by Jill Jonnes
FOURTEEN
“A WORK UNSOUGHT”
Within days of Alexander Cassatt’s announcement that the Pennsylvania Railroad was coming into Gotham, architects began their jockeying, some simply making their interest known, others brazenly nominating themselves for what had to be one of the most desirable commissions of the new century: the PRR’s New York depot. This terminal was to be the public face of Cassatt’s corporation in Gotham, the highly visible crown jewel of a colossal but largely subterranean engineering feat. The Pennsylvania Railroad’s new station would be the city’s great monumental gateway, the edifice where millions of commuters and travelers would surge off PRR and LIRR passenger trains.
By mid-January 1902, William Baldwin was proposing Bradford L. Gilbert, a seasoned architect “in the line of railroad and heavy construction…I also asked him to send me such plans as he had in print…He is a great big fellow, and his specialty is railroad and public structures.” The firm of Howells & Stokes let it be known that they had a man already over in Paris studying the Gare du Quai d’Orsay. Another PRR officer sent a personal note to Samuel Rea on behalf of Samuel Huckel, a distinguished Philadelphia architect. Rea wrote back on April 10, 1902, saying Huckel had come by in person asking “for the privilege of competing on plans for our New York station when we are ready. As you may surmise, we have had a great many applicants of this kind, but have taken no definite action…Mr. Huckel’s work on Grand Central Station in New York, I understand, gave entire satisfaction.”
Railroad stations in all their physical immensity and importance had emerged as the cathedrals of the industrial age, monuments to modernity and to the machine that at their best reflected and honored the full panoply of the train station’s drama. In what urban crossroads in human history had so many multitudes high and low, so many varied nationalities, converged in such vast numbers for such different purposes? All those often inchoate human emotions tied to departures to far-flung destinations, to new beginnings and romance (had not George Westinghouse famously met his wife on a train?), even to human routine, deserved a suitably noble setting. Every architect who designed terminals coveted this prize.
Certainly Cassatt, who had passed through and savored the endless small dramas and theater of the world’s great railroad depots, understood the wonderful possibilities here, as well as the considerable constraints of the particular site. As the railroad architects pursued the commission in their various ways, Samuel Rea advised one supplicant, “It is a matter which President Cassatt will look into personally.” Indeed, Cassatt kept his own counsel, and on Wednesday April 23, 1902, he rode into Broad Street Station and dictated a telegram to a New York architect of great distinction.
Cassatt’s Western Union telegram found Charles McKim of the celebrated firm of McKim, Mead & White not in his Fifth Avenue offices up in Gotham, but down in Washington, D.C., strolling about Capitol Hill with his friend Charles Moore, enjoying a warm spring day. It was perhaps fitting that these two gentlemen were at that moment surveying the site of yet another prospective train station. Their friend, Chicago architect Daniel Hudson Burnham, hoped to build there a suitably grand Union Station for Cassatt’s PRR and the Baltimore & Ohio. (The bill to grant the land was still stuck in a Senate committee.) McKim and Burnham had been friends ever since the wildly successful and influential 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Burnham’s creation that showcased a novel and astonishing vision of an America as City Beautiful.
The capitol’s famously swamplike mugginess made it seem more like summer than spring as the architect opened the missive and read that Cassatt wished to see him the next morning, Thursday. McKim waved the telegram, saying in his usual self-deprecating way, “I suppose President Cassatt wants a new stoop for his house.” Five foot seven, of slender build, the ever-effacing but charming Charles McKim looked very much the passionate aesthete with his high-domed forehead, balding head, and slender handlebar mustache. His droll, playful manner masked a rigorous intellect and decided ideas about cities, architecture, and beauty, ideas intensively cultivated during his youthful studies in Paris and subsequent roamings in Europe.
