EIGHTEEN

“DISTURBED ABOUT NORTH RIVER TUNNELS”

On Monday April 2, 1906, an anguished Samuel Rea sat at a wooden desk in his spacious Bryn Mawr home and considered how best to begin his letter to Alexander Cassatt. Outside, after days of rain and squalls, it was a cold spring afternoon suffused with clear light. The PRR’s third vice president was bone tired, recovering from tonsilitis, and feeling steady twinges of rheumatism in his knees, his back, and now his arm. His doctor was pressing him to go away for a bit, to make a quick but restful sail down to the warmer climes of Jamaica. Rea wearily took up his fountain pen, scrawled “Confidential” in his neat small script atop the half sheet of lined paper and paused. He decisively underlined “Confidential,” and then plunged in: “Dear Mr. Cassatt, I have been disturbed about North River tunnels for some time—since I told you that General [Raymond] thought they were rising—He has verified this & Jacobs told me on the phone last Friday I think that he had suspended work and he thought they had risen about 6 inches, but he thought they would come to rest.”

This was typical of Charles Jacobs—always sanguine. But Samuel Rea had just learned in a deeply distressing tête-à-tête that the eminent but prickly Brigadier General Charles Raymond very strongly begged to differ. Raymond, balding, his remaining good eye steadily dimming with its thickening cataract, was a formidable and punctilious military engineer. He was so esteemed that the PRR had pleaded with the War Department to borrow him to serve as chair of the PRR’s board of engineers. In 1904, just before his military retirement, Raymond’s stellar forty years of public service had been rewarded by promotion to brigadier general.

General Raymond had traveled especially to Rea’s home to report his decided professional opinion that the as-yet-unfinished tunnels on the Weehawken side were shifting dangerously about in the river’s infamous alluvial silt. Raymond, employing a large magnifying glass to aid his diminished vision, had painstakingly reviewed the daily figures and data produced by Charles Jacobs’s own alignment crews. He had slowly come to believe that something was alarmingly amiss. Five days earlier, Raymond had for the first time confronted Jacobs with these disturbing facts at a board of engineers meeting. Both Alfred Noble and Jacobs scoffed, Rea told Cassatt in this letter, expressing such utter skepticism that they declined even to include Raymond’s doubts or his data in the board’s written minutes. But, wrote Rea, the “General was insistent on management being advised.”

During their just-concluded private meeting, Rea wrote to Cassatt, Raymond had also revealed that his figures for the Weehawken tunnels showed “there had been a rise of about 2 feet in one place—This is alarming…If General was correct we must change method of construction—devise some way of anchoring tunnel and possibly doing that work as the driving of the tunnel progresses and that of course the work of driving must be suspended…Jacobs and Noble are now alive to the situation but for a long time didn’t have much faith in General’s theory or his results.”

Was it possible that the naysayers were right? One man had written Cassatt early on, wondering if the bed of the river was still moving seaward, “like the movement of a glacier” and so might “be fatal to the stability of any structure imbedded in it?” Was it possible the PRR had indeed fatally miscalculated? The Pennsylvania Railroad had already spent the vast sum of $80 million on constructing its monumental entry to Manhattan, an enterprise many continued to condemn as an unnecessary and extravagant folly. If the trains could not roll into Gotham through the North River tunnels, it would be a humiliating corporate catastrophe.

And so began a season of unparalleled woe for Alexander Cassatt, Samuel Rea, and the Pennsylvania Railroad.

 

Up in New York, Alfred Noble and the many engineers working on the PRR’s four subaqueous East River tunnels (known prosaically as A, B, C, and D) were as weary and frustrated as Samuel Rea. When they stood atop one of the Manhattan caisson shafts they beheld a beautiful swift-flowing river, its powerful tidal waters shimmering pewter as the sun rose and the batteries of ferryboats and steamers began their busy workaday schedules plying the industrialized waterfront. Soon, the more nimble fishing smacks, oyster sloops, and pleasure boats would breeze by, and on warmer afternoons even the occasional intrepid canoeist. As evening came, and the many vessels berthed and the city quieted, the East River gleamed with reflected lights and flowed a glossy indigo. But the riverbed deep below these scintillating tidal waters was proving a maddening and intractable mix for tunneling: a perilous underworld of quicksand, coarse sand, huge boulders, gravel, and clay—the bedeviling legacy of the ancient glaciers—lay between the water and the bedrock.

