FIFTEEN

“DRILLING OF FIRST HOLE”

Never had the United States experienced such material abundance as it did during these first years of the twentieth century. American factories, mills, mines, and farms churned forth tremendous volumes of coal, steel, oil, glass, garments, grain, cattle, hogs, fruits—a veritable tsunami of industrial and agricultural wealth. The Pennsylvania Railroad was overwhelmed. On Sunday January 25, 1903, Cassatt sat at a rolltop desk in his Rittenhouse Square mansion, pondering his road’s travails and writing a private letter to Henry Clay Frick, the PRR’s largest stockholder and a major customer. Cassatt lamented “the present unfortunate and mortifying condition of the road,” confessing, “The fact is we have reached the limit of yard & track facilities on several parts of the system, especially on the main line between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.”

One Pittsburgh reporter described rail yards “jammed with cars that could not be moved…thousands of workmen were idle for weeks waiting for materials that were rusting in cars blocked on side-tracks, within a few squares of their destination but inaccessible, and the owners of mills and of factories canceled orders, paid forfeits, and closed down their works.” Cassatt just hoped they would have no serious problems two days hence when President Roosevelt and his cabinet would travel on private cars via Pittsburgh for a meeting of the Republican League in Canton, Ohio.

The year 1902 had almost certainly been one of the most trying of Cassatt’s professional life. Not only had there been the galling political struggle with the Tammany aldermen over the franchise (thankfully won), but the PRR’s collapsing freight service had customers apoplectic. Finally, in early December 1902, as the winter weather worsened, Cassatt stunned the railroad world by crowning William Wallace Atterbury, thirty-six, the little-known superintendent of motive power in Altoona, the new and youngest-ever PRR general manager. An engineering graduate of Yale who started his PRR career as a three-dollar-a-week shop apprentice, the unassuming Atterbury, a master of detail and organization, set to work untangling the PRR’s freight business. But it was certainly too soon to see any major progress, as Cassatt candidly admitted to Frick.

And then there was George Gould, egged on by Andrew Carnegie to extend the Wabash Railroad into Pittsburgh, where five thousand manufacturers were desperate for reliable freight service. Cassatt was furious at this poaching, for he’d faithfully steered his road clear of Gould’s territory. All through 1902, Gould’s engineers and work crews hacked and blasted their way toward the industrial riches of the Smoky City at the prodigious cost of $380,000 a mile. In retaliation, Cassatt had first refused to renew the twenty-year Western Union contract providing the PRR’s telegraph service, then requested Western Union remove its poles and wires. Gould sued. Two days after the PRR prevailed in the U.S. Court of Appeals on May 19, 1903, Cassatt dispatched an army of ten thousand Italian workmen along the PRR rails, armed with cross saws, axes, and wire cutters. In the next few days, they chopped down forty thousand Western Union poles and fourteen thousand miles of wire, inflicting $1 million in perfectly legal damage. Cassatt found the New York Herald’s headline sweet reading: “Western Union Is Staggered By Railroad’s Blow.” To rub it in, Cassatt further billed Gould fifty thousand dollars for the cost of the “work.” Even the PRR’s own corporate historians conceded, “This was probably as drastic an act of eviction as has ever occurred in railroad history.”

 

The year 1903, however, was shaping up well for the Pennsylvania Railroad. In Gotham, the PRR’s Tunnels and Terminal Extension was finally under way, and on June 24 another historic tunnel moment was imminent. It had been four months almost to the day since Charles Jacobs and Alfred Noble and their engineers had watched George Jump’s man pry up a floorboard from the forlorn lodging house at West Thirty-second Street and Eleventh Avenue. Now it was summer, that five-story building was demolished, and Jacobs and his top staff were assembled on the dirt floor of its old cellar, the site enclosed by plank fencing, the foundation stones creating a low wall. With the air surprisingly cool off the nearby river and the gray skies threatening rain, many of the engineers were attired in overcoats and carrying umbrellas. Aside from two young men sporting straw summer boaters, all the men wore their black derbies tilted at the jaunty angle befitting the momentous occasion.

