Click here to look inside Conquering Gotham
As the nineteenth century ends, Pennsylvania Railroad president Alexander Cassatt seeks some way-other than huge fleets of ferries from New Jersey-to bring the PRR's tens of millions of passengers into water-locked Gotham. By 1901, the brilliant Cassatt has embarked upon a course so ambitious, so visionary, it is denounced as corporate folly. Under his direction, the PRR will build a monumental system of electrified tunnels under the Hudson River, Manhattan, and the East River to Long Island, capping them all with the crown jewel of Pennsylvania Station. And so begins a high-stakes Gilded Age drama pitting the nation's greatest corporation against the unruly forces of Tammany New York, America's richest city and most important port.
Set in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., and featuring such titanic characters as J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Teddy Roosevelt, Boss William Croker, architects Charles McKim and Stanford White, press lord William Randolph Hearst, Jill Jonnes' riveting narrative brings to life the feats of politicking and engineering that forever changed New York's physical and psychological geography. As the PRR secretly assembles land for a terminal in the Tenderloin vice district, amid the whore houses, crime, and dance halls, Cassatt outwits Tammany Hall politicians in the bruising fight for the necessary franchise. In the meantime, the engineers and legions of "sand hog" laborers battle the crushing forces of two rivers as they burrow year after year through treacherous glacial soils, suffering blow-outs, explosions, labor troubles and mounting fatalities. In fact, haunting the entire monumental project is a deep secret--PRR engineers fear that the Hudson River tunnels may not be safe and could doom the whole project.
Nevertheless, in late 1910, Penn Station, Charles McKim's great Doric temple to transportation, opens in all its magnificence. As the first trains of the LIRR and the fabled Pennsylvania Railroad travel swiftly under those two ancient rivers, the PRR has done what many believed impossible. It has conquered Gotham. Glittering Manhattan has been connected to the mainland and Long Island, forever changing New York and its suburbs, forever transforming the lives of millions.
Jill Jonnes is an historian and author of Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the Race to Electrify the World and South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall & Resurrection of an American City. She has been an NEH scholar and received several grants from the Ford Foundation.
