Conquering Gotham

by Jill Jonnes

  Mayor Low lacked the president’s power and only the incessant clamoring of the New York press caused the Board of Aldermen’s Railroad Committee to set a hearing date on the tunnel franchise. On Wednesday November 26, five hundred people mobbed the wood-paneled City Hall hearing room. Reform and Tammany politicos traded bitter and passionate jibes with the silk-hatted merchants, while the ranks of labor engaged in such loud booing and hissing that Chairman Diemer had to pound his gavel violently to bring order. Hour after tumultuous hour, one side—“the railroad interests, the Rapid Transit Commissioners and the great commercial associations”—sang the praises of the great tunnels and terminal, while foes—“united labor”—hectored on about the lack of a labor clause (“If this rich corporation wants the tunnel, let them agree to pay…$2 a day for eight hours work”), insufficient payment for the franchise privilege, and the general chicanery of the corporations. Alderman Reginald Doull alone occupied thirty minutes ranting, as was now his wont, about the PRR’s “trickery and bribery” in buying up so much of his district. When the session finally dragged to an end after five dispiriting hours, lower Manhattan was dark and oddly quiet, for the working world had long gone home to prepare for Thanksgiving the next day. The PRR’s fourth vice president Samuel Rea told a reporter, “I am sure that the pride of this community and the enterprise of its citizens will not allow us to abandon the tunnel.”

  The PRR was growing weary of this stalling and John Green, third vice president, told one reporter as he departed, “If we don’t get permission within the next twelve months to build the tunnel we will abandon the whole enterprise and sell the real estate we have already bought. We can do that without any trouble. We have received offers for it.” Once again, the Tribune boldly warned of a “clique…determined to extort from the Pennsylvania company a round sum for the tunnel franchise,” hiding behind a sudden “love for the cause of labor.” The figure of $300,000 remained the purported sum. Alexander Cassatt reiterated, “We have come to New York for this franchise with clean hands, and we are going to keep our hands clean. We will not pay one cent for the granting of this franchise beyond the terms stated in the proposed contract.”

  With the bill still mired in the Railroad Committee more than a week later, the World ran a big front-page cartoon on Thursday December 4 featuring a hungry Tammany Tiger holding an empty, open “dough bag,” its large paws pinning down the PRR franchise legislation. Lounging about were a handful of cigar-smoking politicians complaining, “Nawthin’ in it for us!” The accompanying story, titled “Ugly Rumors of Boodle,” spoke darkly not just of the usual bribery but of “powerful interests” out to thwart the PRR’s entry into Manhattan. The talk of defeat intensified. The next day Manhattan had its first snowfall and the temperatures began to plummet. Within days it was so bitterly cold, the aldermen voted $100,000 in free coal for the poor in their frigid tenements. The harbor began to clog with ice, forcing the ferries to struggle across, a potent reminder of the dire need for tunnels.

  Every important Gotham newspaper and magazine (save Hearst, who had just won a congressional seat with Tammany backing) had joined in a prolonged and collective howl of high dudgeon and outrage. The New York Times denounced the aldermen as crooks: “There is not an honest hair in the head of one of them.” Scientific American excoriated the aldermen for “one of the most shamefaced exhibitions of political tyranny that ever disgraced the city of New York.” Letter writers hurled contempt, lamenting “the shameful spectacle” and castigating the aldermen as “a perpetual menace to good government.” By December 9, the much-abused Railroad Committee at last disgorged the franchise bill to the Board of Aldermen.

  Now the serious arm-twisting and vote counting began, with every paper running detailed lists of which aldermen were For, which Against, and which In Doubt. The “Easy Boss” declared from the fastness of the Amen Corner that every one of the fourteen Republican aldermen would faithfully vote for the franchise, as his party did not want any responsibility for “defeat of a measure of such vast importance to the city.” Senator Platt and others further warned that should Tammany fail to do right, they intended to sidestep them via legislation in Albany. Governor Odell, ever hostile to Platt, disputed this claim. Charles F. Murphy, the wealthy owner of four saloons who had beaten out Tim Sullivan for the Tammany leadership, claimed neutrality, but few believed him.

