ONE

“WE MUST FIND A WAY TO CROSS”

Alexander J. Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, arose from the plush chair in his Pullman Palace car sitting room, checking the time on his gold pocket watch. The train was slowing, approaching the railroad’s Jersey City station and ferry depot, and billows of steam smoke floated past. The black porter and chef bustled about, the aroma of good coffee lingered, and Tiffany lamps set the polished wood paneling aglow. Cassatt, well over six feet tall, wore a dark old-fashioned frock coat, vest, starched white high-collar shirt, and cravat. As he and several of his PRR officers debarked onto the platform they were enveloped by the sooty clangor of their road’s Jersey City Exchange Place Terminal. On this morning in late May 1901, the men strode briskly, joining the impatient tide of travelers and commuters in the new depot, which, with its cavernous, arched glass-ceilinged train shed, rebuilt after a bad fire, had been hailed by the New-York Tribune as “one of the handsomest and most commodious in the world.”

Uniformed porters maneuvered steamer trunks and valises, while a sea of dark-suited men sporting derbies and young women in Gibson-style shirtwaists and broad-brimmed hats hurried to board one of the railroad’s double-decker ferries, huge rumbling boats bound for Manhattan. On the lower decks, one could see and smell horses pulling express wagons and drays up the gangways, jostling into place. On the upper deck, the reek of locomotive coal smoke gave way to the pungent scent of the river. The gigantic ferries named for the road’s far-flung empire—the Philadelphia, the Pittsburgh, the St. Louis—were painted a signature Tuscan red, and emblazoned with the PRR’s proud keystone crest. As the commuter throng pressed onto the Cortlandt Street ferry, a sign admonished passengers: “Gentlemen will not, others must not, spit on the floor.” The freshening river breezes riffled Cassatt’s thinning sandy hair and drooping mustache as he angled to the front of the open deck, his intelligent blue-gray eyes calmly sizing things up. Cassatt’s aura of authority was tempered by a laconic reserve, a slight stoop, and hint of melancholy. Little known to the general public, Alexander J. Cassatt had long been viewed by his peers as the “most brilliant railroad official in this country.” With American railroads at the apogee of their importance and influence—the mightiest and, in some circles, most despised economic force in the nation—this was no small accolade. Cassatt, a veteran engineer and executive of immense talent, had reluctantly emerged two years earlier, in 1899, from seventeen years of pleasant retirement to take charge of the Pennsylvania Railroad, thus becoming one of the most powerful men in the United States.

All about him was the luminous briny river air and ahead a wondrous sweep of sky and currents. Yet the very bodies of glistening water that encircled Manhattan and made the port city so rich were now starting to strangle her rambunctious growth. In 1901, only one major bridge, that marvel of grace and engineering, the Brooklyn Bridge, connected Manhattan to any other piece of land. Only one railway, the Vanderbilts’ New York Central Railroad, came directly into Manhattan, and that from upstate. The New York Central ran down the east bank of the Hudson River, across the narrow Harlem River, and into the heart of Gotham. For many decades, sole ownership of this wonderful monopoly had made the Vanderbilts America’s richest family, notorious for their churlish indifference to the well-being of their road’s passengers. The late, large William H. Vanderbilt—his mausoleum still guarded by Pinkertons around the clock against grave robbers—had summed it up neatly with his infamously imperious, “Let the public be damned.”

The other ten railroads serving New York, the world’s greatest port as well as the nation’s colossus of trade, finance, manufacturing, and culture, had had no choice but to build sprawling waterfront terminals on the industrialized New Jersey shore and to operate fleets of ferries across to Gotham. In typical corporate understatement, the PRR’s official historians noted that “The Pennsylvania, as the Central’s greatest rival, could not view this situation complacently.”