Not long after Rea confided his alarm over the North River tunnels to Alexander Cassatt in early April 1906, Alfred Noble, who had launched his East River tunnels two years earlier, detailed for the PRR president his own litany of setbacks: “In Line A, there has been no excavation done since December 29, 1905…In Line C, work was continued until March 22nd when it became necessary to stop work on this line and bulkhead the face on account of the impossibility of supplying air for more than two tunnels…In Line D, the work has been extremely difficult during the entire month and progress has been very slow.” Line D had been the first tunnel out into the river and the southernmost of the four, and now the recently erected iron tunnel rings were developing cracks. Finally, there were so many blows on Line D, despite the dumping of a twelve-foot layer of clay onto the riverbed, conceded Noble, “the heading was closed on the 31st.” In short, three of the four East River tunnels were at a standstill. The two sets of subaqueous tunnels under the North and East rivers—the linchpins of this most ambitious of civil engineering projects—were now both in limbo.

Then there was the rising toll of fatal and sometimes macabre accidents under the East River. About nine in the morning on March 31 an Italian sandhog working with a big gang a hundred feet down in the warm, dank Tunnel B aimed his pneumatic drill at a ledge of rock. A thunderous blast ricocheted through the tunnel, the concussive force hurtling the sandhog and thirty nearby men onto the tunnel floor, rocks and dirt cascading down. A carelessly forgotten stick of dynamite. Most of the sandhogs slowly extricated themselves from the debris, bloody and shaken, as the junior engineers rushed in to the grim scene to help. The ambulance medics from nearby Bellevue Hospital carried out stretchers with three Italians so mangled and burned they were not expected to live.

Ten days earlier, a bored Negro watchman down by the air lock had snuck a cigarette (against all tunnel rules) at six in the morning. By the time the firemen put out the flaming salt hay (for patching blows), all that remained was a charred corpse. Back on January 15, there had been a far worse fire with even more fatalities. “DIE LIKE RATS IN TRAP” reported the New-York Tribune. “Four Killed in Caisson Smothered by Smoke and Drowned in East River Tunnel.”

But what the sandhogs most feared were the bends. More and more often, it seemed, a brawny mud-smeared sandhog would exit the air lock, step free of the shaft, and collapse. It was a heart-wrenching sight, a large strong man gasping and writhing, groaning pitiably under the excruciating and peculiar torments of the bends. Succor was always swift. Yet, as fast as the sandhog might be rushed to the medical air locks or the hospital, often he was not seen again. Such a multitude of tunnel laborers came, worked, and quit in these ill-starred East River tunnels, so many of the men were new immigrants speaking no English—Italians, Bohemians, Swedes—that the longtime sandhogs knew little of the fate of the afflicted. How many men had been felled with bends in the three daily shifts? How many crippled? Dead? No one knew, but as the sandhogs sat in the air locks, they traded dark rumors of far too many among their ranks disabled and dead.

As the emergencies and troubles proliferated, Noble’s second in command, Henry Japp, thirty-seven, a handsome, lantern-jawed Scotsman, had taken to sleeping nights in a little room off the company’s offices by the Long Island City ferry slip. Japp, managing engineer for the PRR’s East River tunnel contractor, the British firm S. Pearson & Son, was not infrequently jolted out of his light slumber by foremen telephoning from the tunnels with some new crisis. A graduate of Dundee University and a veteran of the Blackwell Tunnel under the Thames River and of London’s Great Northern & City Railway tunnel, Japp kept the proverbial stiff upper lip as he, Alfred Noble, and their corps of engineers soldiered wearily on.

