Grand Central's Engineer: William J. Wilgus and the Planning of Modern Manhattan

CONCLUSION

245 william wilgus left a detailed chronicle of his professional life for posterity. His voluminous papers fill over one hundred boxes in the manuscripts collection of the New York Public Library. He overlooked no memo, telegram, or newspaper clipping ; his papers include correspondence, memos, and reports detailing all his engineering projects. In an unpublished autobiography of over 350 pages, he described a professional career spanning more than forty years, from his start as a fledgling railroad engineer in Minnesota in 1885 to his brilliant ideas for the new Grand Central Terminal, his time as the chief consulting engineer for the Holland Tunnel in 1919, and finally, his tenure in 1933 as head of the Office of Work Relief in New York City during the Great Depression. Yet, in the Wilgus papers at the New York Public Library, almost none of the material involves his personal life. In his memoirs he mentions meeting his first wife, May Reed, in Minneapolis, where he began work for the railroads. Her brother and Wilgus’s friend, Charles Reed, who was at the time beginning his career as an architect, went on to design a number of stations for the New York Central Railroad and became involved with the Grand Central project. Wilgus included Reed’s design for a new Grand Central terminal building among the first set of proposals he sent to the railroad’s senior management in 1902. The New York Central and the Vanderbilts rejected Reed’s twelve-story building and instead selected Whitney Warren’s design for Grand Central. Wilgus’s memoirs contain numerous references to Reed’s design work, but May Reed, Wilgus’s wife, receives only a passing word. Her sudden death in 1918 occurred while Wilgus served in France with the Allied Expeditionary Forces. He did not return to the United States to attend the funeral. Even more elusive are his children. May and William had two children: a daughter, Margaret, born in 1892 and a son, William Jr., born in 1898. The 1900 census finds the Wilgus family living at 129 Riverside Drive in Manhattan. By 1910 they had moved to Scarsdale, to a large home on Crane Road, in a very fashionable neighborhood, next door to May’s brother, Charles. A scandal unfolded in 1911 when his daughter, Margaret, eloped at the age of nineteen with Clarence Smith of White Plains, New York. An article in the New York Times reported that the couple had married secretly to “outwit the parents of the bride, who thought that their daughter was too young to wed.” Smith, a CONCLUSION 246 GRAND CENTRAL’S ENGINEER student at Amherst, returned to Scarsdale when their secret marriage became public. The couple went to the Wilgus home on Crane Road, told of their marriage , and “were forgiven.” 1 Wilgus’s son, who used the nickname Jack, led a complicated life. He became involved in bohemian circles in New York City and included among his correspondents James Oppenheim, a poet and writer who lived in Greenwich Village. Oppenheim achieved a modicum of renown in radical circles when he published a collection of poetry, Songs for a New Age, with Century in 1914 and then founded a literary magazine, New Age, in 1916 with Waldo Frank. Jack Wilgus published some of his own poetry in New Age and kept up a long correspondence with Oppenheim. In late January 1927, the New York newspapers reported that William Jr. had attempted suicide and was in Bellevue Hospital. Jack was distraught at the recent suicide of his girlfriend, Vivienne Minor, who killed herself by taking poison at the Martha Washington Hotel. While in Bellevue, Jack “cried out several times for aid from his father” and threatened to make another attempt at suicide.2 William Wilgus never commented publicly or in his autobiography about this incident, nor did he include any details of his son’s travails in his private papers. After his suicide attempt, Jack left New York in 1930 and moved to Claremont , New Hampshire, across the Connecticut River from his father’s home in Ascutney, Vermont. In Claremont, he leased a broken-down farm, the 140 acre Ironwood Mountain Farm, from the Wells family and tried to continue his literary career. It is not clear whether he had any contact with his father while living in Claremont. In the summer and fall of 1931 Jack wrote a series of letters to Oppenheim describing his new life as a “farmer.” In a July letter he...