"Bridge and tunnel" is an aspersion cast on the un-chic residents of Long Island or New Jersey who commute to Manhattan over or under the waters that encircle the city like a shimmering velvet rope.
Jill Jonnes's superb "Conquering Gotham" shows how times have changed. A century ago, the same three words conjured up enterprise and audacity. Millions of dollars were invested, and dozens of lives lost, in pursuit of the prize of an unbroken rail link through New York (that is, in addition to the New York Central's long-standing route from the north). Millions more dollars were poured into construction of Pennsylvania Station, an edifice patterned after the great buildings of ancient Rome. As well it might have been: At the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. looked a little like the second coming of the Roman Empire.
Ms. Jonnes's first-rate narrative tracks the tunnels, the station and the times in which they were conceived, dug and built. The book she did not write is an extended and, necessarily, invidious comparison between the heroic era of urban construction and our own. Yes, in a nicely turned addendum, she does mourn the wanton mid-1960s demolition of Penn Station. But she leaves it up to the reader to contrast, for example, the immense undertakings of 1903-10 with the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center towers used to stand. (Only now, more than five years after the 9/11 attacks, have new structures begun to rise where the Twin Towers stood, and they still haven't risen much.) Neither does she note the conspicuous non-invocation of the eminent-domain doctrine in the early 20th century and its promiscuous use in the early 21st.
It must be said that money is not the author's best subject. Investors will find much to enjoy in "Conquering Gotham," but they will wish the book told more about the finances of the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad, which bankrolled the whole project -- tunnels and station alike -- and pushed it through to its glorious conclusion. It's no easy thing to imagine a 21st-century corporation laying out billions to out-build and out-beautify the Romans. Yet the old Pennsy did just that, and at a substantial cost to its stock-market capitalization.
Stubborn men achieved great feats 100 years ago. Alexander J. Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was among the stubbornest. He never wavered in his faith that trains could enter Manhattan not on ferries but through tunnels and, once arrived, discharge their passengers in a building whose function seemed not so much to keep out the elements as to ennoble the human spirit and immortalize the corporation that paid for it all.
The trick was translating this grand vision into watertight tunnels, groin-vaulted coffered ceilings and Corinthian columns. The silty Hudson River bottom presented one set of problems, the seemingly impenetrable East River rocks another. Then there were the crooked city fathers. The Pennsy bought itself a peck of trouble and delay by refusing, on principle, to pay the kind of tribute that Tammany Hall felt it deserved.
Reading about these trials and tribulations, so vividly described by Ms. Jonnes, the reader may feel an unscratchable itch to go back in time and have a brief word with the long-deceased members of the Pennsy front office. One might ask them, for instance: "Are you sure you want to build this monumental station on the eve of the automobile age, and have you heard about the Wright brothers?" Or: "Do you really suppose that the government will allow you to earn the returns you've projected over the long pull now that Teddy Roosevelt is opening the floodgates to the meddling politics of his rising cousin Franklin?"
Uncoached by time travelers, however, management pushed on. It bought up huge tracts of Manhattan real estate with the shareholders' money, not the taxpayers'. It filed not one environmental impact statement. It hired sandhogs to tunnel and blast -- and when one fell ill or died of the bends, or was shattered by a carelessly laid stick of dynamite, it hired another. And when the neighborhood around Penn Station was rocked by an especially big mistimed explosion, the company just shrugged. "This happens occasionally in all blasting work," its contractor airily said in a statement, "and is an unavoidable accident."
When the financial future becomes especially opaque, Wall Street people cast an envious glance at those who seem to work in a state of certain knowledge. There was no such certainty in the hole-digging trades a century ago. The engineers racked their brains over the tunnels connecting New Jersey and Lower Manhattan. It seems that the pathways undulated. How much more would they waver under the constant pounding of fully loaded passenger trains? The experts were divided over this life-and-death issue. Should they try to secure the tunnels to the riverbed floor with screw piles? After much wrangling, the anti-screw-pile faction prevailed, though neither those men nor their professional adversaries could really be sure they were right. Happily, the mass drowning they silently feared never came to pass.
