Conquering Gotham

by Jill Jonnes

  All this took its toll on McKim, and, in early 1905, his precarious health collapsed completely. “I have had to carry more than one load this year,” he wrote a friend, “and my nerves which have held out so well for so long have felt the strain, accompanied by disordered digestion and depression.” Partner William Mead, ever the forthright Yankee, had described McKim as “alright physically, but when he attempts to do any work he goes to pieces.”

  By and large, the design for Pennsylvania Station was complete. But plenty of details remained to be resolved, and in 1905 McKim handed over much of that final work to William Symmes Richardson, a younger member of the firm who had worked extensively with Stanford White over the years. That summer, McKim recuperated in the restful sun and salt air of the Rhode Island beaches with his daughter, Margaret, before heading north with architect Daniel Hudson Burnham for a bit of fishing in the woodland lakes of rural Wisconsin.

  Richardson took the terminal plans up to Bar Harbor so Cassatt could review them. “I went over with [Richardson] the revised plans of the New York Station,” wrote Cassatt to one of his engineers. “I found that he was providing head room 13 feet in the clear for the baggage passageways and that this was accomplished with some difficulty and at the expense of putting quite a grade in the passageways, which ought to be as nearly level as possible. I told him that 11 feet was quite sufficient. Certainly that is higher than baggage ought to be piled upon a truck.” It was just this capacity for such minutiae and detail—headroom and baggage trucks!—that so amazed those who worked for Cassatt.

  McKim followed up his beach and fishing vacations with a quiet sojourn out at the Stanford Whites’ Long Island seaside compound, St. James. The Whites had long served as McKim’s surrogate family, and Charlie, as they called him, cherished his deeply affectionate friendships with both Stanford and Bessie, as well as with her parents, many sisters, and the Whites’s college-age son, Larry. All this made it especially painful that McKim and Mead, fearful that liability for White’s vast debts would ruin them, felt obliged that year to legally end his partnership in the firm, and put him on salary. The pathos of these practical steps had eaten away at McKim’s fragile peace of mind.

  While Cassatt worried about the myriad details of the Pennsylvania Station design, the tunnels were steadily progressing. On a late summer day in 1906 journalist Arthur Reeve, not long out of Princeton and a writer for the prestigious magazine World’s Work, strode down the drab precincts of far West Thirty-second Street. A group of boys was playing ringalevio, shrieking and running as one boy counted. The smell of the river and the stockyards intensified as he neared the Hudson, and a long, lumbering New York Central freight train passed just ahead of his destination on Eleventh Avenue: Chief Engineer Charles Jacobs’s bustling tunnel headquarters, wedged into the former Wigand Foundry on a cramped lot. Reeve stepped gingerly through the tumult of men busy with the boom derrick, feeding sand into the grinding cement mixer, and shoveling wheat coal into bins.

  Reeve was delighted to be here. The offices were literally throbbing with activity, for the great steam-driven dynamos and the all-important compressed air machines were whirring away in the adjacent building. Jacobs had for several years forbidden entry to all reporters seeking to tour his Plutonian domain below the North River, so perilous and unpredictable was the work of subaqueous tunneling. But now the English engineer had relented and Reeve had landed this journalistic scoop. Even as he was shaking hands with several of the junior engineers, he began feeling a few qualms. To enter the tunnel, he was told, he would first have to submit to examination by Dr. A. J. Loomis, the PRR’s “caisson’s disease” specialist. The doctors rejected about six of every hundred men applying for tunnel work as unfit, usually for weak hearts or diseased lungs. To his relief, Reeve passed muster.

  Reeve then followed his guide, a junior engineer, to the changing room, and donned tunnel gear: flannel shirt, oilskin overalls, oversized heavy yellow boots, and an oilskin sou’wester hat. Properly suited up, the two men clumped out to the top of the Manhattan shaft where a perilous-looking cagelike elevator awaited them. Looking down, Reeve saw nothing but a dark hole. The elevator cage door clanked shut, and at unnerving speed they dropped straight down fifty-five feet to the dark and dank bottom. The sunny day was gone.

