Conquering Gotham Read online

  In Paris, at the splendid Gare du Quai d’Orsay, Cassatt saw that technology had advanced to the stage that the PRR might propel heavy trains electrically under the Hudson River in mile-long tunnels. But the building of these subaqueous tunnels under the swift-flowing North River was still fraught with perilous uncertainty.

  The world’s first attempt at a subaqueous tunnel—a trolley tunnel under the Thames at London—had been launched with great fanfare in 1825 by the engineer Marc Isambard Brunel. “Seldom has a construction development attracted such attention, national and international, as the Thames tunnel. It was being discussed the world over, and ambassadors to the Court of St. James were ordered to keep reporting on its progress.” Such was the fascination (and the need to offset the huge costs) that the Thames tunnel builders admitted hundreds of paying tourists every day to the slowly advancing construction site. But gushing leaks followed by many other catastrophes soon struck. It would be sixteen years before the twelve-hundred-foot Thames tunnel was finally complete, a financial disaster that had cost seven lives and destroyed the health of hundreds who worked on it.

  The next major underwater tunnel project was far more ambitious. This time, the Great Western Railway proposed to lop an hour off its London to Cardiff route by tunneling under the Severn River. Work began in March 1873 on the twelve-thousand-foot-long tunnel, through which cables were to pull the trains. Year after year, the tunnel advanced without incident. Then in October 1879, when the two sides of the tunnel were within 130 tantalizing yards of one another, an underwater spring inundated one tunnel half. Such were the travails that the tunnel wasn’t ready for regular service for seven more years. The contractor vowed never to work on a tunnel again.

  And, if one needed a spectacular tunnel failure closer to home, in the United States, there was DeWitt Haskins’s moribund tunnel lying right under the very Hudson River in question. The general opinion was that the Hudson River bed was simply not a place where one could successfully build an underwater tunnel. True, a handful of other less ambitious subaqueous railroad tunnels had been completed without such drama and disaster, but the Thames, Severn, and Haskins tunnels were brooding reminders of the unknowns lurking beneath riverbeds.

  Neither Alexander Cassatt nor Charles Jacobs were the sort to play it safe. Within days, the Cassatts and Jacobs had quietly boarded the White Star’s S.S. Celtic to sail back to New York. This was a most fitting vessel for two engineers dreaming of monumental projects, for the recently launched Celtic was the largest steamship in the world, an astonishing paean to majestic size and the possibilities of modern daring. On its maiden voyage to the United States several weeks earlier, the New York papers had been awestruck by the steamship’s combination of enormity and elegance. “She Seems To Dwarf Everything In Sight, Even Her Pier,” ran one headline in the New-York Tribune, observing that the tugboats bringing it into shore were like “pygmies.”

  As Cassatt and Jacobs sailed across the Atlantic, they walked miles of pristine deck as the ocean spread out infinitely before them. Jacobs, his intense blue eyes alight, Cassatt, tall and commanding, strolled and talked, and strolled and talked some more, lingering in the skylit Smoking Room with its brilliant colors, embossed leather walls, and marble-topped tables, and pausing in the oak-paneled library. But always, always they were talking tunnels, afire with purpose. The advantages were indisputable. With tunnels under the North River, the PRR would have exclusive access from New Jersey to Manhattan, its own magnificent new Manhattan terminal, and if the tunnels were bored straight onward under Manhattan and below the East River, the Pennsylvania would eventually have a continuous and convenient direct route via the proposed New York Connecting Railroad to New England. It would not only transform and open up the whole of Gotham and its surrounding environs, guaranteeing the city and port would remain the nation’s most important, it would knit together the eastern part of the United States. And it would ensure the continued dominance of the PRR itself. After all these years, here was a real solution, wrote one PRR executive, to “this object [that] has obsessed our officers by day and haunted their slumbers by night.”

