by Jill Jonnes
And so, McAdoo unrolled all his blueprints showing the revived Haskins tunnel, and most relevantly the two new tunnels he and his partners proposed to build between Jersey City and the Wall Street neighborhood. Of course, each man knew Charles Jacobs well since the Englishman was busy building tunnels for both. As McAdoo spread his plans out on the big wooden table, “I told Cassatt exactly what was in my mind. He looked over my maps and asked some questions. Then he glanced at me and smiled dryly, ‘Well, it seems to me,’ he said, ‘that you’re going to destroy our most profitable ferry.’”
Since this was certainly true, McAdoo waited politely but said nothing as Cassatt further studied the plans. Cassatt looked at his young visitor and continued rather genially, “‘You are about to put our ferries out of business, but the Pennsylvania Railroad believes in providing the best facilities for its patrons, and, as your tunnels will do that, we’ll hook up with you.’”
McAdoo was agreeably amazed, for the two men had conferred for less than an hour. The New York lawyer had anticipated many drawn-out meetings and conferences, and, if the PRR was interested, certainly a presentation to the board of directors. This all seemed rather precipitous. “The brevity of the discussion and his readiness to come to terms on such an important question were somewhat disquieting…Of course, I wanted to get it all settled definitely, yet I did not want to ask him if he had authority to commit the road to this arrangement without seeing other people.” Could Cassatt really speak so confidently for his road’s board? McAdoo decided to reveal that his plan involved not just the building of new subway tunnels, but also two gigantic new office buildings that would rise above an underground terminal in Manhattan near the river (where the World Trade Towers later stood). He and his partner were already raising money and quietly buying the real estate. “If any hitch occurs in this agreement with the Pennsylvania Railroad,” McAdoo told Cassatt, “it will put us in a bad hole.”
“‘There’ll not be any hitch,’ Cassatt said. ‘At any rate, none on our part. You can count confidently on us.’
“I left his office with full confidence in his word, and my confidence was entirely justified. He was the kind of man on whom one could rely absolutely.” And indeed, just as Cassatt promised, his board approved, and McAdoo had his contract by mid-May 1903.
Less than a year later, on March 11, 1904, McAdoo received an excited phone call from Charles Jacobs, who was down in the tunnel. The lawyer-turned-tunnel-developer recalled, “I and a few others hastened across the river in a ferry-boat and went to the shaft on the New Jersey side.” It was raining as they pulled on the usual yellow oilcloth coats and hats and the heavy waterproof boots. “We walked in the tunnel and passed through the air-locks until we came to the shield. The workmen were standing around. The men looked worn and tired; they were covered with mud, of course, from head to foot.
Chief Engineer Jacobs smiled. The two ends of Haskins tunnel had finally met up. Everyone present crept through the narrow passageway, dark and dripping, transiting from the Jersey side to the New York half of the tunnel. A historic half hour of walking later, and they had reached the Manhattan shaft, muddy and exalted. As Jacobs liked to say thereafter, “Henry Hudson was the first white man who crossed over the river, and Jacobs was the first who crossed under it.” Sadly, DeWitt Clinton Haskins had died broke and forgotten, long before his great dream was realized.
By July 1, 1904, the house-wrecking crews had completely cleared the Penn Station site, and work was beginning on the “Biggest Hole Ever Dug in the Island of Manhattan.” Tammany chief Charles Murphy’s company hired two thousand men to excavate around the clock, blasting and digging steadily down, while the small elevated steam locomotives hauled the spoil away to the scows at the West Side piers. By August 1905, half the digging—a million cubic yards of earth and rock—was already done. “It’s an interesting job,” said Murphy’s chief engineer, “because of its size, but it’s pretty prosy work. We haven’t had any exciting incidents or made any interesting discoveries—haven’t found gold mines, or human skeletons, or anything of that kind.”
