Customer Reviews

Conquering Gotham: A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels

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This is a book that can be appreciated on many levels. First and foremost, it is the story of how the once mighty Pennsylvania Railroad brought East-West trains into Manhattan. Though it had become the greatest sea port in the nation, the country's financial and manufacturing hub, Manhattan had no terminal for East-West trains. The New York Central had its trains coming in from the north, but if you wanted to ride the train to Philadelphia and points west and south, you first had to take a boat across the Hudson River to New Jersey.

For decades, the leaders of the Pennyslvania Railroad had tried to come up with a way to bring their trains into Manhattan. A bridge over the Hudson was designed and then abandoned for lack of financial support from other railroads. A brilliant visionary, Alexander Cassatt, as President of the Pennsylvania convinced the board of directors on a great gamble: to invest millions in the building of tunnels under the Hudson, erection of a great station in Manhattan and extending the tunnels across the Manhattan and the East River to Long Island.

The stories are of the herculean engineering effort involved in designing and constructing the tunnels, since none that long had ever been attempted; the problems of dealing with the Democrat Party's corrupt Tammany political machine; the design and construction of the iconic Penn Station; Teddy Roosevelt's campaign against trusts and big business and more.

In short, Jonnes's history is epic because her subjects are epic.

Jonnes has a good writing style; she is able to breathe life into some relatively obscure subjects and does well at attempting to convey the nature of life in the early 20th Century.

None of us will ever be able to visit Penn Station and appreciate that it was designed to be a monument, not a structure that was destroyed a mere half-century after it was built. Few of us will ever be able to appreciate just how important passenger railroads were at one time and fewer still will ever experience the thrill of cross-country travel on a first-class train. Probably none of us or very few will ever experience performing manual labor a hundred feet beneath the surface of a roiling river when labor relations were considered a matter strictly between the laborer and his employer.

Jonnes does a marvelous job of bringing all this to a reasonable semblance of life. It is a wonderful history from a time when technologies we take for granted now were still new and men thought they could acheive anything and believed that the future would be a better place.

Jerry

Jill Jonnes does a wonderful job of describing the long and difficult saga concerning the digging of the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels under the Hudson and East Rivers, as well as the construction of old Pennsylvania Station in the middle of turn-of-the-century New York's infamous "Tenderloin" district. Very well-written and easy to read, she discusses the travails Alexander Cassatt and subsequent PRR presidents had in dealing with New York's Tammany Hall, the shifting muck and silt under the Hudson River, which at times threatened to doom the project, and a number of other issues related to an undertaking that was described as one of the world's greatest engineering feats. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in railroading, New York City, or the Pennsylvania Railroad in particular.

This book is very good. Highly informative about an enterprise I knew nothing about. A personal look at the people responsible for this feat, as well as politically and socially educational. I had a bit of an issue with some hopping around on the dates; and also toward the end of the book the author stated that the General Waiting Room in the gorgeous Pennsylvania Station was, at the time of its completion, the largest room in the world. She also stated that, at the time, it was the world's largest building. Versailles, Blenheim and the Biltmore come immediately to mind and any number of others that would have been in existence then. I would have liked some facts to back these statements. I would also have liked to know where all of the lovely granite went to. Surely it was not ALL deposited in fields? But then, again, perhaps. After all, some group of idiots managed to decide to tear it down in 1963. Lovely book, well worth the read.

I came to this book prepared to place it in the pantheon of marvelous accounts of epic undertakings and events of the muscled, 19th century America powerbrokers whose vision shaped the world we live in. Unfortunately, Jonnes is not the writer to capture that age.

The majesty of the tunnel undertakings should have been the centerpiece of the story. The effort in the book clearly went into retracing the intrigues surroundinging the graft-ridden political machinery the PRR had to overcome. So, for visual support, we are treated to a number of head- and group shots of the principals, in and out of business meetings, and nostalgic scenes of congested New York streets and waterways. Where are the detailed descriptions, maps and diagrams that flesh out the real story - the mastery of tunnel construction in an unstable footing?

Jonnes has a long way to go to approach the narrative skills of David McCullough in "The Great Bridge," "The Johnstown Flood," or "The Path Between the Seas."

