TWENTY-FIVE
“OFFICIALLY DECLARE THE STATION OPEN”
The first day of August 1910 was a warm and sunny Monday in Gotham. On Seventh Avenue, the lunchtime traffic rumbled by, the automobilists in their Pierce Arrows and Whites impatiently blasting past horse-drawn carts and electric trolleys. Newsboys in ragged knickers and bare feet yelled the day’s big story: the murderer Dr. Hawley Crippen had been dramatically arrested at sea. Inside the still unopened Pennsylvania Station, the modern world with all its hurly burly and vehicular cacophony seemed far away. Several PRR men, who had just entered from the station’s colonnaded loggia, paused atop the forty-foot-wide Grand Stairway, awed anew by what Charles McKim had wrought: They looked up and about, admiring the vast and luminous space that was the General Waiting Room, McKim’s masterpiece of Roman grandeur.
Towering sixty-foot-high Corinthian columns topped with carved acanthus leaves lifted the eye up 150 feet to the soaring groin-vaulted coffered ceiling, which framed eight huge and lovely semicircular lunette windows. Through these windows poured lambent shafts of moted sunshine, bathing the stone floor with moving pools of light. The warm honey-colored travertine of the stairway, walls, and massive fluted pillars was a clever blend of real marble brought all the way from Roman quarries, and a more economical matching faux-marble mixture. Travertine, as the PRR proudly noted, was the stone of ancient Roman monuments and never before used in the United States. Charles McKim had so skillfully evoked classical monuments that the very air seemed ancient, golden, suffused with quiet and timeless drama. Samuel Rea had already decreed that no advertising or even seating would mar the stateliness of this wondrous space.
During those languorous days in Rome a decade earlier, McKim had been enthralled by the antiquity, grandiose scale, and grace of the Baths of Caracalla. Now, as the PRR men strolled down into Penn Station’s immense, glorious, and misnamed waiting room, they could see how the architect had incorporated that golden memory, giving to Gotham his last and greatest building, one of appropriately imperial formality, scale, and nobility. “The conditions of modern American life in which undertakings of great magnitude and scale are carried through…” noted McKim, Mead & White partner William Symmes Richardson, “are more nearly akin to the life of the Roman Empire than that of any other known civilization.”
It was perhaps fitting that McKim had gone the Romans one better, making his American homage even bigger than those ancient baths. His General Waiting Room was the largest room in the world. Its dimensions were colossal—two city blocks wide and 150 feet high, enough to hold Gotham’s City Hall and then some. Its spare and somber beauty was lightened by Jules Guerin’s elegant pale blue map murals depicting the territory served by the Pennsylvania and Long Island railroads. The only other sign that this was the beginning of the twentieth century was the incandescent lighting. A double row of electrolier candelabra atop bronze pillars and marble pedestals created a pretty walkway through the immensity of the marble floor. In each corner were arrayed a marble-clad information desk, a ticket window, a parcel room, and a telephone and telegraph office.
All this impending PRR grandeur had not been lost on the Vanderbilts. In 1902, they had announced that the New York Central would also build a brand new terminal, one equally magnificent, and invited a quartet of major firms, including McKim, Mead & White, to submit plans. When the railroad’s president chose a design (not Stanford White’s) with a huge, revenue-producing hotel atop it, chairman William K. Vanderbilt intervened, rejecting such crass considerations. Gustav Lindenthal wrote to Samuel Rea, “Everyone concedes that the Pennsylvania Railroad has been at extraordinary pains to make its railroad station in this city architecturally beautiful, and that fact may be said to have induced the New York Central Railroad to go to the very large expense of a new terminal building for its own road, conceived also on monumental lines.” Without a doubt.
Penn Station’s General Waiting Room looking north to West Thirty-third Street in 1911.