With summer once again upon the city, on the hottest days the New York Herald gave away free ice in the slum districts, while charities organized picnics and boat rides to get thousands of tenement children out in the fresh air. When the heat lingered and grew miserable, the “Fire Department flushes the tenement streets with streams of cold water, wetting down the panting horses and the hundreds of children who enjoy the shower-bath. Most of the horses, as in London, wear bonnets of straw all summer with the most coquettish effect. Free concerts are given on all the recreation piers…there are many public baths in both the Hudson and the East River where men and women can swim…[Nor] does it cost much time or money to reach the greatest pleasure circus in the world, Coney Island.” There you could cool off in the Atlantic’s surf, rise high up in the air on the Ferris wheel or hurtle down the giant Helter-Skelter slide. At Dreamland and Luna Park, you could ride a camel or the thrilling loop-de-loop, and then amble with the crowds to see all the queer sights—the six-tailed Bull Terrier or the human pincushion.
Penn Station site and Ninth Avenue and the Elevated before being propped up.
The Gotham of 1905 was growing like Topsy. No matter where ordinary citizens of New York looked, they could see their city being remade in every possible direction. Two years earlier, Daniel Burnham’s twenty-two-story Flatiron Building became the tallest skyscraper in the city, its strange triangular shape topping 285 feet. Some skeptical New Yorkers called it “Burnham’s Folly” and had wagers on when it would collapse. Over on the East River, the city was erecting new bridges. Up at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, the old Croton Aqueduct had been demolished and the $5 million New York Public Library was arising in all its magnificence. Andrew Carnegie’s gift to New York of $5.2 million promised dozens of new library branches. Below the streets and rivers, August Belmont’s men and machines were burrowing new subway lines to connect Manhattan to Queens and Brooklyn. All this ambition and improvement was most exhilarating.
In mid-August 1905, soon after Samuel Rea returned from holiday, Cassatt wrote from Bar Harbor asking that their New York work be “pushed more rapidly. It seems to me that it has been going a little slowly.” Chief Engineer Jacobs certainly found he needed every iota of experience gleaned from the McAdoo-Haskins tunnels as he and his men struggled to put through the PRR’s North River tunnels. Yet the two projects—seemingly very similar—posed very different problems. First, the McAdoo tunnels were for electrified subway trolleys, and were consequently smaller in diameter than the PRR tunnels, which were designed to handle larger railroad cars and locomotives. No one worried that the Haskins tunnels might crack or break under the repeated journeys of their subways. But that was the constant fear of the PRR. For, as Jacobs himself conceded, “capitalists and engineers” had long believed (and a great many still did) that “owing to the very soft nature of the [North River] ground, a tunnel could not be built that would be sufficiently stable to withstand the vibration due to heavy traffic, and for this reason tunnels under the North River were not looked upon as practicable.” Second, Jacobs was discovering that while the tunnels burrowed under the same river, the retreating glaciers had deposited very different substrata.
The Jersey side presented its own endless vexations, bringing work on the North Tunnel to a complete standstill in the summer of 1905. “The leakage of air through the ground was so great that it was impossible to maintain sufficient air-pressure to work both North and South Tunnels,” reported Jacobs. The shield had also been installed in the South Tunnel from the Weehawken side but, wrote Jacobs, “Owing to the inability to maintain sufficient air-pressure to keep the face dry, slow progress has been made.” From August 25 to September 12, 1905, Jacobs’s sandhog teams managed to install only eight rings of tunnel lining. Since then, “the average progress has been one ring every working day. The material in the face is sand, gravel, and hardpan, with some larg
e boulders. The entire face is timbered for each shove of the shield, and the water in the ground is about 9 feet above the invert…On Sept. 4th fire was discovered in the timber above the shield and tunnel. This was smothered by removing air-pressure from the tunnel for 12 hours, with no damage to the works.
“To date 62 rings of cast iron lining, equivalent to 155 feet of tunnel, have been constructed. The excavation done is approximately 5.7% of the total.”
By the end of 1905 work was again progressing on the Jersey South Tunnel, and the shield “passed under the westerly side of the Fowler Warehouse on December 4th,” reported Jacobs, “and immediately encountered wooden piles forming the foundation of the building. At about this same point the material in the face changed from red sand and gravel to black sand and river silt. The ends of seventy piles which came within the tunnel limits have been cut…The Fowler Warehouse, which is a heavy timber structure enclosed with a brick shell, has settled to some extent. Some cracks have shown.” For the next several months, sandhogs worked in front of the shield under the benighted Fowler Warehouse. They laboriously hacked away with axes, slowly and carefully cutting up and pulling in the remaining 136 wooden piles in their path. Finally, in January of 1906 the shield in that South Tunnel passed under the Fowler Warehouse and out into the river.
