Grand Central

by Sam Roberts

  Gilbert installed a convocation of mammoth nine-foot-high cast-iron eagles (two of which, following a nine-decade absence, now adorn the terminal again). In 1900, the depot, by now commonly known as Grand Central Station, was enlarged again, this time by the architect Samuel Huckel Jr. The inconvenient separate waiting rooms for the three lines were merged into one that measured 100 by 200 feet. The renovated head house on 42nd Street featured a 50-foot-wide concourse between Vanderbilt Avenue and Depew Place (named for the New York Central’s president and simultaneously a U.S. senator) connecting the waiting rooms (fitted with rocking chairs and fireplaces) and the train platforms, and a rotunda flanked by more ticket windows and other marble-clad amenities, including a women’s waiting room and a “retiring room.” A separate “emigrants’ waiting room” was installed in the basement, “thus relieving the main waiting room and rotunda of this class of passengers,” the railroad’s chief engineer boasted. The terminal passed its first test in the crush of summer vacationers in 1901.

  CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW (LEFT) SURVIVES AS THE NAME OF A PRIVATE STREET. THE FORMER CENTRAL PRESIDENT CONFERS WITH A SUCCESSOR, PATRICK CROWLEY.

  “Anybody could before that have admired the spaciousness and the new architectural impressiveness of the new arrangement,” the Times observed, “but nobody could have said with authority whether it was or was not adequate to its purpose.” The new Grand Central Station was hailed again as “the largest, it is believed, in existence,” with a waiting room 1,000 square feet bigger than Boston’s South Union Station. Even so, by the turn of the century, Grand Central was handling 500 trains a day—three times the traffic of the 1870s. The station’s shortcomings inconvenienced only passengers. The divide created by the tracks still vexed a broader constituency.

  And as promising as the improvements seemed, the erstwhile Times editorialist, obviously writing from personal experience (someone once defined news as something that happens to an editor or, worse yet, to an editor’s spouse), presciently cautioned that

  the work will not be complete until something is done to make traveling through the long Park Avenue tunnel less to be dreaded. In hot summer weather the thought of going through that hole in the ground hangs like a disheartening sword of Damocles over the mind of the poor commuter all day long and burdens his dreams at night. It is not pleasant in winter. But if the locomotive engines between 42nd Street and Mott Haven were driven by electric power and the interior of the tunnel were brightened by paint or kalsomine and illuminated by electricity, the traveler would have nothing more to complain of. The property owners along Park Avenue would be glad, too.

  Sinking the tracks and covering them had mollified those property owners. The tunnel helped reduce traffic fatalities and congestion at street level. But it created havoc for riders trapped in the heat and fumes below. The Times railed against “the tortures daily inflicted upon large numbers of persons within the peace of the State of New York by taking them through four miles of the mephitic atmosphere of the tunnel from Grand Central Station to the Harlem River.” While the tunnel improved the flow of traffic on the surface, it was compounded below, where steam, smoke, and cinders conspired to obscure the vision of locomotive engineers. Which is exactly what happened on Wednesday, January 8, 1902, to terrifying effect.

  ENGINEER JOHN WISKER, “IMPATIENT OF DELAY,” WAS BLAMED FOR THE 1902 FATAL COLLISION THAT LED TO THE MODERN TERMINAL.

  ROTARY CONVERTERS TRANSFORMED ALTERNATING INTO DIRECT CURRENT. JIM FRAWLEY, ENGINEER OF POWER, SUPERVISED IN NEW YORK’S DEEPEST BASEMENT.

  THE ENGINEER

  HAD THERE BEEN ANY DOUBTS about the depot’s adequacy even after the renovations, two events dispelled them as the new century began. The fatal crash in the Grand Central yards prompted demands that the engineer and even the New York Central’s management be prosecuted for manslaughter and suggestions that the railroad be barred from Manhattan altogether and required to build a new terminus at its Mott Haven yards in the South Bronx instead. A month earlier, another event proved just as decisive: the Pennsylvania Railroad, the New York Central’s chief competitor to points west, announced that it would challenge the Central’s Manhattan monopoly by tunneling under the Hudson River from New Jersey and building a sumptuous station on the West Side.

