Conquering Gotham Read online

  The Pennsylvania Railroad’s New York Tunnels and Terminal Extension, as it was officially known, now became the nation’s biggest, most difficult, and most important civil engineering project. And, unlike that celebrated and much-ballyhooed enterprise, the transcontinental railroad, it would be privately financed. Presumably to avoid alarming the skittish financiers and stockholders they would rely upon in the coming years, they were strikingly reserved about the sheer Pharaonic scale and difficulty of their historic enterprise. Tunnel master Charles Jacobs would describe it privately as “one of the greatest engineering works undertaken in this day and generation.” But such expensive-sounding and extravagant phrases were never uttered in public discussion.

  The New York Extension was, as Cassatt had anticipated, a controversial enterprise. All told, the engineers of the PRR would be building 16 miles of tunnels, more than any other civil engineering project to date. The two famous Alpine mountain tunnels, the Simplon and St. Gothard, were 121?2 and 91?2 miles respectively. The longest underwater tunnel, the Severn in England, was 41?2 miles. The truth was, as one PRR engineer would later write, “Tunnels of the kind contemplated, to be used for heavy and rapid railroad traffic, had never been constructed through materials similar to those forming the beds of the North and East Rivers.” And it was this uncertainty, this prospect of risk, that caused legions of the PRR’s vast army of shareholders to hate the whole enterprise. The stock price began to drop. Some engineers, said Samuel Rea, “believed there was a drift, or tendency of the silt to moved southward with the flow of the [Hudson] river and that this drift might shift any tunnels built through it unless they were anchored in some extremely secure manner.” The Wall Street Journal marveled at the largeness of Cassatt’s “sublime exhibition of faith” in the face of “all the croakings of pessimism.”

  To counter the possibility of drifting and insubstantial silt, explained LIRR president Baldwin, the tunnels under the Hudson River would actually be “an underground bridge. That may sound like an absurdity, but that, nevertheless, is just what this scientifically planned paradox is intended to be—a tunnel burrowed through the soft mud of the river’s bottom and supported at short intervals by piles driven deep enough for their ends to rest on rock bottom.” In addition to these complicated tunnels and monumental station, a huge 192-acre train yard was to be built in Sunnyside, Queens. Nor was that the end of it. Cassatt wanted his road to link up to the lucrative New England markets. In July 1901 the PRR had purchased a company known as the New York Connecting Railroad, which held a federal franchise to build a gigantic railway bridge across the Hell Gate on the East River. Here at last would be the PRR’s rail connection to New England.

  “Electricity and modern science have made it possible for us to do this thing,” Baldwin proclaimed as the reporters pored over the PRR’s hastily filed plans. In marked contrast to all the Vanderbilt trains steaming into the city, showering sparks, cinders and soot as they made their way along Park Avenue to Forty-second Street, Cassatt painted a vision of elegant Pennsylvania passenger trains rolling electrically into Gotham: “There will not be any smoke, dirt or noise, and as all the surface property may be built upon after being utilized underneath for railroad purposes, the neighborhood of the station will be improved instead of marred, as is so often the case when railroad lines are constructed.”

  The route of the PRR’s North River tunnels.

  As details emerged, the New York newspapers engaged in all manner of erroneous speculation—the PRR planned a new port for ocean liners and freighters out on the tip of Long Island at Montauk, its headquarters would soon be relocated to Manhattan, other roads like the Erie or the Lackawanna would be given use of the tunnels. What the papers and the public quickly realized (on the same day that heavy morning fog caused the wreck of a ferry and the evacuation of all its passengers by lifeboats) was that the PRR’s grandiose tunnels and terminal project dwarfed even the earlier hugely ambitious plans for a North River Bridge. When it was all finally completed—and Baldwin spoke of three years—this vast and ambitious project would forever alter the physical and mental geography of the nation’s most important city, New York, and its environs, New Jersey and Long Island.

  On Saturday evening December 14, 1901, William Baldwin sat at his desk in his handsome Willow Street house in Brooklyn as the rain pattered down outside. He was elated but fatigued. He had spent much of the previous day enthusing to journalists in Manhattan about the glories of the New York Extension before returning early in the evening to confer with mayor-elect Seth Low at his Brooklyn mansion about strategy. Baldwin wrote Cassatt in a jubilant mood, “The town is on fire. The universal sentiment, with high and low, is one of approval and anticipation. The more we stir them up, the cheaper will be the terms…The editorials all seem to demand prompt and reasonable conditions on the part of the city.” The “conditions” Baldwin was alluding to encompassed the still uncertain legislative hurdles and the dollar cost of the franchises. After all, much of this was fresh legal terrain. For starters, Baldwin proposed, “I suggest that we try to secure the approval of the Rapid Transit Commission to an amendment to the charter in relation to terms of franchise of steam railroads etc.”