  In its December 12 issue, the Railroad Gazette marveled that “every daily newspaper in New York” endorsed the franchise. “Public opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of what is unquestionably one of the most valuable public improvements ever devised for the city. This nobody questions, but the franchise is held up by a band of political buccaneers…It is hoped that…a few of those who now oppose the franchise will come to their senses.” The early perverse civic amusement at Tammany’s greedy antics had given way to sober concern that the PRR’s marvelous enterprise, this $50 million private solution to water-locked Gotham with its forty-one ferry routes, might actually be rejected. And so petitions in the tunnel’s favor began inundating the aldermen. Great department stores like R. H. Macy & Co. and Saks & Co., leading hoteliers from the Waldorf-Astoria, the Delavan, and the Navarre, real estate companies with major holdings, even fifty-two labor unions beseeched the dilatory aldermen “not to deprive New York City of this great project.” But Tammany’s “Little Tim” Sullivan insisted that he and forty-three of his political Myrmidons intended to do just that. They had the votes and they would vote nay. “No power on earth can deliver me into the hands of the Pennsylvania Railroad,” he vowed.

  On Tuesday December 16, Gotham was swathed in light snow from a furious weekend nor’easter. Now, the skies were an iridescent blue, but a bone-chilling damp encased the city. Coal shortages plagued the slums. The city’s bedraggled, bundled-up shovel brigades shuffled and scraped as they cleared the streets and sidewalks, dumping the snow into horse-drawn carts for disposal in the river. It had been an exasperating year since Alexander Cassatt had first announced the PRR’s tunnels and terminal project.

  Finally, on this freezing wintry day the full Board of Aldermen would determine the PRR’s fate. All Gotham was abuzz over this high-stakes cliff-hanger, the final act in the rare spectacle pitting Alexander Cassatt and his unusual ethos of corporate honesty versus the entrenched grafters of Tammany Hall, holding out for their $300,000. The Journal American had reported a week before “the presence of Mr. Patton, President Cassatt’s right-hand man in this city for a few hours…His movements could not be traced, but it was understood that he had given assurances [to key aldermen], in nowise connected with the payment of money.” In an era of flagrant bribery and boodle, the Railroad Gazette praised the PRR simply for being honest and thus “an example to other corporations…And there has been no retreat, no dickering and no serious concession.” The tunnel bill needed 40 votes to pass. The newspapers listed only 22 aldermen willing to go on record thus far as yeas. This was certainly an improvement over the board’s original dismissive vote of 10 yeas and 56 nays, but it was no winning number.

  And so, once again, the aldermanic chambers and galleries were jammed with spectators, a shifting sea of black derbies and silk top hats, all anxious to witness and influence this historic clash. At 2:07 p.m. on December 16, the session was gaveled open. Mayor Low had dispatched to every member of the “honorable board” (and the city press) a heartfelt letter, pleading with them to consider the monumental importance of the tunnels. “It means, if accepted, more work for the laboring man of New-York, not only during the process of construction, but also through the centuries of the railroad’s operation; it means more business for our shops, more employment for our factories, and more commerce for our port; and it means cheaper and better homes within the borders of our city for multitudes of our population. It will go far to make sure of the permanent pre-eminence of New-York among the cities of the world.”

  The first order of business was a full reading of the Railroad Committee’s favorable
report. Then two antis stood up to deliver cantankerous reports against the tunnels and the PRR. Alderman Moses Wafer proposed consigning the franchise once again to the Railroad Committee. The first moment of truth had arrived, causing a ripple of excitement in the galleries. A dozen aldermen scurried out of the chambers to avoid casting votes, while those remaining strutted and speechified at length before voting yea or nay. It was perilously close, but the PRR won 35 to 32 on this issue of consignment. The franchise would be voted on this afternoon. Such was the importance of this vote, that all but one (out ill) of the seventy-nine aldermen were present.