  As the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad’s chief engineer since 1899, William J. Wilgus had supervised the recent costly renovation of Grand Central. Born in Buffalo in 1865, Wilgus studied for two years under a local civil engineer and later took a Cornell correspondence course in drafting. His creativity and expertise propelled him through the ranks of various railroads and finally to the New York Central. The fatal 1902 crash persuaded him that the renovations, as impressive as they were, were insufficient to stem the rising tide of public outrage over the preposterous notion of running a chaotic railroad yard in what a few decades earlier had been a practically bucolic landscape but by now was becoming the very heart of the nation’s largest city.

  JOHN M. WISKER, ACCUSED OF CAUSING THE 1902 CRASH.

  Already, prompted by the 1902 crash, the state legislature had extended the ban on steam-powered locomotives from 42nd Street all the way to the Harlem River, effective 1908 (imposing a $500-a-day fine unless the mayor “shall certify to the necessity for the use of steam locomotives arising from the temporary failure of other motive power”). Railroad officials briefly considered diverting commuter traffic to a “Grand Union Station” on the Harlem River in the Bronx, which would be accessible by subways and elevated trains. But Wilgus conceived another alternative.

  “Suddenly, there came a flash of light,” he recalled decades later. “It was the most daring idea that ever occurred to me.” In a succinct three-page letter to W.H. Newman, the railroad’s president, dated December 22, 1902, less than a year after the crash, the 37-year-old self-taught chief engineer recommended an audacious and extravagant remedy: raze the new Grand Central Station that had just been renovated and replace the egregious steam locomotives with electric trains, which had advanced technologically since they were first introduced on a main line by the Baltimore & Ohio in 1895 (four years later Wilgus himself had proposed an experimental trial on the Central; his plan was adopted but not implemented).

  The technological advantages were clear-cut. Electricity required less maintenance. Unlike steam or, later, diesel locomotives, electric trains did not need the fuel or machinery to generate power on board. Electricity empowered trains to accelerate more quickly, a decided amenity for short-haul commuter service. Another advantage, an obvious one, in retrospect, provided the rationale that made Wilgus’s suggestion so revolutionary and, in the end, so inevitable. Electric motors produced fewer noxious fumes and no obfuscating smoke or steam. That would help quell the public outcry and quiet the increasing vocal critics who regarded the trains as a necessary evil, one that was needlessly dangerous and inconvenient, though. Moreover, as Wilgus explained, electricity “dispenses with the need of old-style train sheds,” because it made subterranean tracks feasible.

  WILLIAM J. WILGUS, THE CENTRAL’S CHIEF ENGINEER.

  Absent the smothering smoke, soot, and cinders, the depot could be expanded on the same footprint by delivering trains to platforms on two levels, the lower for suburban commuters and the upper for long-distance trains. For the first time, the entire rail yard all the way to 56th Street, to where the maze of rails that delivered passengers to the platforms coalesced into four main-line tracks, could be decked over. The “veritable ‘Chinese Wall’ ” that bisected the city for 14 blocks could be eliminated. The air above the yards could be magically transformed into valuable real estate in the heart of Manhattan.

  For starters, Wilgus envisioned a 12-story, 2.3-million-square-foot building above the terminal that could generate rents totaling $2.3 million annually. Those advantages not only benefited “humanity in general,” as the Commodore would have put it, an ingratiating by-product, but also fulfilled the railroad’s primary mission that “we first s
ee that we are benefiting ourselves.” Wilgus’s overarching remedy to the “Park Avenue problem,” he unabashedly proclaimed, “marked the opening of a remarkable opportunity for the accomplishment of a public good with considerations of private gain in behalf of the corporation involved.”

  “History,” James Marston Fitch and Diana S. Waite wrote, “was to prove this an epochal scheme.”

