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Milestones in History MILESTONES IN HISTORY PHOTOCOURTESYLIBRARYOFCONGRESS The Building of New York’s PENNSYLVANIA STATION BY JILL JONNES In spring of 1901, Pennsylvania Railroad railroads stuck on the Jersey shore. President Alexander J. Cassatt debarked But by summer of 1901, the bridge his Pullman Palace car at the Jersey City was dead: the other railroads balked Exchange Place Terminal, and joined at paying their share. the crowds streaming onto his company’s While in Paris that August visiting his huge double-decker ferries to cross the sister, the artist Mary Cassatt, the PRR Hudson River. For 30 years, it had galled president inspected one of the city’s train Cassatt to know that every New York- stations, the Gare d’Orsay, there finding bound Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) the possible solution. Perhaps the PRR, passenger—some 40 million too, could use electric-powered locomo- people a year—had to take a tives to enter Manhattan under, rather ferry. “I have never been able than over, the river. (Steam engines oper- to reconcile myself,” Cassatt ating in a mile-long tunnel would had once said, “to the idea asphyxiate the passengers.) that a railroad system like Cassatt quickly sailed back to New the Pennsylvania should be York with Charles Jacobs, the preeminent prevented from entering the English engineer of sub-aqueous tunnels, most important and popu- and Jacobs was soon spending nights lous city in the country by a on a PRR tugboat secretly probing the river less than a mile wide.” Hudson’s riverbed. Jacobs informed The very waters that Cassatt on Nov. 8 that the PRR could encircled the port city of New indeed build its tunnels 40 feet below York and made her so rich the riverbed. and powerful were now start- The caveat? The grade of those tun- ing to strangle her rambunc- nels dictated that they emerge—not at a tious growth, for no bridge derelict railyard on the far west side of or tunnel connected New Manhattan as Cassatt hoped—but in the York City to the mainland. West 30s, the city’s infamous vice district Ten railroads came to a halt known as the Tenderloin. Soon, the at the Jersey shore, while PRR was quietly buying up 28 acres of the Vanderbilts’ New York real estate in the shabby blocks filled with PHOTOCOURTESYLIBRARYOFCONGRESS Central trains steamed into bordellos, opium dens and wild dance Seventh Pennsylvania Railroad the city by crossing the river higher up halls. By January 1903, after a fierce President Alexander Johnston Cassatt at Poughkeepsie, traveling down the political battle to obtain the needed city died in 1906, just four years before the east bank of the river, and in to northern franchise, demolition and clearing began. rail station was completed. Manhattan over the Harlem River. Cassatt’s colossal engineering project, Under Cassatt’s aggressive leadership, known as the New York Tunnels and the mighty PRR hoped at long last to Terminal Extension, would begin in the enter New York by backing the construc- Jersey Meadowlands, blast two tunnels tion of the long-planned North River through the Bergen Highlands, and Bridge, a gargantuan $90 million, three- then begin descending far below the decker span [equivalent to $2.3 billion Hudson River. Those two tunnels would today] that could accommodate all the then enter 40 feet below Manhattan at WWW . DIXONVALVE . COM SPRING 2 0 1 0 ᔢ BOSS 27 Riding the Rails During World War II, when Penn Station served only the PRR and the Long Island Rail Road, 109 million passengers arrived or departed on trains in 1945. Today, Penn Station serves the Long Island Railroad, Amtrak and the New Jersey commuter lines, and about 200 million pas- sengers pass through each year, making it the busiest station in the United States. Both Waterloo Station in London and the Gare du Nord in Paris handle comparable numbers. But it is Japan, a nation famous for its top-speed rail travel, that boasts the world’s truly busiest New York architectural firm McKim, Mead & White used glass-and-steel train sheds in 1904 for the construction of the station. train stations. Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station serves 3.6 million passen- gers a day, followed by another understood, as no other man in America, “bends” or decompression sickness, Tokyo Station, Ikebukuro, which grandeur, the city nicknamed Gotham where excess nitrogen can form dan- serves about 2.7 million people a and the monumental. Inspired by the gerous bubbles in the body) as they day. In two months, as many pas- great buildings of Rome, McKim pushed the shields forward, assembling sengers come and go in Shinjuku designed Penn Station to be of imperial the 13 sections of each 23-foot-wide Station as go through Penn Station scale, its façade an imposing colonnaded cast-iron tunnel ring one after another. in a year! temple to transportation. Inside, McKim’s The tunnels grew, looking in their raw Penn Station would evoke the classical state like long, segmented snakes. past in its luminous General Waiting The PRR tunnelers had to be sure not Room, a space of extraordinary height to damage the New York piers or harbor and grandeur that drew on the archi- bulkheads overhead. Once out in the tect’s memories of a visit to the ruins rivers, problems arose with quicksand. the new West 34th Street train station. of the Roman Baths of Caracalla. The tunnels were piped full of com- From there, four tunnels would cross On June 24, 1903, Charles Jacobs pressed air, which held the river water town below the city streets, heading gathered with his junior engineers on at bay. But sometimes that compressed down again under the East River. The the west side and drilled the historic air found a way to escape, and these two PRR tunnels would end in the new first hole for the Hudson River tunnels, deadly “air blows,” as they were called, Sunnyside Yards in Queens, while the dispatching the drill to Cassatt as a especially plagued the East River tunnels. two Long Island Rail Road tunnels would souvenir. And so began the actual dig- When the tunnel “blew,” terrifying continue on out to the island. All told, ging for a civil engineering work of floods of water cascaded in. Every foot 16 miles of tunnels had to be built. extraordinary ambition, scale and peril. of the way, the alignment engineers Samuel Rea, who had joined the PRR Engineers pushed the two Hudson and were measuring to be sure the tunnels as a 16-year-old rod-and-chainman, four East River tunnels simultaneously. were on track to meet up and join in supervised this $100 million engineer- As soon as the shafts were sunk, the the middle of the rivers. ing project that would forever transform engineers began assembling on each Meanwhile, a gigantic hole was being the physical and psychic geography of end of the tunnels the Greathead shields, blasting and excavated in the Tenderloin, New York City. strange 193-ton behemoths of machines, for the site for Penn Station had to be Pennsylvania Station would serve as gigantic mechanical moles that would 50 feet deep. Such was the spectacle, the visible crown jewel of this monu- burrow deep under the river, leaving that day and night, crowds watched the mental but largely subterranean work. in their laborious wake the new tunnel. blasting, peering into the evermore On April 23, 1902, Cassatt bestowed Greathead shields were assembled at gargantuan canyon, where little trains that plum commission upon architect the ends of each tunnel. Once under the hauled away the debris via specially Charles F. McKim of McKim, Mead & rivers, the “sand hogs,” as the tunnel constructed elevated rail lines that led White, who had never designed a workers were nicknamed, worked in to the West Side piers and awaiting train station in his life. But McKim compressed air (with serious risk of the barges. The amount of debris was so 28 BOSS ᔢ SPRING 2 0 1 0 substantial that it was used to fill in elegant pale blue map murals depicting wetlands in Greenville, N.J., to create an the PRR’s rail lines. “In thousands the additional rail yard for the PRR. [throngs] flooded the acres of its floor As the tunnels neared completion in space,” reported the Tribune, “and gazed 1908, New Yorkers were amazed to watch like awestruck pygmies at the vaulted what seemed to be an ancient monument ceilings far above them, inspected curi- rising on shabby 7th Avenue—McKim’s ously the tiny details of the place, so magnificent Roman temple, a strange beautifully finished.” classical vision with its austere columns Passengers catching the first trains carved from rosy-hued Milford sand- from the new concourse marveled at stone. By now, sadly, Alexander Cassatt, McKim’s version of the familiar Victorian 67, had died, succumbing in late 1906 train shed: a railroad cathedral of light to the strains of the PRR presidency. and dramatic motion, an airy rhythmic Samuel Rea, who assumed full charge space of repeating, vaulted lacy steel-truss of the project, had his own tragedy: the umbrella arches, the glass skylights sup- death of his only son, a junior engineer, ported by tall slender steel pillars. Cassatt from a flu contracted working in the and Rea had bestowed a gateway worthy PHOTOCOURTESYLIBRARYOFCONGRESS PRR tunnels. Charles McKim’s health of the nation’s most important city. Inspired by Roman Baths of Caracalla, the was also failing. And yet, the great As the decades passed, the great age station’s main waiting room is approximately PRR project moved inexorably forward.
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