While reading Conquerimg Gotham by Jill Jones, I felt like I was back in the old neighborhood in New York. I grew up just north of the Tenderlion section, in Hell's Kitchen. Several things stand out in my mind after reading this excellent book: Alexander Cassat as President of the Pennzy, was such an honest and honorable man; New York City has lost a great civic monument; and this book has been an excellent trip into the past. The destruction of Pennsylvania Station has the feeling of being on the level of a national crime. Maybe one day a new station will arise on the site of the old. What a great and fascinating story. Thank you Jill Jones. From Hoss

You do not need to be a railroad history fan to be captivated by this book, as this book delves into the gilded age of business in America as well as the monumental corruption of Tammany Hall and the aldermen in turn of the century New York. A great book on the Pennsylvania
Railroad: it's leaders, planners and civil engineers and rank in file, arguably one of the greatest corporations in American history.

Much has been written about the lamentable loss of the original Penn Station in the 1960s. The majestic building's turn-of-the-century birth is less well known. Jill Jonnes tells this fascinating Gilded Age story in "Conquering Gotham."

The Pennsylvania Railroad, one of the most powerful corporations of the time, had long been thwarted in its efforts to enter the New York market, being forced to ferry its passengers across the North (Hudson) River. Andrew Cassett, the PRR's visionary President, was determined to finally overcome the technical challenges posed by the mile-long river crossing and the equally formidable obstacles of New York's graft-infested Tammany politics.

Fortune graced Cassett in the form of the election of the reform Mayor Seth Low in 1901. A dour, disagreeable man ("A politician can say `no' and win a friend," wrote journalist Lincoln Steffens. "Low can lose one by saying 'yes.'"), Low would serve only one term. But the two-year break in Tammany's City Hall stranglehold was window enough for Cassett to win approval for his plan without paying any "boodle." And an audacious plan it was: crossing the North River, burrowing under the City and then crossing the East River, in order to link the LIRR (PRR's subsidiary) directly to Manhattan.

Most observers expected PRR to erect bridges to achieve the river crossings. Instead, Cassett's engineers elected to construct subaqueous tunnels - two under the North River and four beneath the East River. Tunnel construction was a harrowing proposition; the East River tunnels, in particular, were marred by several fatal mishaps. Even after completion, PRR's engineers were not sure the tunnels were safe enough to withstand the stresses of high-speed trains.

Penn Station would be located in the heart of Manhattan's "Tenderloin" district, also known as "Satan's Circus," because of its rampant vice. Cassett's point man on the site assemblage was Douglas Robinson, brother-in-law to President Teddy Roosevelt, who set out to quietly buy up the bars, brothels, shops and tenement buildings on the cheap. However, PRR's intentions soon became public, and costs mounted. The hardest bargainer: the pastor of a Catholic church, who walked away with a half-million dollars and a more central location for his parish. Total cost for the assemblage: more than $5 million.

Turn-of-the-century train stations were cathedrals of commerce. And in this regard, Charles McKim's Penn Station - inspired by the ancient Roman Empire -- set a new standard. McKim's masterpiece would guilt the Vanderbilts into building a new, more palatial Grand Central Terminal, the one we still admire today.

McKim would not live to see the project finished. Neither would Cassett nor the LIRR's President William Baldwin (dead at 41). But the creation of these men and others - Penn Station and its tunnels - would transform Manhattan, sharply easing the dense overcrowding by making broadscale suburban commuting viable.

There was a point while I was reading Jill Jonnes', "Conquering Gotham", that I wished I could reach back through time, grab old Penn Station and plunk it back down onto its comfortable spot at 7th Avenue and West 32nd Street. Not the tawdry Penn Station I remember walking through as a child of eight or nine with my mother on the way to visiting my father at his showroom around the corner on West 31st Street, the one with the dusty, decrepit old signs, the misplaced ticket counters blocking one's way , and the general filth and neglect following years of the financial decline of its eponymous Railroad company owner. No, it would be the pristine building with the tremendous open spaces that must have awed travelers to New York and that can only be seen now in old black and white photos. Or, it would have been the restored Penn Station that almost surely would have been had it only survived a few more years into the 1980's or 1990's, and just as actually did happen to that other great New York Train station a few blocks to the northeast.

The story related by the author was really about the dream of one man, Alexander Cassatt, President of the Pennsylvania Railroad to connect the greatest, best run railroad in America, to its greatest city. In an era when most railroad heads were Robber Barons who manipulated their company's stock to enrich themselves and who cared nothing or little for their shareholders, employees or passengers, Cassatt was a statesman who ran the `Pennsy', as it was affectionately called, always with the goal of improving it.