  While ultimately the vast tunnel system and monumental terminal were to be an extraordinary and herculean engineering feat, Cassatt, Baldwin, Rea, and the Pennsylvania Railroad first had to successfully maneuver through New York’s complicated and perfidious local politics. Naturally, they anticipated good-faith negotiations to satisfy the city’s publicly stated conditions. But even more important might be the unspoken illegal “terms,” that is, the bribes and inside deals certain to be expected by Tammany Hall. It was Cassatt’s extraordinary good fortune that tenement voters—angry over Tammany’s ill-timed rigging of ice prices and excessive promotion of vice—had punished the Wigwam by electing Silk Stocking reformer Seth Low as mayor.

  Baldwin had already reported that Low “realizes the importance of the enterprise.” The new mayor was a trained attorney who had given up the management of the family silk trade to first enter politics in the (then) city of Brooklyn, serving twice as a crusading mayor, and then accepting the presidency of Columbia University. There he had orchestrated the move uptown to the Morningside Heights campus designed by master architect Charles McKim of McKim, Mead & White. But Tammany still controlled key governing bodies—notably the Board of Aldermen—and the Pennsylvania Railroad could not so much as stick a shovel in the earth until it secured their consent.

  For all the decades that Tammany had ruled Manhattan (interrupted by occasional short-lived reform governments) every city employee, including policemen and judges, duly paid Tammany large set sums (the rate then was $5,000 to $15,000) for the privilege of obtaining (and keeping) their jobs. By the same token, many who conducted private businesses in Manhattan were expected to fork over to Tammany when so instructed.

  In one recent instance, Tammany boss Richard Croker had appeared in 1898 to ask a “favor” of George Gould, the gregarious son and crown prince of the late unlamented Jay Gould. The young Gould presided over the family’s corporate empire, the ill-run Wabash Railroad, the mighty Western Union Telegraph Company, and the Manhattan Elevated Railway. Unlike his dour, secretive, funereal father, writes historian Maury Klein, “George wore fine clothes, sported a well-trimmed moustache, and strutted like a dandy. Small and lithe, he loved fast horses, hunting, fishing…He became an excellent polo player and did much to establish the game in the United States. His tastes ran to clubs, parties, and the theater.” He had first spied his lovely wife on the stage. Nonetheless, Gould fancied himself a serious businessman.

  In late 1898, Croker, glossily resplendent in gray English tailoring, strolled into Gould’s large office at the Western Union Telegraph Building. Gould greeted him cordially. The Tammany boss got right to the point—a certain company wished its compressed-air pipes to be mounted on Gould’s Elevated structure. Gould demurred, saying he would have to consult hi
s engineers and lawyers. Croker snapped “Oh, hell! I want those pipes put on, and I don’t want any circumlocution.” Gould again resisted. Croker glowered and decreed, “We want those pipes put on, and we don’t want any fuss about it.” George Gould, a gentleman of privilege and proud owner of one of Fifth Avenue’s finest turreted mansions, rose imperiously, outraged at such thuggish effrontery. “Under the circumstances, Mr. Croker, I will settle the question now, without referring it to my officials. We will not permit you to attach your pipes to the Elevated structures.”

  From that moment on, recounts Croker’s biographer, “almost every branch of city government took part in [a] concerted assault [on Gould’s business]. The Health Department declared several hundred points on the Elevated structure to be unsafe, and served notice that repairs must be made forthwith. The Park Department ordered the company to remove its tracks from Battery Park immediately, citing an obscure clause in the original franchise. The Board of Aldermen threatened to pass a series of ordinances that would cost the company millions of dollars.” Though young Gould might be a bit of a fool, he was a powerful plutocrat. And yet Croker had not thought twice about savagely attacking Gould’s corporate interests—and even crippling a critical part of the city’s transit system—when Gould balked at lining Tammany’s pockets.

  Even such a necessary and important civil enterprise as the Roeblings’ Brooklyn Bridge had been forced to pay illegal tribute. Back in the 1870s, Tammany had exacted sixty-five thousand dollars in bribes and placed the soon-to-be-infamous boss William Marcy Tweed on the bridge’s board. As the building of the great bridge dragged on year after year and the costs steadily mounted, a hue and cry arose. Inveighed one newspaper, “Had Mr. Roebling done his duty instead of becoming the cat’s paw of the [Tammany] Bridge Ring, he might have saved millions of dollars to the two cities.”

  Numerous inconclusive investigations never quieted public suspicions about the bridge project, and so, writes historian David McCullough, “A good part of the public would remain convinced that every day the work continued some crooked somebody behind the scenes was getting rich on it.” Considering what their predecessors decades earlier had extorted from the Brooklyn Bridge builders, the Board of Aldermen must have licked their venal chops indeed when they learned that the mighty PRR needed a franchise to bring its tunnels into Manhattan and build its palatial temple to electrified railroading.

  Board of Directors of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, July 1905.

  Though never directly stated, Tammany men saw this looming opportunity and intended to be well paid for their votes and efforts. The Pennsylvania Railroad was, after Morgan’s recently organized U.S. Steel, the nation’s biggest, wealthiest, and most powerful corporation. Cosmopolitan magazine reported that very year that the PRR operated “more than ten thousand miles of road, using over three thousand locomotives and fifty thousand cars. It carried more than sixty-one million passengers…It moved over eighteen billion tons of freight one mile.” It employed a vast army of 150,000 men and was worth more than $300 million. The Pennsy was also famously politically savvy, possessing inordinate sway over the Pennsylvania state legislature and its two influential U.S. senators. Tammany might have been forgiven for assuming the PRR would simply view Gotham bribery and boodle as the usual cost of doing business.

