by Jill Jonnes
Tammany’s reemergence could not have been more ill-timed. Samuel Rea was about to seek the necessary franchise for the final phase of Cassatt’s entry into Gotham: the New York Connecting Railroad, the road north to New England. As an exasperated Cassatt himself would later explain to a hostile Mayor McClellan, “The Connecting Railroad is to be twelve miles long, to run through a part of Queens borough as yet half rural…and, by a bridge authorized by the State and Federal Governments, to cross the East River at Wards and Randalls Islands.
“Its completion is obviously the key to the development thus proposed of commercial and manufacturing traffic in Brooklyn and Queens. We intend to connect this railroad by a short, direct line with the ‘Tunnel Line,’ thus permitting a new and direct all rail communication with New England and the north for Manhattan as well as for Queens and Brooklyn.” As before, the PRR franchise required approvals from two boards and the mayor. When Rea attended the first hearing in late March before the Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, he wrote Cassatt that they were “very stiff in their first proposition, are unwilling to consider a fixed sum as an annual charge for our franchise…I argued with them for about an hour, but could make no impression on the rental, and in fact they raised other questions, notably, the right to regulate trains.” It did not bode well.
As if the return of Tammany was not ill omen enough, back in Manhattan LIRR president William H. Baldwin faced the scheming of ever-vexsome August Belmont. Where exactly would the Transit King deign to expand his new subway system? The first Belmont subway line, set to open in the fall, would have a stop right at the Vanderbilt’s Grand Central Station. However, “Belmont does not intend to make connection with [Pennsylvania] Station except by spur from Broadway,” Baldwin wrote on January 28, 1904, in a confidential letter to Cassatt. He warned, “He is playing to bother you.” If the PRR wanted absolute certainty that their terminal would be properly served by new subway lines, insisted Baldwin, they needed to control a subway company. “I believe that the whole situation can be worked out…you have no need of subway now.” But he warned Cassatt that he would. “You will need Metropolitan Subway by the time it is finished…I never saw such a situation.”
Cassatt and Rea were also in the final throes of acquiring property for Penn Station. Among the more interested of the spectators watching the steady demolition and disappearance of the old Tenderloin neighborhood had been one John A. Gleeson, rector of the Church of St. Michael’s. Gleeson’s Catholic parish included a substantial church, school, rectory, and convent, all on the west side of Ninth Avenue between West Thirty-first and Thirty-second streets, just across from the PRR’s known terminal boundaries. Gleeson had not yet been approached, but he had gazed out from his handsome red-brick complex with its mansard roofs and seen all those buildings give way to an endless expanse of dirt.
In late April 1904 the rector sent a handwritten letter to Alexander Cassatt: “Could I ask the favor in strict confidence of information” about which nearby streets they might still intend to acquire?…“not for purposes of speculation” but so he could plan—if necessary—for St. Michael’s future and “the people whose spiritual wants I must attend.” Both Cassatt and Rea had concluded some time before that their original plans for property acquisition were too conservative. Cassatt, for one, was already factoring in his intention to later construct yet another two North River tunnels into the as-yet-unbuilt terminal.
When Cassatt discovered Gleeson would sell only if the PRR replicated his magnificent church complex on a nearby block, the PRR president proposed to prop up Gleeson’s property while they built under it. Gleeson emphatically declined. There ensued the most complicated, costly, and protracted of all of the PRR’s many hundreds of New York real estate dealings. Back and forth the negotiations went, dragging on, culminating eventually in the PRR reluctantly purchasing a new site for St. Michael’s three blocks north at West Thirty-fourth Street and building the shrewd Father Gleeson an entirely new and equally handsome complex, closer to his many parishioners in hardscrabble Hell’s Kitchen. The new church incorporated portions of the old, including its magnificent marble altarpiece. All told, this one real estate deal cost the PRR more than $500,000. The total cost just for real estate was now heading toward $5 million.
A couple of months after Gleeson first contacted Cassatt, in early spring of 1904, a reporter for the New-York Tribune visited the Eleventh Avenue spot where Jacobs, Noble, and the engineers had posed for “Drilling of First Hole.” The hardpan floor, the reporter found, had given way to a deep rectangular hole—thirty-two feet across—surrounded by onlookers peering nervously down into what had become a “subterranean wonder.” He joined them and observed only “faint lights flashing below…confused murmurs of underground activity…[a fitting] entrance to Plutonian regions.”
