On May 25, 1907, the usual hundreds of idlers and spectators were leaning on the rough plank fence along Seventh Avenue, enthralled by the show far below their feet in the gigantic Penn Station excavation, New York’s “Culebra Cut.” Ignoring the busy traffic and throngs of Saturday shoppers, the men and boys along the fence chatted among themselves, commenting on this and that as the army of dusty workmen labored away in the vast man-created canyon now thirty and forty feet deep. It was a gratifying drama of perpetual motion: roaring steam derricks jerkily scooped up dirt and blasted rock, heaving them with a resounding crash into the waiting lines of battered freight cars. Small black locomotives steamed about, whistles shrieking, trundling the laden cars toward the North River, disappearing into the tunnel under the propped-up Ninth Avenue El, where every few minutes uptown and downtown IRT trains passed high above. And then there was always the excitement of the blasting.
Across the wide avenue, jammed with horse-drawn trucks and wagons, Isaac Finesilver and Jacob Kosty were enjoying the balmy morning, conversing in front of their secondhand clothing store on the corner of West Thirty-second Street. Upstairs in the Finesilvers’ second-floor apartment, their wives were just sitting down to lunch in the dining room with its panoramic (if noisy) view of the great Penn Station dig. Mrs. Finesilver was serving her four small children, while Mrs. Kosty shushed her baby. One block south on West Thirty-first Street, a Mrs. Melonius was up on the roof taking advantage of the fine weather to hang her family’s laundry to dry on a clothesline. Less industrious souls in the neighborhood were passing Saturday bellied up to the bar drinking beer in Bob Nelson’s corner saloon down on Seventh Avenue and Thirtieth.
Those men and boys lining the Penn Station fence noticed the work gangs across the deep canyon moving back as flagmen waved red warning flags to signal that blasting was imminent. Excavation had so advanced that it had been down to hard rock for some time now. As the PRR’s publicist, Ivy Lee, was happy to point out, this was no ordinary excavation, but required “the supporting of streets, including three main north and south avenues carrying the city’s heaviest traffic; the closing up of Thirty-second Street between Seventh and Tenth Avenues; the removal, care and support of miles of water, gas, and fire mains; telegraph, telephone, electric light, police and fire alarm wires.” Before actual construction could proceed for the new station, twenty-eight acres had to be dug down forty-five feet, which meant removing a mind-boggling three million cubic yards of material—mainly rock—from the terminal and track yards. And so the blasting had become a thrilling commonplace. The perimeters of this four-block site were being shored up by a mile and a half of ten-foot-thick concrete retaining walls. With the workmen backed far away, the signal was given to detonate.
In the next moment, a volcanic explosion ripped through the neighborhood, hurling the lounging spectators violently, and spewing a bombardment of hundred-pound boulders, big and small rocks, and a heavy hail of pebbles high up above Seventh Avenue. A towering dust cloud swirled out of the great pit, billowing skyward, reeking of nitroglycerin, and briefly engulfing the street in its gritty pall. After a lull of shocked silence, there was pandemonium.
Police patrolmen came running in their tall helmets and blue coats, while from the brown fog came yelling, wailing, and groans. Shattered glass glistened on the sidewalks while the brick fronts along Seventh Avenue were full of bulletlike holes. Debris and thick dust settled heavily into a rocky carpet. Mr. Finesilver picked himself up to see a huge gaping hole in the front wall of his own second-floor apartment. One of the bigger boulders had “plowed through the wall into the room where the women and children were…through the brick masonry as if it was so much pasteboard. The [150-pound] rock knocked the chandelier down, and then ricocheting across the room, tore away about fifteen feet of plastering, after which it fell to the floor and rolled under the table. Not a person in the room was so much as scratched. The hole in the wall measured four by five feet.”