It was no surprise that Cassatt should seek out the architect widely hailed as the nation’s best, the unquestioned dean of American architecture. His firm, McKim, Mead & White, ran “the largest and most important architecture office in America, if not the world. With a staff that grew to over one hundred, the firm became the model for the modern architectural practice.” Like the Pennsylvania Railroad, McKim, Mead & White dominated and defined its field. McKim had never designed a train station in his life, but no other man in America so understood grandeur, Gotham, and the monumental. The magisterial new uptown Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University was McKim’s most recent triumph, displaying his consummate ability to think and design on a heroic scale.
Architect Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead & White.
Burnham’s train station was just a secondary concern for McKim on that muggy spring day. In truth, he had journeyed down to Washington, D.C., expressly for a command visit with President and Mrs. Roosevelt. They had first summoned McKim nine days earlier for advice on how best to rebuild, remodel, and refurbish the worn and rat-infested Executive Mansion, appalling in its dangerously sagging floorboards (propped up from below for big receptions), “scuffed wooden stairs, the curly wallpaper and wainscots jaundiced with fifty years of tobacco spit…mustard carpets, the dropsical radiators, the sad-smelling laundry, the vertical wooden pipes that made flatulent noises in wet weather.” The dowdy presidential residence was to be expanded and modernized as it was returned to its older, simpler historical character, and recast to gracefully house the large and young rambunctious first family and its menagerie of odd pets. Roosevelt, the author of numerous works of history, instructed McKim that his official residence and offices specifically be “restored to what it was planned to be by Washington.” McKim had been giddy with delight. “The whole thing is so exciting and full of possibilities…am writing now in the frame of mind of a man more likely to go off on a spree than home to dinner.”
Nonetheless, the next morning, still unseasonably warm, found McKim in Philadelphia promptly presenting himself at Cassatt’s office. There, he was met by Cassatt’s longtime personal assistant, William Patton, who kept a sharp eye on the wood-paneled corporate offices, vetting all the visitors and supervising the small phalanx of clerks. In his forties, Patton had rather staring eyes, middle-parted slicked-down hair, sideburns and a mustache. Many years earlier he had impressed Cassatt with his self-taught stenography skills. Subsequently, Patton had proved his worth in spheres of far more moment, becoming Cassatt’s aide-de-camp and the PRR’s unofficial political fixer.
McKim was welcomed and ushered into Cassatt’s inner sanctum, a huge office starkly spare in its furnishings and lack of clutter: a gleaming mahogany and leather-topped desk holding but a blotter, a telephone, and a few papers. As McKim settled into one of several comfortable chairs, he noticed the large varnished globe, where the whole PRR system was outlined in red. There was also a luxurious private bathroom and a large private dining room where most days the road’s top officers and any guests ate an excellent lunch together. Marveled one local journalist, “It is much easier to get an audience with the president of the United States than to gain admittance to the private office of Mr. Cassatt.” And yet in the space of two heady days McKim had engaged in councils with both men.
“I passed the morning with Mr. Cassatt,” McKim wrote that very evening to his friend, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, “leaving this afternoon. [He wants] a new terminal depot of the Pennsylvania Railroad to be built in New York, and which, as you will be glad to hear, was placed under our direction.” McKim was typically self-deprecating and diffident about this most enviable of architectural plums—a monumental new train station costing $15 million for the nation’s premier city, his own Gotham. When Daniel H. Burnham heaped congratulations, McKim wrote back saying it was “a work
unsought, and which came as a complete surprise. They should have given it to you and I fully expected they would. Just after the interview, Newhall [a McKim friend and PRR officer] told me that they employed a New York man as a question of policy, and I ascribe our appointment chiefly to this cause.” This was, of course, silly modesty.
The idealistic product of high-minded Pennsylvanian abolitionist parents, McKim spent a year at Harvard studying engineering before changing course. Soon after the end of the Civil War, he departed for Paris, where he trained for three years at the École des Beaux-Arts, returning to New York to serve an apprenticeship of sorts with master architect H. H. Richardson. Soft-spoken and scholarly, and rather particular about his clothes, McKim revered beauty above all things. For McKim, beauty was not “confined to architecture,” wrote one colleague. “He saw beauty wherever it was; and he insisted that things accessory to architecture and to life in general should conform to his ideal of good taste.”