Alexander Cassatt found these ferry rides a galling reminder that, unlike its nemesis, the Central, the Pennsylvania Railroad, which prided itself on being the nation’s largest, richest, and best-operated road, still had no way to bring its trains into the commercial heart of the nation’s busiest seaport. Easy access to Gotham was arguably as important in the twentieth century as had been the building of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s or the great interoceanic canal now being proposed to cross the Isthmus of Panama. And yet, astonishingly, there was no definite plan. No bridge or tunnel of the magnitude needed to span the Hudson River had ever been built. But Cassatt could now console himself that he and his great corporation were actively considering building the gargantuan North River Bridge, the long-promoted solution of engineer Gustav Lindenthal and what would be the biggest bridge in the world. As Cassatt had confided to General William J. Sewell the previous spring, “We are now taking up the question of the construction of the bridge seriously.”

British politician James Bryce had been stunned by the princely power and influence of American railroads and the men—“potentates”—who ran them, writing in 1888, “These railway kings are among the greatest men, perhaps I may say are the greatest men, in America…They have power, more power—that is, more opportunity of making their personal will prevail—than perhaps any one in political life, except the President and the Speaker.” By 1900, the 185,000 miles of American rails equaled those of the whole rest of the world combined.

Alexander Cassatt, as the seventh president in the history of the Pennsylvania Railroad, intended to wield his corporate power to accomplish what no other man had yet done: He would somehow send the Pennsylvania Railroad across the mile-wide Hudson River and bring its elegant gleaming passenger trains triumphantly into the heart of Manhattan. “We stand on our last railroad tie within view of [Gotham] and cannot reach it,” he said in frustration. “We must find a way to cross.” He also intended to redress, some might say avenge, some long-festering corporate wrongs.

 

The ferry whistle shrieked, the powerful engines rumbled, and the behemoth ferry bearing Cassatt, his officers, and a thousand passengers began threading its way across the mile-wide Hudson, long known to sailors as the North River. Ahead, the sky enveloped the gray-green river, a wide panorama alive with maritime hustle. To starboard, an ocean liner attended by tugs steamed in from its Atlantic voyage, while all about sailed shabby workhorse sloops and huge six-and seven-masted schooners carrying loads of sand, bricks, granite blocks, and crushed stone.

Busy maritime traffic on the North River in 1898.

The Hudson River was vivid testimony to New York’s extraordinary economic boom. Coming downriver from Albany were palatial side-wheelers as well as tugs towing three, six, eight, even ten blue Erie Canal barges laden with ice, coal, and lowing cattle. Later in the summer these barges would bear the bumper harvests of Midwest wheat and corn to be stored in the city’s big dockside grain elevators before export overseas. The red, green, and olive passenger ferries lumbered back and forth, day and night, from shore to shore, as did the railroads’ “floaters” and “lighters,” huge wooden platformlike vessels (often complete with shed and rails) ferrying freight cars to rail yards for unloading in New York or continuation to New England. Some people never became accustomed to the odd sight of trains traveling slowly along atop the water.

 

On such a glistening spring day out upon the Hudson River, when the shore receded, and the primal feel of river and nature asserted themselves, a determined dreamer aboard the ferry could conjure up the ancient Ice Age whose brute geologic forces had gouged out Gotham’s incomparable harbor. That very New Jersey riverbank, that grimy jumble of rail yards, terminals, ferry berths, and ocean liner docks, backed by high palisades, had all been encased by a massive thousand-foot-high glacier, as had much of North America. The glacier’s pulverizing weight, edging gradually south, had crushed the land, heaving up hills and cliffs, its glacial advance down through the Hudson River valley scraping out an ever-deeper estuary that swept a hundred miles beyond present New York to the then Atlantic shoreline and an ocean ten thousand feet shallower than that of today.

When the world began to warm an imponderable seventeen thousand years ago and ice sheets gradually melted and retreated, the oceans rose precipitously. What would become New York City was left encircled by marvelously deep, broad waters, and the glacially carved Hudson River ebbed and flowed for 170 miles with the ocean’s tides, its dark rippling currents separating the island of Manhattan from the wilderness of the mainland.