High up on the roof, six stories above the street, Mrs. Melonius was not so lucky. One moment she was hanging wet clothes and adjusting the wooden clothespins, next she was face first on the tar roof, badly injured by a large rock. In Bob Nelson’s saloon, three blocks away, the plate glass shattered explosively as a twenty-pound rock crashed through. There, again miraculously, no one was hurt. But the barroom was a wreck. The cause for what seemed a volcano and an earthquake combined? At the Penn Station excavation, several forgotten and unexploded sticks of dynamite in some rocky crevice (a so-called “loaded hole”) had ignited unexpectedly.
As the breeze blew away the last of the dust and grit cloud, ambulance crews from three hospitals arrived to tend and remove the groaning, weeping victims. Despite the many hundreds out doing their weekend shopping, those badly hurt totaled but ten. The worst injured was a young boy of nine who had been watching the excavation and whose leg was badly crushed. The police found and arrested “John Fitzpatrick, the Superintendent in charge of the work, who was promptly bailed by his employers, John J. Murphy, a brother of Charles F. Murphy, leader of Tammany Hall, who is President of the contracting company.” The Murphy firm issued a statement notable for its insouciance: “This happens occasionally in all blasting work, and is an unavoidable accident.”
Unnerving accidents and fatalities had punctuated and marred the steady progress of the tunnels under the two rivers, but of late, the construction mishaps had become far more public and embarrassing. As the Pennsylvania Railroad’s gargantuan civil engineering project relentlessly advanced, untoward dangers were being visited upon an unsuspecting citizenry. Two months before the manmade “volcanic” eruption at the station site, there had been a far more terrifying earth-shaking episode. Twelve minutes after midnight on Sunday March 3, the whole of Manhattan and the New Jersey opposite woke to a stupendous jolt. In Gotham, “firemen from all the engine houses in the city were ordered out at once to try to locate the trouble. Police Headquarters, in Mulberry Street, was shaken by the shock, and each police station was at once communicated with to learn quickly what had happened.”
But the epicenter of the trouble was far across the river in Homestead, New Jersey, and the PRR’s Bergen Hill tunnel. Minutes after midnight the residents of nearby Union Hill “were awakened from their sleep by a trembling of the earth, followed by a terrific crash. They groped blindly about for lights, and then stood back aghast at the destruction. Shutters, window panes, and sashes were missing, and the cold wind poured into the rooms. On the floor lay pictures, bric-a-brac, and other trinkets…they rushed from their homes to the street.” At first, panicked families fleeing their battered houses into snowy yards wondered if an earthquake had set off some kind of brief cyclone. On both sides of the Hudson River, calls flooded into police stations, fire stations, and the newspapers, seeking the cause. In Jersey City, one man wandered the streets asking if Judgment Day had arrived. New York reporters descending upon Union Hill were astonished—hundreds of modest homes in a one-mile radius “looked as though they had been subjected to a severe bombardment…Many of the houses were so badly wrecked that they will have to be rebuilt or renovated.” The casualties included the local silk mill, where every single window was blown out, and the home of the very unhappy mayor, who had been ejected from his warm bed onto a floor littered with broken glass.
It quickly emerged that the cause was dynamite and sheer carelessness. This time, it was not an overlooked “loaded hole” but an entire storage magazine that had exploded. “It may be that the building was overcrowded with dynamite, and some of the boxes therefore too near the stove,” reported Charles Jacobs at the next meeting of the board of engineers. In fact, flaunting all the local rules, the PRR Bergen Hill contractor, William Bradley, had stockpiled far more dynamite than legally allowed. The mile-long Bergen Hill tunnels, where the electric PRR trains would begin their descent into the North River tunnels, were being advanced through extraordinarily hard rock. The contractors called one tough section “bastard granite.” No official cared to admit just how much dynamite was on hand when it blew up, but there was talk of one to four tons, a truly prodigious stash, and certainly sufficient to explain why the blast left a blackened crater thirty-six feet wide and ten feet deep and was felt for a radius of twenty miles, as far away as Connecticut. At first, the morning papers reported, “30 May Be Dead, Town Wrecked,” “Score Injured in Dynamite Explosion in Pennsylvania Tunnel at Homestead, N.J.,” “New York City Shaken.” Amazingly, when the dust settled and heads were counted, only one workman was slightly injured, and three members of one family cut and bruised by falling picture frames. Indignant local officials arrested a supervisor, who was quickly bailed out.
