by Jill Jonnes
Harriman may struggle for the N.P. stock;
Hill may try to keep the interests pooled;
Vanderbilt of Atchison may get a block;
Pittsburgh may be opened up by Gould
But the Pennsylvania need never fear,
While the helm is held by A.J.C.
With his men behind him he can safely steer,
And his railroad first always will be.
Outside the Cassatt mansion, the hundreds of damp onlookers in the park ignored the steady rain, relishing the luxurious pomp of magnificent horse-drawn carriages and chauffeur-driven motorcars splashing up through the rain. The crowd gawked as dozens of somber railroad presidents, a U.S. senator, and several eminent financiers emerged from these splendid conveyances, men large in girth and corporate power, sporting silk top hats, clutching canes. Many murmured curiously, wondering just how rich Cassatt had been? Not until the will became public would the sum be known: $10 million. There was a satisfied stir at glimpses of such millionaire titans of Wall Street as Edward Harriman, J. P. Morgan, and Henry Clay Frick, dour, fearsome men well known from the nation’s front pages.
Inside the increasingly crowded parlor, the clock struck one, and William Patton stood up and reverently closed the lid of the coffin, gazing down on his patron for the last time. Perhaps he felt a twinge of guilt for his role in the ill-starred ICC scandal, for he had acquired one of the larger fortunes in “free” coal stocks. On the lid lay two bouquets of purple violets, Cassatt’s favorite flower, and wreaths from Cassatt’s sister Mary, in Paris, and his brother Gardner. By now three hundred guests had squeezed in, filling all the chairs in the parlor, adjacent music room, and entry hall. Even a few millionaires were obliged to stand, pressed in back along the walls and in the corners. Suddenly the whisperings and murmurings were pierced by the sweet boyish strains of choir boys singing “O Paradise.” As the music filled and quieted the rooms, Lois and other family members, all dressed in deepest mourning, walked slowly into the parlor and stood by the closed casket for the service.
Later that afternoon, a far smaller group reassembled in the rain out in Bryn Mawr at the rustic stone Church of the Redeemer. Lois, a sad figure in her dark coat, black-veiled hat, and muff, had prevailed in keeping the graveside service more private. President and Mrs. Roosevelt had sent a wreath of dark greens and white hyacinths, an offering some felt should not have been accepted. As the mourners ringed the large muddy grave, the heavens opened and the rain drummed down so ferociously few could hear the readings.
In this most respected and meritocratic of great American corporations, the accession to president was swift and orderly. James McCrea, a tall, bearded Scotsman who had also begun at the bottom as a rodman many decades earlier and who had long run all the PRR lines west of Pittsburgh, was promoted to president. Samuel Rea, who long ago had had his first job under McCrea, became second vice president. It would now fall to Rea to guide the great New York tunnels and terminal to completion. Rea wrote a Wall Street friend about Cassatt, “He was a great man and a noble character, and aside from the great loss officially it is a severe personal loss, and the last seven years association with him was the pleasantest period of my life.”
TWENTY-THREE
“NEW YORK CITY SHAKEN”
On May 25, 1907, the usual hundreds of idlers and spectators were leaning on the rough plank fence along Seventh Avenue, enthralled by the show far below their feet in the gigantic Penn Station excavation, New York’s “Culebra Cut.” Ignoring the busy traffic and throngs of Saturday shoppers, the men and boys along the fence chatted among themselves, commenting on this and that as the army of dusty workmen labored away in the vast man-created canyon now thirty and forty feet deep. It was a gratifying drama of perpetual motion: roaring steam derricks jerkily scooped up dirt and blasted rock, heaving them with a resounding crash into the waiting lines of battered freight cars. Small black locomotives steamed about, whistles shrieking, trundling the laden cars toward the North River, disappearing into the tunnel under the propped-up Ninth Avenue El, where every few minutes uptown and downtown IRT trains passed high above. And then there was always the excitement of the blasting.
