Conquering Gotham:
Building Penn Station and Its Tunnels

As the nineteenth century ended, Pennsylvania Railroad president Alexander Cassatt sought some way—other than huge fleets of ferries from New Jersey—to bring the PRR's tens of millions of passengers into water-locked Gotham. By 1901, the brilliant Cassatt had embarked upon a course so ambitious, so visionary, it was denounced as corporate folly.

Under his and Samuel Rea’s direction, the PRR would build a monumental system of electrified tunnels under the Hudson River, Manhattan, and the East River to Long Island, capping them all with the crown jewel of Pennsylvania Station. This high-stakes Gilded Age drama pitted the nation's greatest corporation against the unruly forces of Tammany New York, America's richest city and most important port.

Set in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., Conquering Gotham is the history of a political and engineering battle that forever changed New York's physical and psychological geography. Cassatt took on J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Teddy Roosevelt, and Boss William Croker, as the PRR secretly assembled land for a terminal in the Tenderloin vice district, amid the whore houses, crime, and dance halls. Engineers and legions of "sand hog" laborers battled the crushing forces of two rivers as they burrowed year after year through treacherous glacial soils, suffering blow-outs, explosions, labor troubles and mounting fatalities. In fact, haunting the entire monumental project was a deep secret—PRR engineers feared that the Hudson River tunnels might not be safe and could doom the whole project.

Nevertheless, in late 1910, Penn Station, architect Charles McKim's great Doric temple to transportation, opened in all its magnificence. As the first trains of the LIRR and the fabled Pennsylvania Railroad traveled swiftly under those two ancient rivers, the PRR has done what many believed impossible. It had conquered Gotham.

Author’s Notes:

While writing Empires of Light, I knew I wanted my next book to be about Alexander Cassatt and Samuel Rea bringing the Pennsylvania Railroad into New York City, perhaps the greatest engineering triumph of its day. The PRR and Gotham were each such powers in Gilded Age America, it was an irresistible story. Yet, during repeated visits to the vast and labyrinthine PRR archive in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I could not locate the relevant documents. Then one of the archivists suggested I try a huge century-old leather-bound PRR ledger index. Only on the very last page did I finally find a reference (written in tiny script) to The New York Tunnels and Terminal Extension, along with a file number.

For a historian, this was an unforgettable Eureka!! moment. When those six big cartons came down from the archives that day, October 3, 2002, I was thrilled to find in their dusty files confidential letters and memos about politics, real estate, financing, construction, disasters, labor and engineering disputes, as well as meticulous everyday reports detailing the progress of this monumental project. I had what I needed to write Conquering Gotham.

Nor did the drama of research stop there. This book would be the first where I discovered two long-buried secrets. In the course of reading Board of Engineers’ meeting minutes, I was amazed to find the five-man board bitterly divided over whether the North River tunnels would be safe. The PRR could not understand why the tunnels were moving in the river silt and thus whether they needed to be anchored to bedrock. In the end, Samuel Rea had to make this parlous decision by himself. Until the tunnels opened and were in constant use, the PRR really had no way of knowing if the tunnels might crack. Understandably, this scary situation remained a complete secret until I stumbled upon it in these century-old corporate files.

While gathering material for any book, you always meet people who are generous with their time and knowledge. Jeff Groff, a Philadelphia architectural historian, kindly drove me around one day to see what was left of the old Cassatt and Rea estates. Jeff mentioned that Samuel Rea’s only son, George, a junior engineer and new father, was working on his father’s tunnel project when he became ill and died. None of the various PRR experts and authors had ever heard of this tragedy. Though I could find no obit or article, one of Rea’s descendants confirmed it. I learned the date of death from the young man’s tombstone in a Bryn Mawr churchyard. It certainly put the whole triumphant enterprise vis a vis Samuel Rea in a very different and sadder light.

I was also surprised, considering how very famous Alexander Cassatt
was in his time, how few personal papers remained. The Cassatt descendants were very gracious in letting me see their archives, but there was very little there from his years as president of the PRR. In the end, one of my frustrations was not having enough personal material to really know his character well enough.

Links to Resources

Friends of Moynihan Station

The Pennsylvania Railroad Technical & Historical Society

The Pennsylvania Railroad

Long Island Rail Road History

Lorraine Diehl's Website

Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania at Strasburg, Pa., Pennsy Days

NPR

NYC-Architecture

Peggy Fox, Photographer