TWENTY-FOUR

“THE WAY IS STONY AND WET”

That same fall of 1907, Charles McKim returned from his annual outing to the Scottish moors, where he had hunted grouse and ignored his birthday. “When we turn our 60th corner and face 70, the less said the better,” he wrote his daughter, while sailing toward New York on the leviathan ocean liner, the S.S. Celtic. “So I kept it wisely to myself…. I am coming home—if not yet quite well and strong—better in every way than when I went away. I am advised to start in gradually to work…[I] propose, if possible, to get well enough, deaf or dumb, to get back to my work, and to take care of you for a while longer!” McKim lingered only briefly in Gotham before retreating to St. James out on Long Island and the simple beauties of its sea air, thatch meadows, orchards, and clam flats.

By early 1908 McKim was back in Manhattan and settled into a new apartment, still on East Thirty-fifth Street but a few doors closer to Fifth Avenue. His daughter, Margaret, moved in to keep house for him. The two could stroll downtown just two blocks, head west, and join the perennial gawkers watching the wonder of the Pennsylvania Station construction site. The blasting still went on day in and day out over toward Ninth Avenue, but on Seventh Avenue, the station’s foundation was in place and the steel frame was readily visible. “The new Pennsylvania Railroad Station in New York,” reported Harper’s Weekly, “…is slowly rising out of the gaping depths…The vast extent of the excavation, in which gangs have been delving and building night and day during the last three years, gave the spectator a sense of wonder at the gigantic task that was being undertaken. It seemed almost beyond physical powers to complete it. But it is being accomplished. The foundations are laid, and little by little the steel framework of the central building rises above the surrounding houses.” In January, Samuel Rea, an avid reader of thick tomes of history, had a copper box with the project’s history and plans placed in the cornerstone at Seventh Avenue and Thirty-third Street.

On January 6, Harry Thaw’s second murder trial had begun, the whole rancid circus once again undermining McKim’s faltering health. It was not possible to venture forth on the streets of Manhattan without encountering some scruffy herd of newsboys bleating about Evelyn and Harry and Stanford. This time, mercifully, the trial had moved swiftly, with Thaw’s lawyers arguing that their client was crazy and should thus be acquitted. On February 2, the jurors had agreed, finding “Mad Harry” not guilty of murder by reason of insanity. But that had not put an end to the whole sordid saga. Harry Thaw lost little time seeking to be declared sane, while his family worked on annulling his marriage to Evelyn. In mid-February, William Mead had written to Daniel Burnham, “Poor McKim has had another knock out, and quite severe this time. He is getting on all right and out in the country, where he is receiving good care. I am afraid, however, it will be some months before he shows up here.” One consolation was that Larry White had finished Harvard, and he and Bessie were far away in Paris, where he was studying architecture.

As for the rest of Gotham, they were soon distracted. On February 12, 150,000 strong, they squeezed into Times Square to watch the thrilling start of the New York to Paris Automobile Race sponsored by the New York Times and Le Matin. The Hotel Astor was festooned with flags and bunting, while mounted police kept the street clear. Westward the six autos roared (stopping soon enough, of course, to cross on the ferries), and a nation increasingly mad for motorcars cheered the American team as it raced toward Alaska, and ultimately, on to Siberia, Russia, Europe, and the finish line in Paris.

 

Even as Samuel Rea and his board of engineers wrangled over how best to protect the North River tunnels, the seemingly accursed quartet of East River tunnels were at long last nearing completion. In the wake of all the spectacular blowouts, fires, cave-ins, floodings, explosions, injuries, deaths, and various strikes, Ernest W. Moir, Scotsman by birth, veteran tunnel builder, and vice president of S. Pearson & Son, had taken decisive charge, rallying the men onward. A constant presence in the tunnels for the past eighteen months, Moir maintained a penthouse in the skyscraping Belmont Hotel with a view of the East River. “When he goes to bed, which is seldom according to the sand-hogs, Mr. Moir has a telescope glued to his never-closed eye. Certain it is from his aerie den you can see the air bubbles in the river…he has always turned up on the job before the telephonic message of a ‘blow-out’ or some other of the hundred and one obstacles which have beset the undertaking.”