New York’s Penn Station was to be its own small city. Travelers coming through the main Seventh Avenue double-colonnaded pavilion and into the arched doors entered a graceful high-ceilinged arcade, a 235-foot “boulevard” lined with artful bronze shop fronts, their modern motifs set into the honeyed travertine marble walls of Ionic pilasters. The natural light pouring through the arcade’s lunette windows illuminated the luxurious displays of candies and flowers, as well as more practical goods dear to the traveler. At the end of the large and airy arcade, just before the grandeur of the General Waiting Room, were the station’s two restaurants. The one on the south side was the formal Corinthian Room, where tea was poured from fine silver, while the one on the north side was a lunch buffet with counter seating.
Penn Station also offered the latest word in barbershops, haberdashers, shoeshine stands, both a gentlemen’s and a ladies’ waiting room, a men’s smoking lounge, luxurious pay toilets and changing chambers equipped down to silver-handled broom whisks, special waiting rooms for bereaved funeral parties, full-service baggage rooms, a small police station and two-cell jail, a staffed medical clinic, and all manner of amenities. On the Eighth Avenue side, there were new executive offices for the PRR and the LIRR. Above those, the station’s third and fourth floor were given over to a YMCA serving the road’s employees, offering not just sleeping quarters for 175 men, but a gym, a bowling alley, billiard room, library, and lecture and assembly rooms.
On this momentous Monday, the small group of PRR men strolling through the luminous splendor of the General Waiting Room savored its timeless quality, knowing that soon enough its ethereal silence would give way to busy throngs of purposeful voyagers. Walking down the stairs from that magnificent waiting room into the train concourse, they left behind the past and entered an utterly inspired industrial present. McKim had reconfigured the familiar Victorian glass train shed into a complex railroad cathedral of light and dramatic motion, an airy rhythmic space of repeating, vaulted lacy steel-truss umbrella arches and glass skylights supported by tall slender steel pillars. The glass-block floors echoed the airiness, filtering natural light down to the eleven subterranean train platforms serving the twenty-one tracks. McKim (and then Richardson) had thought long and hard about the experience of train travel, designing the terminal so that departing passengers entered the train platforms through this upper concourse, while those arriving by train exited out from a lower separate concourse and onto the city streets. It was not hard, even in the warmth and quiet of this August afternoon, to envision the hurrying crowds of travelers moving through McKim’s version of the modern train shed, almost unconsciously savoring the dramatic possibilities of their travels, a drama heightened by the dreamy, shifting play of light through the vaulted glass ceilings. Charles McKim’s astute eye, his delight in detail and light, his pleasure in the romance of departures, arrivals, and novel sights, had all been embodied in Penn Station.
Penn Station’s concourse in 1911.
In his train station, McKim had called on a lifetime of architectural knowledge and passion to celebrate the human spirit and civilization itself. “While amply equipping Penn Station to sort and handle vast numbers of people and trains, and to sustain the fast-paced life of the city,” writes art historian Hilary Ballon, “McKim tried to temper the brute claims of efficiency with the reassuring comforts of historical tradition. Guided by a vision of civic grandeur, he translated the mundane business of boarding trains into a stately procession, and subsumed the commotion of constant movement and disorganized crowds into the station’s overriding order.”
As the PRR men descended the steel concourse stairs they became players in their own corporate drama, awaiting a special two-car train arriving from Philadelphia, carrying President James McCrea, the board of directors, many officers, and Alexander Cassatt’s two sons and his son-in-law. (From Bar Harbor, Lois Cassatt had wired: “Poor health makes journey from here unwise for me.”) This day, August 1, 1910, was the official opening of the terminal, even though it would be months before the station truly opened for regular service. When the DD1 rolled quietly into the platform President McCrea, natty in white vest, bow tie, and Panama hat, stepped out, flanked by Samuel Rea and Captain Green, each attired in dark suits, ties, and summer straw hats. All the railroad men as a matter of punctilious habit checked their pocket watches to see how long the trip had taken from Manhattan Transfer—a highly satisfactory thirteen minutes.