 

Down in Washington, D.C., President Theodore Roosevelt, triumphantly elected for a second term, was hell-bent on wresting a landmark piece of legislation—railroad regulation with real teeth—from an imperious and hostile Republican Senate. Long-simmering public anger was boiling over as the muckraking press dredged up new lows in railroad greed and malfeasance. “The cry arises from every part of the country,” charged the influential McClure’s Magazine, “that the railroad ‘baron’…makes the [rates] low and easy for his rich favorites—the Rockefellers, the Armours, and their like…[but] high and hard for the farmer, the small struggling manufacturers and shippers and all the vast unorganized mass of producers and consumers.”

Not since Abraham Lincoln had such an activist president occupied the White House. And never one so amusing, energetic, and combative. Theodore Roosevelt was determined to terminate forever the laissez-faire era of big business by ramming through the historic Hepburn bill, legislation that would at last give real muscle to the Interstate Commerce Commission, empowering the federal government to investigate secret corporate books and enforce fair railroad rates.

Senate majority leader Nelson Aldrich, son-in-law of Standard Oil’s John D. Rockefeller, had come to view Roosevelt, his fellow Republican, as an impertinent rabble-rouser. Senator Aldrich adroitly and contemptuously consigned the vexsome Hepburn railroad bill to the care of Teddy’s longtime Senate archenemy, South Carolina’s “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, a ferocious one-eyed backwoods Democrat who favored a black cowboy hat. Teddy and Tillman had not spoken since 1902 when Tillman had been stricken from a White House guest list for pugilistic assault upon another senator. To add insult to this blackballing, the snob in Teddy had quipped that Senator Tillman’s politician brother had been “frequently elected to Congress upon the issue that he wore neither an overcoat nor an undershirt.” Now, Teddy simply gritted his famous teeth and cultivated a working alliance with “Pitchfork.” For the sake of railroad reform, the two antagonists held their respective noses and advanced the bill. The puissant Senator Aldrich was not pleased.

“Railroad rate regulation was the greatest challenge handed to Congress in forty years,” writes Roosevelt’s biographer Edmund Morris of the president’s declaration of political war on the nation’s most powerful and entrenched corporate interests. “More precisely, [the greatest challenge handed] to the Senate—the House voted to approve the [Hepburn] bill on 8 February by an astounding margin, with only seven negative votes. But the forces of reaction were confident that Old Guard delay tactics down the corridor would eventually make this victory Pyrrhic. ‘No railway rate bill,’ the [deeply conservative] New York Sun declared, ‘will be passed by the Fifty-ninth Congress.’” U.S. senators, often castigated as the Millionaire’s Club, were still (until 1913) elected by state legislatures, and cared little for popular opinion. Or, for that matter, for the young and presumptuous president.

During the 1904 elections, when the Democrats published their satiric, “An Alphabet of Joyous Trusts,” R read: “R is the Railroad Trust, always on time/To Run over the People, and get their last dime.” The fury aroused by the railroads largely boiled down to the dull-sounding issue of rate discrimination. The galling and inescapable reality in these early years of the twentieth century was that almost every American company, town, and farm found its economic well-being hostage to the local (and often high-handed) railway corporation. The railroad, as McClure’s editorialized, “is not like any other industry…it is the essential tool of commerce. Other industries and men and cities, who must use this tool, rise to success or sink to poverty as it is handled well or ill.”

Railroad freight rates—and the lack of any recourse if they were unfair—stirred vehement passions. The ever-sober World’s Work declared: “Great corporations have grown rich because of such discriminations…They have broken laws and evaded laws…A small group of men control the great transportation lines; and the group becomes smaller every decade. Railroad property is tending towards one colossal ‘combine.’ It is this fact that stirs the public fear more and more seriously.” More than anything, Americans wanted fairness. When they felt wronged, they wanted recourse.

President Roosevelt had already irritated important Republicans by intervening in the coal strike and attacking Northern Securities. Now, Roosevelt had really pushed beyond the pale, challenging the sacred concept of laissez-faire itself. Big business, which had contributed many millions to Teddy’s presidential campaign, felt ill-used and wrathful. Hissed coke and steel king Henry Clay Frick, regretting his check for fifty thousand dollars, “We bought the bastard, but he didn’t stay bought.” Theodore Roosevelt, who understood the angry, impatient temper of the nation far better than the men he denounced as “malefactors of great wealth,” was impenitent.

