As Gotham suffered through the miserable days of a “hot wave” in late June 1901, Alexander Cassatt busied himself with financiers and railroad officers, pushing forward the North River Bridge project. “The Pennsylvania Railroad,” confided one anonymous financier to the New York Times, “is bound to have this bridge built. It has decided that it needs an entrance, and it is going to have it. It is not satisfied with its terminals in Jersey, and it is not going to stay there. It has made up its mind to this effect, and when the Pennsylvania undertakes to do a thing it always does it.” Cassatt believed that persuading the other roads would not be too difficult. In the previous year, ninety million passengers crossed from New Jersey on ferries, almost forty million of those on the PRR’s boats. And the city and nation were still growing like Topsy. President William McKinley had been handily reelected and the country was riding a wave of unprecedented prosperity.
By Monday July 1, the “hot wave” had become so scorching and relentless it had vanquished Manhattan’s legendary energy. At dawn in the tenement districts, entire families slept inert on every fire escape and sidewalk. The greensward of the Battery, with its tiny harbor breezes, was solid with splayed, prostrate figures, reminiscent of a Civil War battlefield. By two o’clock that afternoon the thermometer in Herald Square hit a record-breaking 108 degrees, and heat “devils” shimmered up from the broiling cobblestones. By Monday night, eighty-seven people had died from the heat. On the streets, dead horses gathered flies. By Tuesday morning, the “heat was so intense,” reported the New York Times, “that the entire city was as if paralyzed. Many big companies and wholesale houses closed their doors as early as noon.” That night another two hundred souls died. Finally, the next day, violent thunderstorms swept through Gotham, refreshing the spent city with its torrents, followed by a steady drizzle that cooled the night.
Cassatt and Gustav Lindenthal resumed their meetings and by early July 1901, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that “all the trunk lines terminating in New Jersey, opposite New York City” were considering the North River Bridge into Manhattan. It was a complete surprise to the public that the Vanderbilts would participate. In fact, the sums to be raised were so gigantic the wealthy Vanderbilts were critical. Lindenthal wrote Cassatt in one memo that “the financial syndicate [would include] the names of Vanderbilt and his followers. Your Company and the New York Central taking the lead, it was expected that all the other railroads in New Jersey would willingly come in with their quota of cars under the proposed agreement.”
As was its conservative wont, the PRR had as yet made no formal public announcement that it was committed to Gustav Lindenthal’s bridge, but all kinds of rumors bubbled up as Alexander Cassatt pressed forward at full speed. The North River Bridge into Gotham was shaping up to be the nation’s largest and most important civil engineering project since the building of the transcontinental railroads. Moreover, Alexander Cassatt’s vision had grown even more ambitious. The previous May, the PRR had beaten out the Vanderbilts to acquire the Long Island Rail Road, a small commuter road active mainly in the summer. Cassatt coveted its large rail yards on the New York waterfront and viewed the LIRR as a key link in the PRR’s eventual all-important access to New England. Cassatt also intended to bring the LIRR lines physically into Manhattan and the LIRR’s previous president, Austin Corbin, had had plans underway for tunnels under the East River, until his sudden death in mid-1896 in a carriage accident at Newport.
His successor, the handsome, young William H. Baldwin Jr., was equally ambitious. President Charles Francis Adams had hired Baldwin straight out of Harvard in 1886 to work with him at the Union Pacific, a railroad which was then “in bad repute, loaded with obligations, [and] odious in the territory it served.” In a business peopled largely by what Adams called “a coarse, realistic, bargaining crowd,” Baldwin stood out. Not only was he a “practical” businessman who loved to make money, “he was the soul of chivalry, of honor, and of moral courage.” He looked the part, with a clear mien, a high-domed forehead, deep-set, intense dark eyes, a thick moustache, and dimpled chin. Men marveled at Baldwin’s combination of manly charm and warmth, railroad savvy, and sterling personal qualities.
So swift was Baldwin’s rise in the rough-and-tumble railway profession that he became president of the Long Island Rail Road when just thirty-three. Already, in his brief tenure he had sufficiently improved the road that the trip into Manhattan (or to the road’s ferry terminal into Manhattan) had been shortened by a half hour. Baldwin was also pushing forward the plans to build tunnels under the East River from the LIRR’s Flatbush station in Brooklyn to New York’s East Side. He was more than delighted to find that the mighty PRR coveted the LIRR and its extensive holdings along the East River, where “freight depots, yards for carload deliveries, and coal and lumber yards can be conveniently located.” Yet even under Baldwin, the LIRR still lagged far behind PRR standards.