And then there were the unanticipated troubles with the crosstown tunnels in Manhattan. The original plan for the two double-track tunnels, which would connect the East River tunnels to Penn Station, was to burrow away quietly sixty feet below all the brownstone row houses, the Pilgrim Baptist Church, the Alpine Hotel, and various apartment buildings lining East Thirty-second and Thirty-third streets, sparing residents living and working there any noise, chaos, or traffic snarls. The first hint that perhaps all was not well had come in mid-January when a horse and coal wagon were “swallowed up” in a cave-in on Thirty-third Street just behind the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. A fortnight later, the Pennsylvania Railroad admitted the crosstown tunnels were “at a standstill” having encountered quicksand, but worse yet, half-dried-up underground streams.
The only safe way to proceed, they told the city’s Rapid Transit Commission, was to tear up Thirty-second and Thirty-third streets between Madison and Seventh avenues “from curb to curb, a wooden roadway being substituted for the present asphalt surface, and the buildings which line those thoroughfares may all have to be shored up from beneath.” Each night, the wooden roadway would be lifted while tunnel crews excavated down sixty feet. They predicted a timetable of ten months. After a brief fight, the property owners—including such powers as Alfred and Cornelius Vanderbilt, John Jacob Astor, and William Havemeyer—relented, and the ripping up of the streets proceeded.
The winter and early spring of 1907 served up their own tumult for Charles McKim. Even as the workers at one section of the Penn Station site were about to begin constructing its foundation, the ethereally lovely Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, dressed like a schoolgirl in simple smocks with large collars and wearing veiled hats, began testifying in the trial of her husband, Harry, for the murder of Stanford White. The afternoon papers of February 7 fulfilled McKim’s worst nightmares. With graphic candor, Evelyn told all: Her ascension into New York show business as a Floradora Girl at age sixteen, Stanford White’s wooing her at small dinner parties in his Madison Square Garden hideaway, and the evening she was deflowered. As she testified, Harry Thaw filled the courtroom with racking sobs. Evelyn said, “Stanford told me to finish my champagne. I said I didn’t care much for it. He insisted that I drink this glass of champagne.”
Here the New York newspapers reported, “She told of awaking later, to find herself in a bed surrounded by mirrors. She screamed and Stanford White asked her to please keep quiet…Then she went home and sat up all night.” McKim still remembered running into White that very day ushering Evelyn around their Fifth Avenue offices. “This little girl’s mother has gone to Pittsburgh and left her in my care,” he said. McKim had eyed her and said, “My God!” As sensation, the trial did not disappoint: Harry Thaw was a cocaine addict, he may or may not have tied Evelyn down and beaten her, Stanford White paid Evelyn’s fancy boarding school fees, showered her one Christmas with white-fox furs and diamonds, loved to push her naked on a red velvet swing.
Through it all, Charles McKim soldiered on. His usual bouts of depression and weariness were now joined by what he termed “ear trouble.” McKim, not yet sixty, was losing the hearing in his left ear. He could still, despite all these travails, write wryly to his daughter about this new affliction. “I am afraid deaf is the word!” When beset by his own infirmities and the murder trial, Charles McKim could console himself that professionally he was at the pinnacle of a distinguished career.
The previous fall, he had completed an Italian Renaissance library for financier J. Pierpont Morgan’s collection of rare manuscripts on East Thirty-sixth Street and Madison Avenue (conveniently just a block north of his own apartment). Morgan tended toward the cantankerous, so McKim stole in and out of the construction site, avoiding the imperious financier he had dubbed Lorenzo the Magnificent. When the library, with its wondrous jewellike interiors, was finished in November 1906, McKim exulted, “The sky is blue and there is no cause for worry,” for the difficult Mr. Morgan “expressed great pride and satisfaction in the building.”