In the realm of subaqueous work, it was widely acknowledged that the East River tunnels had posed nearly insuperable conditions, especially in the central sections where the top of the tunnel passed through sand and the bottom hit up against rock. Many had been quick to call it impossible and the designs fatally flawed. Dozens of sandhogs and other laborers had been carried out of the tunnels, suffering ghastly deaths during the always-behind-schedule job. In early February 1908, the two sections of Tunnel D neared one another after four grueling years. The alignment engineers cautiously thrust an eight-inch-wide steel pipe forward fifty feet from one shield face to the other. Rapturous cheers greeted the pipe’s final successful push into the other shield. The two sides were about to meet!

When the elated sandhogs in one half of Tunnel D felt the strong air current flowing through the connecting pipe, they rushed out and “procured a toy train [a replica of the Congressional Limited]…Placing it in the pipe, it was forced through at a high rate of speed. This was the first train to actually pass through the tunnels.” On February 20, 1908, the two halves of D became the first of the PRR’s benighted East River tunnels to meet up. Anticipating no further major obstacles, a jubilant Ernest Moir swiftly dispatched engraved invitations to celebrate the long-anticipated “Junctioning of the Four East River Tunnels.” The formal dinner was set for Thursday evening April 2 at Gotham’s most fashionable restaurant, the opulent Sherry’s. Rea, happily responding to Moir’s invitation, lamented only that Cassatt, “who devoted so much personal time and attention [to the project]…was not spared to join with us.”

Rea had already taken concrete action to ensure posterity would never forget Alexander Cassatt’s visionary leadership. At his suggestion the PRR board of directors voted to honor Cassatt with a larger-than-life bronze statue. Fittingly, this memorial of their company’s seventh president would be enshrined in the monumental Manhattan terminal. Rea had assumed charge, going in person to 160 Fifth Avenue to consult with Charles McKim, who had returned from his rest in the country at a sanitarium.

McKim, in his usual fastidious way, considered all the ins and outs of his station design and then advised: “There is one space which particularly suggests itself…the head of the flight of steps leading from the Arcade into the General Waiting Room.” McKim proposed “a niche out of reach and considerably above the line of the eye, designed to contain an heroic figure which would be seen by all entering the Station on its main axis, as well as from the Waiting Room…its elevated and retired position, while being seen by all, would escape the charge of conspicuousness, which above all things would be distasteful to Mr. Cassatt.” To Rea, it seemed most apropos that Alexander Cassatt could keep a benevolent eye on the millions of railroad passengers arriving and departing from the station he did not live to see.

With McKim’s health still wobbly, William Mead shepherded through the commission for the Cassatt statue. He engaged, for a twelve-thousand-dollar fee, Adolph A. Weinman, the New York artist already sculpting the station’s gigantic stone statues of robed women, allegories of Day and Night, and stern eagles that would flank each of the giant seven-foot clocks decorating the four main entrances. In March, Mead asked the PRR if Weinman could have “both a heavy and a light overcoat of Mr. Cassatt’s, a cutaway coat, vest, pair of trousers, as well as a pair of shoes. If he could also have a collar it would be useful. I think Mr. Rea had a certain type of coat in mind which Mr. Cassatt usually wore.” Mead suggested he and Weinman meet with Lois Cassatt “for any suggestions she may desire to make.”

Meanwhile, the board of engineers still could not agree about the necessity of screw piles, nor was there consensus about whether the tunnels would keep settling until they cracked. But even as the board clashed over these dilemmas, the other phases of the gigantic enterprise were falling gratifyingly into place after six hard years. By mid-March, after so many travails, the mood was ebullient when the remaining three East River tunnels connected well before Moir’s formal affair at Sherry’s. The workmen in Tunnel B, “not to be outdone by those in ‘D,’ procured a rag doll representing a lady and sent it through the [aligning] pipe…heralding it as the first lady to make the trip. This doll was preserved, framed and presented by the contractors as a souvenir to the engineers in charge of this tunnel.”

For the hundreds of engineers and sandhogs who had struggled through so much disaster and uncertainty, these triumphant early months of 1908 were a fitting time for sentiment, pride, and souvenirs. The East River sandhogs bestowed a munificent gift upon their boss, Ernest Moir, veteran of the original ill-starred Hudson River tunnel, who had reappeared at the East River tunnels’ darkest hour to lead his sandhog troops to glory. The gift was an impressive model air lock measuring “two feet six inches long and…nine inches in diameter. The interior is lit by electric lights, and compressed air is supplied by pumps. There is a miniature hospital bed…There is also a chronometer inside the little room; also pressure gauges.”