As for the bridge-and-tunnel crowd of 1910, how do you suppose they responded to the triumph of man over the natural and political elements? Ms. Jonnes relates that the Long Island Railroad riders "fumed at having to exchange their old commuter tickets for new ones (at the cost of an additional dollar)." A century later, they're still mad.
Mr. Grant is the editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer and the author, most recently, of "John Adams: Party of One" (Farrar, Straus, 2005).
––Wall Street Journal
~*~
"In 1901, the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) embarked on an epic nine-year project to bring its tracks into New York City. It would involve two tunnels under the Hudson River, four under the East River, and the building of the majestic Penn Station in midtown Manhattan. In her meticulous history, Jonnes (Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race To Electrify the World ) brings to life the project's leaders, its workers, and early 1900s New York City. She carefully explains how engineering decisions were made to overcome the extremely difficult tunneling conditions. She creates suspense over the PRR's investigation of why the Hudson River tunnels kept shifting in the riverbed's silt. She gives full attention to the McKim, Mead & White architectural designs for Penn Station and details the sensational Stanford White murder and trial. Throughout, she seamlessly weaves in the machinations of the Tammany Hall political machine and the imperious practices of Gilded Age business tycoons. In a sad epilog, she chronicles the decline of the PRR and Penn Station's demolition in 1963. Several dozen superbly chosen period photos and diagrams round out the book. Jonnes has produced a well-researched and fast-paced history that is most highly recommended to all libraries"
––Library Journal (starred)
~*~
"A tale of large-scale engineering during the Gilded Age, when America was on the rise and grand enterprises were the badges of its ascendancy.
Historian Jonnes (Empires of Light, 2003, etc.) evidently had to spend much time burrowing into the slime and muck of Tammany politics before she could get down to digging through the Hudson River silt and mud. The Tammany-dominated Board of Aldermen had the power to kill the Pennsylvania Railroad's ambitious project to link its mainland rails by subaqueous tunnels to the island of Manhattan. But the PRR's stalwart president, Alexander Cassatt, who had already done away with free rides and secret rebates, had no intention of paying the customary bribes. Aided by newly elected reform mayor Seth Low, the PRR forced the Board's approval without boodle on Dec. 16, 1902. Though North River tides caused the tubes to undulate slightly, the difficult construction was finally completed successfully. At the culmination of the 16-mile tunnels, where Manhattan's seedy Tenderloin District had formerly sprawled, stood Pennsylvania Station, the grandest public space in Gotham. Opened in 1910, Charles McKim's magnificent Roman-style terminal survived just 53 years, approximating the life expectancy of a citizen born when the PRR's first train made the cross-river transit. In the tradition of David McCullough's narratives of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal, Jonnes's elegy to a mighty engineering feat is clearly reported and populated with a well-delineated cast of robber barons, heroic builders and a few crooks sporting handlebar mustaches.
~*~
Intelligent history about building an indispensable part of our infrastructure."