Well aware that no member of the New York press had yet been granted access to this new and mysterious underworld, the reporter boldly descended the narrow wooden staircase that zigzagged down. The cloud-flecked May sky above him became fainter and fainter, and the air colder and mustier. Sixty-five feet down in the strange earthen gloom, he could see “two ragged arches hewn in solid stone, and through them two narrow gauge tracks vanish into darkness, carrying tiny cars laden with rock blasted two hundred feet beyond, for the work has already marched this far toward the Jersey shore.” At that moment, the engineers noticed the intruder and escorted him firmly back up whence he had come. When a Hearst reporter sneaked down on another occasion, the assistant engineer who confronted him encouraged the dumping of an “enormous bucket of mud” upon the hapless fellow before he was “frog-marched” back to the surface. These uninvited descents into the Manhattan shaft were as close as the voracious New York press would get for quite some years to the underground work on the North or East River tunnels.
Shortly thereafter, in early summer, LIRR president William Baldwin was diagnosed with intestinal cancer. With Tammany back in power, this was a real blow to Cassatt and Rea, for Baldwin was a well-connected Gotham leader who knew the key players and politicians, the feuds and factions, and could advise and strategize accordingly. It would be hard to proceed without his help as Rea began seeking the franchise to link up their Manhattan rails with New England.
“Mr. Baldwin is very sick,” Booker T. Washington cabled a mutual friend on July 24. “Not expected to live. I go to New York today to see him.” As Baldwin lay ill at his Locust Valley, Long Island, home, he confided to a family member, “I have been thinking of him [Washington] so often as I have been lying here. He is one of the chief reasons for my struggling to get well.” In an era of entrenched Jim Crow, Baldwin, the first head of the Rockefellers’ General Education Fund, promoting black education in the South, remained resolutely committed to racial advancement, an ardent advocate and fund-raiser for Tuskegee Institute and the black race. Baldwin did rally and Samuel Rea wrote Cassatt in early August, “I sincerely hope that he will recover, but I fear that what the doctors discovered on their first examination is too true.”
While Baldwin valiantly battled his cancer that summer, William Patton, on a train speeding through New Jersey, received a telegram from Cassatt telling him to inform Tammany boss Murphy that “We propose letting the contract [for excavation of the twenty-eight-acre Penn Station site] to Isaac A. Hopper & Sons, who are the lowest bidders.” The PRR’s board of directors duly awarded the $5 million contract. Days later, William Patton, who specialized in delicate political dealings, heard from Hopper (himself a Tammany man) that he no longer cared to do the work and was yielding his prize to…the Murphy firm, which would match his low bid.
Exulted the shameless Alderman Gaffney, “You can bet all the money in New York that it is true and that we have got that contract.” It was believed to be the biggest excavation contract ever awarded in the nation. Giddy with victory and feeling garrulous, Gaffney regaled a Herald reporter with the immensity of it all, the vast enterprise of excavating and clearing fifty feet down
on the entire twenty-eight-acre site, all in a mere twenty-two months. “We will have to remove three thousand loads, that is sixty thousand cubic yards of earth and rock every day for the twenty-two months, put it on an elevated road, carry it to the North River, dump it in scows, tow the scows to Greenville, take it off the scows and place it in the swampy place of the big freight yards. It will keep nearly eight thousand men [a great exaggeration] busy day and night for the whole time.” And there was the key to it all: Murphy and Gaffney hoped to have thousands of jobs to bestow upon the faithful followers of the Tiger.
Within two weeks, the enthralling spectacle of excavation began at the Penn Station site, Manhattan’s own version of the Panama Canal. As the summer heat settled in, gangs of workers swarmed purposefully about, digging, drilling, dynamiting, and carting away. Steam-shovels gouged out the dirt and shattered layers of gneiss rock, slowly transforming what had been a flat dusty earthen plain into wilder terrain, featuring shallow valleys and stony outcroppings.
