Conquering Gotham

by Jill Jonnes

  As the station took magisterial shape, Chief Engineer Gibbs grappled with two critical decisions about motive power. First, what kind of electricity—alternating current or direct current—should power the New York Extension’s 110 miles of rails, starting in Harrison, New Jersey, and continuing into Penn Station and then on to Long Island? “The Manhattan terminal…[of] the Pennsylvania involved electrical systems of such magnitude,” writes historian Carl W. Condit, “embodied so many novelties, and grew from such an intricate complex of urban factors, [it]…may be described [along with Grand Central Station] as the greatest unified engineering and architectural work ever undertaken in the United States.”

  As the end of 1908 neared, Gibbs had fully considered all aspects of the situation. While alternating current systems offered greater flexibility, they were also newer and less tested. For several years, LIRR trains running on the Atlantic Avenue line through Brooklyn had been powered by direct current electricity via a third rail. And it was that road’s intention to simply extend its D.C. third rail all the way to Penn Station. This alone “argued more strongly for the Pennsylvania’s own use of direct current than any other factor.” Moreover, D.C. traction technology had been around longer, and thus was more familiar and reliable. Add to the equation the many travails the New Haven Railroad had suffered on its newly electrified A.C. lines out of Gotham and it was easy to understand Gibbs’s inclination to err on the side of certainty. “Any serious operating failures,” he later said, “would have jeopardized the whole investment and put electrification back years.” One had also to consider the flexibility of interchanging cars with other local transit systems using the same D.C. system. And so, in early December 1908, Gibbs endorsed D.C. to the board of engineers, who agreed they should opt for the tried and true—direct current electricity.

  The second major question then was what kind of electric locomotive would best serve the PRR’s brand-new all-steel fleet of passenger and Pullman cars that Cassatt had insisted on to prevent train fires in his New York tunnels. Gibbs had been helping with experimental designs for new kinds of electric locomotives, collaborating with the Westinghouse Company and Baldwin Locomotive Works. They had been methodically testing locomotives over the past several years. “It was decided to make quite a radical departure from general practice,” said Gibbs, “in the final design of high-speed locomotives for the terminal equipment.” By the time Gibbs was done, he had indeed come up with something unprecedented. His engine looked nothing like the hulking, ripsnorting steam locomotives Americans had long admired as they roared along the rails. Instead, the DD1, as it was dubbed, appeared to be just two joined passenger cars, and it could operate in either direction, a great plus. With its two front oval windows looking like sad drooping eyes, the DD1 looked disconcertingly like a big mechanical basset hound rather than a powerful locomotive.

  Yet the DD1 immediately became the most powerful locomotive—steam or electric—of its day. The DD1s “showed not the slightest strain,” says railroad historian Michael Bezilla, “when called upon to start 850-ton trains on the steep 1.93% grade westbound in the Hudson tunnels—a task which would have set the drivers of a steam locomotive spinning helplessly.” They rocketed along reliably at eighty miles an hour. In the coming years, the DD1s would operate for an average of 11,458 miles for every minute they were down from engine failures. They would cut the trip between Harrison (its station, soon to be renamed the far more resonant and romantic Manhattan Transfer) and Penn Station down to thirteen minutes. Under the best of circumstances, the ferry crossing had taken fifteen minutes, and one still landed in the dreary wilds of West Street. When railroad men and the public first saw the DD1 in action, they were struck not only by its meek and homely appearance, such a contrast to its power, but also by its quiet. Americans were not used to locomotives that did not belch and steam and shriek. When the mighty but modest DD1 entered a station, it glided in almost silently.

  Through Charles McKim’s Roman temple to transportation, the citizens of Gotham were slowly coming to comprehend the magnitude of Alexander Cassatt’s vision and how this vast enterprise would reconfigure their world by opening up New York City to the shores beyond its rivers. In late April 1909, an infirm McKim had returned to Manhattan from a sojourn in Washington, D.C., for work on the design of the central Mall. Acknowledging his declining health, McKim had first signed over power of attorney for his business affairs to William Mead, that Vermont rock of reliability, then closed his New York apartment for good.