  Reeve was entering a peculiarly modern and claustrophobic netherworld, a damp space beset by relentless noise, heat, and giant machines. As they began to walk forward through this pounding chaos and then gradually downward, his eyes adjusted to the shadows. Reeve saw they were now in one of the vaulted tunnels, still rather raw looking, musty-smelling, dank water dripping all about and onto their hats, trickling down his neck, with noise and confusion echoing and a strange tribe of mud-smeared men scurrying here and there. Ahead loomed a wall with three massive iron doors blocking all access to the tunnel. These doors were the air locks, a large one for materials going in and river muck coming out, an emergency lock up above for escape, and an everyday lock where anyone going down into the tunnel had to spend time acclimating to the far higher compressed air pressure.

  It was the compressed air that provided the pressure critical to keeping out the river water. Up top it had been George Gibbs’s compressed air plants that Reeve had felt and heard steadily pumping the tunnels full of this all-important pressurized air, anywhere from ten to twenty-five pounds per square inch. On the way out of the tunnel, engineers, workers, and visitors had to pass through the air locks once again to acclimate to the lower everyday air pressure outside.

  Reeve was told all this as he and his guide entered the ominous-looking air lock, studded with huge bolts like a powerful boiler. The reporter watched apprehensively as the heavy iron door clanged shut. “Your only view of the outside world is through two thick glass portholes in the doors,” wrote Reeve later. “A valve is turned on and compressed air from the tunnel begins to rush in with a hissing as of escaping steam. Pound after pound to the square inch the pressure slowly rises. You feel it in the drums of your ears, which begin to press in as though they would burst.” The guide, jaded veteran of the air lock, watched Reeve with amusement, and then showed the reporter how to hold his nose and blow to equalize the pressure. As the moist heat in the airlock became “insufferably hot and stuffy,” Reeves, his flannel shirt already damp with sweat, began to imagine himself trapped in one of those “dungeons of deep moated castles of the Middle Ages.” His guide suggested, “Whistle.” Reeves was surprised to discover he could not comply. “You can’t whistle in compressed air.” By now, the hissing of compressed air had slowed to a wheeze and ceased. The air lock was full of mist.

  Everyone working far below the surface of the earth in compressed air was at risk of “caisson’s disease,” or “the bends,” an excruciating affliction set off when the sandhogs going back up to the surface exited too quickly and nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream exerted pressure on organs and nerves, causing not only terrible pain but sometimes paralysis or death. Men subjected to this agony contorted into “doubled-up and distorted positions,” hence the “bends.” No one really understood the mechanism of the disease—they knew only that spending time in the air lock generally helped prevent it. As the PRR doctors tracked cases of bends, they discovered that the number rose noticeably when the weather up top became colder or whenever compressed air pressure had to be increased.

  The PRR sandhogs working in compressed air were advised of the following rules: “Never [to] enter…on an empty stomach, not to use intoxicating liquors, to put on extra clothing when coming out, to get seven hours’ sleep every day, to avoid sudden chills, and not to take cold baths on coming heated from the tunnels.” Men who emerged from the tunnel air lock and began to suffer the bends were quickly escorted to a separate supervised medical air lock to be treated. “A man in a state of coma from compressed air is a man in an extremely serious condition, and…even though the life is saved, partial or complete paralysis of limbs or organs may result. In some cases, the paralysi
s disappears after perhaps several years, while in some cases it is permanent.” In short, Reeve had good reason to be uneasy as he descended to gather his story.

  What Reeve looked forward to seeing was the Greathead-style shield, a strange 193-ton behemoth of a machine, a gigantic mechanical mole that burrowed deep under the river as the tunnel’s rings were assembled in its laborious wake. Charles Jacobs and James Forgie had designed their shields to be seventeen-foot-long cylinders that would snugly encase the forefront of each twenty-three-foot-wide tunnel as it was being built. The shield face itself, constructed with three strong layers of two-inch-thick steel plate, had nine compartments with doors so sandhogs could excavate from the face. Or those compartments could be carefully opened to let in river muck as the shield pushed forward. The tunnel itself was a series of gigantic cast-iron rings, each one two-and-a-half feet wide. Each ring was assembled with thirteen separate flanged segments, laboriously bolted together then attached to the previous ring. And so the tunnel advanced, two feet and six inches at a time.