  Back at the road’s corporate offices above Philadelphia’s busy Broad Street Station, the sixteen members of the PRR board of directors gathered in the sumptuous wood-paneled meeting room and arrayed themselves around the unusual doughnut-shaped table, polished to a high gleam. The floor was covered with a huge oriental carpet. On the walls hung large gilt-framed oil portraits of the road’s previous six presidents. Cassatt had served under four of these eminent executives and it was fitting that they (all deceased) could now bear witness to discussions of their road’s impending conquest of Gotham. The road’s directors, attired in the formal somber suits of their class, required by law to be residents of Pennsylvania, and paid only in prestige, were to learn just how many hoops their company would have to leap through.

  Cassatt looked about at these men he had known for many years, and began, “The New York law names the Rapid Transit Commission as the body which is to issue a franchise for building and operating the line within the City of New York, and it is proposed to at once enter into negotiations with the Commission…The franchise, when granted by the Commission, will require the approval of the Board of Aldermen, the Board of Estimate and Apportionment, and of the Mayor. The New York law also requires that the route be approved by the Board of Railroad Commissioners, and that the assents of the owners of a majority in interest of the property fronting any streets occupied be obtained, or failing to obtain such assents, that the Supreme Court shall adjudge the construction of the road necessary to the public interest.”

  In short, the PRR would soon be wading deeply into the muck of New York politics, thus confronting Tammany. The most important (and precarious) encounter, however, would almost certainly be with the Tammany Board of Aldermen, described by English socialist Beatrice Webb as an “inconceivably low looking set of men.” Another favorite sobriquet was “The Forty Thieves,” though in fact, since the consolidation and creation of Greater New York, there were now the almost ludicrous number of seventy-nine aldermen.

  The whirl of Christmas and New Year’s festivities placed such purely political matters briefly on hold, but the PRR put the time to good use by buying up more Tenderloin properties for their terminal, even as all around the police were suddenly raiding gambling “resorts” and pool halls. On Christmas Eve, Rea telephoned Cassatt just before lunch from the firm’s New York offices at 85 Cedar Street (on the corner of Broadway) to discuss real estate. Every property they needed to buy had been mapped out and listed by address. Cassatt was out and Rea left this message: “I have been all over the property with Mr. Robinson this morning, and when convenient I think you should also look over it, because we have reached a point where we ought to determine on some more purchases before entering our condemnation proceedings…#213 is a four story new building, the first floor is used as a stable and the other floors as lofts. Mr. Robinson still thinks he can buy it for $40,000, and recommends its purchase. I would like to have you review this again and say whether he shall take it. #217 we cannot get now.”

  And so it went, day in and day out throughout the holiday season, with Rea, Robinson, and Cassatt constantly surveying the complex real estate chessboard, contemplating this building and that block, buying a corner here, a factory there. By January 2, they had purchased 40 percent of one block, almost 70 percent of another, and just over half of a third at a total cost of $3,250,401. But they would need every single structure.

  On January 7, Samuel Rea lunched with William Baldwin to plot strategy for the franchise. Afterwards at 3:22 p.m. Rea called Cassatt to tell him, “Before you decide definitely what action we shall take, relative to amending the law, it is imperative for you to see the Mayor.” Cassatt quickly telegraphed New York and secured an appointment. As the general of the PRR’s mammoth campaign to enter Gotham, Cassatt was, albeit reluctantly, now truly a public figure. The New York Times described him “coming up Cortlandt Street [from the ferry] several times each week, making his way with great strides to the offices of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company at Broadway and Cedar…[He is] a man of large stature, who gives instantly the impression that he is a man of affairs and of power, that he is occupied with great problems, and yet is alert and observant.”

  Cassatt had over the decades acquired the reputation of being almost reckless in his audacity and yet, oddly, wrote veteran business writer Frank H. Spearman, “In his presence no atmosphere of ‘drive,’ hasty action, or confused thought suggests itself. This is a very safe man, one reflects instinctively, deliberate in considering, slow of judgment, patient in decision, but capable—when action must come—of a tremendous initiative and follow-through. The source of such strength is apparent in the man’s manner;
Mr. Cassatt has the simplicity of Lincoln.”

  New York mayor Seth Low on November 5, 1901, soon after his election.

  Cassatt, like anyone walking the jammed canyons of lower Manhattan bedecked with American flags, with new skyscrapers shooting up on all sides, could feel just how desperately hemmed in and crowded the world’s greatest port had become. The sidewalks were thronged and teeming with purposeful men, women, and youngsters, all moving fast. “The very dogs had apparently no time to loiter,” wrote one bemused visiting Englishman, “but scurried about, as though late for their engagements.” The air pulsed with mechanical urban energy: “The dull roar of traffic and the sharp alarm of the cable gong never ceases here, and grows more ominous when about five o’clock the toiling day-dwellers of lower Broadway throw work aside to turn homeward.”