A camera expert (hired by Jacobs to document progress on his tunnels) directed the fifteen engineers to stand to one side of a set of rough wooden steps ascending a small platform in the middle of the sloping hardpan floor. From an adjacent fire escape, a small child watched curiously as Jacobs mounted the wooden platform, turned on a hand-operated compressed-air drill, and a great RAT-TA-TAT-TAT blasted out. The camera expert clicked, cursing the several men who at that moment moved for a better view of what the photographer later titled, “Drilling of First Hole.”

Jacobs saved this suddenly historic drill and, in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek gesture, had it silverplated and sent down to Cassatt at Broad Street Station, “with the hope that you may consider it as an interesting souvenir, inaugurating a work of such magnitude under your distinguished leadership.” They were launching what Engineering News hailed as the “most extensive and difficult piece of submarine tunnel work ever undertaken,” the first of the PRR’s tunnels under the North River. Jacobs and his engineers jammed into field offices at the renovated but still-decrepit old brick foundry next door on West Thirty-second Street. There the medical officers examined the hearts and lungs of the hundreds of sandhogs who would soon be working in shifts round the clock. Elaborate locker rooms were set up with special clothes-drying facilities, showers, and plenty of strong “tunnel” coffee for all those working down under the earth. In all four divisions—in New Jersey, on the East River, and on Long Island City—work was now launched.

Even as George Jump and the other contracted building wreckers were noisily clearing the terminal site, creating mountains of debris and sending rats scuttling for new homes, Samuel Rea and realtor Douglas Robinson were still struggling to acquire the final pieces of property they needed, trying to avoid the slower route of condemnation through the courts. As always, Rea and Robinson first consulted the PRR’s president about every purchase, in this instance about a strategic old brownstone at 233 West Thirty-third Street. “This is a very difficult property to deal for,” Rea wrote Cassatt on January 12, 1904. “It is owned by two old ladies and Mr. Robinson has never been sure whether he could close with them or not…He doubts very much whether we can get it for less than $70,000, which, of course, is exorbitant, when we consider that we only paid $27,000 for #231. I will be glad to have your views.” The stubborn old ladies got their price, making out far better than the Sire Brothers, “very unscrupulous” speculators who had snapped up a dozen properties they felt certain the PRR would want. By the time Robinson finally bought out the Sires, their carrying charges accumulating, they were grateful for a modest profit, and promised to buy no further buildings in the station vicinity.

President Cassatt, meanwhile, had decided to recoup some of their mounting land costs (and improve the neighborhood tone) by selling the large parcel between Eighth and Ninth Avenues to the U.S. Postal Service, then seeking a larger main post office in Manhattan. After all, the PRR trains carried 40 percent of the U.S. mail and a new post office structure (set atop the PRR’s train tracks), could be specially designed to make mail handling efficient. On February 9, 1903, Cassatt offered the site to the postmaster general, noting that McKim’s station would be “monumental in character and of very moderate height, [and is] of a style of architecture harmonious with the classic forms generally adopted by the Government, so that the two buildings ought to present a very fine effect.” Further, the PRR would be happy to sell the land at cost.

Cassatt contacted Senator Matthew Quay to enlist his influence in this quest, for any such post office purchase required congressional budget approval. Douglas Robinson, down in Washington on a family visit to his presidential brother-in-law, duly scouted out the prospects with the secretary of the treasury at a Friday night soiree. Robinson bluntly warned Cassatt in a letter the next morning: “400 Congressmen must be convinced that the government has found a gold nugget for nothing in the street.” Cassatt would have to “show that the Penna. R.R. is ready, to get the P.O., to lose a good many thousand dollars…you are the only one who can decide what loss to take.” Undeterred, by the summer Cassatt had an agreement in the works.