Moreover, McKim could rejoice to know his long-cherished dream of an American Academy in Rome was a solid reality, with a powerful board (including Morgan), a rich endowment, and a villa for its students. In Washington, D.C., he and Daniel Hudson Burnham had successfully revived L’Enfant’s original vision of the Mall. They had persuaded the federal government that the nation’s capitol should feature imposing classical buildings worthy of ancient Rome. Moreover, McKim’s design for a Lincoln Memorial was gaining favor.
And then, of course, there was New York’s Pennsylvania Station. In early 1907, New Yorkers saw a gigantic and rocky canyon rimmed by rundown brownstones and filled with armies of excavators. But McKim knew that very shortly the Fuller Construction Company would be erecting a steel frame that would begin to convey the magnificent dimensions of his railroad temple. While Stanford White, the private man, was being daily scourged in the press, McKim encouraged young Larry White’s interest in his father’s profession. In mid-February, McKim sent Larry photographs of the “Pennsylvania Terminal record, including those of stone quarried, cut, and awaiting transportation, as well as models, etc. There are fields of this cut stone lying ready for shipment near South Framingham, and some day, when the weather is fair, it would be a good object lesson for us both to go out…The quarry itself is well worth the short journey of an hour from Boston. The drawings show the work in its various stages of progress. I send them to you for this reason.”
When McKim was feeling well, he helped William Mead organize auctions of Stanford White’s thousands of objects of desire and exotica. He also oversaw White’s grave site out at the St. James cemetery, “transplanting a large white pine tree, much box wood…[and erecting] a Greek stele, nine feet high.” Then, on April 12, as thousands of New Yorkers mobbed the courthouse to hear Thaw’s murder trial verdict, the judge declared a mistrial. A second murder trial would reprise the whole sordid tale. For McKim, it was too much to bear.
It was now the spring of 1907 and Samuel Rea still did not know why the now-completed North River tunnels continued to move about in the silt forty feet below the riverbed. They could proceed no further with finishing these tunnels until they understood what the problem was. The previous September, not long after his triumphant public walks through the tunnels, Charles Jacobs had finally responded in writing to Rea’s repeated and increasingly exasperated demands for his professional opinion. It did not help Rea’s mood when Jacobs had conceded, “Since we commenced to construct these tunnels we know very little more about the nature of the mud—its specific gravity may have been determined more closely…but we have no knowledge of its future action during the permanent use of these tunnels in railroad service.” Rea found this completely unacceptable. He was equally angry to read Jacobs’s assertion that, “We are faced at the present with the certainty that these tunnels go down and not up. We do not know why they go down.”
“The Behavior of the Subaqueous Tunnels,” as the issue was now blandly referred to in meeting after meeting, was causing a bitter split between Brigadier General Raymond and, it appeared, the rest of the board of engineers, led by Jacobs. General Raymond’s cataract had been operated on, but with little success. Now, when he descended under the North River for his investigations, “he had to be personally led to and through the tunnels, and could examine drawings only with the aid of a strong glass, magnifying one spot at a time.”
Understandably, Raymond had taken deep professional umbrage at Jacobs’s lackadaisical and skeptical attitude on the tunnel issue, wondering caustically, “Does Mr. Jacobs believe that a tunnel can be built scientifically if it cannot be scientifically designed, and does he propose to build the tunnels at hap-hazard and design them scientifically after their completion?…He has driven four tunnels completely across the river and has removed or displaced several hundred cubic yards of the material concerning the nature of which he is still ignorant…The plain truth is that Mr. Jacobs has made no serious effort to investigate this important question. Even the specific gravity determinations, which he reluctantly admits mayhavebeen made, were not obtained by him. A lack of information on this subject may involve the company in the useless expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars and in the construction of tunnels not well adapted to the surrounding conditions.”