Much to Ivy Lee’s delight, he was allowed to organize a press tour for journalists (“should be men who can stand an air pressure of 34 pounds”) to witness the actual breakthrough for the northernmost and final East River tunnel, Tunnel A. “In the mud and the mist and the drenching fog ahead,” wrote one Philadelphia reporter, thrilled to be walking under the river from Manhattan in one of the infamous, off-limits tunnels, “we could see the glint of the shield that had traveled from Long Island City, and we could see that the two powerful engines were only 18 inches apart. The jacks were started, the shields quivered and shook, they moved forward like caterpillars, resting on their tails, and soon they touched all round the circumference, but for an impertinent rock lodged in one corner.

“Jimmy Sullivan was for blowing the thing to smithereens, but Moir said, ‘No bulldozing, boys, now, least of all when we have got the East River, backed by the Atlantic Ocean, just where we want ’em.’ Quietly he plotted the destruction of the rock, and together we climbed into the Long Island shield while both gangs cheered the completion of the work.” It was a deliriously thrilling and historic moment. As thanks, the workers were given two days paid vacation.

However, bemoaned the reporter for the New York World, relishing all the drama of the drippy, shadowy iron tubes where men had struggled and died to penetrate these antediluvian depths, “The millions of people who will use these tunnels in getting to and from their business will see nothing of them but a blur at the car window, and will scarcely realize that they are passing through tubes which have proved to be the most difficult of any driven, nor will they comprehend the stupendous nature of the labor that has been expended in their construction.” All those future Long Island Rail Road commuters whooshing through these hard-won tunnels would know only that swift trains made possible their family’s move from a crowded, expensive apartment building to a home of their own, with trees and a garden for the children.

On the morning of April 1, as a steady rain began, Ernest Moir left a telephone message for one of the PRR officers about his elaborate dinner, detailing its many courses, planned toasts, talks, and vaudeville entertainment. Consequently, Moir was disappointed to learn later that afternoon that Rea had been summoned to Pittsburgh to the bedside of his dying mother. Before leaving, however, he had dictated a message of congratulation for the party. Such was the occasion that PRR president James McCrea and vice president Green would both journey up from Philadelphia to attend.

Moir’s dinner, however convivial, was almost certain be a far more sedate affair than the gigantic bash Charles Jacobs had thrown at Sherry’s in March 1907 for the four hundred men involved in finishing the long-aborning McAdoo tunnels. That evening, following the usual flowery speeches and cigars for all, a Sand Hog Band decked out in yellow oilskins had mounted the stage under the crystal chandeliers to torture the banqueters by caterwauling on tin instruments, imitating the sounds of air blows, foghorns, and tunnel explosions. The jeering, boisterous audience expressed its appreciation first by tossing “rolls, then pickles, and within a few minutes the place was in an uproar with 400 tunnelers pelting the Sand Hog Band with loaves of bread, chunks of beef and other things handy on the tables. The army of waiters became frightened and ran pell mell from the great dining hall, but Chief Engineer Jacobs restored order.”

 

Samuel Rea departed his Bryn Mawr home in a rush, anxious to reach Pittsburgh and his mother, Ruth Moore Rea. As his wood-paneled PRR parlor car rumbled through the Alleghenies, the engineer in Rea appreciated the notable reductions in his road’s grades and curves. He also worried, for his was a coal-carrying road and once again labor unrest and wildcat strikes were roiling the Pennsylvania coal mines. The morning’s papers wrote of twenty-five thousand men out. As for Rea’s ailing mother, he was quite resigned to her death—“it is be expected”—for she was eighty-eight years old.

In truth, Rea was more concerned about his grown son, George, twenty-eight, a civil engineer, married and a new father. For almost a week, George had been down with the grippe, a malady his mother, Mary, feared he had contracted working in his father’s New York tunnels. After graduating from Princeton in 1904, George Black Rea had joined the large army of junior engineers toiling away in the PRR’s New York Extension. Because their only son had suffered rheumatic fever when young, the Reas still worried about his health.