––Kirkus (starred)
~*~
"Modern Manhattan is a miracle in many ways, but all of its imports, commuters included, must traverse at least one river to get there. In 1900, the New York Central, owned by the Vanderbilts, already gave Manhattan a northern connection over the narrow Harlem River. A southern connection over the mile-wide Hudson would be a whole different story. Alexander Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was the visionary on the project. But how to do it- A bridge plan fell through due to expense; a tunnel would lack the oxygen needed for steam engines. The breakthrough lay in the cutting-edge electrified locomotives developed in Paris. Historian Jonnes (Empires of Light ), demonstrating impressive immersion in the Gilded Age, ably spins the tale, which bears some similarities toThe Devil in the White City . This is a vivid story of hardball Tammany Hall maneuvering and mind-boggling engineering. Once construction began, the two-track narrative settles on the daunting construction of the tunnels and Charles McKim's much-admired design of the terminus at Pennsylvania Station, prized by New Yorkers only after its ill-considered demise in 1963. Jonnes can claim an important addition to the popular literature of how New York became the archetype of a great American metropolis.(Apr. 23)"
––Publishers Weekly
~*~
"Commemorated in many a rueful history book after “barbarians” demolished it in the 1960s, New York City’s Pennsylvania Station was the visible manifestation of a titanic subterranean project. Its sweeping story, involving engineering challenges, an inflexibly honest corporation leader, flexibly corrupt politicians, and street-level sociology, comes together marvelously in Jonnes’ admiring history of the undertaking. It arose from the Pennsylvania Railroad’s determination to run its trains directly into Manhattan; in the 1890s, Penn passengers had to alight in New Jersey and board ferries, a scene Jonnes evokes with an excerpt of Penn president Alexander Cassatt’s experience of the inconvenience. The main impetus to the enterprise, Cassatt, operating in an era of lightly regulated capitalism, wielded substantial power, and his decisions structure Jonnes’ narrative. Cassatt’s siting of the station in the city’s notorious den of iniquity, the Tenderloin, introduces the outstretched palms of Tammany Hall, while his taste for the classical aesthetic introduces Charles McKim’s design of the station. Equally interesting on the technical hazards of the tunnel work, Jonnes has produced an exemplary construction epic."
––Gilbert Taylor, Booklist
~*~
"Historian digs up tale of a tunnel dreamer"
Historian Jill Jonnes had pored over thousands of records in the vast dusty archive of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Harrisburg by the time she found what she was looking for.
In a huge century-old leather-bound ledger, her eyes fell upon an index reference in tiny script - a clue to a treasure trove of files on a Gilded Age drama set in Philadelphiaand New York.
The confidential letters and memos told the story behind the PRR's monumental effort to build a system of electrified tunnels under the Hudson River, Manhattan, and the East River to Long Island, all meeting at the magnificent Pennsylvania Station.
"It was an unforgettable 'Eureka!' moment," said Jonnes, Baltimore author of the new book Conquering Gotham - A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels. "I was looking through files that no one had seen in 100 years."
But the records described more than the pharaohlike achievement of Philadelphia's PRR president, Alexander Cassatt, more than the roles of titans including John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, William Randolph Hearst and Theodore Roosevelt.
They contained a surprise: The engineers were deeply concerned about the "up-and-down movement of the [Hudson River] tunnels 40 feet below the river bed," Jonnes said.
"They didn't realize how soupy the silt was, or how the tunnels would behave. They didn't know whether they would keep settling in the silt and crack."
In 1907, PRR engineer Samuel Rea, whose junior engineer son was lost to a deadly disease contracted in the tunnels, was stunned to read an editorial in Scientific American titled "Tunnel Tubes in Soft Material." It posed questions about the "bending stresses developed . . . far in excess of the resisting power of the tubes . . . fracture must ensue."
The Inquirer also wrote an editorial: "Here is a question in which the public is vitally interested not only through its ownership of the securities which built the tubes, but because it is to become a vast artery of travel. The thought of a breaking down of the tunnel is too horrible for contemplation."
Some engineers proposed a system of anchoring the tunnels in the bedrock, Jonnes said. It was never done.
In the end, thousands of 700-ton trains passed through before they were reassured that tunnels were not sinking.
Today, Philadelphia area residents still make the daily commute to jobs in New York. "They are going through these same tunnels," Jonnes said.
The tunnels were the dream of Cassatt, whose PRR brought him to the Hudson River - but could not take him across to Gotham. For that, he had to board ferries.
Cassatt had been the first to extend the PRR lines to Jersey City in 1871 and he helped develop the system of ferries. Now the ferry trip was galling to him.
"No one in New York was thinking about [building the tunnels]," Jonnes said. "The issue was money. The PRR was the biggest corporate entity in the United States. People in New York didn't care about getting back and forth."
Some 1,200 trains a day steamed into various New Jersey terminals. By 1901, the railroad ferries carried 80 million passengers a year.
To build tunnels under the river, "you had to be a company that wanted entre to New York," Jonnes said, "and the Pennsylvania Railroad was that."
Cassatt, who had homes in Haverford and Rittenhouse Square, was determined to span the one-mile-wide Hudson, long known to sailors as the North River.