  For four tense hours discussion dragged on, “during every minute of which there was constant effort being made by the opponents and friends of the franchise to win votes.” There were small surprises, as when a Tammany man, Frank Dowling, stood up to say, “If you pass this tunnel franchise, it is in the interest of labor…If it is a crime to give people work, than I am going to commit that crime.” Finally, as six o’clock approached, the roll call began. Again, numerous aldermen exited. Of those present, only 33 voted yea for the franchise, while 28 voted nay. (It was a reflection on Boss Platt’s waning powers that four Republicans were among the nays.) Some of the absent Tammany men reentered the chambers. Two voted yea. Bronx Borough President Haffen, who hurried out to take a telephone call, returned scowling. As he conferred with other Bronx men a rumor raced through the chamber that Charles F. Murphy, who had emerged as the new boss of Tammany, had called to order Haffen to vote nay. But an angry-looking Haffen, suffering from a cold and sore throat, stood up and croaked his vote yea for the tunnels. At that, a Brooklyn alderman rushed over to change his yea vote to nay. Slowly, one after another, Haffen’s Bronx Democrats followed their leader, and the vote for the tunnel franchise crept slowly up to 39.

  At six o’clock when yet another Bronx Democrat stepped forward, the crowd quieted. That alderman looked around and voted yea, making 40 votes, exactly the number needed for passage. The chamber exploded in a rollicking roar of applause, groans, and hisses. The public reaction was jubilant. More than a year after Cassatt had first announced his tunnels, the PRR had their franchise and they had paid no boodle. “The great thing,” wrote the New York Times, “the momentous thing, is that the way is now open for the Pennsylvania Railroad to begin work upon the tunnel and terminal.” For the PRR men, all the earlier frustrations and postponements and the failure of their North River Bridge plans could now be forgotten. They could luxuriate instead in the knowledge that their railroad would come into Gotham. Down in Philadelphia, Cassatt emerged from a Union League dinner smiling broadly, “It looks like clear sailing now.” He would need every ounce of that optimism for the travails ahead.

  A political cartoon about the tunnel franchise fight.

  PART II

  THE CROSSING

  “Oh River! darkling River!…

  On glide thy waters, til at last they flow

  Beneath the windows of the populous town,

  And all night long give back the gleam of lamps,

  And glimmer with the trains of light that stream

  From halls where dancers whirl…”

  —William Cullen Bryant, “Night Journey of a River” (1857)

  THIRTEEN

  “WE ARE NOT MAKING A MISTAKE”

  The Pennsylvania Railroad began its titanic battle with nature very quietly, just after ten in the morning on Wednesday February 25, 1903. On that day a bevy of distinguished-looking men in derbies and dark suits assembled in front of 557 West Thirty-second Street, a shabby five-story tenement house at Eleventh Avenue. The English tunnel maestro Charles Jacobs (the “Chief”) was readily recognizable by his bald head and sweeping white handlebar mustache. Next to him stood the genial and portly Alfred Noble, renowned builder of western bridges and canals, now part of Alexander Cassatt’s expert engineering corps. Numerous junior engineers milled about, including James Forgie, an angular Scotsman with a drooping dark mustache, trained by British tunnel pioneer J. H. Greathead, and now Jacobs’s second in command. A crew of rough-clad workmen clattered up in a horse-drawn cart and unloaded tools in front of the vacant brick building. Across the cobblestone street, a camera expert from the New-York Tribune fussed with his bulky apparatus. Now he yelled to all the men—engineers and workers—to stand together. His camera flashed, capturing their solemn visages.

  With that, one of contractor George W. Jump’s workmen unlocked the front door of the former lodging house, the stale air of the entry hall still rancid with departed boarders and years of cheap meals. At precisely 10:30 a.m., amidst the faded wallpapers, a laborer ripped up a worn wooden floorboard, thus signaling the official start of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s great New York Tunnels and Terminal Extension. Once Jump’s wrecking gang had leveled this building, as well as the corner saloon next door and several small buildings on the adjacent Cooper & Wigand foundry, Charles Jacobs could launch the digging of the huge Manhattan shaft straight down, directly below where they now stood, to the musty depth of sixty-five feet. From there, Jacobs would begin tunneling toward the Hudson River, whose waters sparkled beyond the New York Central piers.