Assuming the riverbed silt off Weehawken to be like that in the Haskins tunnel further south, on January 16 Jacobs ordered all the doors on the Jersey South Tunnel shield shut, preparatory to shoving full speed ahead. It was a jubilant moment, because from here on in, his men could shove rapidly forward without the mess and trouble of taking in muck. But when the crew of alignment engineers appeared at the facing to take measurements after several rings had been installed, they had startling and worrisome news. The South Tunnel was not on grade, but rising rapidly. They weighted the shield to counter this, but when they pressed forward the tunnel again failed to keep to grade, and the iron shell itself was “distorted…the horizontal diameter decreasing and vertical diameter increasing by as much as 11/4 in.” Chief Engineer Jacobs came over in the freezing weather on the PRR’s jaunty steam-powered despatch boat, the low-slung Victor, American flags flapping brightly in the river’s breezes. But he and his engineers did not feel jaunty, just perplexed. Reported Jacobs, “The material in the face is soft mud of a peculiar consistency.” But that did not explain the now slightly off-grade and distorted tunnel.
This was a very worrying issue, the worst they had yet encountered, for if the South Tunnel veered too much further off grade, it would become potentially defective. “A good many different theories were advanced as to the probable cause,” wrote one of Jacobs’s young engineers. “It was thought that the hood of the shield might have something to do with the trouble.” So now the hood was removed, the doors remained shut, and the shield was driven forward. With great trepidation and anxiety, everyone waited for the findings of the alignment crew. Alas, all they documented was that the trouble persisted. “It was impossible to keep the grade.” This was now a most serious matter. “Work was stopped, and the question was thoroughly debated.” Jacobs decided to try another shove with one of the shield doors open as an experiment, allowing in 50 percent of the displaced muck. This time, when the alignment crew rapidly did their calculations, it was most welcome news. “The shield began to come down to grade at once,” reported the delighted junior engineer, “and it soon became necessary to close the door partially and reduce the quantity of muck taken in, in order to prevent the tunnel from getting below grade. The other troubles from distortion, etc., ceased at the same time.” There was great jubilation all round.
And so Jacobs and his men joyfully charged full speed ahead. During February 1906 alone on the Jersey South Tunnel, reported Jacobs to Cassatt, “166 rings have been built, an average progress of 14.31 lineal feet per working day. To date 436 rings of cast iron lining equivalent to 1091 lineal feet of tunnel have been constructed. The excavation done is approximately 38.5% of the total.” The worst, they believed, was clearly over. All too soon, they would discover their celebration was most premature.
EIGHTEEN
“DISTURBED ABOUT NORTH RIVER TUNNELS”
On Monday April 2, 1906, an anguished Samuel Rea sat at a wooden desk in his spacious Bryn Mawr home and considered how best to begin his letter to Alexander Cassatt. Outside, after days of rain and squalls, it was a cold spring afternoon suffused with clear light. The PRR’s third vice president was bone tired, recovering from tonsilitis, and feeling steady twinges of rheumatism in his knees, his back, and now his arm. His doctor was pressing him to go away for a bit, to make a quick but restful sail down to the warmer climes of Jamaica. Rea wearily took up his fountain pen, scrawled “Confidential” in his neat small script atop the half sheet of lined paper and paused. He decisively underlined “Confidential,” and then plunged in: “Dear Mr. Cassatt, I have been disturbed about North River tunnels for some time—since I told you that General [Raymond] thought they were rising—He has verified this & Jacobs told me on the phone last Friday I think that he had suspended work and he thought they had risen about 6 inches, but he thought they would come to rest.”
