by Jill Jonnes
Only Evelyn Nesbit survived from Gilded Age Gotham, her ethereal girlish beauty long gone. After the Thaws had abandoned her, she had triumphed in a series of smash hit vaudeville shows, but these interludes of showbiz success merely masked her private struggles with alcoholism, morphine addiction, suicide attempts, and the necessity of earning a living. Over the years she sold her story again and again to various newspapers and publishers. In 1955, the movie The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing made Evelyn, now age seventy and given to wearing heavy spectacles, briefly known to a new generation. “You must be wiser than most women and wealthier than most women if you are beautiful,” Evelyn told an interviewer then. “For there is no way to avoid danger if you are beautiful.” She had raised a son she said was fathered by Thaw (he denied it), and in her old age was living modestly in Los Angeles and teaching ceramics. She had long outlived Harry Thaw, dead in 1947 of a heart attack. Mad Harry had gained his freedom, only to revert with a vengeance to his wastrel ways, a regular item in the yellow press with his brawls, sordid flings, costly cover-ups, and bailouts.
Through the ballyhoo of the new Madison Square Garden deal, a handful of Manhattan architects discerned that the Pennsylvania Railroad Company intended to demolish its classical New York station. In spring 1962, this small group raised the alarm, banding together as the Action Group for Better Architecture in New York. On August 2, 1962, they marshaled two hundred concerned architects and others, elegant in their suits, the women in pearls and high heels, and set up a picket line outside the station at five o’clock as the sea of humanity flowed in and out for the evening rush hour. The architects, many of them renowned modernists, marched carrying picket signs emblazoned with slogans: “Don’t demolish it! Polish it!” and “Save Our Heritage” or “Action Not Apathy!” They buttonholed commuters and gathered several hundred signatures on petitions to stop the demolition.
Later that evening, several journeyed out to the Port Authority’s Idlewild International Airport to greet Mayor Wagner as he jetted back from a European vacation, pleading with him to join their crusade. Eventually, prodded by James Felt, chairman of the City Planning Commission and, oddly, brother of the very developer planning to destroy Penn Station, the mayor appointed a Landmarks Preservation Commission. But it had no real power yet. And there were rebuffed suggestions that the Port Authority take over Penn Station, as it had McAdoo’s New Jersey trains, which became known as the PATH, or the Port Authority Trans-Hudson.
The AGBANY architects were stunned at how few of their fellow citizens seemed to care. “People never heard of landmarks in 1962,” said Norval White, chairman of the group. “They didn’t realize what they were about to lose.” Norman Jaffe, another member, recalls his boss, architect Philip Johnson, warning, “You can picket all you want, but it’s not going to do any good. If you want to save Pennsylvania Station, you have to buy it.” “There was not consciousness among most New Yorkers of the value of old architecture,” said Elliot Willensky. “People wanted automobiles, suburban houses,” explained Kent Bartwick, a future chairman of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. “There wasn’t much affection for the city itself around the country.”
Perhaps the hard truth was this: New Yorkers had never come to really love Penn Station. Charles Follen McKim, an architect rankled by the very skyscrapers, crowds, and cacophony that embodied modern New York, had designed a classical monument out of step with its own time and place. In 1939, Fortune magazine had ungraciously described McKim’s masterpiece as “a landmark from Philadelphia [that] squats on the busiest part of underground New York.” The Fortune article about the station, while affectionate about men like “Big Bill” Egan and station cats (two mousers), was otherwise grudging: “Pennsylvania Station affronts the very architectural rationale on which New York is founded by daring to be horizontal rather than a vertical giant. Many New Yorkers unconsciously resent the Pennsylvania Station for that reason…To sensitive New Yorkers the station’s body is on Seventh Avenue, but its soul is in Philadelphia…The New York Central Railroad, on the other hand, was put together in New York and New Yorkers think of the Grand Central Terminal as a native…it has the grace to be newer, more vertical, and compactly efficient in a way New Yorkers admire.” In short, the Pennsylvania Station was the work of men who did not love New York. It seemed that the subsequent decades—as even Penn Station’s grandeur had faded with grime and neglect—had done little to overcome that lingering native resentment. And so, the plans advanced for the destruction of one of the city’s noblest civic spaces and monuments.
