by Jill Jonnes
It was now the spring of 1907 and Samuel Rea still did not know why the now-completed North River tunnels continued to move about in the silt forty feet below the riverbed. They could proceed no further with finishing these tunnels until they understood what the problem was. The previous September, not long after his triumphant public walks through the tunnels, Charles Jacobs had finally responded in writing to Rea’s repeated and increasingly exasperated demands for his professional opinion. It did not help Rea’s mood when Jacobs had conceded, “Since we commenced to construct these tunnels we know very little more about the nature of the mud—its specific gravity may have been determined more closely…but we have no knowledge of its future action during the permanent use of these tunnels in railroad service.” Rea found this completely unacceptable. He was equally angry to read Jacobs’s assertion that, “We are faced at the present with the certainty that these tunnels go down and not up. We do not know why they go down.”
“The Behavior of the Subaqueous Tunnels,” as the issue was now blandly referred to in meeting after meeting, was causing a bitter split between Brigadier General Raymond and, it appeared, the rest of the board of engineers, led by Jacobs. General Raymond’s cataract had been operated on, but with little success. Now, when he descended under the North River for his investigations, “he had to be personally led to and through the tunnels, and could examine drawings only with the aid of a strong glass, magnifying one spot at a time.”
Understandably, Raymond had taken deep professional umbrage at Jacobs’s lackadaisical and skeptical attitude on the tunnel issue, wondering caustically, “Does Mr. Jacobs believe that a tunnel can be built scientifically if it cannot be scientifically designed, and does he propose to build the tunnels at hap-hazard and design them scientifically after their completion?…He has driven four tunnels completely across the river and has removed or displaced several hundred cubic yards of the material concerning the nature of which he is still ignorant…The plain truth is that Mr. Jacobs has made no serious effort to investigate this important question. Even the specific gravity determinations, which he reluctantly admits mayhavebeen made, were not obtained by him. A lack of information on this subject may involve the company in the useless expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars and in the construction of tunnels not well adapted to the surrounding conditions.”
In the wake of this acrimonious exchange, Rea and his board of engineers managed to agree on one matter: Perhaps the tunnels were moving about because they were not yet watertight. Back on November 8, 1906, Jacobs had ordered caulking commenced on the North Tunnel in the middle section from Ring 735 to Ring 1,135. The first phase had been finished the day Alexander Cassatt died, December 28. But there was still considerable leaking. During the ensuing months, Jacobs built a dam at each end of a thousand feet of tunnel to wall off the water from the uncaulked portions of the tunnel, and then “re-tightened and red-leaded [those thousand feet]…in addition to [more] caulking and grummeting [of] the tunnel lining [and] the joints between the bore-plugs and bore-segments. [All] were made tight with wooden wedges driven as tightly as it was possible to drive them.” But despite Jacobs’s efforts, it was now spring of 1907, the tunnels were still not watertight, and Rea still had no answer.
Moreover, even as they were bewildered by the mysterious oscillations of the tunnels, Rea and the board of engineers still had to decide whether they should proceed with anchoring the tunnel to the riverbed in some fashion. And if so, how? They were actively studying different systems of screw piles to provide supports. On June 5, 1907, Rea weighed in. He believed that if the North River tunnels were anchored by screw piles of any kind to bedrock, “any appreciable movement would tend to rupture the shell.” If they attached screw piles that allowed for motion of the tunnels, the very nature of those attachments would cause “more or less leakage into an otherwise dry tunnel.” He proposed they consider reserving the ability to install screw piles if needed, but to strengthen the tunnel instead by “the insertion of steel rods in the concrete lining.”
Only days later, on June 8, 1907, Rea opened his Scientific American to find an editorial titled “Tunnel Tubes in Soft Material.” It began as a discussion of the East River Rapid Transit tubes. But it also dealt with their own work, and the further he read the more his heart sank: “The success of the work under the Hudson and East rivers proves that it is entirely possible to build as many tunnel tubes as may be desired. But the question which has yet to be proved…is how far will the vibration set up in the metal tubes by the passage of the trains tend to agitate the surrounding material…[If] bending stresses developed…far in excess of the resisting power of the tubes…fracture must ensue. But whatever theory may indicate, time alone can tell.” And so, for safety sake, the editors of Scientific American strongly endorsed exactly what Rea now opposed: piles “sunk through the bottom of the tubes until they reach rock or some other sufficiently firm bearing.”