Those who worked with McKim were soon aware of his extraordinary charm and his ability to bring others around to his point of view. Lawyer Joseph Choate, an old friend, wrote, “I do not believe it was possible to know Charles McKim without loving him, or to have come in personal contact with him without admiring the wonderful features of his character.” McKim harbored a special affection for Britain and Rome. Now, in his prime, he made an annual pilgrimage to “Albion,” where one London ritual was the faithful purchase of a particular kind of beloved hat, a blue bag, and umbrella. Then it was on to the moors of the Scottish Highlands, for grouse shooting, golf, and the delicious coziness of peat fires on wet, chilly nights.
Yet, notes historian Paul R. Baker, “Some of those associated with him nonetheless considered McKim overly meticulous and even prim in his habits and overly rigid in his viewpoints.” In fact, an early marriage had swiftly soured after the birth of one cherished daughter, ending in an ugly divorce and a custody battle that had devastated McKim. To make it all worse, his wife’s brother, William Bigelow, was then his partner so that his professional life was sundered at the same time. Not quite a decade later, in early 1887, McKim’s second wife died tragically in childbirth. All this heartache had undermined his health, leaving him prone to bouts of indigestion and melancholy.
Then in January 1899, to his great joy, his daughter, Margaret, twenty-three, sought him out. He had not seen her since she was three, when her mother had been remarried to a clergyman and started a new family with three sons. Charles McKim and his daughter became poignantly devoted to one another. “Everything is all right and happy,” McKim wrote her as he was sailing out of the New York harbor to Europe on August 1, 1900, “or would be if only you were with me; but the next time we shall be together, I hope, and (as you said in your letter the other day) we shall always be together in spirit wherever we are, so that fact is settled comfortably forever.” He delighted in being able to sign these letters, “Daddy.”
Over the years, McKim had lavished most of his energies on his work, determined to bring a simple style of beauty and order to the chaotic American scene. His work on the Boston Public Library had made his early reputation. In recent years, the firm of McKim, Mead & White had ennobled Manhattan with one distinguished public building after another—the Herald Building, the University Club, the Century Club, Madison Square Presbyterian Church, and, of course, the new Columbia University campus. The Brooklyn Museum and the Grand Army Plaza were also magnificent exemplars of the firm’s talent for civic splendor.
McKim’s dear friend and partner, Stanford White, was a frenetic collector of beautiful things, a native New Yorker who had made a name designing (and often decorating) fabulous Gilded Age country mansions, important and exclusive New York venues like the Metropolitan Club, the Knickerbocker Trust on Fifth Avenue, and James Gordon Bennett’s new Herald Building. Not only was White physically distinctive, a tall bristly haired redhead with a huge droopy mustache, he was always “bubbling with enthusiasm, always in motion, perpetually talking, usually loudly…In time, as he became known for his buildings, his civic activities, and his widely reported social life, he became a public celebrity” as neither of his partners ever was.
Charming, generous, ardent, restless, Stanford White was an architect of the picturesque, always in a whirlwind of designs and constructions. Above all, White was celebrated for the elegant and ornamental yellow-brick, white tile, and terra-cotta Madison Square Garden, an extraordinary Moorish pleasure dome that opened in 1890 with a concert hall, theater, and terraced Roof Garden dinner theater. Its 341-foot Spanish Renaissance tower became an instant New York landmark, topped by Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s lithe nude Diana. White retained one of the seven apartments in the tower for himself as a studio and hideaway. A consummate sybarite, he was always pursuing yet another exotic objet, seducing yet another chorine, organizing yet another important festive occasion. One of the greatest of White’s extravaganzas came soon after the opening of Madison Square Garden: a miniature indoor Venice complete with flooded waterways, gondolas, and thousands of twinkling lights.