Across the wide avenue, jammed with horse-drawn trucks and wagons, Isaac Finesilver and Jacob Kosty were enjoying the balmy morning, conversing in front of their secondhand clothing store on the corner of West Thirty-second Street. Upstairs in the Finesilvers’ second-floor apartment, their wives were just sitting down to lunch in the dining room with its panoramic (if noisy) view of the great Penn Station dig. Mrs. Finesilver was serving her four small children, while Mrs. Kosty shushed her baby. One block south on West Thirty-first Street, a Mrs. Melonius was up on the roof taking advantage of the fine weather to hang her family’s laundry to dry on a clothesline. Less industrious souls in the neighborhood were passing Saturday bellied up to the bar drinking beer in Bob Nelson’s corner saloon down on Seventh Avenue and Thirtieth.
Those men and boys lining the Penn Station fence noticed the work gangs across the deep canyon moving back as flagmen waved red warning flags to signal that blasting was imminent. Excavation had so advanced that it had been down to hard rock for some time now. As the PRR’s publicist, Ivy Lee, was happy to point out, this was no ordinary excavation, but required “the supporting of streets, including three main north and south avenues carrying the city’s heaviest traffic; the closing up of Thirty-second Street between Seventh and Tenth Avenues; the removal, care and support of miles of water, gas, and fire mains; telegraph, telephone, electric light, police and fire alarm wires.” Before actual construction could proceed for the new station, twenty-eight acres had to be dug down forty-five feet, which meant removing a mind-boggling three million cubic yards of material—mainly rock—from the terminal and track yards. And so the blasting had become a thrilling commonplace. The perimeters of this four-block site were being shored up by a mile and a half of ten-foot-thick concrete retaining walls. With the workmen backed far away, the signal was given to detonate.
In the next moment, a volcanic explosion ripped through the neighborhood, hurling the lounging spectators violently, and spewing a bombardment of hundred-pound boulders, big and small rocks, and a heavy hail of pebbles high up above Seventh Avenue. A towering dust cloud swirled out of the great pit, billowing skyward, reeking of nitroglycerin, and briefly engulfing the street in its gritty pall. After a lull of shocked silence, there was pandemonium.
Police patrolmen came running in their tall helmets and blue coats, while from the brown fog came yelling, wailing, and groans. Shattered glass glistened on the sidewalks while the brick fronts along Seventh Avenue were full of bulletlike holes. Debris and thick dust settled heavily into a rocky carpet. Mr. Finesilver picked himself up to see a huge gaping hole in the front wall of his own second-floor apartment. One of the bigger boulders had “plowed through the wall into the room where the women and children were…through the brick masonry as if it was so much pasteboard. The [150-pound] rock knocked the chandelier down, and then ricocheting across the room, tore away about fifteen feet of plastering, after which it fell to the floor and rolled under the table. Not a person in the room was so much as scratched. The hole in the wall measured four by five feet.”
High up on the roof, six stories above the street, Mrs. Melonius was not so lucky. One moment she was hanging wet clothes and adjusting the wooden clothespins, next she was face first on the tar roof, badly injured by a large rock. In Bob Nelson’s saloon, three blocks away, the plate glass shattered explosively as a twenty-pound rock crashed through. There, again miraculously, no one was hurt. But the barroom was a wreck. The cause for what seemed a volcano and an earthquake combined? At the Penn Station excavation, several forgotten and unexploded sticks of dynamite in some rocky crevice (a so-called “loaded hole”) had ignited unexpectedly.
As the breeze blew away the last of the dust and grit cloud, ambulance crews from three hospitals arrived to tend and remove the groaning, weeping victims.
Despite the many hundreds out doing their weekend shopping, those badly hurt totaled but ten. The worst injured was a young boy of nine who had been watching the excavation and whose leg was badly crushed. The police found and arrested “John Fitzpatrick, the Superintendent in charge of the work, who was promptly bailed by his employers, John J. Murphy, a brother of Charles F. Murphy, leader of Tammany Hall, who is President of the contracting company.” The Murphy firm issued a statement notable for its insouciance: “This happens occasionally in all blasting work, and is an unavoidable accident.”
