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

At the turn of the twentieth century, America’s railroads were at the apogee of their power and the Pennsylvania was the largest, most profitable, and best operated of all, respected for its technical excellence and dedication to safety and service. At its helm was Alexander Cassatt, a talented executive and original thinker who found it galling that his trains (unlike those of the rival New York Central) came to an abrupt halt at the Jersey City waterfront and had to use fleets of ferries to make the crossing into Manhattan. He set out to send his trains across the mile-wide Hudson directly into New York City. This—“the nation’s biggest, most difficult, and most important civil engineering project” (p. 89)—is the subject of Jill Jonnes’s Conquering Gotham: A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels.

The new tracks would cross the New Jersey Meadowlands, pass through two tunnels blasted through the solid rock of the Bergen Hill Portal, plunge deep into the glacial silt below the Hudson, and emerge fifty feet below street level, at Thirty-Second Street and Eighth Avenue. From there the tunnels would continue under the East River and surface at Long Island City. (Besides serving long-distance trains, Pennsylvania Station would serve the Long Island Railroad, thereby opening up thousands of acres to new development.) The project was announced to the public on 11 December 1901.

To design the terminal—“the highly visible crown jewel of a colossal but largely subterranean engineering feat” (p. 139)—Cassatt personally selected Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead &White, a passionate aesthete and the dean of American architecture. “McKim,” writes Jonnes, “had never designed a train station in his life, but no other man in America so understood grandeur, Gotham, and the monumental” (pp. 141–42). Cassatt and McKim were determined to bestow on New York a monument worthy of Cassatt’s road and McKim’s city. And they did. McKim’s Doric temple, covering seven-and-a-half acres, was an architectural masterpiece. Its main waiting room, modeled on the tepidarium of the Baths of Caracalla, was the largest room in the world—“vast enough,” Thomas Wolfe would famously write, “to hold the sound of time.” (Neither Cassatt nor McKim lived to see the project completed.)

For all its grandeur, Pennsylvania Station was plagued by a variety of shortcomings, none as serious as the fact that it never served the one hundred million people a year for which it had been designed. (Long Island commuter traffic turned out to be the more important source of its passengers.) In a coda, Jonnes relates the sad story of its short life: the post-World War II decline in rail travel, the lack of upkeep and the architectural indignities of the station’s last years, and the demolition, in 1963, that sparked scant protest but gave birth to a local landmarks ordinance and even a national historic preservation movement.

Jonnes employs short, dramatic, and colorful chapters to tell her story. Unfortunately, Conquering Gotham is high on drama but short on technology. It describes the PRR’s protracted political struggles to secure the franchise and its quiet assembly of the necessary real estate. It even provides the salacious details of the infamous Harry Thaw-Evelyn Nesbit-Stanford White triangle and its aftermath. (White was McKim’s partner and friend, and his murder is said to have undermined McKim’s health.) But it says little about the actual engineering and construction, including the techniques that allowed sandhogs—beset by blowouts, fires, explosions, cave-ins, and uncounted injuries and deaths—to inch their way through sixteen miles of alluvial silt and rock. There are numerous illustrations throughout but not a single plan or map. Too, Jonnes overreaches in her attempts to supply atmospheric detail. The narrative is peppered with gratuitous comments about the weather and...