Charles McKim could not be present. He had died almost a year earlier, just sixty-two, his early demise precipitated, his friends and family believed, by the shock and heartache of Stanford White’s murder. Not long after Bessie White and Larry had sailed home from Paris and settled back into Long Island the previous summer, Bessie had invited McKim, now almost an invalid, to come to them to convalesce. Mead wrote, “Mrs. White feels that McKim always loved St. James, and everything is familiar to him down there, even the old horses on her place, and that he would be not only contented but encouraged.” And so McKim returned to the bucolic seaside of so many fond memories—the clamming and sea bathing, the good meals and conversations—the better to nurse his failing health. Bessie fixed up “the Red Cottage for him. She put in gateposts adorned with beskirted bronze horses that had been figureheads for gondolas in Venice…She furnished the house with, among other things, a five-foot-high Tyrolean chest…a Swiss gaming table…a corner cabinet that Stanford had improvised out of some ornamentally painted wooden panels from a Bavarian church.”
McKim had not been there long when in mid-August 1909 he was stricken by a heart attack. “For a time,” reported the New York Times “his condition was critical, but it was believed now that he will recover.” Despite the cool and languid ocean breezes, “the serene sky and the white clouds and the friendly sea and the old horse and the dog,” the gentle ministrations of his beloved daughter and the matronly Bessie, Charles Follen McKim grew weaker and weaker. At one o’clock on September 14, 1909, with Margaret by his side, he died quietly in the Red Cottage. Like Alexander Cassatt, Charles McKim would never see his greatest work—the Pennsylvania Station—fully completed. McKim’s was the final untimely death among those great-hearted leaders who had planned the New York Extension to be a magnificent paean to a great city.
Now, almost a year later, fourscore of PRR officers and directors passed into the stillness of the General Waiting Room. Here the Philadelphians greeted the New Yorkers: General Charles Raymond, wearing bottle-thick eyeglasses and a plain black suit and bow tie; engineers James Forgie and George Gibbs; architect William Symmes Richardson of McKim, Mead & White; sculptor Adolph A. Weinman; and Gustav Lindenthal, serving happily now as chief engineer for the Hell Gate Bridge section of the PRR’s New York Connecting Railroad. Alfred Noble was away vacationing on the North Shore of Lake Superior.
About ten days earlier, Samuel Rea had proposed to President McCrea that “as we have determined, and determined rightly, that we will have no elaborate opening [of Penn Station], my suggestion is that we hold our dividend meeting early on August 1st, and then that we come over to New York and that you will unveil the Statue…This trip will be short and informal…As those present…will have been personal associates of Mr. Cassatt’s it seems to me that we can avoid elaborate arrangements or speech-making.”
Rea had expected Penn Station to be open by now, alive with passengers and hundreds of trains rolling in and out daily. But bitter strikes at the car factories had delayed delivery of almost a third of the PRR’s order of 1,988 fireproof all-steel passenger cars, without which the company would not begin using the tunnels. Now, as the hands of the huge waiting room clock moved ponderously to 2:30 p.m., the group quieted and arrayed themselves on the Grand Stairway facing Weinman’s sculpture of Alexander Cassatt. Still draped and hidden by a large cloth, the statue had been duly located, as McKim had proposed, in a special elevated niche.
“With the unveiling of the statue before which we stand, it is proposed, sir,” intoned PRR director Thomas Cuyler, nodding to President McCrea, “that you should officially declare the Station open…these massive walls and columns speak in their severe simplicity and majestic silence far more eloquently than human tongue could give utterance to.” Edward Cassatt tugged off the cloth, revealing an impressive bronze sculpted likeness of his father. Cassatt’s statue showed an imposing man, tall, dressed in an old-fashioned suit and great coat, his right hand touching a book of engineering blueprints, his left hand clutching his familiar derby, gloves, and walking stick. The sculptor, working from photos, had captured Cassatt’s laconic intelligence and power. The bronze plaque below was engraved with his name, title, and years as president, and the simple phrase: “Whose foresight, courage, and ability achieved the extension of the Pennsylvania Railroad system into New York City.”