Gradually, as one block after another was demolished at the station site and carted away, wondrous broad vistas of summer sky and cloud opened up, especially with Thirty-second Street closed off. Where once hundreds of dingy buildings had lined tired blocks, all that was left was an enormous earthen rectangle marked by the uneven smaller square imprints of hundreds of old cellars. Here and there, only the fronts of condemned buildings had been sheared off when the day’s work ended, revealing warrens of small melancholy rooms with many aged patterns of wallpaper, scenes of who knew what joys and sorrows. And when the demolition men stopped their work in the evenings, a strange almost pastoral peace and quiet descended. To the east, the city’s skyscrapers, tall church spires, and big department stores now hovered like faraway jagged cliffs. At almost any time of day and evening, the curious came to peer over the plank fencing festooned with advertisements for tailors and new vaudeville shows. Clusters of men in black derbies and boaters, young women in Gibson Girl shirtwaists and hats, boys in their knickers, girls in their pinafores, all watched the many phases of the demolition and the gradual opening of this immense and unlikely urban plain.

The cleared site of Pennsylvania Station looking east.

 

For all the encouraging progress Cassatt and Rea had achieved on their monumental New York Extension and for all the satisfactions of the startling vista of the almost-cleared station site, the year 1903 had ended on an ominous note. On November 3, the Tammany Tiger roared back to electoral victory, deposing the honest, efficient, and effective Fusion mayor Seth Low, PRR ally and champion, after one two-year term in City Hall. The reason, explained journalist Lincoln Steffens, was simple: His Honor was a cold fish. “The appealing human element is lacking all through…His most useful virtues—probity, intelligence, and conscientiousness—in action are often an irritation…A politician can say ‘no’ and make a friend, where Mr. Low will lose one by saying ‘yes.’ Cold and impersonal…Mr. Low’s is not a lovable character.”

The grim, gray Tammany boss Richard Croker had largely retired to England with his ill-gotten millions, declaring as he departed on an ocean liner in the spring of 1902, “I am out of politics, and now I am going to win the Derby.” Charles F. Murphy, a former horse-car driver and saloon owner who had become mysteriously rich while commissioner of docks, emerged as new chief sachem of the Tammany Wigwam. Famously taciturn, Murphy was also intelligent, canny, and far more progressive than Croker. Murphy persuaded the patrician congressman George B. McClellan, son of the Civil War general, graduate of Princeton and New York Law School, to run as the Tiger’s mayoral candidate.

Many respectable voters—especially the Germans who enjoyed spending leisurely Sundays with family and neighbors in the beer gardens—resented Low’s enforcement of Sabbath drinking laws. With Murphy ascendent, and memories faded of the Ice Trust scandal and vice run amok, all those voters in the tenement districts hankering after jobs or smaller forms of Tammany beneficence reverted in droves to the Tiger. George B. McClellan, a clean-shaven gentleman quite at home in a silk top hat, trounced the unlovable Low, 314,782 votes to 252,086.

Within days of the elegant McClellan’s election as mayor, a clerk at the PRR’s New York offices picked up the telephone and (as later reported to President Cassatt) was puzzled to be conversing “with a Mr. Gay, from New York, who said that Mr. Charles F. Murphy—whom he represented—would be very glad to see Mr. Cassatt the next time he was in New York.” Could Mr. Cassatt telephone said Murphy? He did no such thing. About a week later in Philadelphia at the Broad Street Station offices, William Patton was surprised by the unexpected appearance of Mr. James E. Gaffney, a rather rough-looking, large and fleshy fellow wearing a loud suit and derby. Patton readily recognized him as Manhattan’s Eighteenth District alderman, and one of Tammany’s ringleaders in the fight to defeat Cassatt’s winning the franchise.

Here in the PRR’s home offices, Gaffney was the soul of shameless affability. He had traveled down, he confided proudly to Patton, as the emissary of Mr. Charles F. Murphy. “Mr. Murphy would be very glad,” he suggested, “if Mr. Cassatt would give careful consideration to the bid made by the New York Contracting & Trucking Co., of which Mr. John J. Murphy—brother of Chief Murphy—is President…Mr. Murphy is very anxious to see these people get the contract if their prices are anywhere near right.” The Tammany Tiger was back in power.

Tammany’s reemergence could not have been more ill-timed. Samuel Rea was about to seek the necessary franchise for the final phase of Cassatt’s entry into Gotham: the New York Connecting Railroad, the road north to New England. As an exasperated Cassatt himself would later explain to a hostile Mayor McClellan, “The Connecting Railroad is to be twelve miles long, to run through a part of Queens borough as yet half rural…and, by a bridge authorized by the State and Federal Governments, to cross the East River at Wards and Randalls Islands.