  Ensconced temporarily at the Hotel Netherland overlooking Central Park, McKim wrote to Larry White, about to enter the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, saying, “When you…come home ready to build, you will find opportunities awaiting you that no other country has offered in modern times. The scale is Roman.” McKim exulted at the new classical buildings he had seen beautifying and permanently redefining the nation’s capitol. “As Mr. Root says, ‘Enough pegs driven to make it impossible for anybody to pull them up.’”

  But New York was another matter altogether. McKim chafed at the towering new skyscrapers sprouting up everywhere, the growing congestion, and incessant commercialism. In mid-May, he wrote Larry, “I think the sky line of New York grows daily more hideous.” He had never much cared for skyscrapers and hated to see architects vying to erect what he viewed as misbegotten behemoths. Since 1908, the forty-seven-story Singer Tower downtown had reigned as the world’s tallest building. Topping six hundred feet, made of ornate brick and terra-cotta, the Singer Tower was almost twice the height of the 362-foot Times Tower. And now, the Singer Tower was to be eclipsed by a building McKim disliked even more. He wrote Larry: “The new Metropolitan Life Insurance tower, 700 feet high, makes [Burnham’s] the Flatiron building look like a toy and puts every building within a mile in the shade. But all the same, Madison Square tower [Stanford White’s creation], one-third of its height, is by far the greater of the two as David than Goliath. The first has the merit of bigness and that’s all.”

  McKim lamented the imminent widening of Fifth Avenue, and the consequent removal of stoops, the narrowed sidewalks, and the discombobulation of the existing graceful streetscape. “The constantly increasing traffic on the streets and the crowded sidewalks have made this imperative and I suppose it is a choice of evils that must be accepted. What New York is coming to, Dieu sait!” Still suffering over the Stanford White scandal and its aftermath, McKim had become so fearful and anxious at times that he required an attendant.

  In June, Samuel Rea, back from several weeks motoring around France, had dispatched a photograph of the nearly completed exterior of Penn Station and a letter of congratulation to McKim. “It is a wonderful building, and as time goes on will justify its cost.” To William Mead, he wrote of the station: “It is regarded, not alone by ourselves but by everybody who is competent to judge, as a magnificent building.” On July 31, 1909, the PRR announced that the last section of Milford pink granite stone had been cemented into place, signaling the completion of Penn Station’s imperial Roman Doric exterior. Ivy Lee delighted to tell all that, among many other stupendous facts, “It took 1,140 freight cars to transport these 47,000 tons of stone from Milford, Mass.” Covering seven and a half acres, Penn Station was going to be not just the world’s largest train station, but the world’s fourth-largest building, with the three bigger ones—St. Peter’s Basilica, the Tuileries, and the Winter Palace—all ancient monuments that had been built and expanded over the centuries.

  When hot weather enveloped New York, McKim and Margaret migrated north to Narragansett Pier, their favorite resort in Rhode Island. On July 23, 1909, William Mead, about to depart for a European jaunt on the S.S. Lusitania, sent McKim a short note of farewell. Mead was in good spirits because work was now well underway on another of the firm’s plum Gotham commissions: the new main U.S. Post Office across Eighth Avenue from Penn Station. They had designed a stately Corinthian edifice to complement McKim’s Doric temple. This would have pleased Cass
att, for back in June 1904 he had written to the secretary of the treasury, taking “the liberty of suggesting to you, quite unofficially” that they give the work to McKim, Mead & White. “I know you appreciate how important it is, from an artistic standpoint, that your building should accord with ours in general style.”

  Mead regretted not having time to visit McKim before he left for Europe, but wanted him to know in his quick goodbye note, “Larry White was in the office this morning, looking very well…Webster was in the office at the time, and I had him take Larry over to the Station and show him around, and I am sure it was a pleasure to both of them. Larry has seen the outside, and said it was the finest thing on earth. I shall be back before you miss me.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “OFFICIALLY DECLARE THE STATION OPEN”

  The first day of August 1910 was a warm and sunny Monday in Gotham. On Seventh Avenue, the lunchtime traffic rumbled by, the automobilists in their Pierce Arrows and Whites impatiently blasting past horse-drawn carts and electric trolleys. Newsboys in ragged knickers and bare feet yelled the day’s big story: the murderer Dr. Hawley Crippen had been dramatically arrested at sea. Inside the still unopened Pennsylvania Station, the modern world with all its hurly burly and vehicular cacophony seemed far away. Several PRR men, who had just entered from the station’s colonnaded loggia, paused atop the forty-foot-wide Grand Stairway, awed anew by what Charles McKim had wrought: They looked up and about, admiring the vast and luminous space that was the General Waiting Room, McKim’s masterpiece of Roman grandeur.