  And so, on this dilapidated Eleventh Avenue block, on this breezy morning, there unfolded a historic beginning. This humble act of demolition would be the first visible work on a vast, transforming transportation enterprise, what the Railroad Gazette termed “an extraordinary example of imagination and daring,” the connecting of the nation’s mainland and its greatest railroad to its most important port and city. Everyone present had a heady sense of being part of something very big, something they could proudly tell their grandchildren.

  The unprepossessing lodging house, with its dreary bed-sitters, would be the first of seven hundred buildings to be cleared, almost all those being further east in the Tenderloin. For the past year, real estate broker Douglas Robinson had been steadily “turning the tenement house dwellers and the storekeepers out by the wholesale, and the whole district seems at elbows and knees.” And while the PRR had installed policemen rent-free in numerous homes it now owned, the neighborhood had become a strange ghost town in the very heart of this busiest of metropolises, an eerie urban wasteland of cheap brownstone double-decker lodging houses, shuttered saloons, dance halls, whorehouses, pool halls, vacated churches, derelict old three-story brick houses, and a few remaining Dutch-era residences.

  The summer before, a Tribune reporter had described this forlorn and largely deserted section of the Tenderloin as “almost pathetic in its complete abandonment…Property owners say that every available doorknob, every letterbox and fully half of the lead piping have been stolen from the tenements and houses.” The journalist wandering about on that warm June afternoon saw here and there “flowers and faces at the windows,” but mainly, “everything is ramshackle. The windows have lost their panes and are stuffed with old rags, gaunt cats haunt the houses, and children are growing afraid…It would not be such a bad place for midnight murder.”

  The New York Herald waxed slightly more nostalgic for the passing of the heart of the Tenderloin, this “famous landmark of vice and blackmail,” marking it with a tongue-in-cheek poem in its Sunday literary section:

  Foul Tenderloin! Least wholesome spot in town,

  Where vice and greed full many a man brought down.

  The red faced drivers of the nighthawk cabs

  The wardman taking tribute of the drabs,

  The bold faced vixen mixing fizz and Scotch,

  The rural swain lamenting wad and watch—

  Sunk are your hovels, but in wholesome ruin,

  Freed from the stigma of much ‘shady doin.’

  The iron horse has sent your dives to join

  The other nightmares of the Tenderloin.

  It was certainly not possible to wax nostalgic for the very far west avenues, tired blocks filled with “factories and rookeries, dingy buildings and the ‘great unwashed’ that lounge through its streets, giv[ing] it an aspect that
is dismal at all times. There is no picturesqueness to be discovered here, not a vestige of the color and foreign chatter of the East Side.” Fifty-car New York Central freight trains lumbered up and down their tracks on Tenth Avenue, spewing acrid clouds of cinders and smoke. An old man waving a danger flag rode a half block ahead on an aged nag.

  Optimistic throughout the many uncertain and trying months of Tammany’s intransigence over the franchise, Alexander Cassatt had been visiting Gotham regularly to quietly advance the PRR’s plans. With mounting millions of dollars tied up in Manhattan real estate, the railroad had to press forward. In the beginning of 1902, Cassatt had appointed an eminent board of engineers to study, advise, and ultimately oversee construction of this behemoth and complex enterprise. Those five men gathered for the first time on January 11, high up in the railroad’s offices at Cedar Street, two long blocks from the ferries and overlooking Wall Street. Outside the windows, the skies lowered, threatening more light snow. The chairman was Colonel, soon to be General, Charles W. Raymond, sixty, top man in his West Point class, veteran of Gettysburg, the first army officer to explore Alaska and raise the American flag over the Yukon (an adventure that cost him his sight in one eye), and decorated engineer of many harbor works executed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. His brilliant career and distinguished service at the busy Philadelphia harbor brought him to the PRR’s favorable notice. Now he had been given special permission by the army to supervise this gigantic project.