Aside from the AGBANY architects, a few lone voices expressed outrage. The New York Times and its architecture writer, Ada Louise Huxtable, inveighed against “carte blanche for demolition of landmarks…We can never again afford a nine-acre structure of superbly detailed solid travertine…The tragedy is that our own times not only could not produce such a building, but cannot even maintain it.” The president of the PRR, A. J. Greenough, defended the impending destruction, saying in a letter to the Times that “Pennsylvania Station is no longer the grand portal to New York that it was in the days of the long-line passenger travel.” One city official said in an interview, “Pennsylvania Station is one of the city’s great buildings of our time. I’m working on a plan to save the columns.” Even that rather pathetic gesture was beyond the city’s ken.
On October 28, 1963, as the very skies seemed to weep a gentle rain, desecration and demolition began. By eleven o’clock, the first of sculptor Weinman’s twenty-two imperial Roman eagles, symbol of the Caesars, had been detached from its aerie and lowered to the pavement. There that imposing stone raptor looked trapped, the three-ton centerpiece of a group photo of grinning officials wearing hard hats. The station’s main clock was sentimentally set at 10:53 to signal the opening date of the station, 1910, and its lifetime, fifty-three years. That afternoon the AGBANY architects reappeared to march silently in protest, wearing black armbands and hoisting picket signs reading simply, “SHAME!” as the wrecking team attacked with jackhammers.
“Until the first blow fell no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished,” editorialized the New York Times, “or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance…Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tin-horn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.”
By the summer, the wrecking crews, working carefully in the sticky New York heat not to disrupt the regular comings and goings of the six hundred trains in the station below them—the part built by George Gibbs—were desecrating McKim’s General Waiting Room, with its great lunette windows streaming in huge shafts of light. “A half century of emotion hung in the air,” writes Lorraine B. Diehl, “textured with memories of two world wars, a worldwide depression, and the private histories of people coming and going, meeting and parting. So many Americans passed through this room, leaving so much of themselves behind, that it seemed to belong to all of them.”
Now, as the wreckers pressed on, it “looked like the bombed-out shell of a great cathedral. Coils and wires hung like entrails from its cracked and open walls. The men with jack-hammers filled the air with noise and dust. The noise violated memory; the dust smelled of death.”
And so, slowly, McKim’s great temple built for the centuries was methodically dismantled over four years. By July 1966 the demolition crews were ready to remove Weinman’s quartet of female statues, each pair representing Day and Night and arrayed around one of the enormous outdoor clocks. Some were saved, but like much of Penn Station, the rest were unceremoniously dumped in the swamps of the Meadowlands, along with the gigantic Doric columns that had once lined Seventh Avenue. This strange instant ruin, complete with snapped and strewn columns and tumbled statuary,
was all sadly visible to the passing Pennsylvania trains. By the time winter arrived in 1966, the destruction was complete. McKim and Cassatt’s monumental gateway was gone. Several weeks later, on January 18, 1967, Evelyn Nesbit died in a nursing home in Santa Monica. Just before Thanksgiving, the last of the Hudson River ferryboats made its final crossing, the Erie-Lackawanna’s service between Hoboken and lower Manhattan, departing for its terminal voyage at 5:45 p.m. from Barclay Street. Most of the three thousand passengers who “still rode the comfortable, broad-beamed boats chose to do so not so much for convenience as for romance.” Perhaps they would now drive their cars. It was the end of an era.