  Time and secrecy were now of the essence. Of course, what Cassatt, Rea, and Jacobs all burned to know was, Could they build tunnels large enough, strong enough, and stable enough eighty feet below the surface of the North River to handle big Pennsylvania passenger trains pulled by locomotives operated electrically? And, if they could, what of the all-important state and city franchises they would need? Gustav Lindenthal had spent years securing the necessary federal charter and then state permits, overcoming one objection after another. The political and practical waters swirling round New York were corrupt and treacherous. It was one thing to propose the North River Bridge, a giant work open to all the roads, benefiting them all. It was quite another for the PRR to build its own tunnels and terminal. In that case, the politically powerful Vanderbilts and others were not likely to sit idly by while their greatest rival invaded their profitable territory.

  SEVEN

  “GET A LITTLE OF THE TENDERLOIN”

  The golden September sunshine gleamed off the Manhattan skyline as the S.S. Celtic glided majestically amongst the ferries and coal barges to dock at the White Star pier on the afternoon of Saturday September 7. Charles Jacobs and the Cassatts debarked amidst the hubbub, already knowing what the gaggles of newsboys were loudly ululating outside the customs shed. “EXTRA! EXTRA!” the boys wailed, each waving his stack of the Tribune, Herald, World, Sun, Times, or Journal American, all sporting the same calamitous headlines: “President Shot at Buffalo Fair,” “IN GREAT PERIL, President McKinley’s Wound Very Serious—The Stomach Perforated,” “PRESIDENT MCKINLEY SHOT: Assassination Attempted by an Anarchist at the Pan-American Exposition.”

  The president was still alive. Physicians spoke optimistically of recovery for the popular McKinley, yet acknowledged that surgeons could not locate the second bullet lodged in his stomach. The somber mood gripping Manhattan belied much real hope. The bells of the tramcars still rang out unendingly, iron horseshoes clanged on the cobblestones, there was the deep rumble of the overhead elevated trains and the whoosh of too-fast automobiles, but the city’s throbbing energy was muted as anxious crowds gathered to scan the latest bulletins posted outside the great newspaper offices. This marked the third time in Cassatt’s adult life that an American president had been shot. Abraham Lincoln’s assassin had been sympathetic to the defeated South, James Garfield’s a deranged and disappointed seeker of a patronage job. William McKinley had been attacked by a baby-faced citizen named Leon Czogosz, who declared, “I am an Anarchist. I am a disciple of Emma Goldman. Her words set me on fire.” In an era of such simmering raw antagonism between labor and capital, few were shocked.

  McKinley was dead a week later, and Cassatt had to arrange the elaborate PRR funeral train that traveled slowly south to Washington, D.C., bearing the president’s body in a black casket under a sheaf of ripened wheat. Republican kingmaker Senator Mark Hanna slumped in gloom and poor health in one of those sumptuous Pullman cars, cursing the day that New York Republican boss Senator Thomas Collier Platt—outraged at Theodore Roosevelt’s “various altruistic ideas”—had forcibly exiled Teddy to vice presidential oblivion after a mere two years as governor in Albany. Exploded Hanna, “Now look—that damned cowboy is President of the United States.”

  Roosevelt pledged to hew to McKinley’s cautious, pro-corporate rule, but who could imagine the exuberant, pugilistic Teddy long eschewing his vociferous political style or his powerful need to speak blunt, honorable, and colorful truths? Staunch GOP men knew it was a new and perilous day when New York’s other Republican senator, New York Central chairman Chauncey Depew, entered Teddy’s White House office just as another man was departing. Teddy asked Depew, “‘Do you know that man?’ Depew replied, ‘Yes, he is a colleague of mine in the Senate.’ Roosevelt said, ‘Well, he’s a crook.’”

  Even as the Sturm und Drang of William McKinley’s
valiant but losing battle with death unfolded, Alexander Cassatt pressed quietly forward with the tunnel plan. Gotham was in mourning: all up and down the avenues flags flew at half mast and buildings were draped in black crepe. But this was the Empire City and business pulsed on. “We immediately started on surveys and estimates for a tunnel extension into New York,” recalls Samuel Rea. Gustav Lindenthal, learning of this latest dispiriting threat to his stalled North River Bridge plan, wrote Alexander Cassatt on September 21, “Last week Mr. Samuel Rea informed me that you have under examination a tunnel route from the New Jersey side into New York for the exclusive use of your Company, in connection with and in continuation of the tunnel to the Long Island Railroad.” It was indeed true, though the PRR did not want so much as a whisper known beyond its inner circles.