“Its completion is obviously the key to the development thus proposed of commercial and manufacturing traffic in Brooklyn and Queens. We intend to connect this railroad by a short, direct line with the ‘Tunnel Line,’ thus permitting a new and direct all rail communication with New England and the north for Manhattan as well as for Queens and Brooklyn.” As before, the PRR franchise required approvals from two boards and the mayor. When Rea attended the first hearing in late March before the Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, he wrote Cassatt that they were “very stiff in their first proposition, are unwilling to consider a fixed sum as an annual charge for our franchise…I argued with them for about an hour, but could make no impression on the rental, and in fact they raised other questions, notably, the right to regulate trains.” It did not bode well.

As if the return of Tammany was not ill omen enough, back in Manhattan LIRR president William H. Baldwin faced the scheming of ever-vexsome August Belmont. Where exactly would the Transit King deign to expand his new subway system? The first Belmont subway line, set to open in the fall, would have a stop right at the Vanderbilt’s Grand Central Station. However, “Belmont does not intend to make connection with [Pennsylvania] Station except by spur from Broadway,” Baldwin wrote on January 28, 1904, in a confidential letter to Cassatt. He warned, “He is playing to bother you.” If the PRR wanted absolute certainty that their terminal would be properly served by new subway lines, insisted Baldwin, they needed to control a subway company. “I believe that the whole situation can be worked out…you have no need of subway now.” But he warned Cassatt that he would. “You will need Metropolitan Subway by the time it is finished…I never saw such a situation.”

Cassatt and Rea were also in the final throes of acquiring property for Penn Station. Among the more interested of the spectators watching the steady demolition and disappearance of the old Tenderloin neighborhood had been one John A. Gleeson, rector of the Church of St. Michael’s. Gleeson’s Catholic parish included a substantial church, school, rectory, and convent, all on the west side of Ninth Avenue between West Thirty-first and Thirty-second streets, just across from the PRR’s known terminal boundaries. Gleeson had not yet been approached, but he had gazed out from his handsome red-brick complex with its mansard roofs and seen all those buildings give way to an endless expanse of dirt.

In late April 1904 the rector sent a handwritten letter to Alexander Cassatt: “Could I ask the favor in strict confidence of information” about which nearby streets they might still intend to acquire?…“not for purposes of speculation” but so he could plan—if necessary—for St. Michael’s future and “the people whose spiritual wants I must attend.” Both Cassatt and Rea had concluded some time before that their original plans for property acquisition were too conservative. Cassatt, for one, was already factoring in his intention to later construct yet another two North River tunnels into the as-yet-unbuilt terminal.

When Cassatt discovered Gleeson would sell only if the PRR replicated his magnificent church complex on a nearby block, the PRR president proposed to prop up Gleeson’s property while they built under it. Gleeson emphatically declined. There ensued the most complicated, costly, and protracted of all of the PRR’s many hundreds of New York real estate dealings. Back and forth the negotiations went, dragging on, culminating eventually in the PRR reluctantly purchasing a new site for St. Michael’s three blocks north at West Thirty-fourth Street and building the shrewd Father Gleeson an entirely new and equally handsome complex, closer to his many parishioners in hardscrabble Hell’s Kitchen. The new church incorporated portions of the old, including its magnificent marble altarpiece. All told, this one real estate deal cost the PRR more than $500,000. The total cost just for real estate was now heading toward $5 million.

A couple of months after Gleeson first contacted Cassatt, in early spring of 1904, a reporter for the New-York Tribune visited the Eleventh Avenue spot where Jacobs, Noble, and the engineers had posed for “Drilling of First Hole.” The hardpan floor, the reporter found, had given way to a deep rectangular hole—thirty-two feet across—surrounded by onlookers peering nervously down into what had become a “subterranean wonder.” He joined them and observed only “faint lights flashing below…confused murmurs of underground activity…[a fitting] entrance to Plutonian regions.”