Rea did not need any lectures or advice. This matter, “The Behavior of the Subaqueous Tunnels,” along with the related issues of attaching piles, had become his constant preoccupation and worry. At such moments, he sorely missed Cassatt. James McCrea was a fine president, but McCrea’s whole career had been in the Lines West of Pittsburgh, his duties far removed from the entanglements of Gotham. With Cassatt dead, Rea had to carry the full burden of the New York Extension. And the problem of whether or not to install screw piles was sowing discord among his board of engineers just as he most needed their counsel and advice.
As if that were not sufficiently galling, on Saturday June 29 Rea was perusing the Philadelphia Inquirer when he saw an editorial headline titled, “The Philadelphia Tunnels Condemned.” To his horror, the newspaper editors had read the Scientific American article and were parroting its assertion that without piles anchoring the PRR’s two North River tunnels, “the strain from pressure and vibration will be so great as to make the tubes break.” Inveighed the Philadelphia editors: “Here is a question in which the public is vitally interested, not only through its ownership of the securities which built the tubes, but because it is to become a vast artery of travel. The thought of a breaking down of the tunnel is too horrible for contemplation.” Was this not precisely the possible calamity that had haunted Rea for more than a year?
“My first impulse on Saturday morning when I saw this editorial,” Rea confided to McCrea later when he had calmed down, “was to write the Editor of the paper at once denying the truth of it…But after conferring with our Board of Engineers, I feel inclined to drop the matter. To get into a discussion with a daily newspaper on a technical question is fruitless, but at the same time I realize that such articles as these lead to other comments…I would prefer not to do [anything] pending our experimental tests which I am watching continuously.”
All that spring and summer of 1907, Charles Jacobs worked on those experimental tests, trying to make a thousand feet in both North River tunnels truly dry. By September, when both were deemed watertight, Jacobs installed an Edson Recording Gauge in each to monitor “any movement of the tunnel.” A week later, he noted that these gauges had revealed “the interesting fact that the tunnel bodily rises at low tide and subsides again at high tide.” Despite Rea’s inclinations not to have screw piles, he and the board had decided to proceed with the installation of various test screw piles to see how they worked. When the board met again on October 3, 1907, Jacobs reported that using the Edson Gauges, “The actual time and elevation of high and low tide in the river at this point are observed daily, and the time of high tide is found to agree identically with that at which the tunnel reaches its lowest position.”
A month later, at the November 7, 1907, meeting of the board of engineers, Jacobs further reported, “That the tunnels (and piles also) move down at high tide and up at low tide is now a certain fact. This is shown clearly not only by the Edson Recording Gauges…but also by the pile test observations.” And so it was that Samuel Rea finally learned in part
why the PRR’s North River tunnels were moving about in the silt: they were responding to the changing pressures of the incoming and outgoing tides. Once known, it seemed so simple and so obvious. They now had a full scientific explanation for the upward movement of the tunnels. They all knew the North River was a tidal body, but never dreamed these tides were powerful enough to affect their deeply buried tunnels. Rea also now knew that making tunnels watertight had slowed their gradual downward settling. So they could say that the downward drift of the tunnels was partly a function of leaking. But there still remained a terrifying unknown: Situated in this soft North River silt, would the tunnels continue to subside downward year after year? And if so, would they finally sink so far in the fluid silt that they would rupture?
Rea had already expressed the opinion that screw piles seemed more of a danger to the tunnels than a solution. By November, General Raymond had come round to that same stance. Unhappily, Alfred Noble, Charles Jacobs, and George Gibbs, three engineers with decades of hands-on experience, remained completely unpersuaded. “In recent discussions,” wrote Noble, “the question has been asked frequently of those of us who favor the use of supports what we propose to do if the subsidence of the tunnels proves to be rapid. It is equally pertinent for us to ask those who propose to omit supports what they would do if the tunnels, unrestrained by supports, should wallow in the mud…[If] a large and continued downward movement should occur, the condition of the tunnel project would be very serious and supports on a more comprehensive scale than has yet been contemplated might be the only alternative to the abandonment of the project.” There in a nutshell was the fearsome truth. Might they have to abandon the two finished North River tunnels as unsafe?