This was typical of Charles Jacobs—always sanguine. But Samuel Rea had just learned in a deeply distressing tête-à-tête that the eminent but prickly Brigadier General Charles Raymond very strongly begged to differ. Raymond, balding, his remaining good eye steadily dimming with its thickening cataract, was a formidable and punctilious military engineer. He was so esteemed that the PRR had pleaded with the War Department to borrow him to serve as chair of the PRR’s board of engineers. In 1904, just before his military retirement, Raymond’s stellar forty years of public service had been rewarded by promotion to brigadier general.
General Raymond had traveled especially to Rea’s home to report his decided professional opinion that the as-yet-unfinished tunnels on the Weehawken side were shifting dangerously about in the river’s infamous alluvial silt. Raymond, employing a large magnifying glass to aid his diminished vision, had painstakingly reviewed the daily figures and data produced by Charles Jacobs’s own alignment crews. He had slowly come to believe that something was alarmingly amiss. Five days earlier, Raymond had for the first time confronted Jacobs with these disturbing facts at a board of engineers meeting. Both Alfred Noble and Jacobs scoffed, Rea told Cassatt in this letter, expressing such utter skepticism that they declined even to include Raymond’s doubts or his data in the board’s written minutes. But, wrote Rea, the “General was insistent on management being advised.”
During their just-concluded private meeting, Rea wrote to Cassatt, Raymond had also revealed that his figures for the Weehawken tunnels showed “there had been a rise of about 2 feet in one place—This is alarming…If General was correct we must change method of construction—devise some way of anchoring tunnel and possibly doing that work as the driving of the tunnel progresses and that of course the work of driving must be suspended…Jacobs and Noble are now alive to the situation but for a long time didn’t have much faith in General’s theory or his results.”
Was it possible that the naysayers were right? One man had written Cassatt early on, wondering if the bed of the river was still moving seaward, “like the movement of a glacier” and so might “be fatal to the stability of any structure imbedded in it?” Was it possible the PRR had indeed fatally miscalculated? The Pennsylvania Railroad had already spent the vast sum of $80 million on constructing its monumental entry to Manhattan, an enterprise many continued to condemn as an unnecessary and extravagant folly. If the trains could not roll into Gotham through the North River tunnels, it would be a humiliating corporate catastrophe.
And so began a season of unparalleled woe for Alexander Cassatt, Samuel Rea, and the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Up in New York, Alfred Noble and the many engineers working on the PRR’s four subaqueous East River tunnels (known prosaically as A, B, C, and D) were as weary and frustrated as Samuel Rea. When they stood atop
one of the Manhattan caisson shafts they beheld a beautiful swift-flowing river, its powerful tidal waters shimmering pewter as the sun rose and the batteries of ferryboats and steamers began their busy workaday schedules plying the industrialized waterfront. Soon, the more nimble fishing smacks, oyster sloops, and pleasure boats would breeze by, and on warmer afternoons even the occasional intrepid canoeist. As evening came, and the many vessels berthed and the city quieted, the East River gleamed with reflected lights and flowed a glossy indigo. But the riverbed deep below these scintillating tidal waters was proving a maddening and intractable mix for tunneling: a perilous underworld of quicksand, coarse sand, huge boulders, gravel, and clay—the bedeviling legacy of the ancient glaciers—lay between the water and the bedrock.
Not long after Rea confided his alarm over the North River tunnels to Alexander Cassatt in early April 1906, Alfred Noble, who had launched his East River tunnels two years earlier, detailed for the PRR president his own litany of setbacks: “In Line A, there has been no excavation done since December 29, 1905…In Line C, work was continued until March 22nd when it became necessary to stop work on this line and bulkhead the face on account of the impossibility of supplying air for more than two tunnels…In Line D, the work has been extremely difficult during the entire month and progress has been very slow.” Line D had been the first tunnel out into the river and the southernmost of the four, and now the recently erected iron tunnel rings were developing cracks. Finally, there were so many blows on Line D, despite the dumping of a twelve-foot layer of clay onto the riverbed, conceded Noble, “the heading was closed on the 31st.” In short, three of the four East River tunnels were at a standstill. The two sets of subaqueous tunnels under the North and East rivers—the linchpins of this most ambitious of civil engineering projects—were now both in limbo.
