SEVENTEEN

“SLOW PROGRESS HAS BEEN MADE”

Charles Mattathias Jacobs, fifty-four, chief engineer of the PRR’s North River tunnels, looked very much like what he was—a British man of empire at the zenith of a colorful and accomplished career. Supremely confident, calm, and commanding in appearance and manner, he was in the prime of his manhood, easily recognizable with a noble bald head, distinctive sweeping white mustachios, and intensely blue eyes. Of medium height, he had a barrel chest and powerful build from decades of active work. Dispiriting and dramatic engineering disasters were just workaday challenges to him.

“Mr. Jacobs is not an office engineer,” wrote one admiring reporter not long after the Weehawken tunnel cave-in. “He does not sit at his desk studying maps, charts, blue-prints and typewritten reports, and writing letters of instruction. He deals with real things and is out among his men. He holds frequent ‘councils of war’ with his assistants and foremen, and is ever ready to hear suggestions from any subordinate. ‘I do not want a man in my employ,’ he says, ‘whose opinion isn’t worth something.’ But when he makes his decision, it is expected to go—and it does go; and oddly enough, every man somehow feels it is the proper thing to do. Familiar at all times with every detail of the work and the man doing it, always clear-sighted, resourceful, enthusiastic, he inspires his men, who, from assistant engineers who share his inmost councils to the men who handle the spades and drive the mules, recognize in him a chief worthy to follow, who expects every man to do his duty. This helps to explain the remarkable success which Mr. Jacobs has had.”

Born in Hull, Yorkshire, to a “substantial” family, ninth in a family of fourteen, by age sixteen the privately educated Jacobs had been apprenticed to an English engineering firm, Charles and William Earle, specializing in ship and engine building. When Jacobs finished his five apprentice years in 1871, the Earles showed their faith in this young man by dispatching him first to the wilds of India and then to China to build a number of bridges. Upon his return from the Orient, Jacobs continued his training, going to sea for several years to earn a certificate as a First Class Marine Engineer. He then established his own offices at Cardiff, Wales, but worked much on the Continent and as far afield as Australia. As his reputation and commissions grew, he decided in 1887 to relocate to London, where he first worked on a subaqueous tunnel. Three years later, Jacobs had his fateful meeting with LIRR president Austin Corbin, who invited him to come to New York City to help solve various engineering problems, above all that of tunneling under the rivers encircling Manhattan. It was in that long-ago era that Jacobs had first met Samuel Rea and Alexander Cassatt and begun talking bridges and tunnels.

By early 1905, Jacobs was renowned in Gotham not just for the decade-old feat of completing the eight-by-ten-foot natural gas tunnel under the East River (the first subaqueous tunnel to reach Manhattan and the first built using a shield and compressed air), but a far more amazing and recent triumph. The previous March, Jacobs had completed what many had long and loudly concluded was impossible: the seemingly accursed Haskins tunnel from New Jersey to New York. Started in 1879, the Haskins trolley tunnel had for more than twenty years defeated every engineer and contractor who took it on. Its completion after two decades by Jacobs was testament to his originality, skill, and sheer perseverance. The opportunity (or challenge) presented itself in late 1901, just as Cassatt was launching the Pennsylvania Railroad’s great tunnel enterprise.

William G. McAdoo, a young, ambitious Tennessee lawyer seeking his fortune in Gotham, had contacted Jacobs, who had long advocated completing the Haskins tunnels (to utter skepticism). The veteran engineer enthusiastically escorted McAdoo, tall, lanky, an almost Lincolnesque figure with striking bushy eyebrows, into the murky, half-flooded tunnel works on a gray October day. The two men, dressed in hip boots and yellow oilskin coats and hats, carried oil lanterns as they descended sixty feet down a dark vertical shaft. “As I entered the tunnel,” recalled McAdoo, “I had a powerful feeling of visiting a place I had known well many years ago…I was like a man who walks through a wrecked and dismantled house that he had lived in when he was a boy.” It was pitch black, but you could hear the moisture trickling off the tunnel’s old iron-plate walls. The narrow wooden boardwalk was slippery with oozing muck, and as the two edged carefully along, their lanterns cast “wavering, fantastic shadows. The gloom lay ahead of us like a long black section of nothing. When we spoke, it sent our voices back to us in metallic, unearthly echoes…The whole thing was so inanimate, so ponderous, and so lonely. It was not a ghost, or a skeleton, but a carcass. I felt as if I had seen the body of some long and enormously heavy animal that had lain down and died. Yet, from the moment I saw the tunnel I never doubted that I would get possession of it and complete it.” While Reeve had disliked being in the PRR tunnel, McAdoo expressed that strange affinity and fondness, an almost mysterious bond certain men felt when immersed in the nethermost bosom of the elements.