Every man on that stairway must have marveled at it all, as the applause faded and they waited for the photographer to click away, capturing for posterity in a formal portrait this sentimental tribute and historic PRR occasion. The New York Tunnels and Terminal Extension had finally come to be, just as Alexander Cassatt had envisioned when he stepped off the S.S. Celtic almost exactly nine years earlier. As one engineer would later write, “When one considers the magnitude of this undertaking even after the engineering plans were approved and found feasible—the tremendous scope of the work, the purchase of the enormous amount of necessary property in the heart of a great city, the financing of the venture and the thousand and one other difficulties to be met and overcome—one cannot but admire and applaud the stout and brave heart of the chief whose foresight planned, whose splendid courage inspired, whose counsel guided and whose ability mastered it!”
As Charles Raymond stood on the Grand Stairway, he felt a pang of melancholy that Cassatt was present only as a bronze statue. Raymond’s thick eyeglasses did not much help his near blindness. He could not see the magnificence of the station as the others did, but even the blurred sight of the statue stirred many memories of their collective effort. Living now out at the Water Witch Club in the New Jersey Highlands, Raymond had met many of the titans of his time, but he considered Cassatt “almost unequaled, owing to the breadth, originality, and decisiveness of his character.” Beyond Cassatt’s brains and brilliance, what had so touched Raymond about the man was that “his manner to his subordinates was so direct and simple that he seemed unconscious of his own superiority.” It was a rare quality that had endeared Cassatt to almost all who worked for him.
Charles Jacobs, with his job as chief engineer completed, was back in England, as he was every summer. Later that day Samuel Rea, first vice president since Green’s retirement a year earlier, wrote Jacobs, saying, “I am personally very sorry that you could not have seen this simple unveiling ceremony to our old chief, but will look forward to you being here in the Fall when the regular operation begins.” As for Rea, the moment Cassatt’s statue was unveiled he knew the face was too dark. Before the week was out he had Weinman lightening up the bronze patina. But all in all, Rea confided to an aide, “I am quite well pleased with the statue and like it more than ever.” Lois Cassatt would not have her first view until September.
The memorial statue of Alexander Cassatt in Penn Station.
The previous December at the annual formal dinner of the PRR’s board of directors, Rea had reminisced about the perils, pitfalls, and frustrations of their road’s prolonged forty-year quest to enter Gotham. An impressive, rugged figure as he entered his fifty-fifth year, his brushy hair and mustache gone salt-and-pepper gray, Rea reminded these powerful men of “the severe criticism—written and spoken—which rained upon the Company for a so-called needless and extravagant expenditure of money that would never bring any return directly or indirectly, but happily that is past…I for years had my doubts whether the present generation would fully appreciate this work, and more than once remarked [about this] to Mr. Cassatt…I am happy to feel, however, as the work is nearing completion, that people are beginning to see and appreciate what it really means…to have this extension into and through New York City, and a station erected there creditable to our system and well worthy of the greatest city of the country, if not of the world…Had it not been undertaken at the proper time, it would be practically prohibitive today by reason of cost and physical impediments. The whole work speaks for itself and will stand for all time as a monument to the Company, to the Directors and stockholders…[and] to the engineers in charge of construction and to the whole staff of the Pennsylvania Railroad.”
Rea acknowledged the project’s costs, heading now toward $111 million. But he assured the directors what they knew full well: “Every agreement [was] negotiated by the best talent we could secure, and every expenditure so scrutinized that adequate value has been obtained, and every dollar of this large sum has been regularly and properly disbursed and audited.” And so, as the evening grew later, Rea came to the end of his almost nostalgic review of the company’s many travails and triumphs in Gotham, saying, “It should be a great satisfaction to us to have lived to see the great work completed, and the anticipation of so many years realized.” But there was always, as Samuel Rea now said, “the sorrow ever present that Mr. Cassatt was not to see the completion of the work in which he took such a deep interest.” Unspoken was Rea’s other even greater sorrow and loss—his only son, George Black Rea, who had died as a junior engineer building those tunnels.