  Until now, for Reeve and most of Manhattan, the most visible work on the North River tunnels had been the extrication of the network of aged wooden piles (some eighty feet long) supporting the New York Central’s huge wooden freight shed at Pier 62 at the end of West Thirty-second Street. Jacobs ordered a veritable forest of those piles—a total of 720—removed as both North River tunnels would pass right beneath the pier. And so for many winter weeks, while crowds of idling men and boys stood about watching, a powerful triangular-shaped machine slowly extracted the long poles from the mire.

  Assistant engineer James Forgie stands in the center of the Greathead shield.

  In early 1905 Jacobs had reported to Cassatt that he had made “rather less progress than we had anticipated, owing to the liability of the piles to break in drawing and the shallowness of the water at low tide…a few more than 500 have already been drawn.” Speed was of the essence here, for the sooner the piles were out, the sooner the PRR could reassemble the pier and complete the elevated wooden train trestle that would originate at the Penn Station site. Then the little black locomotives (which had worked the elevated lines before they went electric) could steam all the way from the station dig over to the river via a tunnel under Ninth Avenue, pass up onto the rough-hewn, elevated trestle, cross several more busy avenues, and finally pass over West Street, the busy New York Central freight yard and tracks, and straight out the long Thirty-second Street pier. From here, trainloads of Penn Station excavation “spoil” were dumped in a great whoosh and roar down numerous chutes onto waiting barges.

  Each month now Charles Jacobs and Alfred Noble submitted to Cassatt brief, matter-of-fact progress reports along with documenting photographs providing detailed updates on their respective bailiwicks. Jacobs always sounded quite sanguine, even as he related one woe after another. Pushing the shields under Pier 62 was certainly arduous, but nowhere as perilous and complex as the next obstacle: getting through Gotham’s heavy masonry riverfront bulkhead, all supported first by riprap, or big stones, and then more wooden piles. The shield had to push torturously through those twenty-five feet of riprap, the mud-smeared sandhogs working in teams of two in front of the tunnel shield, one armed with a bar that he used to carefully loosen the riprap stones. As the first man cautiously withdrew a stone, the other sandhog stuffed the hollow with a huge clump of mud to fend off “blows.” And so each rock had to be plucked out and passed in through the shield, a dangerous and seemingly endless task made worse by the constant small blows that occurred in spite of their precautions.

  Once they had worked through the worst of the riprap, the sandhogs in the shields then advanced at a snail’s pace through thirty-five more feet of supporting piles, each of which “had to be cut into several pieces with axes to enable it to be removed through the shield doors.” Not until March 2, 1906, could Jacobs report that on the North Tunnel the “100th or last pile was out.” But then, the incredibly porous riprap just beyond the bulkhead allowed so much compressed air to escape, it “washed away the greater part of the mud cover.” Jacobs stopped the shield, which, along with the portion of iron tunnel constructed thus far, now lay in sixty feet of water perilously exposed to the river. For four days, all work stopped on the North Tunnel while scows dropped a “blanket consisting of 16,000 sacks of mud” to once again bury the shield and the exposed tunnel. To fend off yet another bad blow when the South Tunnel shield, having cut through more than fifty piles, pushed beyond the bulkhead, Jacobs ordered “A blanket formed by canvas 30 feet wide by 60 feet long covered with 4000 sacks of silt laid on the riverbed just outside the bulkhead wall.”

  But that was all behind them as journalist Arthur Reeve prepared to exit the air lock. His guide thrust open the heavy door into the tunnel and Reeve, his shirt now completely soaked, stepped out into the shadow. The interior of the tunnel was twenty-one feet in diameter, though the dark and mist obscured the view. “You can feel that it is cooler in the tunnel,” Reeve observed to his readers, “and yet you perspire almost as freely as in the heat of the lock…Along a suspended wooden platform through the tube you follow your guide, fanned by the moist breath of the tunnel. Every few feet an incandescent light gleams in the misty darkness. After perhaps a hundred paces, you have to duck down under a semi-circular partition covering the upper half of the tube.” This Reeve learned was the emergency curtain. They walked on. “Should the tunnel start to flood, the other half of the emergency curtain can be dropped so as to cut off in-rushing water. The tunnel itself could be nearly flooded and safety could be found along the platform.”