  Towering sixty-foot-high Corinthian columns topped with carved acanthus leaves lifted the eye up 150 feet to the soaring groin-vaulted coffered ceiling, which framed eight huge and lovely semicircular lunette windows. Through these windows poured lambent shafts of moted sunshine, bathing the stone floor with moving pools of light. The warm honey-colored travertine of the stairway, walls, and massive fluted pillars was a clever blend of real marble brought all the way from Roman quarries, and a more economical matching faux-marble mixture. Travertine, as the PRR proudly noted, was the stone of ancient Roman monuments and never before used in the United States. Charles McKim had so skillfully evoked classical monuments that the very air seemed ancient, golden, suffused with quiet and timeless drama. Samuel Rea had already decreed that no advertising or even seating would mar the stateliness of this wondrous space.

  During those languorous days in Rome a decade earlier, McKim had been enthralled by the antiquity, grandiose scale, and grace of the Baths of Caracalla. Now, as the PRR men strolled down into Penn Station’s immense, glorious, and misnamed waiting room, they could see how the architect had incorporated that golden memory, giving to Gotham his last and greatest building, one of appropriately imperial formality, scale, and nobility. “The conditions of modern American life in which undertakings of great magnitude and scale are carried through…” noted McKim, Mead & White partner William Symmes Richardson, “are more nearly akin to the life of the Roman Empire than that of any other known civilization.”

  It was perhaps fitting that McKim had gone the Romans one better, making his American homage even bigger than those ancient baths. His General Waiting Room was the largest room in the world. Its dimensions were colossal—two city blocks wide and 150 feet high, enough to hold Gotham’s City Hall and then some. Its spare and somber beauty was lightened by Jules Guerin’s elegant pale blue map murals depicting the territory served by the Pennsylvania and Long Island railroads. The only other sign that this was the beginning of the twentieth century was the incandescent lighting. A double row of electrolier candelabra atop bronze pillars and marble pedestals created a pretty walkway through the immensity of the marble floor. In each corner were arrayed a marble-clad information desk, a ticket window, a parcel room, and a telephone and telegraph office.

  All this impending PRR grandeur had not been lost on the Vanderbilts. In 1902, they had announced that the New York Central would also build a brand new terminal, one equally magnificent, and invited a quartet of major firms, including McKim, Mead & White, to submit plans. When the railroad’s president chose a design (not Stanford White’s) with a huge, revenue-producing hotel atop it, chairman William K. Vanderbilt intervened, rejecting such crass considerations. Gustav Lindenthal wrote to Samuel Rea, “Everyone concedes that the Pennsylvania Railroad has been at extraordinary pains to make its railroad station in this city architecturally beautiful, and that fact may be said to have induced the New York Central Railroad to go to the very large expense of a new terminal building for its own road, conceived also on monumental lines.” Without a doubt.

  Penn Station’s General Waiting Room looking north to West Thirty-third Street in 1911.

  New York’s Penn Station was to be its own small city. Travelers coming through the main Seventh Avenue double-colonnaded pavilion and into the arched doors entered a graceful high-ceilinged arcade, a 235-foot “boulevard” lined with artful bronze shop fronts, their modern motifs set into the honeyed travertine marble walls of Ionic pilasters. The natural light pouring through the arcade’s lunette windows illuminated the luxurious displays of candies and flowers, as well as more practical goods dear to the traveler. At the end of the large and airy arcade, just before the grandeur of the General Waiting Room, were the station’s two restaurants. The one on the south side was the formal Corinthian Room, where tea was poured from fine silver, while the one on the north side was a lunch buffet with counter seating.