It was still pitch-black in the wee hours of Thursday September 8, 1910, and the night air distinctly chilly, when a small group of men and women began to gather on the West Thirty-third Street side of Penn Station. McKim’s austerely simple classical walls made for a strange contrast with the worn tenements and shops across the street. Amidst the early admiration, already some architects and critics were grousing at the “archeological” quality of McKim’s work, while others would bemoan the heaviness and monotony of the great expanse of granite pillars. In June, the Architectural Record lamented “the sadness of the interminable fronts…A stranger set down before the Seventh Avenue front…would be apt to guess it a good substantial jail, a place of detention and punishment of which the inmates were not intended to have a good time.” And then there was the matter of the many blocks immediately surrounding the station that still looked raw and unfinished after all the years of demolition and construction.
More and more people drifted up to join those waiting at the LIRR station, and a blue-coated police sergeant and seven traffic cops kept a close eye on them, ready for any unruliness. The crowd tensed as at 3:00 a.m. the doors to Penn Station’s (comparatively modest) Long Island Rail Road section swung slowly open, ready to receive these eager inaugural riders. Today was the first day of regularly scheduled service and the first train would soon be departing. The waiting crowd sprinted in to the ticket booth, each hoping to buy the first tickets for the historic first ride on the first train out of the new Penn Station and through the East River tunnels.
All were disappointed to learn that the pioneering first train, scheduled to depart at 3:36 a.m., was a two-car baggage train carrying chiefly newspapers. So the history-minded passengers made do with the Number 1702 departing five minutes later at 3:41 a.m. on Track 19 for Winfield Junction, whence they could connect with trains for Babylon, Hempstead, Whitestone Landing, and Port Washington. One passenger bestowed a congratulatory bottle of champagne upon LIRR motorman T. W. Fields, who would drive No. 1702. A gaggle of newspaper reporters, the stationmaster, his aides, and numerous porters gathered on the pristine platform to watch as, promptly at 3:41, No. 1702 glided out under Manhattan, the East River, and on toward its first stop at Long Island City. This new all-rail journey would cut in half almost every Long Island commuter’s travel time. The New York Times had devoted an entire special section on September 4 (crammed with real estate ads) to the opening of LIRR tunnels and the huge and inevitable suburban housing boom coming to the bucolic spaces of Long Island. With commutes so much simpler and shorter, the breadwinners of New York families could move their wives and children, now jammed into small apartments, out to the island’s fresh air and seashore. The great transformation of the New York region was about to begin.
Exactly one hour after the first LIRR passenger train had departed Penn Station, intimations of opening day trouble surfaced. Three veteran LIRR commuters, men holding monthly tickets, boarded the 4:40 a.m. New York-bound train in Jamaica, settling in as usual in the smoking car. When the LIRR conductor came through to exact the 14-cent day surcharge for the new (nonferry) service, the trio were outraged. One “argued with the conductor a while and finally handed over 15 cents, with the remark: ‘Keep the change—my contribution to the tunnels.’ Another man puffed his cigarette and offered to draw a check on the National City Bank for 14 cents. A third declined to pay anything and asked the conductor to put him off under the river.” Considering that the East River tunnels had just reduced their usual forty-four-minute commute to nineteen minutes, their tight-fisted chagrin must have seemed churlish.
At 8:30 a.m., middling disaster struck at Winfield. There had been “imperfect installation of a section of third rail which knocked the shoes off from two electric trains,” explained LIRR president Ralph Peters. “This stalled the trains, and it was necessary to get locomotives to pull them out of the way. The damage was repaired promptly,” but not before causing an hour’s worth of LIRR rush-hour trains to be ten to forty minutes late. All over Long Island on what turned out to be a September day of sunshine and breezes, country towns rejoiced with “tunnel” parades and festivities celebrating their speedier and more convenient connection to Gotham’s wealth and opportunity. But as village bands played, schoolchildren marched, and politicians speechified, chaos was building on the LIRR.
