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

CHAPTER ONE. New York City’s Geography and Transportation Challenges

11 NEW YORK CITY’S GEOGRAPHY AND TRANSPORTATION CHALLENGES when william wilgus arrived in New York City in 1897 to work in the corporate headquarters of the New York Central Railroad, the transportation system of the city and the harbor had grown into a complex, intertwined , and unruly monster. A thriving city and metropolitan region of over twelve million people surrounded the port of New York. Twelve railroads with teeming rail yards crowded the New Jersey shore of the harbor, and the New York Central’s two large rail yards on the West Side of Manhattan filled multiple city blocks connected by rail lines on the city streets. Numerous bridges crossed the East and Harlem rivers; and ferry lines from New Jersey and between Manhattan , Brooklyn, and Staten Island crisscrossed the waters. Myriad private companies hauled freight on the crowded city streets in Manhattan and along the Brooklyn waterfront. For the next thirty years Wilgus worked tirelessly in an attempt to bring order and efficiency to the transportation challenges created by New York’s geography and the city and region’s rise to the pinnacle of American commerce and industry. 1 New York’s Geography One fundamental geographical fact shapes the fate of New York City and the entire metropolitan region: at the very center of the region sits Manhattan Island , surrounded on all sides by water. The island consists of a narrow slice of land running twelve miles long to the north and less than two miles wide at 14th Street and much narrower as one moves north. To the west, the Hudson River, or North River, forms a mile-wide boundary separating Manhattan from New Jersey. To the east, the East River separates Manhattan from Brooklyn and Queens, both part of Long Island, which extends a hundred miles to the east to Montauk Point. To the north, the Harlem River separates the island from the Bronx and Westchester. The siting of an urban area on an island provides a complicated challenge. Cut off from the mainland, an island’s population and economy always remain dependent upon connections to the larger world, whether the island is a small place with few residents (like Block Island, approximately 120 miles to the east of New York City) or a densely populated place like Manhattan. Historically, the overwhelming geographical challenge for Manhattan Island and the city of New York 12 GRAND CENTRAL’S ENGINEER has been to create a system of communication with the surrounding mainland to adequately serve one of the most densely populated places in the world—for well over 350 years a challenge never adequately met. The early Dutch settlers of New York built an economy centered on the fur trade with the Native Americans. The needs of early residents were few, and communication by boat proved adequate. Manhattan’s first European settlement , in the 1600s, located at the very southern tip of the island, had a small population and modest needs. Food could be obtained from the few farms on the island. Communication with Amsterdam, across the Atlantic Ocean, proved to be far more important than easy travel to Brooklyn or to the New Jersey side of the harbor. But as soon as the city’s population grew, travel on and off the island dramatically increased in importance. The second geographical feature that has been critical to New York’s history is the superb harbor just to the south of Manhattan Island. Surrounded on all Bronx Queens Brooklyn Staten Island NEW YORK ATLANTIC OCEAN Lower Bay Upper Bay H u d s o n R . Jamaica Bay Sandy Hook Narrows Arthur Kill NEW JERSEY M a n h a t t a n Newark Bay Raritan Bay E a s t R . H a r l e m R . Long Island Sound New England England, Europe Southern U.S. Caribbean, South America Panama Canal Albany Erie Canal New York Harbor and Manhattan, “the island at the center of the world.” The Hudson River leads to Albany, the Erie Canal, and the Midwest; the East River to Long Island Sound and New England; the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, the southern states, South America, the Panama Canal, California, and Asia. GEOGRAPHY AND TRANSPORTATION CHALLENGES 13 sides by land, the Upper Bay forms a large estuary sheltered from the Atlantic Ocean to the south. For over four hundred years, the Upper Bay has provided ships a perfect shelter...