Unnerving accidents and fatalities had punctuated and marred the steady progress of the tunnels under the two rivers, but of late, the construction mishaps had become far more public and embarrassing. As the Pennsylvania Railroad’s gargantuan civil engineering project relentlessly advanced, untoward dangers were being visited upon an unsuspecting citizenry. Two months before the manmade “volcanic” eruption at the station site, there had been a far more terrifying earth-shaking episode. Twelve minutes after midnight on Sunday March 3, the whole of Manhattan and the New Jersey opposite woke to a stupendous jolt. In Gotham, “firemen from all the engine houses in the city were ordered out at once to try to locate the trouble. Police Headquarters, in Mulberry Street, was shaken by the shock, and each police station was at once communicated with to learn quickly what had happened.”
But the epicenter of the trouble was far across the river in Homestead, New Jersey, and the PRR’s Bergen Hill tunnel. Minutes after midnight the residents of nearby Union Hill “were awakened from their sleep by a trembling of the earth, followed by a terrific crash. They groped blindly about for lights, and then stood back aghast at the destruction. Shutters, window panes, and sashes were missing, and the cold wind poured into the rooms. On the floor lay pictures, bric-a-brac, and other trinkets…they rushed from their homes to the street.” At first, panicked families fleeing their battered houses into snowy yards wondered if an earthquake had set off some kind of brief cyclone. On both sides of the Hudson River, calls flooded into police stations, fire stations, and the newspapers, seeking the cause. In Jersey City, one man wandered the streets asking if Judgment Day had arrived. New York reporters descending upon Union Hill were astonished—hundreds of modest homes in a one-mile radius “looked as though they had been subjected to a severe bombardment…Many of the houses were so badly wrecked that they will have to be rebuilt or renovated.” The casualties included the local silk mill, where every single window was blown out, and the home of the very unhappy mayor, who had been ejected from his warm bed onto a floor littered with broken glass.
It quickly emerged that the cause was dynamite and sheer carelessness. This time, it was not an overlooked “loaded hole” but an entire storage magazine that had exploded. “It may be that the building was overcrowded with dynamite, and some of the boxes therefore too near the stove,” reported Charles Jacobs at the next meeting of the board of engineers. In fact, flaunting all the local rules, the PRR Bergen Hill contractor, William Bradley, had stockpiled far more dynamite than legally allowed. The mile-long Bergen Hill tunnels, where the electric PRR trains would begin their descent into the North River tunnels, were being advanced through extraordinarily hard rock. The contractors called one tough section “bastard granite.” No official cared to admit just how much dynamite was on hand when it blew up, but there was talk of one to four tons, a truly prodigious stash, and certainly sufficient to explain why the blast left a blackened crater thirty-six feet wide and ten feet deep and was felt for a radius of twenty miles, as far away as Connecticut. At first, the morning papers reported, “30 May Be Dead, Town Wrecked,” “Score Injured in Dynamite Explosion in Pennsylvania Tunnel at Homestead, N.J.,” “New York City Shaken.” Amazingly, when the dust settled and heads were counted, only one workman was slightly injured, and three members of one family cut and bruised by falling picture frames. Indignant local officials arrested a supervisor, who was quickly bailed out.
And then there were the unanticipated troubles with the crosstown tunnels in Manhattan. The original plan for the two double-track tunnels, which would connect the East River tunnels to Penn Station, was to burrow away quietly sixty feet below all the brownstone row houses, the Pilgrim Baptist Church, the Alpine Hotel, and various apartment buildings lining East Thirty-second and Thirty-third streets, sparing residents living and working there any noise, chaos, or traffic snarls. The first hint that perhaps all was not well had come in mid-January when a horse and coal wagon were “swallowed up” in a cave-in on Thirty-third Street just behind the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. A fortnight later, the Pennsylvania Railroad admitted the crosstown tunnels were “at a standstill” having encountered quicksand, but worse yet, half-dried-up underground streams.
The only safe way to proceed, they told the city’s Rapid Transit Commission, was to tear up Thirty-second and Thirty-third streets between Madison and Seventh avenues “from curb to curb, a wooden roadway being substituted for the present asphalt surface, and the buildings which line those thoroughfares may all have to be shored up from beneath.” Each night, the wooden roadway would be lifted while tunnel crews excavated down sixty feet. They predicted a timetable of ten months. After a brief fight, the property owners—including such powers as Alfred and Cornelius Vanderbilt, John Jacob Astor, and William Havemeyer—relented, and the ripping up of the streets proceeded.