The statue of Cassatt, that visionary corporate leader, had been plucked from its niche and consigned to his alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York, where it passed many years in storage before finding a home in the Pennsylvania Railroad Museum in Strasburg, Pennsylvania, along with his Sargent oil portrait. Samuel Rea’s statue was relocated to the outside Seventh Avenue entrance at 2 Penn Plaza, along with two of Weinman’s stone eagles. There Rea still stands, a monumental bronze sentinel looking much diminished and out of place, eternally watching the automobile traffic roar downtown, a poignant, little-noticed reminder of splendor lost. As for the new Penn Station, it was and is a mingy low-ceilinged affair little better than a bus depot. But neither the PRR’s desperate despoilment of its magnificent temple nor its doomed 1968 merger with its old rival the New York Central could save those proud old empires of passenger rail. Grudging government ownership was their unfortunate fate. And yet, when developers came to destroy Grand Central Terminal, outraged New Yorkers rallied to its defense, invoking a now powerful landmarks law.
All these decades later—as our love affair with cars and airplanes has soured—there is hope that New York can once again reclaim the grandeur of arriving by train in Gotham. Little could Alexander Cassatt have dreamed that the land his corporation sold on Eighth Avenue for a central post office would become so important. But it is this austere Corinthian General Post Office Building (a New York landmark long known as the James A. Farley Building) that opened in 1913 and its large 1934 addition that offer salvation. These elegant structures are now the centerpiece of a plan that envisions them reconfigured to serve the riders of New Jersey commuter trains. There is also serious talk of demolishing hideous Madison Square Garden and once again erecting a new train station worthy of New York.
Gotham’s Pennsylvania Station. “Through it one entered the city like a god,” wrote architect Vincent Scully of that old wondrous monument in his American Architecture and Urbanism. “Perhaps it was really too much,” Scully pondered, lamenting that “One scuttles in now like a rat.” Maybe now we can hope for a return to the grandeur of the past.
The statue of Day in the Meadowlands.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Conquering Gotham has been in the works for a long time and I have accrued many debts.
First, I would like to thank my agent, the always wonderful Eric Simonoff of Janklow & Nesbit, and my two excellent editors at Viking, Rick Kot and Hilary Redmon, whose work measurably improved the manuscript, as did that of copy editor extraordinaire Elaine Luthy.
Early on, I worked at the Hagley Museum and Library, where Chris Baer continues to be the ultimate expert on the Pennsylvania Railroad, promptly answering all the many, many questions that have arisen in the course of research and writing. During a half dozen years at the Pennsylvania State Archive in Harrisburg, I was helped by good-natured staffers there: Bill Gordon, Brett Reigh, Michael Sherbon, Willis Shirk, Rich Saylor, Jason Amico, Jonathon Stayer, Jerry Ellis, Judie Marcus and Cynthia Margolies. Gerald A. Francis of the Lower Merion Historical Society outside Philadelphia kindly answered various inquiries. As ever, I have depended on the knowledgeable staff of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University.
Mark Reutter, editor of Railroad History, has been endlessly helpful and truly generous. He has fielded innumerable e-mails, carefully read the manuscript, proffered invaluable advice, and been a good dinner companion. In Philadelphia, Jeff Groff of Wyck House has been similarly generous, providing entree to the Philadelphia side of the story and also thoroughly reading the manuscript. Through him I met Pliny Jewell, the great-grandson of Samuel Rea. I was also very fortunate to have the help of Cassatt descendants, Jacques de Spoelberch and Polly Maguire, whose husband, Robert, kindly handled my many inquiries and provided materials, including photos. John Marshall, who is writing a biography of PRR president William W. Atterbury, graciously shared a trove of materials. Both Larry Grubb and Dave Sonderblum read early versions of the manuscript, for which many thanks.
Lorraine B. Diehl, whose classic The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station is the original excellent hisory and photo documentation of Penn Station, has been kind and very helpful, especially as I was gathering photos. John Turkeli gave a fascinating tour of the present Penn Station, shared his impressive collection of images, and kindly lent several for illustrations. Cyndy Serfas wielded her technological prowess on behalf of the photos, as did Viking’s Jacqueline Powers.