Jacobs was equally committed to salvaging the Haskins tunnel and proceeded to solve engineering problems that would have vanquished lesser mortals. Twice the tunnel “blew” and flooded. For eleven months, Jacobs’s men cautiously blasted and inched forward through a solid reef of rock. When they mercifully reached the end of it they encountered silt so porous they could not proceed. It just oozed through the shield in a glutinous mass. The ever-imaginative Jacobs decided to bake the stuff and sent in men with blowpipes. This ingenious solution worked and soon the Greathead shield was burrowing through plain old sandy silt, pushing swiftly ahead. “As soon as we began actual work,” wrote McAdoo, “the sleeping tunnel awoke from oblivion into the glare of publicity as lively as that which surrounds a new operatic star. Everybody was interested. The people of New York looked on and stared as the people of Egypt must have gazed at the building of the Pyramids.” (Of course, this being a tunnel, there was not much to see from the street.)

Once McAdoo and his backers in this $4 million cross-river venture saw they were truly likely to finish Haskins’s old trolley tunnel between Hoboken and Morton Street, McAdoo had begun in early 1903 to seriously consider a second, complementary set of new subaqueous subway tunnels that would connect Jersey City and the Wall Street area. Knowing that these would siphon off passengers from the PRR’s lucrative Cordlandt Street ferry, McAdoo decided to sound out Alexander Cassatt on the matter. The new Penn Station would serve those traveling and commuting uptown, but did the PRR intend to consign all its downtown passengers to the vicissitudes of the ferries? And so McAdoo boarded the PRR ferry to Exchange Place and journeyed by rail down to Philadelphia. Debarking at Broad Street Station, McAdoo strode up to the second-floor offices for his appointment, navigated the various factotums, and entered Cassatt’s spacious office clutching his maps and plans.

The PRR president, attired in his usual black frock coat, dark vest with pocket watch, snowy white, high-collared shirt, and cravat tie, greeted McAdoo cordially. “My instinctive feeling for personality told me,” recalled McAdoo, “before I had been in Cassatt’s office five minutes, that any attempt at shrewd bargaining with him would not only be wasted effort, but might be harmful to my proposal. As a rule, great men do not haggle over details…The only way one can meet them on their own plane is by a frank and complete discussion of the subject in all its phases.”

And so, McAdoo unrolled all his blueprints showing the revived Haskins tunnel, and most relevantly the two new tunnels he and his partners proposed to build between Jersey City and the Wall Street neighborhood. Of course, each man knew Charles Jacobs well since the Englishman was busy building tunnels for both. As McAdoo spread his plans out on the big wooden table, “I told Cassatt exactly what was in my mind. He looked over my maps and asked some questions. Then he glanced at me and smiled dryly, ‘Well, it seems to me,’ he said, ‘that you’re going to destroy our most profitable ferry.’”

Since this was certainly true, McAdoo waited politely but said nothing as Cassatt further studied the plans. Cassatt looked at his young visitor and continued rather genially, “‘You are about to put our ferries out of business, but the Pennsylvania Railroad believes in providing the best facilities for its patrons, and, as your tunnels will do that, we’ll hook up with you.’”

McAdoo was agreeably amazed, for the two men had conferred for less than an hour. The New York lawyer had anticipated many drawn-out meetings and conferences, and, if the PRR was interested, certainly a presentation to the board of directors. This all seemed rather precipitous. “The brevity of the discussion and his readiness to come to terms on such an important question were somewhat disquieting…Of course, I wanted to get it all settled definitely, yet I did not want to ask him if he had authority to commit the road to this arrangement without seeing other people.” Could Cassatt really speak so confidently for his road’s board? McAdoo decided to reveal that his plan involved not just the building of new subway tunnels, but also two gigantic new office buildings that would rise above an underground terminal in Manhattan near the river (where the World Trade Towers later stood). He and his partner were already raising money and quietly buying the real estate. “If any hitch occurs in this agreement with the Pennsylvania Railroad,” McAdoo told Cassatt, “it will put us in a bad hole.”

“‘There’ll not be any hitch,’ Cassatt said. ‘At any rate, none on our part. You can count confidently on us.’

“I left his office with full confidence in his word, and my confidence was entirely justified. He was the kind of man on whom one could rely absolutely.” And indeed, just as Cassatt promised, his board approved, and McAdoo had his contract by mid-May 1903.