Longtime LIRR riders fumed at having to exchange their old commuter tickets for new ones (at the cost of an additional dollar) and again at having to pay new tunnel surcharges. “For some weeks past,” asserted the LIRR the next day, the company had used every endeavor “to inform its patrons of the new tariff…strange to say, very few patrons paid any attention.” But worse yet, commuters discovered all the old familiar schedules had been changed. Infuriated mobs of passengers besieged overwhelmed ticket agents at every station along the various lines, their ire rising yet further as the long waits to exchange or buy tickets caused them to miss trains. Riders of the Far Rockaway Branch learned their trains had disappeared from the schedule altogether. In the LIRR section of Penn Station, police had to quell outbreaks of fisticuffs among rival newspaper hawkers and other assorted thuggish vendors staking out valuable new sales terrain. All told, thirty-five thousand people rode the first LIRR “tunnel” trains, and many were mad as wet hens. The LIRR put the best spin on it they could: “There were no personal injuries to passengers or employes, and that is really the most important thing.” Matters improved steadily from there.
The opening of the LIRR section of Penn Station underscored an appalling oversight: There was not a single subway or elevated line connected to the PRR’s mighty terminal. More amazing, none was as yet even planned. As the PRR prepared to open the entire station, the nearest subway—August Belmont’s IRT—was four long blocks distant. The Ninth Avenue El and the more popular Sixth Avenue El were each a long block away. Only the slow-moving Seventh Avenue trolley car was close at hand. In infuriating contrast, the Vanderbilts’ Grand Central Station had been served for six years by the IRT, which had a subway stop conveniently under the terminal.
Back in early 1904, now-deceased LIRR president William Baldwin had warned Cassatt in a private letter that the PRR could guarantee subway service at the terminal only by taking control of the rival Metropolitan Subway. Cassatt, in a serious miscalculation, demurred. August Belmont pounced, bought the Metropolitan, and proceeded to reign for a good half-decade as the intransigent and wily Traction King (complete with his own private subway car, Mineola), blocking all rivals and any and all subway development that might eat into his fabulous IRT profits. As Manhattan came to be one of the most congested places on earth (“More people resided on this small, twenty-three-square-mile island than in thirty-three of the nation’s forty-six states”), transit politics became correspondingly more byzantine. Tammany under Boss Murphy, Belmont’s staunch ally, evinced as little interest as ever in serving the public. Finally, dire need and utter stalemate propelled the state legislature in 1907 to ram through a new state Public Service Commission dedicated solely to getting New York City’s subways built.
During all those years, Pennsy officers had exhorted, pleaded, demanded, and entreated Belmont, transit commissions, and city and state officials to do their civic duty and launch construction on a Seventh Avenue subway line to serve the city’s other big railroad terminal, their Pennsylvania Station. Said Rea, “This line on the west side of the city is imperatively needed…unquestionably it should be built at the earliest possible opportunity.” As of 1910, it had all been to no avail. Penn Station would open not only without a subway. It would open without even the prospect of a subway. All agreed this was a civic scandal. But no one had a ready solution.
The day after the LIRR inaugurated its train service into Penn Station, William Randolph Hearst’s Journal American jeered in an editorial, “How red are the flushes of the Public Service Commission as it comes trailing with empty hands…on this day of jubilee? Where is its tale of subways to match the Pennsylvania tubes and terminal…a work comparable in difficulty and magnitude to the building of the Panama Canal? What can [the Commission] show for its three years of costly lucubrations and its vast acreage of blue-prints? Nothing but ample terminals for long trains of thought?”