Through that late summer and lovely autumn, New Yorkers lingered to marvel over the astounding sight of the increasingly deeper and more gigantic Penn Station pit while all around them Gotham expanded rapidly both upward, and belowground. Ever taller skyscrapers vied for preeminence, while deep in the ground tunnels were being burrowed, tunnels for William McAdoo’s New Jersey trolley lines, for the PRR, and for the long-awaited subway. Now, the first of those subways—August Belmont’s IRT—was about to open. PRR officers were more than ordinarily interested, for they still feared that travelers might shy away from riding trains in tunnels, viewing them as somehow dangerous and unpleasant. But when the IRT opened to huge fanfare on the evening of October 27, 1904, and an amazing first-time flood of 150,000 eager riders besieged the City Hall line the PRR ceased worrying. Clearly, no one minded riding in tunnels. “It was carnival night in New York,” reported the New York Times, marveling at how instantly and exuberantly New Yorkers embraced the subway. “Why, in two days it will seem to New York as if it had never ridden anywhere but in the subway.”
Little locomotive hauling cars full of station site debris.
The triumph of the subway served as a pleasant distraction from the presidential campaign between the Democrat’s lackluster candidate, Judge Alton B. Parker, and the wildly popular Theodore Roosevelt. The very actions that made Teddy so beloved by the American people had angered powerful Republicans and corporate tycoons. First, he had sided with the coal miners during the strike of 1902. Then, he had dared to attack J. P. Morgan and his huge Northern Securities railroad trust, forcing its dismantling and causing the dyspeptic Henry Adams to cackle gleefully, “He has hit Pierpont Morgan, the whole railway interest, and the whole Wall Street connection, a tremendous whack square on the nose…they don’t like being hit that way…The Wall Street people are in an ulcerated state of inflammation. Pierpont has declined the White House dinner.” Wall Street’s Republican titans, despite their deep suspicion of Teddy, dutifully anted up for this election: Senator Chauncey Depew gave $100,000 for the New York Central; Henry Clay Frick, $50,000; George Perkins of J. P. Morgan and New York Life Insurance, $450,000; George Gould, $500,000; John D. Archbold of Standard Oil, $100,000.
Roosevelt felt increasingly queasy and conflicted about concentrated wealth, power, and corporate millionaires writing checks. “It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worth hearing; but as a rule they don’t know anything outside their own businesses.” From 1897 to 1904, 4,277 firms had merged again and again until they “consolidated into 257. The hundred largest concerns quadrupled in size and took control of 40 percent of the country’s capital.” If that was not enough to make Americans uneasy, half a dozen men controlled much of the nation’s rails: Cassatt at the PRR, William K. Vanderbilt of the New York Central, Edward H. Harriman of the Southern Pacific, James J. Hill of the Great Northern & Pacific, George Gould of the Wabash and other western roads, and then there was Morgan who had huge and influential interests in these and other roads.
Publisher Joseph Pulitzer, an ardent Democrat, attacked Teddy on this tender issue of trusts. Two full splashy pages of the influential World featured headlines questioning Roosevelt’s professed opposition to corporate rapacity and the deluge of trust dollars to his campaign. When the pallid Parker belatedly dared to raise the same questions, a furious Roosevelt struck back, reminding voters he had mediated the coal strike and taken on J. P. Morgan. Teddy need not have worried. On election day Tuesday November 8, 1904, he won in a thunderous landslide.
Meanwhile Baldwin, just forty-one, lay slowly wasting away all that autumn from his cancer. Ever a fighter, he survived many months longer than expected, dying on January 3, 1905, at 4:30 a.m., his wife and children surrounding him. Outside a fierce blizzard howled, high winds whipping the falling snow into huge drifts and fantastic shapes. By the next afternoon, as the storm eased, Manhattan was largely immobilized, but Cassatt, Rea, and Green made it to Manhattan and then crossed on the LIRR ferry to a special LIRR train that plowed slowly through the snow-shrouded landscape toward Locust Valley.
It was a dolorous day. William Baldwin, this unlikely railroad president, as ardently dedicated to reform and uplift as he was to profit and performance, had lived only just long enough to see the start of their great tunnels and terminal project, in which he took such pride. The PRR officers could not know, as they somberly rode through the pristine winter scene, that Baldwin’s would be the first of many untimely deaths.