  During these fresh September evenings, Charles Jacobs ventured out each night onto the Hudson River in a sturdy tugboat to perform tests on the riverbed to determine if the tunnels were feasible. While Jacobs’s mission was utterly practical and of deepest consequence, a man would have to be made of stone not to savor the romance of the nocturnal river. All around him the glistening waters of the harbor were alive with other vessels, including the brilliantly lit palacelike pleasure steamers trailing music and laughter. Over in Manhattan, the new skyscrapers loomed against the heavens, and there was a kind of radiant electric aura above the broad and lustrous avenues. Out on the water, Jacobs quietly made fourteen borings, some going 250 feet down, in a straight line from shore to shore.

  Gustav Lindenthal did his damnedest to save his bridge. He raised very tough and legitimate questions about running subaqueous tunnels through the Hudson River’s deep glacial silt. Paramount was the possible disaster of the tunnels’ settling as trains weighing hundreds of tons rumbled through day in and day out: “Even a slight settlement under passing loads may rupture the iron lining, resulting in leaks under a great head of water,” he argued. Equally worrying was corrosion. When one considered, wrote Lindenthal, “the iron tunnel lining in contact with the silt, charged with salt water and sewage, [this] is not a fanciful objection…As the corrosion would take place outside of the shell, it could neither be discovered nor prevented.” And then there was the terrible prospect of harm from the river itself and the immense flotilla of ships plying its waters. Tunnels would be “exposed to the danger of scour, dragging anchors, or vessels happening to sink on them and breaking them in two. It is always the unexpected that happens.”

  For Lindenthal, these were the most dire and obvious negatives. But there was also the question of pure aesthetics. “A bridge is more attractive to the public for crossing a wide river than a submarine tunnel, which has a bearing on its business future and on the revenues.” Even Samuel Rea had argued (in the days when the North River Bridge looked to be the best prospect) that tunnels are “expensive to maintain and disagreeable to the passengers who would probably prefer crossing on the ferries to trusting themselves on slow trains running through damp and chilly submarine tunnels.”

  Perhaps on a note of some desperation, Lindenthal proposed that the lines carried on the bridge could be connected with the deeper underground LIRR line via huge elevators that would transfer through trains from one level to another in the new station. He believed that once all this was built, the “unwilling roads” would want in. “The bridge is specially designed for an expanding capacity to 12 or 14 tracks at comparatively small additional cost.” Lindenthal signed off, asking to meet, saying it was a matter of “so much personal importance to me.” Cassatt promised him that when more was known about the tunnel plan, he would compare the merits of the two plans.

  Cassatt, meanwhile, was anxiously awaiting word from Charles Jacobs on the feasibility of tunnels. Cassatt had returned from Europe “with the complete plan of the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnel entrance to New York fully developed in his mind,” recalled Jacobs’s American partner, engineer J. Vipond Davies, who was at the first conference where Cassatt “propounded his complete scheme. At that time he contemplated a location for the station on the east side of Fourth Avenue.” Davies had to inform Cassatt that “the grades for the approaches, eastward and westward, would not permit location otherwise than west of Broadway. This was a disappointment.” That being the case, Cassatt then envisioned his palatial Manhattan depot rising upon the derelict yards of the New York & Harlem Railroad Company at West Thirty-third Street on the river.

  Once Jacobs had a chance to look into this plan, he told Cassatt the unexpected and highly unsettling news that this site also would not do. A train station in this location would force the tunnels to be tilted at too steep a grade for a railroad to operate efficiently. The Pennsylvania Railroad’s terminal, which would also serve the Long Island Rail Road, coming in on tunnels under the East River and then under Manhattan, would have to be sited further in toward Seventh Avenue, a rundown area described by one chronicler as “given up to the French and negro colonies, to much manufacturing and to buildings that grow more and more shabby as they approach the river, finally degenerating into a slum…This section is today one of the most troublesome in New York.”