The winter and early spring of 1907 served up their own tumult for Charles McKim. Even as the workers at one section of the Penn Station site were about to begin constructing its foundation, the ethereally lovely Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, dressed like a schoolgirl in simple smocks with large collars and wearing veiled hats, began testifying in the trial of her husband, Harry, for the murder of Stanford White. The afternoon papers of February 7 fulfilled McKim’s worst nightmares. With graphic candor, Evelyn told all: Her ascension into New York show business as a Floradora Girl at age sixteen, Stanford White’s wooing her at small dinner parties in his Madison Square Garden hideaway, and the evening she was deflowered. As she testified, Harry Thaw filled the courtroom with racking sobs. Evelyn said, “Stanford told me to finish my champagne. I said I didn’t care much for it. He insisted that I drink this glass of champagne.”
Here the New York newspapers reported, “She told of awaking later, to find herself in a bed surrounded by mirrors. She screamed and Stanford White asked her to please keep quiet…Then she went home and sat up all night.” McKim still remembered running into White that very day ushering Evelyn around their Fifth Avenue offices. “This little girl’s mother has gone to Pittsburgh and left her in my care,” he said. McKim had eyed her and said, “My God!” As sensation, the trial did not disappoint: Harry Thaw was a cocaine addict, he may or may not have tied Evelyn down and beaten her, Stanford White paid Evelyn’s fancy boarding school fees, showered her one Christmas with white-fox furs and diamonds, loved to push her naked on a red velvet swing.
Through it all, Charles McKim soldiered on. His usual bouts of depression and weariness were now joined by what he termed “ear trouble.” McKim, not yet sixty, was losing the hearing in his left ear. He could still, despite all these travails, write wryly to his daughter about this new affliction. “I am afraid deaf is the word!” When beset by his own infirmities and the murder trial, Charles McKim could console himself that professionally he was at the pinnacle of a distinguished career.
The previous fall, he had completed an Italian Renaissance library for financier J. Pierpont Morgan’s collection of rare manuscripts on East Thirty-sixth Street and Madison Avenue (conveniently just a block north of his own apartment). Morgan tended toward the cantankerous, so McKim stole in and out of the construction site, avoiding the imperious financier he had dubbed Lorenzo the Magnificent. When the library, with its wondrous jewellike interiors, was finished in November 1906, McKim exulted, “The sky is blue and there is no cause for worry,” for the difficult Mr. Morgan “expressed great pride and satisfaction in the building.”
Moreover, McKim could rejoice to know his long-cherished dream of an American Academy in Rome was a solid reality, with a powerful board (including Morgan), a rich endowment, and a villa for its students. In Washington, D.C., he and Daniel Hudson Burnham had successfully revived L’Enfant’s original vision of the Mall. They had persuaded the federal government that the nation’s capitol should feature imposing classical buildings worthy of ancient Rome. Moreover, McKim’s design for a Lincoln Memorial was gaining favor.
And then, of course, there was New York’s Pennsylvania Station. In early 1907, New Yorkers saw a gigantic and rocky canyon rimmed by rundown brownstones and filled with armies of excavators. But McKim knew that very shortly the Fuller Construction Company would be erecting a steel frame that would begin to convey the magnificent dimensions of his railroad temple. While Stanford White, the private man, was being daily scourged in the press, McKim encouraged young Larry White’s interest in his father’s profession. In mid-February, McKim sent Larry photographs of the “Pennsylvania Terminal record, including those of stone quarried, cut, and awaiting transportation, as well as models, etc. There are fields of this cut stone lying ready for shipment near South Framingham, and some day, when the weather is fair, it would be a good object lesson for us both to go out…The quarry itself is well worth the short journey of an hour from Boston. The drawings show the work in its various stages of progress. I send them to you for this reason.”
When McKim was feeling well, he helped William Mead organize auctions of Stanford White’s thousands of objects of desire and exotica. He also oversaw White’s grave site out at the St. James cemetery, “transplanting a large white pine tree, much box wood…[and erecting] a Greek stele, nine feet high.” Then, on April 12, as thousands of New Yorkers mobbed the courthouse to hear Thaw’s murder trial verdict, the judge declared a mistrial. A second murder trial would reprise the whole sordid tale. For McKim, it was too much to bear.