Less than a year later, on March 11, 1904, McAdoo received an excited phone call from Charles Jacobs, who was down in the tunnel. The lawyer-turned-tunnel-developer recalled, “I and a few others hastened across the river in a ferry-boat and went to the shaft on the New Jersey side.” It was raining as they pulled on the usual yellow oilcloth coats and hats and the heavy waterproof boots. “We walked in the tunnel and passed through the air-locks until we came to the shield. The workmen were standing around. The men looked worn and tired; they were covered with mud, of course, from head to foot.

Chief Engineer Jacobs smiled. The two ends of Haskins tunnel had finally met up. Everyone present crept through the narrow passageway, dark and dripping, transiting from the Jersey side to the New York half of the tunnel. A historic half hour of walking later, and they had reached the Manhattan shaft, muddy and exalted. As Jacobs liked to say thereafter, “Henry Hudson was the first white man who crossed over the river, and Jacobs was the first who crossed under it.” Sadly, DeWitt Clinton Haskins had died broke and forgotten, long before his great dream was realized.

 

By July 1, 1904, the house-wrecking crews had completely cleared the Penn Station site, and work was beginning on the “Biggest Hole Ever Dug in the Island of Manhattan.” Tammany chief Charles Murphy’s company hired two thousand men to excavate around the clock, blasting and digging steadily down, while the small elevated steam locomotives hauled the spoil away to the scows at the West Side piers. By August 1905, half the digging—a million cubic yards of earth and rock—was already done. “It’s an interesting job,” said Murphy’s chief engineer, “because of its size, but it’s pretty prosy work. We haven’t had any exciting incidents or made any interesting discoveries—haven’t found gold mines, or human skeletons, or anything of that kind.”

With summer once again upon the city, on the hottest days the New York Herald gave away free ice in the slum districts, while charities organized picnics and boat rides to get thousands of tenement children out in the fresh air. When the heat lingered and grew miserable, the “Fire Department flushes the tenement streets with streams of cold water, wetting down the panting horses and the hundreds of children who enjoy the shower-bath. Most of the horses, as in London, wear bonnets of straw all summer with the most coquettish effect. Free concerts are given on all the recreation piers…there are many public baths in both the Hudson and the East River where men and women can swim…[Nor] does it cost much time or money to reach the greatest pleasure circus in the world, Coney Island.” There you could cool off in the Atlantic’s surf, rise high up in the air on the Ferris wheel or hurtle down the giant Helter-Skelter slide. At Dreamland and Luna Park, you could ride a camel or the thrilling loop-de-loop, and then amble with the crowds to see all the queer sights—the six-tailed Bull Terrier or the human pincushion.

Penn Station site and Ninth Avenue and the Elevated before being propped up.

The Gotham of 1905 was growing like Topsy. No matter where ordinary citizens of New York looked, they could see their city being remade in every possible direction. Two years earlier, Daniel Burnham’s twenty-two-story Flatiron Building became the tallest skyscraper in the city, its strange triangular shape topping 285 feet. Some skeptical New Yorkers called it “Burnham’s Folly” and had wagers on when it would collapse. Over on the East River, the city was erecting new bridges. Up at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, the old Croton Aqueduct had been demolished and the $5 million New York Public Library was arising in all its magnificence. Andrew Carnegie’s gift to New York of $5.2 million promised dozens of new library branches. Below the streets and rivers, August Belmont’s men and machines were burrowing new subway lines to connect Manhattan to Queens and Brooklyn. All this ambition and improvement was most exhilarating.

 

In mid-August 1905, soon after Samuel Rea returned from holiday, Cassatt wrote from Bar Harbor asking that their New York work be “pushed more rapidly. It seems to me that it has been going a little slowly.” Chief Engineer Jacobs certainly found he needed every iota of experience gleaned from the McAdoo-Haskins tunnels as he and his men struggled to put through the PRR’s North River tunnels. Yet the two projects—seemingly very similar—posed very different problems. First, the McAdoo tunnels were for electrified subway trolleys, and were consequently smaller in diameter than the PRR tunnels, which were designed to handle larger railroad cars and locomotives. No one worried that the Haskins tunnels might crack or break under the repeated journeys of their subways. But that was the constant fear of the PRR. For, as Jacobs himself conceded, “capitalists and engineers” had long believed (and a great many still did) that “owing to the very soft nature of the [North River] ground, a tunnel could not be built that would be sufficiently stable to withstand the vibration due to heavy traffic, and for this reason tunnels under the North River were not looked upon as practicable.” Second, Jacobs was discovering that while the tunnels burrowed under the same river, the retreating glaciers had deposited very different substrata.