When the PRR added the LIRR to its empire in May 1900, Cassatt gained in Baldwin an invaluable and well-connected ally. Adams once observed that Baldwin had “quite a remarkable faculty for getting on with men.” So much so that Baldwin was already a Gotham insider, well versed in the complexities of New York’s local power brokers, its grafting bosses, and politicos. But he was also that most curious of beings—an influential railroad executive who was also a passionate reformer. His few years running roads in the Jim Crow South opened his sympathetic eyes to the wretched plight of American blacks. In 1895, just before coming to the LIRR, Baldwin had joined the board of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, which offered Negroes a practical college education. Since then, Baldwin and Washington had become quite close as Baldwin dedicated himself to this difficult and wrenching cause. A typical Baldwin missive to the black leader in the fall of 1899 declared, “I just want to write a line to tell you that my mind and my heart are constantly on you and your work.”
Thus, it was hardly surprising that William Baldwin had also become swept up in 1900 in the great Gotham reform movement to somehow root out the worst excesses of a vast and proliferating web of Tammany-protected prostitution (the “social evil” as it was genteelly termed). Harlotry was as old as the hills, but Tammany Hall’s tightly controlled police force was so actively promoting and protecting the oldest profession that prostitutes were infesting and corrupting new neighborhoods with impunity. “That an army of strumpets,” complained one reformer, “should be allowed to carry on the calling in the midst of a defense-less home-life thronged with children, was a thing too odious for any community to tolerate.”
By November 1900, Baldwin had emerged as the activist head of the Committee of Fifteen, a high-profile group of influential men determined to force some kind of exposé and action. Many people admired Baldwin, who showed no “fear of ridicule, no dread of interference with his own business interests, no thought of possible adverse criticism…He knew not only how to initiate and to decide, but how to listen, to compare, and to conclude.” Predictably, there was far more press in 1901 about Baldwin, the doings of the Committee of Fifteen, and its pursuit of vice than there was about the Pennsylvania Railroad and its intended entry into Gotham.
What Cassatt, Samuel Rea, and Lindenthal now began to learn—to their deepest dismay—was that the other railroads were not willingly signing on to their grand plan. George F. Baer, president of the Central Railroad of New Jersey, pointed out that his road’s net annual profit was only $214,000. “You see how impossible it is for the Central to undertake to pay $800,000 a year [its share], or even one-third that sum, to the Bridge Company…Whatever advantage this bridge might be to companies having a long haul, it is absolutely impracticable for this company.” As for the other companies, while the Erie and the Baltimore & Ohio “appear willing to use the bridge on some terms,” it turned out that it would not bother them so very much if their passengers still had to herd on to ferries to reach New York. After all, had they not done this for years to no great ill effect?
The Vanderbilts, who had been inclined to join in when universal participation looked like a sure thing, now balked. Indeed, why should the Vanderbilts put up tens of millions of precious capital to help their greatest rival steam right into the heart of Gotham and all its riches? It made more sense to sabotage the enterprise to their own lasting advantage, and they duly informed Cassatt of their opposition. As for the other major lines marooned on the Jersey shore across from Manhattan—the Erie, the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western, the Lehigh Valley, the New Jersey Central, the New York, Susquehanna & Western—they seemed convinced that Cassatt and the PRR might well build the federally chartered bridge, that by law had to be open to all roads, with them or without them, so why should they pay a penny in advance? As a highly irate Samuel Rea explained, “If the Pennsylvania R.R. desired to secure such a terminus it would alone have to stand behind it financially, and, when consummated, admit others to its advantages who had not aided in its promotion. This was unfair.”
In early July 1901, Cassatt, soon to sail for Europe, once more wired the president of the New Haven line, “I should very much like to know before leaving whether you have come to any conclusion as to joining us in the building of the bridge lines, so that instruction may be given to acquire the charter.” The New Haven was no more inclined to help the PRR than was the New York Central. “Matters were, therefore, at a standstill,” wrote Rea. “The inability to carry out the bridge scheme was a severe disappointment.” To say the least.