In the wake of this acrimonious exchange, Rea and his board of engineers managed to agree on one matter: Perhaps the tunnels were moving about because they were not yet watertight. Back on November 8, 1906, Jacobs had ordered caulking commenced on the North Tunnel in the middle section from Ring 735 to Ring 1,135. The first phase had been finished the day Alexander Cassatt died, December 28. But there was still considerable leaking. During the ensuing months, Jacobs built a dam at each end of a thousand feet of tunnel to wall off the water from the uncaulked portions of the tunnel, and then “re-tightened and red-leaded [those thousand feet]…in addition to [more] caulking and grummeting [of] the tunnel lining [and] the joints between the bore-plugs and bore-segments. [All] were made tight with wooden wedges driven as tightly as it was possible to drive them.” But despite Jacobs’s efforts, it was now spring of 1907, the tunnels were still not watertight, and Rea still had no answer.
Moreover, even as they were bewildered by the mysterious oscillations of the tunnels, Rea and the board of engineers still had to decide whether they should proceed with anchoring the tunnel to the riverbed in some fashion. And if so, how? They were actively studying different systems of screw piles to provide supports. On June 5, 1907, Rea weighed in. He believed that if the North River tunnels were anchored by screw piles of any kind to bedrock, “any appreciable movement would tend to rupture the shell.” If they attached screw piles that allowed for motion of the tunnels, the very nature of those attachments would cause “more or less leakage into an otherwise dry tunnel.” He proposed they consider reserving the ability to install screw piles if needed, but to strengthen the tunnel instead by “the insertion of steel rods in the concrete lining.”
Only days later, on June 8, 1907, Rea opened his Scientific American to find an editorial titled “Tunnel Tubes in Soft Material.” It began as a discussion of the East River Rapid Transit tubes. But it also dealt with their own work, and the further he read the more his heart sank: “The success of the work under the Hudson and East rivers proves that it is entirely possible to build as many tunnel tubes as may be desired. But the question which has yet to be proved…is how far will the vibration set up in the metal tubes by the passage of the trains tend to agitate the surrounding material…[If] bending stresses developed…far in excess of the resisting power of the tubes…fracture must ensue. But whatever theory may indicate, time alone can tell.” And so, for safety sake, the editors of Scientific American strongly endorsed exactly what Rea now opposed: piles “sunk through the bottom of the tubes until they reach rock or some other sufficiently firm bearing.”
Rea did not need any lectures or advice. This matter, “The Behavior of the Subaqueous Tunnels,” along with the related issues of attaching piles, had become his constant preoccupation and worry. At such moments, he sorely missed Cassatt. James McCrea was a fine president, but McCrea’s whole career had been in the Lines West of Pittsburgh, his duties far removed from the entanglements of Gotham. With Cassatt dead, Rea had to carry the full burden of the New York Extension. And the problem of whether or not to install screw piles was sowing discord among his board of engineers just as he most needed their counsel and advice.
As if that were not sufficiently galling, on Saturday June 29 Rea was perusing the Philadelphia Inquirer when he saw an editorial headline titled, “The Philadelphia Tunnels Condemned.” To his horror, the newspaper editors had read the Scientific American article and were parroting its assertion that without piles anchoring the PRR’s two North River tunnels, “the strain from pressure and vibration will be so great as to make the tubes break.” Inveighed the Philadelphia editors: “Here is a question in which the public is vitally interested, not only through its ownership of the securities which built the tubes, but because it is to become a vast artery of travel. The thought of a breaking down of the tunnel is too horrible for contemplation.” Was this not precisely the possible calamity that had haunted Rea for more than a year?
“My first impulse on Saturday morning when I saw this editorial,” Rea confided to McCrea later when he had calmed down, “was to write the Editor of the paper at once denying the truth of it…But after conferring with our Board of Engineers, I feel inclined to drop the matter. To get into a discussion with a daily newspaper on a technical question is fruitless, but at the same time I realize that such articles as these lead to other comments…I would prefer not to do [anything] pending our experimental tests which I am watching continuously.”
