three years earlier. The imposing three-story building that fronted on 42nd Street was inspired by the palace of Versailles and the Tuileries. It rivaled the Eiffel Tower and Crystal Palace for its ingenious engineering, if not its grandeur. (It was largely overlooked on opening day, though; the New York newspapers were preoccupied by the Great Chicago Fire the night before.)
The depot was distinguished by five mansard roofs. But its most memorable architectural feature was a 652-foot-long arch-ribbed-vault train shed that was modeled on St. Pancras. Thirty-one iron trusses supported the depot’s resplendent 60,000-square-foot semicircular glass roof. The half-cylindrical ceiling was 200 feet wide and soared 100 feet at its apex—the largest interior space on the North American continent and second as a tourist attraction only to the Capitol in Washington.
The effect was magical. It sparked the imagination of novelists. The depot was where Richard Harding Davis’s Captain Royal Macklin, returning from his escapade in Honduras, reveled in buying a train ticket to his hometown in Dobbs Ferry. It was also there, in the afternoon rush one September in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, that Lawrence Selden began his stroll with Lily Bart—“a figure to arrest even the suburban traveler rushing to his last train. Against the dull tints of the crowd,” Wharton wrote, her vivid head “made her more conspicuous than in a ballroom” as she threaded “through the throng of returning holiday-makers, past sallow-faced girls in preposterous hats, and flat-chested women struggling with paper bundles and palm-leaf fans.”
The old station on 26th Street was sold to P.T. Barnum, who converted it into the Hippodrome, a showcase for circuses and other spectacles. In 1879, it was taken over by the Commodore’s grandson, who renamed it Madison Square Garden. (The name endured four incarnations; the second one was where Harry K. Thaw, jealous over the alienation of his affection for Evelyn Nesbit, shot Stanford White in 1906 in a jealous rage; years later, after visiting the South Florida Mediterranean revival hotels, clubs, and mansions designed by Addison Mizner, Thaw lamented: “I shot the wrong architect.” Well, everyone’s a critic.) “Without much pretension to architectural elegance,” a professional critic wrote of the new depot, “it is commodious and well adapted to the purposes for which it was designed, and perhaps we ought not to ask much more from a railroad depot.”
The Times carped, though, that the depot “can only by a stretch of courtesy be called either central or grand”—particularly because 42nd Street was by no means the center of New York City yet. The remote depot was derided by another journal as “End of the World Station.” The critic Lewis Mumford would later denigrate its “imperial façade.” More than a century later, Christopher Gray would write in the Times that the station was “awkwardly up-to-the-minute, more cowtown than continental.”
For reasons that were never made clear, Vanderbilt gave his tenant the New Haven the prime location, fronting East 42nd Street. The Harlem and the Central were relegated to Vanderbilt Avenue. Also lost to history was the reasoning behind the arrangement of the tracks. Because outbound trains left from the west side of the train shed and inbound arrived on the east side, trains had to cross each other’s paths, which they did first at 53rd Street and later at Spuyten Duyvil along the Harlem River and Woodlawn in the north Bronx. Even with five platforms and 15 tracks, passengers complained that they were jammed waiting at entrances for the 88 daily trains and resented the long hike to the platforms.
FOR SOME REASON, THE NEW HAVEN, WHICH WAS MERELY A TENANT, ENJOYED THE MOST PROMINENT FAÇADE, ON EAST 42ND STREET.
Each of the three railroads served by the depot had a separate waiting room, creating havoc for baggage-laden passengers transferring from one line to another and mingling long-distance travelers and commuters. Because the depot was in the middle of nowhere, passengers were “penned in like hogs” on the streetcars that ferried them from the depot to downtown. They were so crowded that the wait to board a commodious car could easily last an hour. The trip to City Hall, still the center of New York, could take another hour. “Without a single exception,” the Times reported in 1871, New Yorkers “denounced the administration of affairs, not only in regard to the slow and wretched arrangement of time on the horse-cars, but also the inconveniences and outrages suffered by passengers at the Grand Central Depot.” Dennis McMahon of Morrisania in the Bronx groused that he could get from the old station on 26th Street to Chambers Street in lower Manhattan in 25 minutes. The railroad promised that the new depot would save him seven minutes, but instead, “Now I never reckon on less than an hour.” Complaining that “we lose one hour between the depot and City Hall,” C.W. Poole of Mount Vernon invoked the ultimate threat, to “sell out and move to New Jersey.”
The train shed itself was remarkably quiet and free of smoke, however. Ringing bells and blowing whistles were banned, and railroad cars minus locomotives coasted to the platforms by gravity. The Herald proclaimed it “the finest passenger railroad depot in the world,” and it would play a vital role not only as a transportation hub, but also in the early development of Midtown. That development included the Vanderbilt mansions that the Commodore’s children and grandchildren built for themselves on Fifth Avenue, prompting Edith Wharton to lament that their extravagances thoroughly retarded culture and confined them to a narrow corridor that conjured up the coastal passage in ancient Greece. “They are entrenched in a sort of Thermopylae of bad taste, from which apparently no force on earth can dislodge them,” she wrote.