In Pittsburgh, Rea debarked his train to find winter, for snow, accompanying a cold wave, had howled in, briefly making the Smoky City white. Over at Duquesne Gardens, crowds filled the second annual Automobile Show, covetously eying new models of Franklins, Packards, Raniers, and Maxwells. The Ford Motor Company (“More Than 20,000 Fords Have Been Sold”) boasted that its utilitarian six-hundred-dollar black roadsters were “equal in value to any car at double the price.”

Rea drove through the elegant precincts of Shadyside to the Kenmawr Hotel, hoping as he neared Mrs. Rea’s suite in the Italianate villa residence on its terraced grounds that he was not too late. Rea found his mother failing but alive and spent the next several days by her side. Then, on Monday April 6 at four in the afternoon, Ruth Moore Rea died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Two days later, soon after he had bid his mother farewell, a telegram arrived from home in Bryn Mawr. Rea opened it, glanced at the message, and felt a wave of misery. Many men had lost their lives working on the PRR’s tunnels and terminal, and now, in an unspeakable sacrifice, George, his son, had joined their ranks. Alfred Noble had noted to Rea just the previous year, “Long continued work in compressed air is very serious in its effects, the men all show them.” If any one knew the exact number dead from working on the PRR’s New York Extension, they did not speak it out loud. Now, his own son had joined those largely anonymous fatalities. Worse yet, from an illness contracted in the poor, always damp air of the PRR tunnels. It was as cruel a blow as could befall any loving father. For five years, men working for the PRR’s contractors had died from the bends, from floods, blowouts, collapsing headings, and in careless dynamite explosions and fires. Not quite two months earlier, three more men had died in the North River tunnels from yet another mishap with dynamite. All those men had families—mothers, fathers. Some had wives and children. And all had been mourned. Now he and his wife and daughter-in-law would join the bereaved. He thought of William Baldwin, the LIRR’s president, dead too young of cancer. And his own dear chief, Cassatt, whose big and courageous heart had simply stopped beating. But most wrenching for him, his own son.

 

Life pressed relentlessly on and Samuel Rea with it. Three days after George’s death, the first of the Bergen Hill tunnels that would carry the PRR tracks from the Meadowlands down to the North River tunnels was to be blasted fully open. Ivy Lee was allowed to invite all the New York and Philadelphia reporters who had been clamoring (usually to no avail) to see the PRR’s manmade netherworld. By seven o’clock on April 11, a mild Saturday morning, a gaggle of journalists, engineers, and tunnelers had gathered in the shadowy rocky bore deep inside Bergen Hill, a musty, dank place. “At 7:05 o’clock the blast was set off, and as the smoke cleared there came a glimmer of light through the cracks in the dividing wall,” wrote the Times man. “This traprock, right where the tubes were scheduled to join had been found among the worst met by tunnel workers at any point of their labors, and has taken an average of three pounds of dynamite for every cubic yard of rock removed. So another blast was set and this time when the smoke cleared there was an opening large enough for the engineers to make their way through without much difficulty.”

With a shout, the engineers and tunnelers inside Bergen Hill, ignoring all the smoke, dust, and grime, clambered through the jagged hole, followed close behind by the crowd of journalists. After three years of around-the-clock work, the men were over the moon at being the first through. At that dusty moment, Cassatt’s dream had been fully realized. You could now enter a tunnel at Bergen Hill and, following it down under the North River, as the New York Times reported, “Walk from Hackensack Meadows to Long Island, but the Way is Stony and Wet.” More than five miles of PRR railroad tunnels, starting in New Jersey and ending in Long Island were now bored completely through. This moment of corporate and engineering triumph was nonetheless somewhat muted, for all knew of the tragedy that had befallen poor Samuel Rea, his wife, and young widowed daughter-in-law. The untimely death of George Rea was alleviated only by the fetching two-month-old granddaughter who understood nothing yet of her own loss. Samuel Rea and his wife, Mary, who from that day on wore black mourning, had buried their son in Church of the Redeemer, the same shady Bryn Mawr church cemetery where Alexander Cassatt lay.

 

Bergen Hill contractor William Bradley organized his celebratory dinner at Sherry’s for Thursday May 7 to honor Chief Engineer Charles Jacobs and his staff. On May 2, one of Rea’s assistants wrote Bradley saying his chief had received the “polite invitation,” but declined, “owing to the recent bereavement which has come to him.” On the very day of the dinner, Charles Jacobs had detonated the final blast opening the second Bergen Hill tunnel, signaling the completion of all the PRR tunnels. All told, almost four hundred tons of dynamite had been exploded to blast away—inch by inch and foot by foot—the Bergen Hill’s tough rock interior. As Rea wrote in a congratulatory note, “The Pennsylvania Railroad is now into New York City.”