Stanford White.
William Mead, the third partner, was generally viewed as the man with his feet firmly on the ground, the “balance wheel” of the office. A Vermonter of few words, constantly smoking cigars, Mead had graduated from Amherst and then spent several years studying architecture in Florence. He was the practical one, the partner who “hired draftsmen, managed the Saturday night payroll, and let men go when work fell off. He kept the flow of projects moving along, supervised financial arrangements, and took charge of those technical elements of construction—heating, plumbing, and other aspects of building engineering.” Sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens had designed a playful medallion showing Mead struggling to control two kites that were the wayward White and McKim. Notably handsome, with especially wonderful blue-purple eyes, Mead “brought in little business, designed little, and spent a lot of time draped on a chaise longue in his office. However, it was he who brought a business sense to the partnership.”
Even as McKim journeyed home to New York in a PRR train, Cassatt was dictating a letter confirming their understanding. “I beg to say that your firm is appointed architects for the Terminal Station…your compensation to be the usual commission of five per cent…The part of the work which will be placed in your charge will be all that above the waiting-room level.” The following Wednesday, McKim returned from yet another visit to Washington to consult with Teddy Roosevelt about the White House. The whirlwind renovations were about to begin and McKim chortled, “I am thinking our noble President will find himself in such bedlam as he never dreamed of, even at Santiago.” That same day the architect met with Samuel Rea in New York to show him some preliminary sketches of the station. Rea wired Cassatt, who was out in Pittsburgh on an inspection trip, that McKim’s design included—as they had instructed—“an eighteen story building rising in centre over station.”
In the past couple of years Charles McKim had become something of a regular at the capitol as a consequence of his friendship with Daniel Hudson Burnham. Not quite a decade after their Chicago World’s Fair collaboration, Burnham, heavier but still handsome and energetic at fifty-one, had drafted McKim to join him on the Senate-appointed McMillan Committee, intended to beautify the ramshackle nation’s capitol along the lines of their short-lived classical dream in Chicago. They recruited landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and all worked to resurrect Major Pierre L’Enfant’s original 1791 plan of an official city arrayed around the stately greensward of a central mall. This required some optimistic imagining, for right in the middle of their prospective “mall”—between Sixth and Seventh Streets—stood the noisy, sooty Pennsylvania Station, “surrounded by a jumbled mass of shacks, assorted vegetable patches, and miscellaneous mounds of rubbish. Open sewers, euphemistically called canals, crisscrossed the Mall, while off towards the Potomac stank the largest marsh in the city.” The commission hoped to clear all these
unsightly intrusions away, and further, advocated the mall’s graceful extension clear down through the hideous marsh to the Potomac River.
In the summer of 1901, less than a year before the fateful telegram from Cassatt, the commission members had traveled first to Paris and then to Rome for several weeks to study public design. Charles McKim could not have known it then, but this trip would play a central role in his PRR design. One languorous Roman afternoon the four friends had rested companionably amidst the Eternal City’s evocative ruins, shaded by the towering brick walls and arches that were all that remained of the once luxurious Baths of Caracalla, talking as ever about architecture and cities. They agreed that the American capitol should and could be made a work of art along classical lines. “That afternoon,” recalled Moore, who was part of the tour, “it seems as if the very spirit of Rome—its ordered bigness, its grandeur, its essence of the eternal—stole into their souls, lifting and transforming the men and giving them insight and power to compass achievements that belong to the ages.”
Still concerned only about their collective vision of a classical (and imperial) Washington, D.C., they knew the removal of the PRR’s railroad terminal was key, for this was an industrial blot in the midst of the future serene greensward of the mall. Fortunately, as the group soon learned in London from Cassatt himself, ‘Since you gentlemen left the United States, a community of interests between the Baltimore and Ohio and the Pennsylvania Railroads has been brought about. We are willing to build a Union Station north of the Capitol.’”