Soon after Roosevelt ascended to the presidency, a group of railroad chiefs had organized to express their intense displeasure at the mere rumor of regulation. Alexander Cassatt, that rare being, a rich corporate Democrat who welcomed regulation as necessary and inevitable, had curtly refused their invitations to join them: “I very much fear that in view of the diametrically opposite views which we hold, nothing would be accomplished by such a meeting.” For years, Cassatt had been privately warning his fellow railroad kings and Wall Street’s financiers that “the increasing power of the rapidly uniting systems of transportation must inevitably be counterbalanced by government control of traffic tariffs.” When Roosevelt took over the presidency, he had assiduously courted Cassatt on railroad matters, asking in one 1901 letter, “Will you give me your views?” Then adding, “It was the greatest pleasure to have you to dinner the other evening. Remember, we are all going to go to that football game.” Both men—the president of the United States and the president of its most powerful corporation—agreed that you could not have a healthy industrial democracy if the rich rigged the system to become even richer and bigger. Only the government had the power to tame the trusts.

Now, Roosevelt was fulfilling the worst fears of the railroad titans who abhorred the Hepburn bill as an outrageous assault on private capital. Armed with a huge war chest, they retaliated with a public relations barrage, stage-managing months of negative newspaper coverage and congressional hearings. Cassatt still abstained. “Let the government regulate us,” he told one journalist. “For my part and for my associates in the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, I am generally heartily in accord with the position taken by President Roosevelt, and we have been all along; I told the President himself when he made his first recommendation on this subject to Congress, more than four years ago, that I believed him to be in the right.”

Not only had Cassatt outlawed secret rebates on his own roads six years earlier, he had just abolished the free railroad pass, something he had wanted to do for decades. The free pass, which the Hepburn bill also sought to banish forever, was the deeply beloved, valuable perquisite of every journalist, entitled citizen, and above all, every petty or powerful politician. “The ability of a member of the legislature, or any other political leader, to get [free] trip passes for his constituents or partisans,” writes historian Mark Sullivan, “was perhaps the most potent form of patronage he had. Any important political boss, such as Quay of Pennsylvania, could command trip passes by the thousand.”

As the PRR’s and Cassatt’s personal letter books attest, the importuning for free passes never ceased. Every day the missives arrived—relatives, reporters, editors, archbishops, congressmen, businessmen of every hue, each expressing the desire to ride the PRR rails for free. People even pestered his sister, Mary, in Paris to ask for free passes on their behalf. On January 1, 1906, Cassatt decreed an end to it, saving the company $1 million annually. There was simmering resentment, worsened by the fact that complaining about the lack of passes made one look cheap. But this particular act of Cassatt, opined the Wall Street Journal, was “probably the most courageous of all his moves” because it so personally touched and riled the powerful.

While the fate of the Hepburn bill was still twisting in the senatorial winds that February and March, Cassatt made many forays to the capitol to advise the president and twist arms in the Senate. He expressed himself forcefully to President Roosevelt on the bill’s ultimate shape, insisting that without certain changes, “You will deny the railroads the right to have orders of the [Interstate Commerce] Commission reviewed by the Courts as to their reasonableness and justness…I respectfully submit that we had a right to expect that a Bill would be framed which would be just to the railroads as well as to the public.”

Even as those Republicans known as Railroad Senators did their imperious best to bury or neuter the Hepburn bill, the Interstate Commerce Commission came to life in early March, a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision enabling it to “examine railroad discrimination and monopolies in coal and oil and to report on same from time to time.” Chief commissioner Martin Knapp announced a sweeping investigation of the half dozen biggest coal roads, including the Pennsylvania, and as March 1906 ended, all those roads were peremptorily ordered to produce lists of every single one of their stockholders, how many shares they held, and the ownership and control of any coal mines served by that road, “data that have hitherto been regarded as privileged and safe from publicity.” A new day had abruptly arrived.

