Lorraine B. Diehl’s The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station (1985), the first history of the station, is well written and beautifully illustrated. It set a high standard. Hilary Ballon’s New York’s Pennsylvania Stations (2002) is another well researched, handsome coffee table book, and she covered both the present Penn Station and a possible future redesigned Penn Station. William B. Middleton’s contribution in Manhattan Gateway: New York’s Pennsylvania Station (1996) was his technical explanations. Steven Parissien’s Pennsylvania Station: McKim, Mead and White (1996) with its gorgeous illustrations took a more architectural viewpoint. I enjoyed and drew on all of these earlier works.
So vast are the Pennsylvania Railroad’s old business files that they had to be divided among more than a dozen institutions. Archivist Christopher Baer, leading PRR expert, led the effort to place these valuable corporate records. Baer now works at one of those institutions, the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, where the Papers of Samuel Rea proved key to writing certain sections of this book.
But I kept hoping to find the full record of the New York Terminal and Tunnels Extension up in the Pennsylvania State Archives in Harrisburg, which holds Alexander Cassatt’s Presidential Papers. These gigantic Harrisburg PRR archival holdings have no detailed finding aide. Starting in 2000, I begin visiting Harrisburg trying to figure out these labryinthine records and where the Penn Station and tunnel building files might be. Finally, on October 3, 2002, I came upon them largely by accident. It was a thrilling eureka! moment as I realized that every file beginning with a 32 contained material about Penn Station and the North River and East River tunnel projects. It took two full days to work my way through all six cartons with their hundreds of files and thousands of photos just to get a general overview of the contents. As I opened one dusty folder after another to find letters, telegrams, photographs, and reports a century old, I suspected I might be the first person in decades (if not more) to look at these meticulous records. With them, I could write a new, detailed history of the monumental project that remade New York City.
Other useful archival sources were the Forgie Papers at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, with their additional North River tunnel material and another trove of photos; the McKim, Mead and White archives at the New-York Historical Society and also at the Avery Library at Columbia University. Finally, the archives of the Pennsylvania Railroad Museum in Strasburg, Pennsylvania, yielded up a few additional materials.
The sole biography of Alexander Cassatt, Patricia T. Davis’s End of the Line: Alexander J. Cassatt and the Pennsylvania Railroad (1978), was commissioned by his family and is workmanlike and useful. Sadly, few of Cassatt’s personal papers survive, whether in any public archive or even in the hands of descendants.
As for the Pennsylvania Railroad, the only history is a corporate endeavor, George H. Burgess and Miles C. Kennedy, Centennial History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 1846–1946 (1949).