The May 7, 1908, dinner at Sherry’s was exceedingly jovial. Jacobs, in formal dinner suit, waxed nostalgic, recalling, “On June 24, 1903, I had the honor of starting the first drill on the first piece of the work of this huge undertaking, viz.: the shaft at 33rd Street and 11th Avenue…Today I have had the extreme pleasure of firing the final blast that brought down the last heading of the North tunnel under the Bergen Hill, which will now enable an inhabitant of the United States to pass under Bergen Hill, the North River, New York City, and the East River and on to Long Island.” After a few more remarks Jacobs sat down to another wild burst of applause.

The evening rollicked on, with sentimental toasts, Sherry’s excellent dishes and wines, raucous renderings of popular songs, silly skits, and jokes about the Tunnel Bowling League (pitting the Bergen Hill engineers against those of the East and North River tunnels), doggerel verse extolling their tremendous triumph, all culminating in a specially written song, “The Pennsy Tunnels,” sung to the well-known political song, “Tammany.”

 

All through that spring, the board of engineers continued to meet and dispute bitterly over the North River tunnels. On May 6, 1908, the board had convened for its 204th meeting. Not quite six years before, Alexander Cassatt had instructed these men to proceed always with “absolute knowledge of the conditions.” But now, despite their best efforts, General Raymond, Charles Jacobs, Alfred Noble, and George Gibbs all had to concede “it had not been possible to do so in every instance.” Two years had passed since General Raymond had journeyed to Bryn Mawr to alert Samuel Rea to the disturbing movements in the unfinished North River tunnels. Now, as they sat around the meeting table, they lacked the “absolute knowledge” that would allow a definitive decision. On the matter of how best to secure and protect the North River tunnels, these engineers could only offer their best professional opinion.

“In my opinion,” General Raymond had written months earlier in arguing against screw piles, “such supports will endanger the safety of the tunnel instead of insuring it…Construction of a satisfactory sliding joint [to attach the screw piles] will sooner or later bind or leak, or do both, introducing conditions that will be troublesome and dangerous.” But Noble, Jacobs, and Gibbs were still in favor of screw piles. The board remained split.

At the 204th meeting, a letter from Samuel Rea was read laying out all the reasons that “I have, after most careful consideration, reached the conclusion that piles, not being a necessity or advisable, we should not install them.” He then instructed “that the North River Tunnels be at once made absolutely watertight, or as nearly so as may be possible; and that they shall be lined with concrete, reinforced with steel to such extent as may be considered desirable by the Board, in such manner as to admit of the installation of piles thereafter if deemed advisable.” Soon, gangs of workmen down inside the PRR’s sixteen miles of completed tunnels would be busily coating the iron tubes with two-foot-thick inner walls of reinforced concrete mixed and minutely monitored by PRR engineers to ensure its absolute integrity.

Samuel Rea could only hope now that he and General Raymond were right in their professional opinions and that the calamity they all feared would not come to pass. They had exercised their best judgment in pursuit of making the North River tunnels safe. But the truth was that they would not know definitively if they were right until years in the future after the tunnels had endured the continual pounding of hundreds of trains day after day, week after week and year after year.

The PRR tunnel route from New Jersey to Long Island.

 

By the fall of 1908, New Yorkers were amazed at the grandeur arising on Seventh Avenue. For months, the gawkers and passersby had watched as a veritable army of men assembled the colossal steel shell, a resplendent silhouette that bespoke the latest construction techniques. From the track bed, 650 steel columns rose up to support the massive structure that McKim had designed. But it was only when the men began to install the Milford pink granite facade that the station’s somber beauty and power appeared. As one majestic Doric column after another rose thirty-five feet into the air, they began to form a monumental Roman colonnade—fronting, of all plebeian places, Seventh Avenue. On a blue September day, one could now stand at West Thirty-third Street staring dreamily at the busy construction site and imagine onself transported to ancient imperial Rome. It was an odd but inspiring sight, to see suchrosy classical splendor materializing in the middle of Manhattan’s Tenderloin.

The construction of Penn Station in October 1908.