Well aware that no member of the New York press had yet been granted access to this new and mysterious underworld, the reporter boldly descended the narrow wooden staircase that zigzagged down. The cloud-flecked May sky above him became fainter and fainter, and the air colder and mustier. Sixty-five feet down in the strange earthen gloom, he could see “two ragged arches hewn in solid stone, and through them two narrow gauge tracks vanish into darkness, carrying tiny cars laden with rock blasted two hundred feet beyond, for the work has already marched this far toward the Jersey shore.” At that moment, the engineers noticed the intruder and escorted him firmly back up whence he had come. When a Hearst reporter sneaked down on another occasion, the assistant engineer who confronted him encouraged the dumping of an “enormous bucket of mud” upon the hapless fellow before he was “frog-marched” back to the surface. These uninvited descents into the Manhattan shaft were as close as the voracious New York press would get for quite some years to the underground work on the North or East River tunnels.

 

Shortly thereafter, in early summer, LIRR president William Baldwin was diagnosed with intestinal cancer. With Tammany back in power, this was a real blow to Cassatt and Rea, for Baldwin was a well-connected Gotham leader who knew the key players and politicians, the feuds and factions, and could advise and strategize accordingly. It would be hard to proceed without his help as Rea began seeking the franchise to link up their Manhattan rails with New England.

“Mr. Baldwin is very sick,” Booker T. Washington cabled a mutual friend on July 24. “Not expected to live. I go to New York today to see him.” As Baldwin lay ill at his Locust Valley, Long Island, home, he confided to a family member, “I have been thinking of him [Washington] so often as I have been lying here. He is one of the chief reasons for my struggling to get well.” In an era of entrenched Jim Crow, Baldwin, the first head of the Rockefellers’ General Education Fund, promoting black education in the South, remained resolutely committed to racial advancement, an ardent advocate and fund-raiser for Tuskegee Institute and the black race. Baldwin did rally and Samuel Rea wrote Cassatt in early August, “I sincerely hope that he will recover, but I fear that what the doctors discovered on their first examination is too true.”

While Baldwin valiantly battled his cancer that summer, William Patton, on a train speeding through New Jersey, received a telegram from Cassatt telling him to inform Tammany boss Murphy that “We propose letting the contract [for excavation of the twenty-eight-acre Penn Station site] to Isaac A. Hopper & Sons, who are the lowest bidders.” The PRR’s board of directors duly awarded the $5 million contract. Days later, William Patton, who specialized in delicate political dealings, heard from Hopper (himself a Tammany man) that he no longer cared to do the work and was yielding his prize to…the Murphy firm, which would match his low bid.

Exulted the shameless Alderman Gaffney, “You can bet all the money in New York that it is true and that we have got that contract.” It was believed to be the biggest excavation contract ever awarded in the nation. Giddy with victory and feeling garrulous, Gaffney regaled a Herald reporter with the immensity of it all, the vast enterprise of excavating and clearing fifty feet down on the entire twenty-eight-acre site, all in a mere twenty-two months. “We will have to remove three thousand loads, that is sixty thousand cubic yards of earth and rock every day for the twenty-two months, put it on an elevated road, carry it to the North River, dump it in scows, tow the scows to Greenville, take it off the scows and place it in the swampy place of the big freight yards. It will keep nearly eight thousand men [a great exaggeration] busy day and night for the whole time.” And there was the key to it all: Murphy and Gaffney hoped to have thousands of jobs to bestow upon the faithful followers of the Tiger.

Within two weeks, the enthralling spectacle of excavation began at the Penn Station site, Manhattan’s own version of the Panama Canal. As the summer heat settled in, gangs of workers swarmed purposefully about, digging, drilling, dynamiting, and carting away. Steam-shovels gouged out the dirt and shattered layers of gneiss rock, slowly transforming what had been a flat dusty earthen plain into wilder terrain, featuring shallow valleys and stony outcroppings.