When the Commodore died in 1877, he left nearly his entire fortune to William H., the son he trusted most. Within a few years, William’s wealth more than doubled. William’s sons, William K. and Cornelius II, would build Marble House and the Breakers, respectively, in Newport, Rhode Island. Their gr
andfather died on January 4, as were falling the first flakes of a blizzard that would shatter the glass roof of the Grand Central Depot. In total, the Commodore left $100 million—more money than was held by the U.S. Treasury. “Any fool can make a fortune,” he once said. “It takes a man of brains to hold on to it after it is made.” His last words were “keep the money together”—an admonition that went unheeded by his heirs.
“With the death of Cornelius II in 1899 at the age of only 56, the Vanderbilt dynasty at the New York Central really came to an end,” Louis Auchincloss concluded, although Vanderbilt great-grandsons would remain involved with the railroad until the 1950s. “The 10 Vanderbilt mansions that once lined Fifth Avenue were never occupied by the next generation,” Arthur T. Vanderbilt II wrote in Fortune’s Children. “One by one, they fell to the wrecker’s ball, their contest lost to the auctioneer’s gavel.” Only the grand depot and its glorious successor would endure as their legacy.
A QUICK FIX THAT TRANSFORMED THE DEPOT INTO A NEO-RENAISSANCE CONCOCTION WAS INSUFFICIENT TO MEET SOARING DEMAND.
THE STATION
BY THE LATTER PART of the 19th century, commuting by train was no longer as unconventional as it had seemed just a few decades earlier. In 1873, New York City annexed the Westchester villages of Morrisania, West Farms, and Kingsbridge, nearly doubling its land mass and extending its north-south axis to 16 miles. Young couples weighed the trade-offs between a less frenetic and costly country life and the time and money spent commuting. An 1890 essay in the Times titled “Men Who Catch Trains” pointed out that commuting from the quaint and “ancient settlement of Yonkers,” just 16 miles from Grand Central, could cost as little as 9 cents a day (compared to the regular one-way fare of 30 cents).
“ ‘I must be able to reach my place of business inside of an hour’s time,’ declared the husband at the very beginning of the search for a suburban abode,” the Times reported. “ ‘Of course you must,’ dutifully assented the wife, ‘and we cannot afford to spend all of the difference in rent for railroad fares.’ ” For all the advantages of country living, commuting took its toll, as another Times writer estimated early in the 20th century. Figuring that it took him an hour to travel each way and that he had been commuting the 16 miles from Westchester for 14 years, he had averaged 9,600 miles and 600 hours annually for a grand total of 134,000 miles and 8,400 hours—or the equivalent of circumnavigating the globe five times over the course of nearly a full year. So much for George M. Cohan’s proverbial Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway.
Thanks to the railroad, things weren’t much better for Manhattan pedestrians. In 1839, a train from Grand Central had collided with a herd of cows at rural East 58th Street. By the time the Civil War ended, though, row houses had already reached the East 60s. With development came people and vehicles and an outcry against the New York Central. It was bad enough that the railroad had usurped public property, obstructing Fourth Avenue and the street grid with its depot, but the 600-foot-wide rail yard and the tracks beyond, from which locomotives spewed smoke, sparks, and cinders, irretrievably bisected a booming swath of Manhattan’s East Side. Cross-town traffic was stymied altogether or shunted to a few bottlenecks.
In 1871, the Times all but shrieked that the city’s “most fearful death-trap” was the nexus of tracks laid only a few feet apart in a no-man’s-land two blocks wide and north of Grand Central in “this now populous quarter” of the city. “One has but to stand a few minutes in 45th Street, where the cars enter and pass out of the depot, to see the peril to which life is daily put,” the paper continued, “and to wonder that more people are not wounded or killed for their temerity in attempting a crossing.” The feverish news account presaged the dangerous congestion and constant tumult that not only vexed pedestrians, drivers, and neighbors, but would ultimately be the depot’s undoing: “There is a continual ringing of bells and screaming of whistles that is confusing to the senses, awakened to the possibility of danger from an unknown or unseen quarter.”
Mass meetings were called to protest the inconvenience and the threat to life and limb north and south of the new depot. “ ‘Cross not Fourth Avenue at the peril of your lives,’ is the dictum of the great Vanderbilt,” one leaflet blazed in 1872. The perils posed by the railroad’s “juggernaut” to pedestrians and horse-drawn conveyances even inspired a poem:
Sink your tracks, you railroad magnate!
Arch it over well and strong,
Do not wait the law’s stern mandate
And your nuisance thus prolong.