  IF WILGUS DID NOT INVENT the notion of air rights and rivet the principle into real estate law, he surely applied it on a larger scale than anyone had ever imagined. “Thus from the air would be taken wealth with which to finance obligatory vast changes otherwise nonproductive,” he said. And by capitalizing on those rights, rights to build towering hotels and office buildings and private clubs that just happened to have trains coursing through their subbasements, the railroad would reap enough revenue to recoup the costs of electrification. The terminal, he explained later, “could be transformed from a non-productive agency of transportation to a self-contained producer of revenue—a gold mine so to speak.”

  In 1902, with the sprawling yards still flanked by pastures for an occasional cow or goat and by cheap tenements proliferating farther east, it would take a stubborn visionary to recognize that this blighted swath of Midtown could be converted into an iconic 140-foot-wide canyon bordered by brick, steel, and glass skyscrapers (and, in name, at least, join the stretches in Murray Hill, below 42nd Street, which had earlier been christened Park Avenue).

  Wilgus envisioned other innovations: constructing an elevated roadway that would gird the terminal and no longer render it a roadblock in the middle of Park Avenue; reserving the upper level of the terminal for long-distance trains and the lower for the growing number of commuters; building loops on both levels, which would allow trains to turn around instead of wasting time backing out; and installing ramps that would obviate the struggle up and down stairs for passengers with baggage.

  Years later, Wilgus would recall that his letter to President Newman got mixed reviews. “At first, he properly questioned the practicability of the scheme,” the engineer recalled.

  He felt that the office space would be a place only “for birds to roost”; that the proposed hotel on the vacant square bounded by Madison Avenue, 43rd and 44th Streets and Vanderbilt Avenue, would be as unpopular as railroad hotels in Europe; that hansom cab-men could not be driven to use Madison Avenue because of their addiction to the sights of Fifth Avenue; and that underground horse cab-stands would be repulsive because of odors. My counter-arguments were that the rapidly increasing demand for office space in the vicinity would surely bring us tenants; that the use of electricity would obviate the features that made the European railroad hotels unpopular; that growing congestion would cause the cab-man to gladly avail himself of the new thoroughfares; and that the coming of the motor-car, then in its infancy, instead of the horse-drawn vehicle would obviate objectionable odors. It was also necessary to urge counter-arguments against the allegations of those who were not friendly to ramps in place of stairways and who opposed what they termed the “grocery store” idea of lending the station to revenue producing purposes.

  Wilgus was asking the railroad’s directors to accept a great deal on faith. His projected $35 million price tag for all the improvements, including a conservative estimate for electrification, nearly equaled half the railroad’s revenue for a full year. Moreover, the railroad made most of its money hauling freight, not people. Why invest so much in a project that benefited only passengers? But the chief engineer was persuasive. He delivered his proposal on December 22, 1902. By January 10, the Central’s board of directors had embraced the project and promoted him. Six months later, on June 30, 1903, the board—whose directors included the Commodore’s grandsons, Cornelius II and William K. Vanderbilt, William Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan—in a daring validation of the chief engineer’s vision, formally empowered Wilgus to proceed with his bold agenda for a regal terminal that would be a gateway to the continent.

  Once he was given the go-ahead, Wilgus still faced two daunting challenges: how to electrify the railroad (and how much of it to electrify); and how to build a new terminal and raze the old one without disrupting passenger traffic. He approached both quandaries with characteristic bravado. Rather than adhere narrowly to the mandate imposed by the state—to ban steam locomotives in Manhattan—Wilgus proposed to electrify the railroad the full 23 miles to White Plains on the Harlem line and all 33 miles to Croton on the Hudson line.

  He gave two compelling reasons. One was that commuters accounted for a growing proportion of the railroad’s passenger traffic and they would be reluctant to waste time transferring in the Bronx to steam locomotives. Moreover, as noted, electric motors allowed trains to accelerate more quickly than steam locomotives, a big advantage for commuter railroads that hopscotched between suburban stations. Theoretically, what Wilgus was proposing seemed sensible, and the decision, as he later described it, was “inescapable.” But translating his hypotheses about the technological and commercial advantages of electricity into dependable motive power was something else altogether.