  And so, a significant new hurdle was added to the project. The PRR would have to secretly acquire four contiguous square blocks of Manhattan real estate bounded by West Thirty-first and Thirty-third streets between Seventh and Ninth avenues. Speed and subterfuge were paramount, and the PRR now had to act before it could be absolutely sure about the feasibility and long-term safety of the tunnels. Wrote Rea, “As much property as possible had to be bought before plans were divulged, and the risk taken of afterwards securing the franchises. If the worst came and they were not granted, then a compact body of land would be secured…and the loss upon reselling would not be great.”

  Cassatt also felt the PRR had little choice but to surreptitiously capture as much of the necessary territory as possible. In early October 1901 the company quietly retained Douglas Robinson, “a real estate agent of high character and standing.” A rich, bullying Scotsman, Robinson not only managed the vast New York holdings of the Astor family, he had, in the twenty years since marrying a deeply reluctant Corinne Roosevelt, served as a key financial and political advisor to his famous brother-in-law, Theodore Roosevelt, delighted new polymath president of the United States. Now Robinson and his men assembled the assessed values on every single property—ranging from $5,000 for dilapidated wooden shanties to as high as $85,000 for big corner commercial buildings. By the second week of October, Robinson had determined the names of the almost two hundred owners and projected the total cost for the four full blocks at about $5 million.

  Soon thereafter, on an overcast fall day, LIRR president William Baldwin took the elevated uptown from his Wall Street office to see the four square blocks they needed to buy, so he could relay his impressions to Cassatt. As Baldwin well knew, the great Pennsylvania Depot—if it ever came to be—would be rising not just in a rundown, marginal neighborhood, but in one of Gotham’s most notorious vice districts. Their four blocks were part of an area infamous far and wide: the Tenderloin, an area bounded by Fifth Avenue, West Twenty-third Street, Forty-second Street, and Ninth Avenue.

  Many respectable and hard-working folk lived and toiled here, as the recent census recorded, and by day it appeared to be just another shabby city enclave. Yet Baldwin’s Committee of Fifteen’s own inquiries had pinpointed more than a hundred known whorehouses in the blocks due north and dozens more in the blocks toward Fifth Avenue. When night enveloped Gotham, and Manhattan’s skyscrapers and grand hotels glowed with the wondrous electric light, the streets here became a hotbed of vice. Conveniently close to the Broadway theaters and the better hotels and restaurants, the Tenderloin catered not just to the rougher elements, but also to slumming (married) middle-class men and daring out-of-towners. Nighttime Sixth Avenue, with the brightly lit elevated trains rumbling overhead, was often jammed with pleasure seekers. The Tenderloin was, odd to say, a neighborhood that the well-to-do Baldwin knew far
better than most, for he had reviewed hundreds of the committee’s private detailed vice reports for his reform work.

  The Tenderloin’s fittingly fleshy moniker was coined in 1876 by the infamous police captain Alexander “Clubber” Williams when he was transferred uptown to the Nineteenth Precinct’s West Thirtieth Street station house. “I’ve been living on chuck steak for a long time, and now I’m going to get a little of the Tenderloin,” chortled Williams, a huge brute of a “blue coat,” proud of dispensing instant “justice” with his nightstick. Williams was just one of the more enterprising and cocky “servants” of Tammany Hall, the city’s long-entrenched, proudly corrupt Democratic machine, its symbol the Tammany Tiger. As William Baldwin walked toward the river along West Thirty-second from Seventh Avenue with its dingy old frame storefronts that autumn day, he found a dirty, busy street lined with small shops, a Chinese laundry, “cheap, low-class Italian tenements…and the Industrial School of the Children’s Aid Society on the corner, which is the only building of any consequence.” When the federal census taker had come through a year earlier he had recorded many Italian families with lodgers, as well as Jews and Irish, working as waiters and tailors.