 

On the ferry, Alexander Cassatt and his fellow passengers could feel the languorous river breezes freshening as the New York skyline grew steadily larger. On the bluest and calmest of days, Manhattan seemed but a stone’s throw away, and the ferry ride was a fifteen-minute interlude of nautical pleasure. Cassatt could now easily spot the shimmering gold dome of Joseph Pulitzer’s World Building alongside six of the new twenty-story skyscrapers that dwarfed such familiar landmarks as the steeple of Wall Street’s Trinity Church.

Cassatt was painfully aware that while the lumbering ferries seemed wonderfully stolid they were not. The previous fall, right off this very Cortlandt Street slip, the PRR’s Chicago had been rammed by the crowded coastline steamer City of Augusta just after midnight and had sunk in minutes. Several passengers, a bootblack, and half a dozen teams of milk wagon horses had drowned.

Today all went smoothly, the ferry engines slowing as the vessel nestled expertly into the railroad’s dock, where the oily river, full of refuse, “bits of wood, straw from barges, bottles, boxes, paper, occasionally a dead cat or dog, hideously bladder-like, its four paws stiff and indignant towards heaven,” lapped at the pier. The city’s urchins, indifferent to the river’s debris, could be seen cavorting and swimming, their yells and shouts blending in with the harbor noises.

West Street in Manhattan where the ferries arrived from New Jersey.

Alexander Cassatt and his fellow passengers streamed off the Pennsylvania Railroad ferry that morning, into the bedlam of West Street, which the New-York Tribune excoriated as “a whirlpool of slime, muck, wheels, hoofs, and destruction,” a cobblestoned maelstrom jammed with cabdrivers, express wagons, garbage carts, beer skids, and yelling teamsters steering their powerful horses around the clanging trolley cars. Here was a “waterfront as squalid and dirty and ill smelling as that of any Oriental port…[lined with] storage and cold-storage warehouses and large commission houses…whose closed iron shutters…look gloomy and forbidding.” Low corner saloons, dives that catered to the longshoremen and sailors from all over the world, were plentiful, and criminal gangs plagued the docks at night.

Scruffy street vendors loudly hawked fresh coffee and roasted peanuts. In colder months came the oyster carts, offering juicy bivalves the size of your hand. Pedestrians were used to negotiating the towering piles of shucked oyster shells, one of the less disagreeable aspects of the city’s legendary filth. The sour, ever-present smell of horse piss permeating the air was tolerable at this time of year. What made all this intolerable to Cassatt was that the PRR’s perennial rival, the Vanderbilts’ New York Central, delivered its passengers straight into the city’s northern heart in its recently expanded Grand Central Station, uptown on East Forty-second Street. The frustrating truth was that the Pennsylvania Railroad, while rumored to control whole legislatures and certain U.S. senators, had not yet managed to overcome nature in the form of the North River, a fact rudely reaffirmed on every ferry journey to New York and thus a perennial “bitter trial.”

Cassatt and his officers followed the crowds of commuters up Cedar Street, crowded with pushcart vendors and tea merchants, to the railroad’s skyscraper offices in the American Bank Exchange Building at the corner of Broadway. True, the New York Times had recently declared the Vanderbilt’s railroad terminal “one of the most inconvenient and unpleasant railroad stations in the whole country…the ugly structure has long been a disgrace to the metropolis.” But this was small consolation to Cassatt and his railroad, repeatedly stymied in their relentless thirty-year quest to reach Manhattan.

A beautiful ferry ride like today’s could only briefly erase the vexatious reality that on many days fog swirled in from the Atlantic Ocean to shroud the Hudson River, bringing danger and delays. Then, recalled lawyer and developer William G. McAdoo, “Through the fog came a bedlam of mournful sounds, the deep bellowing of ocean liners, the angry screams of tugboats, the long, eerie cries of the ferry sirens that reminded one of sea gulls…It was picturesque, but most people…had no time for marine adventures. They were on their way to their daily jobs, or to catch trains, or to keep appointments.” In brutally cold winters the Hudson clotted up with thick ice and became almost impossible to navigate.