The backdrop to this engineering debate was an escalating mood of financial jitters infecting the New York Stock Exchange. All that summer, stocks had been in a nervous swoon. Pennsylvania stock was sinking back to previous lows, reaching $117 by August. Wall Street financiers blamed Roosevelt’s high-decibel crusade against entrenched corporate malefactors and their “successful dishonesty.” Cascading bankruptcies culminated in crowds of desperate depositors besieging the Knickerbocker Trust, a revered marble temple to mammon on Fifth Avenue. At this moment, J. P. Morgan rushed back from an Episcopal conference in Richmond to rescue the nation. Now seventy, Morgan had become a caricature of a plutocrat, with his gigantic belly, ferocious, arrogant eyes, and monstrous nose, red and deformed from acne rosacea. Ensconced now in the inner sanctum of his sumptuous new Madison Avenue library, the great financier smoked his Cuban cigars and huddled with the rich and powerful, consulting the U.S. secretary of the treasury, conferring life or death to banks, trusts, and firms teetering on the brink.
The day the Knickerbocker collapsed, President Roosevelt emerged from a fifteen-day hunting trip deep in the Louisiana bayous. Energized and exuberant, he regaled reporters with tales of shooting bear, turkey, opossum, squirrel, and wildcat. “We ate them all,” he enthused, “except the wildcat.” As for the Panic of 1907, the president accepted no blame, wondering privately in a letter whether certain titans had not provoked the financial crash “so that they may enjoy unmolested the fruits of their own evil-doing.” The panic merely added another layer of difficulty to the PRR’s troubles, forcing layoffs and slowdowns. President McCrea blandly announced they would not push the work in New York “as vigorously as had been done in the past.”
TWENTY-FOUR
“THE WAY IS STONY AND WET”
That same fall of 1907, Charles McKim returned from his annual outing to the Scottish moors, where he had hunted grouse and ignored his birthday. “When we turn our 60th corner and face 70, the less said the better,” he wrote his daughter, while sailing toward New York on the leviathan ocean liner, the S.S. Celtic. “So I kept it wisely to myself…. I am coming home—if not yet quite well and strong—better in every way than when I went away. I am advised to start in gradually to work…[I] propose, if possible, to get well enough, deaf or dumb, to get back to my work, and to take care of you for a while longer!” McKim lingered only briefly in Gotham before retreating to St. James out on Long Island and the simple beauties of its sea air, thatch meadows, orchards, and clam flats.
By early 1908 McKim was back in Manhattan and settled into a new apartment, still on East Thirty-fifth Street but a few doors closer to Fifth Avenue. His daughter, Margaret, moved in to keep house for him. The two could stroll downtown just two blocks, head west, and join the perennial gawkers watching the wonder of the Pennsylvania Station construction site. The blasting still went on day in and day out over toward Ninth Avenue, but on Seventh Avenue, the station’s foundation was in place and the steel frame was readily visible. “The new Pennsylvania Railroad Station in New York,” reported Harper’s Weekly, “…is slowly rising out of the gaping depths…The vast extent of the excavation, in which gangs have been delving and building night and day during the last three years, gave the spectator a sense of wonder at the gigantic task that was being undertaken. It seemed almost beyond physical powers to complete it. But it is being accomplished. The foundations are laid, and little by little the steel framework of the central building rises above the surrounding houses.” In January, Samuel Rea, an avid reader of thick tomes of history, had a copper box with the project’s history and plans placed in the cornerstone at Seventh Avenue and Thirty-third Street.