All that spring and summer of 1907, Charles Jacobs worked on those experimental tests, trying to make a thousand feet in both North River tunnels truly dry. By September, when both were deemed watertight, Jacobs installed an Edson Recording Gauge in each to monitor “any movement of the tunnel.” A week later, he noted that these gauges had revealed “the interesting fact that the tunnel bodily rises at low tide and subsides again at high tide.” Despite Rea’s inclinations not to have screw piles, he and the board had decided to proceed with the installation of various test screw piles to see how they worked. When the board met again on October 3, 1907, Jacobs reported that using the Edson Gauges, “The actual time and elevation of high and low tide in the river at this point are observed daily, and the time of high tide is found to agree identically with that at which the tunnel reaches its lowest position.”
A month later, at the November 7, 1907, meeting of the board of engineers, Jacobs further reported, “That the tunnels (and piles also) move down at high tide and up at low tide is now a certain fact. This is shown clearly not only by the Edson Recording Gauges…but also by the pile test observations.” And so it was that Samuel Rea finally learned in part why the PRR’s North River tunnels were moving about in the silt: they were responding to the changing pressures of the incoming and outgoing tides. Once known, it seemed so simple and so obvious. They now had a full scientific explanation for the upward movement of the tunnels. They all knew the North River was a tidal body, but never dreamed these tides were powerful enough to affect their deeply buried tunnels. Rea also now knew that making tunnels watertight had slowed their gradual downward settling. So they could say that the downward drift of the tunnels was partly a function of leaking. But there still remained a terrifying unknown: Situated in this soft North River silt, would the tunnels continue to subside downward year after year? And if so, would they finally sink so far in the fluid silt that they would rupture?
Rea had already expressed the opinion that screw piles seemed more of a danger to the tunnels than a solution. By November, General Raymond had come round to that same stance. Unhappily, Alfred Noble, Charles Jacobs, and George Gibbs, three engineers with decades of hands-on experience, remained completely unpersuaded. “In recent discussions,” wrote Noble, “the question has been asked frequently of those of us who favor the use of supports what we propose to do if the subsidence of the tunnels proves to be rapid. It is equally pertinent for us to ask those who propose to omit supports what they would do if the tunnels, unrestrained by supports, should wallow in the mud…[If] a large and continued downward movement should occur, the condition of the tunnel project would be very serious and supports on a more comprehensive scale than has yet been contemplated might be the only alternative to the abandonment of the project.” There in a nutshell was the fearsome truth. Might they have to abandon the two finished North River tunnels as unsafe?
The backdrop to this engineering debate was an escalating mood of financial jitters infecting the New York Stock Exchange. All that summer, stocks had been in a nervous swoon. Pennsylvania stock was sinking back to previous lows, reaching $117 by August. Wall Street financiers blamed Roosevelt’s high-decibel crusade against entrenched corporate malefactors and their “successful dishonesty.” Cascading bankruptcies culminated in crowds of desperate depositors besieging the Knickerbocker Trust, a revered marble temple to mammon on Fifth Avenue. At this moment, J. P. Morgan rushed back from an Episcopal conference in Richmond to rescue the nation. Now seventy, Morgan had become a caricature of a plutocrat, with his gigantic belly, ferocious, arrogant eyes, and monstrous nose, red and deformed from acne rosacea. Ensconced now in the inner sanctum of his sumptuous new Madison Avenue library, the great financier smoked his Cuban cigars and huddled with the rich and powerful, consulting the U.S. secretary of the treasury, conferring life or death to banks, trusts, and firms teetering on the brink.
The day the Knickerbocker collapsed, President Roosevelt emerged from a fifteen-day hunting trip deep in the Louisiana bayous. Energized and exuberant, he regaled reporters with tales of shooting bear, turkey, opossum, squirrel, and wildcat. “We ate them all,” he enthused, “except the wildcat.” As for the Panic of 1907, the president accepted no blame, wondering privately in a letter whether certain titans had not provoked the financial crash “so that they may enjoy unmolested the fruits of their own evil-doing.” The panic merely added another layer of difficulty to the PRR’s troubles, forcing layoffs and slowdowns. President McCrea blandly announced they would not push the work in New York “as vigorously as had been done in the past.”