For his project, Cassatt was able to turn to an outstanding team of engineers including the great English tunnel builder, Charles Jacobs, bridge builder Alfred Noble and James Forgie. To design his new train station, Cassatt hand-selected Charles McKim, senior partner of the greatest architectural firm in New York, and maybe the nation, McKim, Mead & White, partly because he wanted and needed a New Yorker to build the station, but also because of McKim's knowledge of things classical and sense of beauty. McKim gave Cassatt and his railroad a monumental building, a truly magnificent visual symbol of the project for all who walked or rode through it.

Penn Station was, of course, just part of the tremendous engineering project its owner took on. In scope, the project ranked with the building of the Brooklyn Bridge as one of the two great construction projects of its era. In addition to McKim's station, the project required buying up hundreds of buildings secretly and anonymously over several blocks of what was then the city's tenderloin district, getting the city to close off and demap three long blocks of West 32nd Street, tunneling under two rapidly flowing rivers and through the rocky heights of the New Jersey Palisades and under the entire width of an already heavily built up part of Manhattan near 31st Street. The project also included a connection to the Long Island Rail Road in Queens, and a new bridge over the Hell Gate that would give the Railroad a direct, through connection to Boston and the rest of New England. The project cost the lives of dozens of workers to accidents and the dreaded Caisson's disease, also known as "the bends." Among those who died was the only son of Samuel Rea, one of Cassatt's chief lieutenants and future president of the Railroad.

Neither Cassatt nor McKim would live to see the project's completion. Cassatt died of a heart attack just after Christmas in 1906, the strain of bringing his massive project to completion coupled with investigations of false allegations that his railroad had resorted to bribing Tammany Hall, New York's often corrupt Democratic Party machine, in order to get the political favors necessary to secure approval for the project, proved to much for him. The chronically sickly McKim died in 1909, having never really recovered from the murder of his great friend and business partner, Stanford White, in 1906 by financier Henry Thaw, over a sordid romantic encounter White had once had with the young address Thaw would marry.

Penn Station lasted a marvelous half-century, but as the final chapter in the book so eloquently points out there were a number of factors that ultimately doomed it. Most importantly, despite its magnificence as architecture, Penn Station never functioned perfectly well as a railroad station. The Architecture critic, Kidder Smith, once wrote that while Grand Central "works superbly," [Penn Station], "picturesquely stuffed into a Roman bath, did not."

In addition Penn Station's location never became as central to the city as did Grand Central's. It took a decade before subway service passed through the station and while the area gradually improved, the old tenderloin district became a gritty manufacturing area rather than an area of first rate office buildings and hotels. Unlike the New York Central Railroad, which bought land surrounding its new terminal to ensure such structures would be built,the Pennsylvania Railroad would not, or could not do the same for its station.

Will "Conquering Gotham" ever become a landmark book on New York City history in the same way that both "The Power Broker", Robert Caro's exhaustively researched and ultimately devastating indictment of New York Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, or David McCullough's romantic, novel-like, "The Great Bridge", about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge have become? Maybe not, but Jonnes' book is an excellent, highly recommended read about an important part of New York City history, and one that gets better as one reads on.

The story presented in this book of the difficulty, sacrifices, and complexity of connecting the Pennsylvania Railroad with Manhattan is amazing. The author presents it in an interesting way while at the same time covering the technical challenges and solutions. Her style is clear and easy to read. I highly recommend it. I gave it to a friend whose reaction was the same.

Jill Jonnes has written a very engaging book about the construction of the late great Penn Station and its tunnels. She captures the language and textures of the late 19th and early 20th century when this monumental undertaking took place. Not surprisingly, she focuses on the railroad king, Alexander Cassatt, who had the audacity to challenge Cornelius Vanderbilt's monopoly on the railroad lines entering Gotham. She charts the various attempts to bridge over and tunnel under the Hudson but best laid engineering attempts had been laid to waste. That was until Charles Jacobs entered on the scene, who had an ego to match Cassatt and the will to complete the tunnels in spite of all criticism to the contrary.

Jonnes also gets into the many political machinations that took place, not least of all Tammany Hall, which pretty much ruled the roost. But, Cassatt was determined not to coddle these power brokers, seeing to it that he built the tunnels honestly. I'm not sure how noble a man Cassatt was, since Jonnes is not overly critical of him. She paints him in heroic terms as she does Jacobs for daring to defy engineering convention and building tunnels through the primordial ooze that underlay the Hudson River.

She spends less time on the great station itself, noting that it was the grandest station of its day and giving the reader a dutiful description of its architect, William McKim, who was considered by many the leading architect of his day. He apparently formed a close working relationship with Cassatt but Jonnes prefers to focus on the engineers that made history by completing the tunnels that fed the station, eventually to be named after each of the engineers that were part of the project.