He'd have to outwit, and outlast, corrupt Tammany politicians; assemble land in New York's Tenderloin district; endure bad press from newspaper mogul Hearst, and get through construction setbacks and worker deaths.
"I wanted to write about an American success, about a monumental project that everyone would be familiar with," Jonnes said. "You say Penn Station and everybody knows it.
"But what was really appealing to me is that Alexander Cassatt was unknown. He was famous then and his sister, Mary Cassatt, was unknown. Now, he's the brother of Mary Cassatt," the American impressionist painter.
During about 50 trips to the state archive in Harrisburg, Jonnes found the details of what was then the nation's biggest, most difficult and important civil engineering project. They were tucked away in thousands of boxes of PRR records.
Six documented the progress toward the 1910 opening of the tunnels and Penn Station, the great Doric temple to transportation. They contained important files labeled "New York Tunnels and Terminal Extension." "This was thrilling for a historian," Jonnes said. "I had everything I needed."
Like a detective, she re-traced Cassatt's every step as he nursed the project in New York or watched over it from his office at the PRR's Broad Street Station. "He was an unusual man, powerful yet modest and considerate," Jonnes said. "He tried to be an honorable employer."
Cassatt died Dec. 28, 1906, at his Rittenhouse Square mansion before his project was completed. The trains of the PRR and Long Island Railroad would not begin running between Manhattan and the mainland and Long Island for about four more years.
Still, Cassatt had done what no one else had - and hundreds of people stood in a steady rain at Rittenhouse Square, waiting to say goodbye to the railroad mastermind.
Some employees shared a story about the day the boss boarded the morning local at the Haverford Station on the Main Line for the commute to Philadelphia and had a run-in with a trainman who didn't know him.
The train made an unscheduled stop, but the flag man, who was to wave a red flag as company rules dictated, instead sat on the back of the car chewing tobacco.
"Cassatt asked if he wasn't supposed to be waving the flag," Jonnes said. "The flag man said, 'I don't know if it is any damned business of yours.' "
Cassatt retreated, muttering, "Certainly not, certainly not."
Later in his office at the Broad Street Station, Cassatt summoned the trainmaster, who vowed to immediately fire the worker.
"No, you won't fire him," Cassatt said, according to Jonnes. "But tell him not to be so disrespectful to people who ask for information in the future."
The man who would transform the lives of millions of people in water-locked Gotham simply wanted a little civility.
"The funeral was a very poignant episode," Jonnes said. "Cassatt was a noble man, and the coming of so many Pennsylvania Railroad employees to pay their respects was touching."
––Edward Colimore, The Philadelphia Inquirer
~*~
"They took Manhattan"
It's hard to imagine Manhattan in its infancy, without cascading lines of skyscrapers, the pestering rumble of subway cars beneath sidewalk grates and the honking of car horns on the avenues. Yet despite its unquestionable position as the hub of New York City, Manhattan of the Gilded Age dangled flimsily from the rest of the nation. The rivers that had made its ascent possible were now a restrictive noose for the many who sought entry, as well as for the businesses that schemed to make a profit from their admission.
But constructing entries into Manhattan was a seemingly impossible and financially ruinous proposition. As one high-ranking Pennsylvania Railroad official warned about one proposed project, it would be "one of the World's great undertakings -- on a parity with such works as the Suez and Manchester Ship Canals, and of equal, if not greater importance." Not only were the risks of tunnel and bridge construction enormously high, but any construction on Manhattan soil would confront Tammany Hall's unscrupulous political machinery. Nevertheless, a connection from the southern part of the island (the Vanderbilts had a thin bridge over the northern Harlem River), and an additional portal under the East River into Queens and Long Island, would allow trains from the industrial heartland to tunnel through to Manhattan and on to the mills and households of New England.
Burrowing into Gotham also offered the titanic prestige the Gilded Age thrived upon. The United States had been brought together by the railways, and conquering Manhattan remained the last prize untaken. The significance of reaching the island was perhaps most pressing for the one company whose reputation demanded it take on this risk: the Pennsylvania Railroad.