  Penn Station also offered the latest word in barbershops, haberdashers, shoeshine stands, both a gentlemen’s and a ladies’ waiting room, a men’s smoking lounge, luxurious pay toilets and changing chambers equipped down to silver-handled broom whisks, special waiting rooms for bereaved funeral parties, full-service baggage rooms, a small police station and two-cell jail, a staffed medical clinic, and all manner of amenities. On the Eighth Avenue side, there were new executive offices for the PRR and the LIRR. Above those, the station’s third and fourth floor were given over to a YMCA serving the road’s employees, offering not just sleeping quarters for 175 men, but a gym, a bowling alley, billiard room, library, and lecture and assembly rooms.

  On this momentous Monday, the small group of PRR men strolling through the luminous splendor of the General Waiting Room savored its timeless quality, knowing that soon enough its ethereal silence would give way to busy throngs of purposeful voyagers. Walking down the stairs from that magnificent waiting room into the train concourse, they left behind the past and entered an utterly inspired industrial present. McKim had reconfigured the familiar Victorian glass train shed into a complex railroad cathedral of light and dramatic motion, an airy rhythmic space of repeating, vaulted lacy steel-truss umbrella arches and glass skylights supported by tall slender steel pillars. The glass-block floors echoed the airiness, filtering natural light down to the eleven subterranean train platforms serving the twenty-one tracks. McKim (and then Richardson) had thought long and hard about the experience of train travel, designing the terminal so that departing passengers entered the train platforms through this upper concourse, while those arriving by train exited out from a lower separate concourse and onto the city streets. It was not hard, even in the warmth and quiet of this August afternoon, to envision the hurrying crowds of travelers moving through McKim’s version of the modern train shed, almost unconsciously savoring the dramatic possibilities of their travels, a drama heightened by the dreamy, shifting play of light through the vaulted glass ceilings. Charles McKim’s astute eye, his delight in detail and light, his pleasure in the romance of departures, arrivals, and novel sights, had all been embodied in Penn Station.

  Penn Station’s concourse in 1911.

  In his train station, McKim had called on a lifetime of architectural knowledge and passion to celebrate the human spirit and civilization itself. “While amply equipping Penn Station to sort and handle vast numbers of people and trains, and to sustain the fast-paced life of the city,” writes art historian Hilary Ballon, “M
cKim tried to temper the brute claims of efficiency with the reassuring comforts of historical tradition. Guided by a vision of civic grandeur, he translated the mundane business of boarding trains into a stately procession, and subsumed the commotion of constant movement and disorganized crowds into the station’s overriding order.”

  As the PRR men descended the steel concourse stairs they became players in their own corporate drama, awaiting a special two-car train arriving from Philadelphia, carrying President James McCrea, the board of directors, many officers, and Alexander Cassatt’s two sons and his son-in-law. (From Bar Harbor, Lois Cassatt had wired: “Poor health makes journey from here unwise for me.”) This day, August 1, 1910, was the official opening of the terminal, even though it would be months before the station truly opened for regular service. When the DD1 rolled quietly into the platform President McCrea, natty in white vest, bow tie, and Panama hat, stepped out, flanked by Samuel Rea and Captain Green, each attired in dark suits, ties, and summer straw hats. All the railroad men as a matter of punctilious habit checked their pocket watches to see how long the trip had taken from Manhattan Transfer—a highly satisfactory thirteen minutes.

  Charles McKim could not be present. He had died almost a year earlier, just sixty-two, his early demise precipitated, his friends and family believed, by the shock and heartache of Stanford White’s murder. Not long after Bessie White and Larry had sailed home from Paris and settled back into Long Island the previous summer, Bessie had invited McKim, now almost an invalid, to come to them to convalesce. Mead wrote, “Mrs. White feels that McKim always loved St. James, and everything is familiar to him down there, even the old horses on her place, and that he would be not only contented but encouraged.” And so McKim returned to the bucolic seaside of so many fond memories—the clamming and sea bathing, the good meals and conversations—the better to nurse his failing health. Bessie fixed up “the Red Cottage for him. She put in gateposts adorned with beskirted bronze horses that had been figureheads for gondolas in Venice…She furnished the house with, among other things, a five-foot-high Tyrolean chest…a Swiss gaming table…a corner cabinet that Stanford had improvised out of some ornamentally painted wooden panels from a Bavarian church.”