The Jersey side presented its own endless vexations, bringing work on the North Tunnel to a complete standstill in the summer of 1905. “The leakage of air through the ground was so great that it was impossible to maintain sufficient air-pressure to work both North and South Tunnels,” reported Jacobs. The shield had also been installed in the South Tunnel from the Weehawken side but, wrote Jacobs, “Owing to the inability to maintain sufficient air-pressure to keep the face dry, slow progress has been made.” From August 25 to September 12, 1905, Jacobs’s sandhog teams managed to install only eight rings of tunnel lining. Since then, “the average progress has been one ring every working day. The material in the face is sand, gravel, and hardpan, with some large boulders. The entire face is timbered for each shove of the shield, and the water in the ground is about 9 feet above the invert…On Sept. 4th fire was discovered in the timber above the shield and tunnel. This was smothered by removing air-pressure from the tunnel for 12 hours, with no damage to the works.

“To date 62 rings of cast iron lining, equivalent to 155 feet of tunnel, have been constructed. The excavation done is approximately 5.7% of the total.”

By the end of 1905 work was again progressing on the Jersey South Tunnel, and the shield “passed under the westerly side of the Fowler Warehouse on December 4th,” reported Jacobs, “and immediately encountered wooden piles forming the foundation of the building. At about this same point the material in the face changed from red sand and gravel to black sand and river silt. The ends of seventy piles which came within the tunnel limits have been cut…The Fowler Warehouse, which is a heavy timber structure enclosed with a brick shell, has settled to some extent. Some cracks have shown.” For the next several months, sandhogs worked in front of the shield under the benighted Fowler Warehouse. They laboriously hacked away with axes, slowly and carefully cutting up and pulling in the remaining 136 wooden piles in their path. Finally, in January of 1906 the shield in that South Tunnel passed under the Fowler Warehouse and out into the river.

Assuming the riverbed silt off Weehawken to be like that in the Haskins tunnel further south, on January 16 Jacobs ordered all the doors on the Jersey South Tunnel shield shut, preparatory to shoving full speed ahead. It was a jubilant moment, because from here on in, his men could shove rapidly forward without the mess and trouble of taking in muck. But when the crew of alignment engineers appeared at the facing to take measurements after several rings had been installed, they had startling and worrisome news. The South Tunnel was not on grade, but rising rapidly. They weighted the shield to counter this, but when they pressed forward the tunnel again failed to keep to grade, and the iron shell itself was “distorted…the horizontal diameter decreasing and vertical diameter increasing by as much as 11/4 in.” Chief Engineer Jacobs came over in the freezing weather on the PRR’s jaunty steam-powered despatch boat, the low-slung Victor, American flags flapping brightly in the river’s breezes. But he and his engineers did not feel jaunty, just perplexed. Reported Jacobs, “The material in the face is soft mud of a peculiar consistency.” But that did not explain the now slightly off-grade and distorted tunnel.

This was a very worrying issue, the worst they had yet encountered, for if the South Tunnel veered too much further off grade, it would become potentially defective. “A good many different theories were advanced as to the probable cause,” wrote one of Jacobs’s young engineers. “It was thought that the hood of the shield might have something to do with the trouble.” So now the hood was removed, the doors remained shut, and the shield was driven forward. With great trepidation and anxiety, everyone waited for the findings of the alignment crew. Alas, all they documented was that the trouble persisted. “It was impossible to keep the grade.” This was now a most serious matter. “Work was stopped, and the question was thoroughly debated.” Jacobs decided to try another shove with one of the shield doors open as an experiment, allowing in 50 percent of the displaced muck. This time, when the alignment crew rapidly did their calculations, it was most welcome news. “The shield began to come down to grade at once,” reported the delighted junior engineer, “and it soon became necessary to close the door partially and reduce the quantity of muck taken in, in order to prevent the tunnel from getting below grade. The other troubles from distortion, etc., ceased at the same time.” There was great jubilation all round.

And so Jacobs and his men joyfully charged full speed ahead. During February 1906 alone on the Jersey South Tunnel, reported Jacobs to Cassatt, “166 rings have been built, an average progress of 14.31 lineal feet per working day. To date 436 rings of cast iron lining equivalent to 1091 lineal feet of tunnel have been constructed. The excavation done is approximately 38.5% of the total.” The worst, they believed, was clearly over. All too soon, they would discover their celebration was most premature.