And then there was the sorry state of the surrounding neighborhood. Later in 1910, Samuel Rea would write a long, detailed letter to the president of New York’s Municipal Art Society, regretting “the rather cheap character of the property adjacent to our Station, [we feel] this section of the City could be very much beautified by an architectural treatment of the entire surroundings, and the territory between Broadway and the Station, and Twenty-third and Forty-Second Streets, enlarged by new streets and traffic facilities to ease congestion…Little has been done for this section of the City…which badly needs improvement.” The lack of a subway only exacerbated this unfortunate situation. Without proper mass transit, the neighborhood would continue to languish, an inconvenient area with a bad reputation.
Penn Station just before it opened in 1910.
On the cold autumn night of Saturday November 26, 1910, following two months of elaborate dress rehearsals, the Pennsylvania Railroad was at last ready to run its Tuscan red passenger trains into the heart of Gotham. By nine o’clock, excited New Yorkers, bundled up against intimations of snow or freezing rain, were converging upon the station’s Doric colonnades. Outside and in, the terminal was brilliantly lit, ablaze with the electricity that made the tunnels possible.
When the station’s massive doors opened officially for business at 9:30 p.m., mobs of curious but well-behaved citizens and a few bona fide train passengers streamed inside. All were suitably awestruck when they emerged into McKim’s monumental General Waiting Room. The play of light and shadow in McKim’s high curved ceilings and pillared walls was evocative and deeply poetic. “A Frenchman standing beneath the dome of the splendid waiting room sobbed aloud because such a ‘beautiful affair’ was ‘just a railway station,’” the World reported, “while friends explained to him that in this commercial country commerce is idealized in art and beauty.”
The citizens of Gotham embraced the magnificent station as their own, with many proudly declaring it one of the wonders of the world. “In thousands they flooded the acres of its floor space,” wrote the reporter from the Tribune, “gazed like awestruck pygmies at the vaulted ceilings far above them, inspected curiously the tiny details of the place, so beautifully finished, on their own level, and pressed like caged creatures against the grill which looked down upon subterranean tracks, trains and platforms.” What particularly struck the Tribune reporter as he watched the awed and curious crowds swirling about McKim’s masterpiece was the building’s ability to absorb this much humanity and hoi polloi, such opening night bedlam, while retaining its magisterial calm and dignity.
Elsewhere in the terminal a bemused reporter for the Herald watched jaded New Yorkers turn into veritable rubes as they spent their Saturday night testing out this new civic space. Fellows in rakish derbies strolled into the men’s waiting room and plopped into the deep leather-cushioned seats or drifted off to puff cigarettes in the men’s smoking lounge. A few had their shoes shined, while many citizens stopped to stare at the statue of Alexander Cassatt. Women in the latest huge beribboned hats dined in the Ladies Café, inspected the arcade shops, and strolled down to see the trains. Everyone, it seemed, had to get a drink of the free ice water at one of the 158 fountains and line up to ask questions of the inundated PRR clerks at the information booth. The Corinthian Room and the café were mobbed and noisy as New Yorkers sampled the PRR’s famous cuisine.
By ten o’clock, many passengers and families had boarded Pullman sleeping cars departing early Sunday morning to points south and west, but few considered retiring to their berths. They milled about on the platforms and visited the General Waiting Room again to crane their necks up at the coffered ceiling and study the mural maps. There was just too much excitement and hubbub to settle in to sleep. Some bought newspaper extras and shook their heads at the somber details of the horrific factory fire over in Newark. Twenty-three young seamstresses at the Wolff Muslin Undergarment Company had died in the roaring flames, roasted alive, while another forty were injured throwing themselves desperately out the windows of a firetrap of a building with useless fire escapes. The details were gruesome, with some jumping girls holding hands as they leaped, only to be impaled on a fence surrounding the property.