On February 21, 1909, the final piece of the stonework was completed on Penn Station’s Seventh Avenue facade. Now one could stand at the junction of Broadway and look west down Thirty-second Street to behold the unlikely classical vision of the station’s main entrance, a “great central pavilion” set off from the long front of Doric columns by its greater height and double row of ten columns. “Above the columns,” reported the New York Times, “is an entablature surmounted by a stepped parapet and sculptured group [Night and Day] supporting a clock with a dial 7 feet in diameter.” When the Brooklyn Bridge had been built decades earlier, the whole of Gotham could easily observe the steady advance of that beautiful behemoth. But most of the PRR’s New York Extension—the tunnels—remained out of sight. Only as the terminal began to rise in all its Doric glory did New Yorkers begin to realize that an immense change was upon them.

As the station took magisterial shape, Chief Engineer Gibbs grappled with two critical decisions about motive power. First, what kind of electricity—alternating current or direct current—should power the New York Extension’s 110 miles of rails, starting in Harrison, New Jersey, and continuing into Penn Station and then on to Long Island? “The Manhattan terminal…[of] the Pennsylvania involved electrical systems of such magnitude,” writes historian Carl W. Condit, “embodied so many novelties, and grew from such an intricate complex of urban factors, [it]…may be described [along with Grand Central Station] as the greatest unified engineering and architectural work ever undertaken in the United States.”

As the end of 1908 neared, Gibbs had fully considered all aspects of the situation. While alternating current systems offered greater flexibility, they were also newer and less tested. For several years, LIRR trains running on the Atlantic Avenue line through Brooklyn had been powered by direct current electricity via a third rail. And it was that road’s intention to simply extend its D.C. third rail all the way to Penn Station. This alone “argued more strongly for the Pennsylvania’s own use of direct current than any other factor.” Moreover, D.C. traction technology had been around longer, and thus was more familiar and reliable. Add to the equation the many travails the New Haven Railroad had suffered on its newly electrified A.C. lines out of Gotham and it was easy to understand Gibbs’s inclination to err on the side of certainty. “Any serious operating failures,” he later said, “would have jeopardized the whole investment and put electrification back years.” One had also to consider the flexibility of interchanging cars with other local transit systems using the same D.C. system. And so, in early December 1908, Gibbs endorsed D.C. to the board of engineers, who agreed they should opt for the tried and true—direct current electricity.

The second major question then was what kind of electric locomotive would best serve the PRR’s brand-new all-steel fleet of passenger and Pullman cars that Cassatt had insisted on to prevent train fires in his New York tunnels. Gibbs had been helping with experimental designs for new kinds of electric locomotives, collaborating with the Westinghouse Company and Baldwin Locomotive Works. They had been methodically testing locomotives over the past several years. “It was decided to make quite a radical departure from general practice,” said Gibbs, “in the final design of high-speed locomotives for the terminal equipment.” By the time Gibbs was done, he had indeed come up with something unprecedented. His engine looked nothing like the hulking, ripsnorting steam locomotives Americans had long admired as they roared along the rails. Instead, the DD1, as it was dubbed, appeared to be just two joined passenger cars, and it could operate in either direction, a great plus. With its two front oval windows looking like sad drooping eyes, the DD1 looked disconcertingly like a big mechanical basset hound rather than a powerful locomotive.

Yet the DD1 immediately became the most powerful locomotive—steam or electric—of its day. The DD1s “showed not the slightest strain,” says railroad historian Michael Bezilla, “when called upon to start 850-ton trains on the steep 1.93% grade westbound in the Hudson tunnels—a task which would have set the drivers of a steam locomotive spinning helplessly.” They rocketed along reliably at eighty miles an hour. In the coming years, the DD1s would operate for an average of 11,458 miles for every minute they were down from engine failures. They would cut the trip between Harrison (its station, soon to be renamed the far more resonant and romantic Manhattan Transfer) and Penn Station down to thirteen minutes. Under the best of circumstances, the ferry crossing had taken fifteen minutes, and one still landed in the dreary wilds of West Street. When railroad men and the public first saw the DD1 in action, they were struck not only by its meek and homely appearance, such a contrast to its power, but also by its quiet. Americans were not used to locomotives that did not belch and steam and shriek. When the mighty but modest DD1 entered a station, it glided in almost silently.