SIXTEEN
“THE SHIELD IS READY TO BE SHOVED”
All through 1904, Charles McKim continued to perfect his designs for Pennsylvania Station, his monumental gateway to Gotham. From his apartment on West Thirty-fifth Street, he could walk to the Mohawk Building at Twenty-sixth and Broadway, where the firm of McKim, Mead & White occupied the whole fifth floor. The hushed reception rooms and partners’ offices were decorated with French and Italian antiques and objets d’art, while the walls were hung with framed photographs and drawings of the firm’s celebrated architectural work. However, most of the office was a beehive of activity, a huge open space with good natural light, where more than a hundred draftsmen—many of them young architects in training—were busy executing architectural drawings.
McKim was convinced that the rising American modern empire was more “nearly akin to the life of the Roman Empire than that of any other known civilization,” so he turned to that ancient imperial scale to create for Cassatt a modern edifice of comparable magnificence. The Pennsylvania Station of McKim’s first designs and models was an austere but imposing colonnaded Doric temple to transportation. McKim proposed giving a warmth to this simple exterior of towering pillars and attics with Milford pink granite. Inside Penn Station, McKim again paid architectural homage to the classical past with his luminous General Waiting Room, a space of extraordinary height and grandeur inspired by the Baths of Caracalla, and to the industrial present with his vast and vaulting train concourse with its lyrical iron-and-arched-glass umbrella roofs. During these early phases of design, McKim found he had to fend off various ill-considered cost-cutting measures proposed by his thrifty PRR patrons. In late summer of 1904, Alexander Cassatt balked at the initial stated cost of the exterior’s Milford pink granite. “We may have to give up using Milford stone,” Cassatt wrote from Bar Harbor, “or perhaps any other kind of granite. I believe that the building would produce a very satisfactory effect if built of brick with granite columns, pilasters, sills, etc. and we would probably save half a million dollars. We shall, however, have to consider the whole question carefully when I return.” Under McKim’s persuasive counsel, however, the Milford granite remained.
Three months later, Cassatt, hoping to save $250,000, further alarmed McKim by suggesting he “leave off the elevated structure over the main waiting room…the saving is a large one, but, of course, we will come to no conclusion until we have an opportunity for a conference. Meanwhile I wou
ld like very much to have you prepare a sketch plan showing how you would treat the interior of this room without the elevated structure.” Charles McKim again persuaded Cassatt this was false economy. Later, Cassatt would write McKim, “I am quite sure we are going to have a very handsome station, and so far as the elevated construction over the main room is concerned, I pin my faith upon your opinion.”
Even as McKim was designing what would be his magnum opus, his friendship with Stanford White had become fraught with worry, embarrassments, and psychic pain. White’s two decades of extravagant living, innumerable mistresses, and manic European shopping sprees (ostensibly for clients) had mired him in hopeless insolvency. By 1903 White’s debts had spiraled up to the hard-to-believe sum of $790,000. The landlord of his lavishly decorated Gramercy Park townhouse was owed $53,000, and comparably vast sums were due wealthy friends and clients. Unable to rein himself in (White had nine exquisite harps in his house), Stanford had rigged up a mirror in his office window in the Mohawk Building so he could see tradesmen coming to dun him and skip out. McKim and Mead, owed $75,000, saw little choice but to put a lien on their partner’s future profits. It had all been unspeakably painful.
In early 1904, White, determined to act responsibly and erase some of his most pressing obligations, had consolidated a portion of his hordes of antique furniture, paintings, tapestries, statues, and rugs into a West Thirteenth Street warehouse for a gigantic auction. But before the auction could take place, fire swirled through the building, and everything but the bronzes—all completely uninsured—went up in expensive smoke. White appeared at McKim’s house in a state of “stony misery,” McKim reported to Stanford’s wife, Bessie, over in Europe, and remained immobile for two days. On the third day, “he broke down and sobbed at the breakfast table like a child…Then he made his mind up to it and threw it off so that one would think he had forgotten all about it.”