Through that late summer and lovely autumn, New Yorkers lingered to marvel over the astounding sight of the increasingly deeper and more gigantic Penn Station pit while all around them Gotham expanded rapidly both upward, and belowground. Ever taller skyscrapers vied for preeminence, while deep in the ground tunnels were being burrowed, tunnels for William McAdoo’s New Jersey trolley lines, for the PRR, and for the long-awaited subway. Now, the first of those subways—August Belmont’s IRT—was about to open. PRR officers were more than ordinarily interested, for they still feared that travelers might shy away from riding trains in tunnels, viewing them as somehow dangerous and unpleasant. But when the IRT opened to huge fanfare on the evening of October 27, 1904, and an amazing first-time flood of 150,000 eager riders besieged the City Hall line the PRR ceased worrying. Clearly, no one minded riding in tunnels. “It was carnival night in New York,” reported the New York Times, marveling at how instantly and exuberantly New Yorkers embraced the subway. “Why, in two days it will seem to New York as if it had never ridden anywhere but in the subway.”

Little locomotive hauling cars full of station site debris.

The triumph of the subway served as a pleasant distraction from the presidential campaign between the Democrat’s lackluster candidate, Judge Alton B. Parker, and the wildly popular Theodore Roosevelt. The very actions that made Teddy so beloved by the American people had angered powerful Republicans and corporate tycoons. First, he had sided with the coal miners during the strike of 1902. Then, he had dared to attack J. P. Morgan and his huge Northern Securities railroad trust, forcing its dismantling and causing the dyspeptic Henry Adams to cackle gleefully, “He has hit Pierpont Morgan, the whole railway interest, and the whole Wall Street connection, a tremendous whack square on the nose…they don’t like being hit that way…The Wall Street people are in an ulcerated state of inflammation. Pierpont has declined the White House dinner.” Wall Street’s Republican titans, despite their deep suspicion of Teddy, dutifully anted up for this election: Senator Chauncey Depew gave $100,000 for the New York Central; Henry Clay Frick, $50,000; George Perkins of J. P. Morgan and New York Life Insurance, $450,000; George Gould, $500,000; John D. Archbold of Standard Oil, $100,000.

Roosevelt felt increasingly queasy and conflicted about concentrated wealth, power, and corporate millionaires writing checks. “It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worth hearing; but as a rule they don’t know anything outside their own businesses.” From 1897 to 1904, 4,277 firms had merged again and again until they “consolidated into 257. The hundred largest concerns quadrupled in size and took control of 40 percent of the country’s capital.” If that was not enough to make Americans uneasy, half a dozen men controlled much of the nation’s rails: Cassatt at the PRR, William K. Vanderbilt of the New York Central, Edward H. Harriman of the Southern Pacific, James J. Hill of the Great Northern & Pacific, George Gould of the Wabash and other western roads, and then there was Morgan who had huge and influential interests in these and other roads.

Publisher Joseph Pulitzer, an ardent Democrat, attacked Teddy on this tender issue of trusts. Two full splashy pages of the influential World featured headlines questioning Roosevelt’s professed opposition to corporate rapacity and the deluge of trust dollars to his campaign. When the pallid Parker belatedly dared to raise the same questions, a furious Roosevelt struck back, reminding voters he had mediated the coal strike and taken on J. P. Morgan. Teddy need not have worried. On election day Tuesday November 8, 1904, he won in a thunderous landslide.

Meanwhile Baldwin, just forty-one, lay slowly wasting away all that autumn from his cancer. Ever a fighter, he survived many months longer than expected, dying on January 3, 1905, at 4:30 a.m., his wife and children surrounding him. Outside a fierce blizzard howled, high winds whipping the falling snow into huge drifts and fantastic shapes. By the next afternoon, as the storm eased, Manhattan was largely immobilized, but Cassatt, Rea, and Green made it to Manhattan and then crossed on the LIRR ferry to a special LIRR train that plowed slowly through the snow-shrouded landscape toward Locust Valley.

It was a dolorous day. William Baldwin, this unlikely railroad president, as ardently dedicated to reform and uplift as he was to profit and performance, had lived only just long enough to see the start of their great tunnels and terminal project, in which he took such pride. The PRR officers could not know, as they somberly rode through the pristine winter scene, that Baldwin’s would be the first of many untimely deaths.