In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

74 3 NEW YORK’S FREIGHT PROBLEM after dramatically resigning from the New York Central Railroad in September of 1907, Wilgus began a second career as engineering consultant. With an old friend, Henry J. Pierce, also a railroad engineer and executive with whom Wilgus had worked in Buffalo, New York, while still with the Central, he formed a consulting business. Their new firm, the Amsterdam Corporation, rented office space at 165 Broadway in lower Manhattan. A major opportunity presented itself as soon as Wilgus and Pierce went into business: the need to alleviate the railroad and freight congestion along the Hudson River. For decades New York City politicians, residents, and the press demanded a solution to the railroad and shipping problems on Manhattan’s west side. Simply referred to as the “west side problem,” the transportation nightmare was created by a combination of shipping piers, ferry slips, and railroad facilities along the Hudson River from 60th Street south to the Battery. As we have already seen, thousands of ships berthed each year at the Hudson River piers; and ten passenger and freight ferries occupied piers on the river between Manhattan Island and the New Jersey side of the harbor, where both people and goods were unloaded and loaded for the trips back and forth across the river. The thousands of tons of freight delivered to the shore had to be hauled to final destinations on the island, often creating gridlock on the streets and avenues in lower Manhattan. Added to the “local” traffic from the hinterlands were the tons of goods involved in overseas import and export, as well as the coastal shipping to Southern and New England ports. To compound the chaos, the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad owned track rights from 60th Street all the way down to St. James Park, just north of the Battery. For a distance of over five miles, the railroad possessed the legal right to use the city’s streets for its railroad tracks. Each day steam engines hauled scores of trains and thousands of freight cars back and forth between 60th Street and St. James Park. Pedestrians took their lives in their hands as they crossed the tracks. Even with a railroad employee riding a horse and waving a large red warning flag to announce a train, numbers of city residents were killed each year by passing freight trains. Newspapers referred to the streets on the west side, especially those along 10th Avenue, as “Death Alley.” NEW YORK’S FREIGHT PROBLEM 75 With a population of over 1.8 million residents in Manhattan alone in 1900 and over 3.4 million in the expanded city of New York—a result of the consolidation with the four other boroughs—the city needed to be supplied daily with an enormous amount of freight. Coal, for example, provided not just heat in the winter but also illumination. All of the early gas companies burned coal to manufacture gas to be distributed for lighting, and the first electric companies burned coal to produce electricity. The city’s transportation chaos did not end on the shores of Manhattan. Once the freight arrived at the piers, horse-drawn wagons—drays—hauled it to thousands of locations throughout the city, especially to the manufacturers and businesses in lower Manhattan. Wilgus estimated that over 23 million tons were delivered in this fashion in 1906–7 (table 3.1). A reverse flow of freight only added to the congestion. Manufacturing companies in Manhattan shipped their products all over the world. Drays carried the merchandise to the piers to be loaded onto ships bound for ports around the world or along the U.S. coast. Other freight had to be loaded onto car floats or lighters and hauled back across the Hudson to New Jersey and then loaded onto departing freight trains for distribution throughout the United States. Even though Manhattan had less than 5 percent of the country’s population, its manufacturing firms accounted for a major share of total U.S. manufacturing from 1880 to 1900 (table 3.2). On a more mundane level, all of the coal burned in New York created ashes to be removed along with the city’s garbage. And perhaps as many as 100,000 horses left tons of manure on the streets to be loaded onto barges for disposal. In short, nowhere else in the entire country did any port have a more complicated transportation system than Manhattan. On one small...

Share