As midnight neared, thousands of New Yorkers made their way onto the skylighted concourse to be there when the first PRR train pulled out at 12:02 a.m. In truth, it was just a local five-car accommodation train going to South Amboy, crammed with those wanting to make a small piece of history. Many suburbanite theatergoers (just in from the Bijou, the Lyric, and the Casino) streamed on, chattering, and installed themselves in the green plush seats, luxuriating in a trip home that entailed no ferry. Onboard, amid the excited crush of passengers was William Atterbury, Cassatt’s protégé now ascended to PRR fifth vice president. Veteran locomotive engineer Leon Bedman leaned out the side window of the DD1 as, at 12:01, conductor Henry Orner yelled “All Aboard!” and waved his lantern. With that, the doors closed and at 12:02 precisely they were off, sailing out on the electrified tracks into the open train yard before whooshing under the North River, rushing through the well-lighted tunnel, and emerging from the Bergen Portal to roll across the marshes of the Jersey Meadowlands and on to Manhattan Transfer. There, while the steam locomotive was exchanged for the electric, many New York passengers debarked to wait for the next train into Gotham.
Back at Penn Station, at 12:50 a.m. the Washington Express pulled in from Philadelphia and points south with President James McCrea and several other PRR officers aboard, all come to experience firsthand this momentous occasion, the true opening of their company’s monumental gateway. As the passengers streamed off, many having attended the traditional Army-Navy game that afternoon, several rhapsodized to the Journal American reporter about what a relief it was not to find themselves facing the ferry ride, and after that, the drab prospect of getting a cab or trolley car at West Street. “The dense crowds at the rush hours, the delays, fogs, floating ice, and river collisions,” prophesied a New York Times reporter, “…will be remembered only vaguely.” These first arriving passengers were greeted by Stationmaster William H. “Big Bill” Egan, a man of massive physique and matching charm who had risen from freight brakeman to parlor-car conductor to stationmaster in Trenton, before ascending to his present Olympian responsibilities and a staff of 250. He possessed a soon-to-be-legendary courtesy and grasp of p.r. and fun.
In contrast to the small gathering when Cassatt’s statue was unveiled back in August, the vast terminal now pulsated with life, filled with expectation and excitement as well as the smooth movement of the on-time trains and people and luggage. The PRR’s publicity bureau estimated a hundred thousand people were present that first evening. All that night and the next day horse-drawn carriages, chauffeured automobiles, and electric taxis swept up to unload and pick up the first train travelers through the North and East River tunnels. But those who came merely to see and savor this extraordinarily gracious public space greatly outnumbered actual travelers. Many who had “never been west of Eleventh Avenue” came to watch trains depart to such faraway cities as Chicago and St. Louis, and down to Port Tampa, Florida. The trains came and went close to clockwork.
Among the swarming good-natured crowds that night stood Scotsman James Forgie, chief assistant engineer to Charles Jacobs and now a member of Jacobs’s New York firm. On Monday Forgie wrote to Samuel Rea, saying, “Yesterday I witnessed the inauguration of the traffic of the Pennsylvania Railroad from New York City by the North River Tunnels with feelings very different, I have no doubt, from those of the average spectator who went to see the opening of the Station.” There were few who knew better than Forgie the agonizing tribulations and commensurate triumphs of their arduous tunnel boring deep under the river’s ancient bed.
“Therefore,” enjoined Forgie, “permit me to offer you my most hearty congratulations on the final attainment of the greatest engineering scheme of the age, to which you have devoted the past twenty years more or less—not a long time, considering the magnitude of the scheme—and for which, also, you are so greatly responsible.” Forgie acknowledged and alluded to their bitter differences on screw piles, “The subject of so much deep concern.” He ended with felicitations and best wishes. In truth, only time would tell if Samuel Rea had made the right decision, if the North River tunnels were safe. But on that wonderful day the tunnels worked and the PRR’s debut was near flawless. Samuel Rea’s wire to Charles Jacobs in London was the understated work of an engineer: “Station operating successfully.” The Pennsylvania Railroad had conquered Gotham.