  “No existing railroad electrification anywhere in the world,” Kurt C. Schlichting wrote in his biography of Wilgus, “approached the scale of the Central’s project or provided a model to duplicate.”

  AN ELECTRIC TRACTION ENGINE had made its experimental debut on the Ninth Avenue El in New York as early as 1885, but the sparks it generated and its slow speed doomed it for the time being. Using electricity to power trains over long distances was relatively untested. In 1897, Frank J. Sprague, an acolyte of Thomas Edison’s, adapted an innovative device he had invented for elevators to railroad cars, allowing them to operate in tandem, each with its own electric motor.

  THE SHOTGUN MARRIAGE OF ARCHITECTURAL FIRMS YIELDED A GRAND DESIGN GREATER THAN THE SUM OF THEIR SEPARATE BLUEPRINTS.

  Sprague approached the Central’s directors with his vision, but the imperatives of electrification were not yet apparent. Still unresolved, too, was how best to generate electricity—through direct current, which was produced at a particular voltage and delivered to the user at the same energy but loses power over long distances; or alternating current, in which the charge periodically shifts direction and the high voltage is reduced before delivery. Given the commercial stakes, as more and more big-city and commuter railroads bowed to government pressure and began to electrify, Wilgus’s dilemma sparked a reprise of the scientific debate a decade earlier over which version of current was most serviceable to execute felons condemned to death.

  In 1890, Edison, an advocate of direct current, surreptitiously powered New York’s first electric chair with George Westinghouse’s alternating current, hoping to demonstrate that alternating current was generally so lethal that it should be reserved only for inflicting capital punishment. Edison proved his point: William Kemmler, a convicted killer, was executed (more or less successfully). The debate didn’t end there, though. Westinghouse and Sprague angrily waged a war of words in the pages of the Railroad Gazette.

  Eventually, Edison and Sprague carried the day. The New York Central, following the lead of the Baltimore & Ohio, opted for direct current traveling through a third rail that delivered power to each railroad car through a spring-loaded “shoe” extending from the motor. (Unlike the New York City subway system and the Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North trains now draw power from the underside of the third rail, which allows for insulation above to prevent electrocution and icing.)

  In 1906, well in advance of the state-imposed deadline for electrification, the Central began operating electric cars from Grand Central. (The New Haven followed suit a year later, using direct current from the Central’s third rail but switching to alternating current delivered from overhead lines on its own tracks in Connecticut, as it does today.)

  A HUNDRED SWITCHMEN, INCLUDING TIM COUGHLIN, MANAGED THE METRO-NORTH LINE. NOW A DOZEN RAIL TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS DO THE JOB.

  ON JUNE 19, 1903, the city granted subs
urface rights to the New York Central between Lexington and Madison Avenues and East 42nd and 47th Streets for $25,000 annually in perpetuity. Work in earnest began on August 17, 1903. Unlike the depot built three decades earlier, the new Grand Central would actually define “Midtown.” The center of the city had been inexorably advancing from downtown, mirroring the railroad’s own brand of manifest destiny. That advance had been nominally cemented on the West Side with the advent of the 25-story Times Tower at 42nd Street and Broadway, then the second-tallest building in the city, which was still under construction. On December 31, 1903, 200,000 spectators would accept the Times’ invitation to celebrate the new building and the New Year with a fireworks display from the roof at midnight (the ball drop down a flagpole on the roof would begin five years later).

  The new Grand Central Terminal—and it would be a terminal, because New York Central horsecars would no longer ferry commuters from its train platforms to destinations downtown—would draw nearly as many people in a single day as Times Square did on New Year’s Eve. Grand Central was designed to accommodate even more, maybe even as many as 100 million a year by the beginning of the 21st century, when the terminal would celebrate its centennial.

  Even before the first spadeful of earth was turned, before the first boulder of Manhattan schist was blasted, a veritable forest of exclamation points began sprouting with what was dubbed the city’s largest individual demolition contract ever. On 17 acres purchased by the railroad, 120 houses, three churches, two hospitals, and an orphan asylum would have to be obliterated, as would stables, warehouses, and other ancillary structures.