As Jill Jonnes explains in the impeccably researched and ravishingly detailed "Conquering Gotham," the PRR's eventual entree into Manhattan owed greatly to the singular vision of its president, Alexander J. Cassatt, an elegantly dressed man whose engineering mind was matched by an industrialist gut and an artistic sense of purpose. Despite a wealthy upbringing, Cassatt began his career at the PRR as a lowly rodman, rising swiftly through the company's ranks before retiring prematurely at 42 to live a gentleman's life of horseback riding. Not the retiring type, he rejoined the railroad only a year after calling it quits, and rose to its presidency six years later.
It was during an annual summer trip to Europe in 1901 that Cassatt had the epiphany that would forever change the fortune of his railroad. Elegantly situated at the Hotel Castiglione on an August morning, he received a cable explaining that the PRR's negotiations over a Hudson River bridge plan had reached a fatal standstill. Armed with the disheartening news, Cassatt took to the streets of Paris at the behest of the cable's author, engineer Samuel Rea, who was now intrigued by the prospect of tunneling into Manhattan. Rea urged Cassatt to visit Gare du Quai d'Orsay, the marvelous Left Bank terminal that had been the jewel of the previous year's Paris Exposition of 1900. Here was a majestic building that both bestowed and reflected the grandeur of one of the world's great cities. Most intriguing was how the trains actually glided on the track under the Seine, a technological advance known as electric traction. Watching the extraordinary power of a 45-ton locomotive schlep the much heavier passenger cars using electrical power, Cassatt realized that his PRR could control Gotham with its own army of similarly mighty locomotives.
So began the gargantuan New York Tunnels and Terminal Extension plan. To build his own Gare du Quai d'Orsay, Cassatt called on renowned architect Charles McKim, upon whom Jonnes dotes with novel-like detail. But, Jonnes tells us, building Cassatt's terminal was simple compared with finding a place to house it. The PRR needed an enormous plot anchored in the middle of the island for its lines to gradually step up from New Jersey and down again beneath the East River. Logistically, the most desirous location was a four-square-block plot bounded by Seventh and Ninth avenues on one side and West 31st and 33rd streets on the other, smack dab in a Manhattan region teeming with saloons and brothels.
Taking the plot called for a most insidious real estate arrangement. Each building within the blocks had to be purchased so it could be razed for the new station. More than 200 landlords had to be persuaded, one way or the other, to sell. After years of attritional advances above and below ground, McKim's handsome Romanesque Penn Station opened at last in 1910. Cassatt would be present in spirit only. Although a larger-than-life statue of the railman stood in the station waiting room, Cassatt had died in the final days of 1906.
The wildly ambitious New York Tunnel and Terminal Extension plan was finally ready in its entirety in March 1917. Nearly two decades of work, sacrifice and human loss (not just Cassatt, reminds Jonnes, but the many men -- Rea's son among them -- who perished while constructing the tunnels) had gone into ensuring the prominence in the world not only of Gotham but also of the Pennsylvania Railroad. However, the Manhattan that the PRR serviced had changed during the enactment of Cassatt's great dream, and would continue to do so in the decades ahead, with a velocity even he could not have fathomed. In 1927 the state-financed Holland Tunnel was opened to serve the country's growing appetite for motor cars. That same year, ground was broken for the massive George Washington Bridge connecting Manhattan with northern New Jersey.
Within decades after the PRR conquered Gotham, Gotham had struck back. The cost of refurbishing the station was simply outweighed by the vanishing income. In 1961 the PRR announced it had reached a deal to sell. Penn Station would shrink into the ground underneath a 34-story office tower and a new entertainment center, Madison Square Garden, a monument to bad taste. Jonnes ends her delightful popular history on a note of hope: "All these decades later -- as our love affair with cars and airplanes has soured -- there is hope that New York can once again reclaim the grandeur of arriving by train in Gotham." A lovely thought, yes. But one must remember New Yorkers are always in a hurry.
––Jonathan Kelly is a staff member at Vanity Fair. San Francisco Chronicle
~*~
|