Alexander Cassatt was unconcerned, for he had long advocated just such government scrutiny. On April 9, he wrote to Knapp at the ICC, saying “If the Commission desires to examine me in connection with the investigation now being made of the coal and oil carrying railroads, I would be very much obliged if you could arrange to have me called some day this month, as I propose sailing for Europe on the ninth of May, and although I shall return the latter part of June, I expect to be at my office only for a few days, after which I shall go to Bar Harbor.” ICC counsel William A. Glasgow Jr., forty-one, a southern coal lawyer with a deceptively “Aw shucks” manner, who had already developed a reputation as a soft-spoken bulldog in early hearings, reassured Cassatt that there was no hurry. Meanwhile, President Roosevelt continued battling to push the Hepburn bill through the Senate.

 

As spring unfolded in Gotham and the light lingered longer in the late afternoons, battalions of speed-mad bicyclists and automobilists zoomed up Riverside Avenue alongside the busy and beauteous Hudson. But for Samuel Rea and his distinguished board of engineers, the North River remained as alarming and perplexing an engineering problem as they had ever encountered. Rea had ordered Charles Jacobs, who conceded in a telephone conversation that the South Weehawken tunnel had indeed risen six inches, not to dig another foot further on the New Jersey side “until some agreement was reached…We must have the facts.” Rea had also spoken rather bluntly with George Gibbs and Alfred Noble on the matter, reminding them that it was their beholden duty as members of the board of engineers to help the PRR obtain “absolute data.”

Ironically, Gustav Lindenthal, the engineer and bridge builder who had preferred his North River Bridge project to tunnels, was now engaged to study what exactly was going awry under the river. Lindenthal’s mandate was that “the stability of the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels must be secure under all circumstances. For ample safety the worst known conditions must be considered.” But the maddening North River glacial silt continued to confound him.

PRR President Alexander Cassatt (center) on an inspection tour.

Jacobs, ever the activist and ingenious problem solver, conferred at great length with his chief assistant, James Forgie. After all, Jacobs had neatly solved the earlier problem of the Weehawken South Tunnel shield advancing off-grade by taking in more muck. Jacobs now posited to Rea that this same tunnel had been moving about in such an unnerving manner—as General Raymond had shown—in response to the advance of the parallel North Tunnel shield just fourteen feet upriver. Exercising all his persuasive powers, Jacobs convinced Rea to let him cautiously push forward with the North Tunnel shield and see if, again, taking in more muck might correct the wayward South Tunnel.

On April 18, the experiment began. “Approximately 50% of the total excavation for a ring of iron has been taken out on every shove, in order to avoid possibility of disturbing the South Tunnel. So far, that portion of the South Tunnel contiguous to which the North Tunnel is working has not shown any discernible rise…The excavation done is approximately 44% of the total.” The South Tunnel had, as Jacobs suspected, been thrust to one side by the passing of the North Tunnel and its shield.

Understanding why one of the Weehawken tunnels had been moving sideways was certainly gratifying. But Samuel Rea’s alarm fastened now on the far graver issue of the overall long-term stability and safety of the North River tunnels. What the junior engineers nervously called the Panic of 1906 was just beginning. Why was it that both unfinished North River tunnels also seemed to be moving up and down? General Raymond’s visit to Bryn Mawr and his data had prompted the deepest scrutiny and its early results were in no way reassuring. Lindenthal could see from his investigation that there was “bending and distorting” in the half-finished tunnels. Jacobs, after studying the matter in these early weeks, acknowledged that there were also “changes in the elevation of the tunnels…due to the effect of natural laws which are as yet imperfectly understood…Some other force than buoyant effort must be in action.”

But what? The overriding fear fueling the PRR’s Panic of 1906 was that whatever natural force this was would end up making the North River tunnels unsafe in the long run. If the tunnels were moving about, how would that affect the screw-piles of the subterranean “bridge” meant to connect them to the bedrock far below? These bedeviling but fundamental questions now hung ominously over Cassatt, Rea, and their engineers. By mid-April Cassatt decided to make the North River tunnels’ cast-iron ring linings much heavier, increasing the weight of each lineal foot from 9,272 to 11,594 pounds, hoping the additional weight would better settle the tunnels. But the gnawing fear persisted that the answers they sought might be as unsettling as the questions.