 

Through Charles McKim’s Roman temple to transportation, the citizens of Gotham were slowly coming to comprehend the magnitude of Alexander Cassatt’s vision and how this vast enterprise would reconfigure their world by opening up New York City to the shores beyond its rivers. In late April 1909, an infirm McKim had returned to Manhattan from a sojourn in Washington, D.C., for work on the design of the central Mall. Acknowledging his declining health, McKim had first signed over power of attorney for his business affairs to William Mead, that Vermont rock of reliability, then closed his New York apartment for good.

Ensconced temporarily at the Hotel Netherland overlooking Central Park, McKim wrote to Larry White, about to enter the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, saying, “When you…come home ready to build, you will find opportunities awaiting you that no other country has offered in modern times. The scale is Roman.” McKim exulted at the new classical buildings he had seen beautifying and permanently redefining the nation’s capitol. “As Mr. Root says, ‘Enough pegs driven to make it impossible for anybody to pull them up.’”

But New York was another matter altogether. McKim chafed at the towering new skyscrapers sprouting up everywhere, the growing congestion, and incessant commercialism. In mid-May, he wrote Larry, “I think the sky line of New York grows daily more hideous.” He had never much cared for skyscrapers and hated to see architects vying to erect what he viewed as misbegotten behemoths. Since 1908, the forty-seven-story Singer Tower downtown had reigned as the world’s tallest building. Topping six hundred feet, made of ornate brick and terra-cotta, the Singer Tower was almost twice the height of the 362-foot Times Tower. And now, the Singer Tower was to be eclipsed by a building McKim disliked even more. He wrote Larry: “The new Metropolitan Life Insurance tower, 700 feet high, makes [Burnham’s] the Flatiron building look like a toy and puts every building within a mile in the shade. But all the same, Madison Square tower [Stanford White’s creation], one-third of its height, is by far the greater of the two as David than Goliath. The first has the merit of bigness and that’s all.”

McKim lamented the imminent widening of Fifth Avenue, and the consequent removal of stoops, the narrowed sidewalks, and the discombobulation of the existing graceful streetscape. “The constantly increasing traffic on the streets and the crowded sidewalks have made this imperative and I suppose it is a choice of evils that must be accepted. What New York is coming to, Dieu sait!” Still suffering over the Stanford White scandal and its aftermath, McKim had become so fearful and anxious at times that he required an attendant.

In June, Samuel Rea, back from several weeks motoring around France, had dispatched a photograph of the nearly completed exterior of Penn Station and a letter of congratulation to McKim. “It is a wonderful building, and as time goes on will justify its cost.” To William Mead, he wrote of the station: “It is regarded, not alone by ourselves but by everybody who is competent to judge, as a magnificent building.” On July 31, 1909, the PRR announced that the last section of Milford pink granite stone had been cemented into place, signaling the completion of Penn Station’s imperial Roman Doric exterior. Ivy Lee delighted to tell all that, among many other stupendous facts, “It took 1,140 freight cars to transport these 47,000 tons of stone from Milford, Mass.” Covering seven and a half acres, Penn Station was going to be not just the world’s largest train station, but the world’s fourth-largest building, with the three bigger ones—St. Peter’s Basilica, the Tuileries, and the Winter Palace—all ancient monuments that had been built and expanded over the centuries.

When hot weather enveloped New York, McKim and Margaret migrated north to Narragansett Pier, their favorite resort in Rhode Island. On July 23, 1909, William Mead, about to depart for a European jaunt on the S.S. Lusitania, sent McKim a short note of farewell. Mead was in good spirits because work was now well underway on another of the firm’s plum Gotham commissions: the new main U.S. Post Office across Eighth Avenue from Penn Station. They had designed a stately Corinthian edifice to complement McKim’s Doric temple. This would have pleased Cassatt, for back in June 1904 he had written to the secretary of the treasury, taking “the liberty of suggesting to you, quite unofficially” that they give the work to McKim, Mead & White. “I know you appreciate how important it is, from an artistic standpoint, that your building should accord with ours in general style.”

Mead regretted not having time to visit McKim before he left for Europe, but wanted him to know in his quick goodbye note, “Larry White was in the office this morning, looking very well…Webster was in the office at the time, and I had him take Larry over to the Station and show him around, and I am sure it was a pleasure to both of them. Larry has seen the outside, and said it was the finest thing on earth. I shall be back before you miss me.”