  Now, as they entered the work zone, Reeve saw below them “men pushing little cars full of ‘muck’ or sand or rock taken out from before the shield. They and the men who do the shoveling are ‘muckers.’ Pipes laid along the side conduct compressed air and fresh water, while electric light and telephone wires are strung all about. These, together with the tools and other accessories strewn along the tunnel, obstruct the narrow passageway to such an extent that one must carefully pick his way between them.” Reeve could not help but imagine muddy river water suddenly inundating this whole chaotic scene and men dashing panicked toward him, scrambling desperately for the air lock. The Haskins tunnel disaster was long ago, but well remembered. A god-awful way to die.

  Again, as his eyes adjusted further to the dim light, Reeve could see from an overhead platform supported by timbers that a regular succession of heavy cast-iron rings formed the gigantic interior tube of the unfinished tunnel. The tunnel seemed drier. The guide explained that as each iron ring was erected, grout was pumped outside through a hole in each segment, creating a continuous sealed lining between the tunnel and riverbed. Reeve and his guide walked slowly along the slick wooden platform, the reporter still getting accustomed to the constant yelling and noise, clammy air, dim light, and the thin mud coating gleaming on every surface. It was unnervingly like one’s vision of Hades. Finally, they reached the seeming chaos of the facing. They were now twenty-five feet below the silt riverbed itself. At high tide, they would have been ninety-five feet below the surface of the river.

  Here Reeve beheld the 193-ton Greathead-style shield at the facing. “At first glance the sight seems little short of bedlam,” he wrote. “Burly Negroes shout at husky Polacks as they load ‘muck’ on the cars. Other men are climbing about the compartments, excavating ahead of the shield. Another gang is erecting a segment of the newest ring. Everybody is apparently in everybody else’s way. But you soon discover that what appears the most utter confusion is complete organization, considering the narrowness of the quarters. One gang excavates, another loads cars, another pushes cars back through the tunnel, another erects segments, and so on.” In a twenty-four-hour period of three eight-hour shifts, the tunnel shield driving through silt advanced anywhere from three to eighteen feet. All this ordered chaos took place to the incessant and worrying hiss of the compressed air.

  Reeve, in his uncomfortable rubber
gear and wet flannel shirt, water dripping intermittently down on him from overhead, found this burrowing through the deep primeval river silt viscerally unsettling. Through the din, his guide indicated he should advance. Reeve went uneasily forward to better inspect the gigantic circular shield, with its nine adjustable forward compartments, several occupied by working sandhogs. Urged to enter, Reeve dutifully got down on his hands and knees and crawled tentatively through the slime into one of the shield’s tiny mud-smeared compartments. Here at the raw front of the tunnel facing he could feel the compressed air escaping and see, smell, and feel the riverbed’s musty ooze.

  This was deeply disconcerting, and Reeve recoiled, experiencing for “the first time the weird realization that only the ‘air’ stands between you and destruction.” Far up on the surface of the North River with all its maritime traffic coming and going, one of the few outward signs of the tunnel so far below had been actual “blows” or eruptions and much bubbling as the compressed air from the tunnel escaped up and out. But down here one realized only too well that if the air pressure dropped the river would rush in, with all its calamitous consequences.

  When Reeve crawled back out of the Greathead shield, filthy and slimy with river mud, he had had enough. His guide took mercy on him and quickly escorted the reporter back to the air lock, which was in reality the most perilous part of anyone’s visit. For even if men faithfully sat in the air lock for the prescribed fifteen minutes as the compressed air was slowly evacuated, no one could know whether they would be stricken with the bends. As Reeve sat in the lock, his flannel shirt totally wet, weighed down by all the heavy rubber protective gear, the air grew notably cooler, and a mist began to form. “By and by,” wrote Reeve, “one of the men in the lock with you starts to whistle, ‘Wait till the sun shines, Nellie’…At last the hiss of the escaping air ceases. The door to the dungeon grates open. You walk up the tunnel to the shaft and are hoisted up to God’s air again. You gaze out across the river with its waves dancing gaily in the sunshine. Down beneath it the ‘sand-hogs’ are still rooting.”