One angry letter writer to the Times complained that “someone living on East 46th Street near Third Avenue, and wishing to go to 46th Street and Fifth Avenue, has to go to 42nd Street or 49th Street, making a detour of a half mile because this monopoly has made it unsafe to cross at any other point.” Another resident, this one from East 50th Street, was apoplectic, writing, “There is no single thing on New York Island so dangerous to the community and prejudicial to its interests as this Valley of the Shadow of Death, which cuts the city in two its entire length, and stretches, unpaved, ungraded, and is given over to the hundreds of locomotives that continually dash up and down, through the richest district of New York.”
With the community up in arms and the Commodore demanding that the right-of-way be widened to accommodate four tracks, compromise was inevitable. Beginning at 45th Street, the grade was lowered. A dozen bridges were commissioned to connect the two sides of Fourth Avenue between 45th and 56th Streets, where a Park Avenue Tunnel would begin (leading to a stone viaduct between 98th and 116th Streets where the land was swampy). Construction finally got under way in 1872. It dragged on for two disruptive years. Who would pay for the projected $6 million cost of a so-called Fourth Avenue Improvement? “All charitable persons pity Mr. Vanderbilt as a poor man who is compelled to spend his frugal income in lowering the railway tracks in Fourth Avenue, merely in order that people may not get themselves run over and killed by passing trains,” the Times said sarcastically, adding: “The City of New York was rendered liable, with wonderful legislative promptitude, for the payment of several millions of dollars to assist Commodore Vanderbilt in paying the expenses of partially restoring Fourth Avenue to the public to whom it belongs.” The collaboration was a marriage of necessity. Nonetheless, John Belle and Maxinne Leighton would later conclude, “In 1875, this was one of the earliest examples of collaboration between government and private industry.”
Spurred by the growing public outcry and by the threat that newly emboldened legislators would impose a more onerous mandate, in 1873 the Central proposed to further mitigate the dangerous congestion by tunneling through solid rock all the way to 96th Street. The sunken tracks were flanked by iron fences and plots of grass—to justify the renaming of Fourth Avenue as Park Avenue north of Grand Central—and vents for the smoke and heat. (The name Park Avenue was first applied to the stretch in Murray Hill from 34th to 40th Streets in the early 1850s, then to 42nd Street in 1867 and in 1888, once the tracks were sunk, all the way to the Harlem River.)
IN THE 1870S, FORMING A PRECEDENT-SETTING PARTNERSHIP, THE CITY AND THE CENTRAL SPLIT THE COST OF SINKING THE PARK AVENUE TRACKS.
The improvements did not totally ameliorate the nuisance but were palpable. When the depot first opened, the 100 trains that clattered over the Fourth Avenue tracks every day made such a racket that classes at Columbia College on 49th Street were disrupted. After the tracks were buried, though, Edith Wharton, who lived in a town house on Park at 78th Street, wrote to a friend in 1896 that in any given hour, “seven or eight trains passed without affecting our nervous system. What happens is a short roar & rumble, & a puff of white smoke. Some people might mind it very much—to me it would not be in the least disturbing, much less so than the jingle of a cable car, for instance.”
THE TUNNEL PLEASED NEIGHBORS AND PEDESTRIANS, but not passengers of the three railroads served by the depot. By 1880, Manhattan’s population would approach 1.2 million, and with Tammany poli
ticians and their cronies profiting from paving contracts and real estate booms, the street grid that was first plotted on paper long before, in 1811, was finally wending its way north of what would become known as Midtown. By 1900, the population would top 1.8 million, and the grand depot, which had seemed so durable only three decades earlier and which the Commodore figured would suffice for a century, had devolved into a hopeless anachronism incapable of accommodating its 15 million passengers a year—much less future growth.
THE DEPOT’S HALF-CYLINDRICAL TRAIN SHED WAS MODELED ON LONDON’S ST. PANCRAS AND RIVALED NEW YORK’S CRYSTAL PALACE.
The stinging verdict on Grand Central Depot as the abject gateway to New York would be echoed nearly a century later by Vincent Scully, the Yale architecture professor, about the pathetic successor to New York’s imposing Pennsylvania Station. “Nothing pertaining to New York City except its government has been so discreditable to it as its principal railroad station,” the Times wrote. “The waiting rooms constituted an ordeal hardly second to that of the tunnel itself, a waiting in rooms crowded to the limit, heated to more than the temperature of the outer air and not ventilated at all… It was an ordeal so dreadful that the experienced shirked it at almost any risk.” The depot was denounced as cramped, dark, repelling, ugly, and disgraceful, and, in the most unkind cut, as a station “which would be considered adequate in Sandusky, Ohio” (which was home to fewer than 20,000 people that year, compared to New York’s population, which O. Henry would immortalize a few years later as “The Four Million”).
IN 1898, the railroad settled on a quick fix. The three-story Second Empire structure was transformed into a six-story neo-Renaissance concoction covered in stucco and artificial stone. It was designed by Bradford Lee Gilbert, who became best known for designing the Tower Building, the first steel-framed curtain-wall structure, at 50 Broadway, which has also been called the city’s first true skyscraper.