Karen Hansen and David Melnick put me up many nights in Delaware, as did Peggy and Bob Sarlin in New York, and were, as always, good company.
NOTES
All material attributed to “PRR Archives, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania” is from the group of papers to be found in the Cassatt Presidential Correspondence, Pennsylvania Railroad Archives, MG 286, Penn Central Railroad Collection, Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg.
1. “WE MUST FIND A WAY TO CROSS”
“one of the handsomest”: “The P.R.R.’s New Station,” New-York Tribune, February 12, 1899, p. 13.
“Gentlemen will not”: Philip Burne-Jones, Dollars and Democracy (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1904), pp. 27–28.
“most brilliant railroad official”: “A. J. Cassatt Unanimously Chosen,” Philadelphia Ledger, June 10, 1899, p. 1.
“The Pennsylvania”: George H. Burgess and Miles C. Kennedy, Centennial History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company 1846–1946 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 1949), p. 363.
“We are now taking up”: A. J. Cassatt to General William J. Sewell. April 3, 1900, carton 2, folder 2/39, PRR Archives, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
“These railway kings”: James Bryce, The American Commonwealth 3 (London: Macmillan, 1888), pp. 412–13.
“We stand on our last railroad tie”: “The Centre of the Universe,” New York Herald, Sunday Magazine, Oct. 24, 1909, pt. 2, p. 9.
“bits of wood, straw”: Rupert Brooke, Letters from America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), p. 8.
“Waterfront as squalid”: E. Idell Zeisloft, ed. The New Metropolis (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1899), p. 586.
“one of the most inconvenient”: Kurt Schlicting, Grand Central Terminal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 53.
“Through the fog”: William G. McAdoo, Crowded Years: The Reminiscences of William G. McAdoo (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), p. 66.
“In daylight, dusk, and darkness”: Maximilian Foster, “The Waterways of New York,” Munsey’s, November 1900, pp. 200–201.
“I have never been able to reconcile myself”: “Long Island’s New Era,” New York Times, Sunday September 4, 1910, pt. 7 (Special Long Island Section), p. 1.
2. HASKINS’S TUNNEL AND LINDENTHAL’S BRIDGE
“Of all the great improvements”: “The Hudson River Tunnel,” New York Times, May 25, 1880, p. 4.
“It is built”: “Down Under the Hudson,” New York Times, July 18, 1880, p. 1.
“That we have gone 300 feet”: “Science in Tunnel Building,” New York Times, Oct. 1, 1880, p. 8.
“slippery blue black”: “Down Under the Hudson,” New York Times, July 18, 1880, p. 1.
“to furnish a brace”: Ibid.
“a thin semi-circular”: Ibid.
“Everything about”: Ibid.
“My God! The wate
r is gaining”: “A Collapsed Tunnel,” New York Herald, July 22, 1880, p. 1.
“Engineering skill”: Ibid.
“This tunnel scheme”: “Science in Tunnel Building,” New York Times, October 1, 1880, p. 8.
“Many of these roads”: John Moody, The Railroad Builders (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), p. 215.
“The sun is no longer”: Ian R. Bartky, “The Adoption of Standard Time,” Technology & Culture 30 (1989): 49–52.
“in national importance”: “Bridge Across the Hudson River at New York City,” House of Representatives, 51st Cong., 1st sess., report no. 928, p. 37.
“We are not disposed to disturb”: Francis N. Barksdale, “The Pennsylvania Station in New York,” Samuel Rea Papers, Accession 1810, carton 146, folder 10, The Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware.
“perpetual control”: Ibid.
“hard work tramping…”: “A. J. Cassatt Stricken by Sudden Death,” Philadelphia Record, December 29, 1906, p. 1.