With each passing decade, the situation became more untenable, more disastrous. In Cassatt’s lifetime, the metropolis of New York had become a marvel of the modern age. As the nineteenth century with all its industrial wonders—the railroads, the telegraph, the Atlantic cable, electricity, the new automobiles—became the twentieth, every citizen of New York saw that this water-locked city reigned supreme. Not only was it the world’s greatest port, Gotham’s powerful banks and rapacious Wall Street financiers—men like J. P. Morgan and August Belmont Jr.—were forces to be courted and feared. The city’s influential battling newspapers—the World, the Journal American, the Herald, the Sun, the New York Times, and the Tribune, to name but the biggest—were read across the land. The city’s infamous political bosses—the Republican Thomas Collier Platt, the thuggish Tammany chieftain Richard Croker—were key to any presidential election. Platt even temporarily rid himself of the reformer governor Theodore Roosevelt by foisting him upon President William McKinley as vice president. The city’s main avenue, Broadway, was a phenomenon in its own right, a phalanx of dazzling theaters, world-famous hotels, and stylish restaurants. Nearby was the iniquitous Tenderloin, Manhattan’s vice district. Book and magazine publishing, department stores, and a myriad of other enterprises fueled the city’s amazing prosperity and set the standard for the rest of America. This world-class polyglot city simply had to be reliably and conveniently connected to the nation it now dominated.

 

Gotham’s visceral commercial energy was embodied in its new Wall Street skyscrapers, its jammed avenues and sidewalks, and above all, in its port. One journalist wrote of New York’s waterfront: “In daylight, dusk, and darkness, [the city] never halts or falters. Cargoes from every port from every nook and cranny of the world…are forever clearing or discharging at the wharves…Here on the South Street front is a veritable forest of masts.” Sicilian lemons, Brazilian coffee, Indian spices, fine West Indian wood poured forth from these holds. When the reporter looked northward on the Hudson River side of the port, he saw “the great Atlantic steamers beside long piers crowned with double storied sheds of corrugated iron…Rank after rank of castled stacks stretch away into perspective, each marked with the distinctive color bands of its company…The Bermuda docks end the ocean trade, and oyster and ice boats, tiny in comparison with the liners, crowd the docks and bulkheads.”

All this power and prosperity acted as an irresistible magnet, and the population of the newly consolidated boroughs of New York City had swelled to three and a half million. Each day a tidal wave of workers, shoppers, and travelers poured in to Manhattan, flooding the Brooklyn Bridge and the fleets of ferries coming from New Jersey, Staten Island, the Bronx, and Queens, crowding the commercial districts and pushing Gotham’s energetic cacophony to fever pitch. By 1901 Manhattan had become one of the most densely populated places on earth, a gilded city notorious for high-living millionaires, corrupt Tammany rule, thriving vice districts, and the fetid misery of the tenements and flophouses for the legions of the down and out.

The sheer daily difficulty of getting in and out of Manhattan was creating more of these scabrous slums and choking the economy. All the railroads, except for the Vanderbilts’, came to an abrupt halt at the Hudson River. In Jersey City, there sprawled the terminals and ferry depots for the Pennsylvania and Erie railroads, as well as those of the New York, Ontario & Western Railroad, and the New York, Susquehanna & Western. The Central of New Jersey terminal sat slightly downriver in Communipaw and also served the Baltimore & Ohio, the Philadelphia & Reading, and the Lehigh Valley railroads. Upriver in Hoboken lay the terminus of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, while the New York, West Shore & Buffalo came into Weehawken. All told, twelve hundred trains a day steamed into the various New Jersey terminals. By 1901 the railroad ferries of six companies, carrying eighty million passengers a year, were part of the busy maritime traffic of the mile-wide Hudson River, negotiating its daily moods, shifting weather, tides, and currents.

And so, when Alexander Cassatt agreed to ascend to the presidency of the Pennsylvania Railroad, his greatest ambition was to span that last watery mile across the North River and into Gotham, to transport his trains, at long last, in proper glory into Manhattan. As Cassatt told a fellow engineer while the two studied a map of the PRR lines, “I have never been able to reconcile myself to the idea that a railroad system like the Pennsylvania should be prevented from entering the most important and populous city in the country by a river less than a mile wide.”