On January 6, Harry Thaw’s second murder trial had begun, the whole rancid circus once again undermining McKim’s faltering health. It was not possible to venture forth on the streets of Manhattan without encountering some scruffy herd of newsboys bleating about Evelyn and Harry and Stanford. This time, mercifully, the trial had moved swiftly, with Thaw’s lawyers arguing that their client was crazy and should thus be acquitted. On February 2, the jurors had agreed, finding “Mad Harry” not guilty of murder by reason of insanity. But that had not put an end to the whole sordid saga. Harry Thaw lost little time seeking to be declared sane, while his family worked on annulling his marriage to Evelyn. In mid-February, William Mead had written to Daniel Burnham, “Poor McKim has had another knock out, and quite severe this time. He is getting on all right and out in the country, where he is receiving good care. I am afraid, however, it will be some months before he shows up here.” One consolation was that Larry White had finished Harvard, and he and Bessie were far away in Paris, where he was studying architecture.
As for the rest of Gotham, they were soon distracted. On February 12, 150,000 strong, they squeezed into Times Square to watch the thrilling start of the New York to Paris Automobile Race sponsored by the New York Times and Le Matin. The Hotel Astor was festooned with flags and bunting, while mounted police kept the street clear. Westward the six autos roared (stopping soon enough, of course, to cross on the ferries), and a nation increasingly mad for motorcars cheered the American team as it raced toward Alaska, and ultimately, on to Siberia, Russia, Europe, and the finish line in Paris.
Even as Samuel Rea and his board of engineers wrangled over how best to protect the North River tunnels, the seemingly accursed quartet of East River tunnels were at long last nearing completion. In the wake of all the spectacular blowouts, fires, cave-ins, floodings, explosions, injuries, deaths, and various strikes, Ernest W. Moir, Scotsman by birth, veteran tunnel builder, and vice president of S. Pearson & Son, had taken decisive charge, rallying the men onward. A constant presence in the tunnels for the past eighteen months, Moir maintained a penthouse in the skyscraping Belmont Hotel with a view of the East River. “When he goes to bed, which is seldom according to the sand-hogs, Mr. Moir has a telescope glued to his never-closed eye. Certain it is from his aerie den you can see the air bubbles in the river…he has always turned up on the job before the telephonic message of a ‘blow-out’ or some other of the hundred and one obstacles which have beset the undertaking.”
In the realm of subaqueous work, it was widely acknowledged that the East River tunnels had posed nearly insuperable conditions, especially in the
central sections where the top of the tunnel passed through sand and the bottom hit up against rock. Many had been quick to call it impossible and the designs fatally flawed. Dozens of sandhogs and other laborers had been carried out of the tunnels, suffering ghastly deaths during the always-behind-schedule job. In early February 1908, the two sections of Tunnel D neared one another after four grueling years. The alignment engineers cautiously thrust an eight-inch-wide steel pipe forward fifty feet from one shield face to the other. Rapturous cheers greeted the pipe’s final successful push into the other shield. The two sides were about to meet!
When the elated sandhogs in one half of Tunnel D felt the strong air current flowing through the connecting pipe, they rushed out and “procured a toy train [a replica of the Congressional Limited]…Placing it in the pipe, it was forced through at a high rate of speed. This was the first train to actually pass through the tunnels.” On February 20, 1908, the two halves of D became the first of the PRR’s benighted East River tunnels to meet up. Anticipating no further major obstacles, a jubilant Ernest Moir swiftly dispatched engraved invitations to celebrate the long-anticipated “Junctioning of the Four East River Tunnels.” The formal dinner was set for Thursday evening April 2 at Gotham’s most fashionable restaurant, the opulent Sherry’s. Rea, happily responding to Moir’s invitation, lamented only that Cassatt, “who devoted so much personal time and attention [to the project]…was not spared to join with us.”
Rea had already taken concrete action to ensure posterity would never forget Alexander Cassatt’s visionary leadership. At his suggestion the PRR board of directors voted to honor Cassatt with a larger-than-life bronze statue. Fittingly, this memorial of their company’s seventh president would be enshrined in the monumental Manhattan terminal. Rea had assumed charge, going in person to 160 Fifth Avenue to consult with Charles McKim, who had returned from his rest in the country at a sanitarium.
