American Experience (1988) s26e10 Episode Script
The Rise and Fall of Penn Station
NARRATOR:
November 27, 1910
was a day New Yorkers
had been anticipating
for nearly a decade.
Pennsylvania Station,
a monumental train terminal
in the heart of Manhattan,
finally opened to the public.
The excitement was palpable.
LORRAINE DIEHL:
There were throngs of people
in the station that day.
It was as if someone took them
to ancient Rome
and ancient Greece.
I mean, they'd never seen
anything like that.
NARRATOR:
Covering nearly eight acres,
the building was the fourth
largest in the world.
The main waiting room,
which extended the length
of two city blocks
and rose 150 feet high,
was comparable to the nave
at St. Peter's in Rome
in both size and splendor.
A French visitor openly sobbed,
noted a reporter,
"Because such a beautiful affair
was just a railway station."
Perched above the crowd
was a statue of the man
who had died bringing
the station to life.
Alexander Cassatt, president
of the Pennsylvania Railroad,
had defied legions of skeptics
and gambled millions of dollars
to link the nation's
biggest railroad
to America's greatest city.
It was a rare example
of a private investment
that would clearly
benefit the public.
ALBERT CHURELLA:
Cassatt believed that he was
performing a valuable service
not only for his company
but a valuable service
for the country.
NARRATOR:
The unveiling of the station
represented the culmination
of an unprecedented
engineering project:
the building of 16 miles
of underground tunnels.
Seven miles were under
the Hudson and East rivers,
two of the busiest
and most geologically complex
waterways in the world.
KEITH REVELL:
When the Pennsylvania Railroad
undertakes to build tunnels
where nobody thought tunnels
could be built,
it's almost as though they are
going to go to the moon.
JILL JONNES:
The scale of this was pharaonic.
It was huge.
It was the biggest civil
engineering project of its time.
PAUL GOLDBERGER:
Pennsylvania Station is
one of the greatest symbols
of monumental public space that
any American city has ever had.
It ennobles the acts
of daily life.
It makes every citizen
feel important.
DIEHL:
We were poor.
We didn't have very much.
My aunt said to me
when I walked into Penn Station,
I felt like a queen
because I felt as if someone
had done that for me.
NARRATOR:
As 100,000 people
streamed through its doors
on opening day,
a half-dozen granite eagles
peered down on each entrance.
DIEHL:
The eagles represented
the Caesars
when they conquered
new territory.
So here Alexander Cassatt
finally conquered New York,
and he'd surround his station
with eagles.
NARRATOR:
Yet what no one that day could
know was that Penn Station,
built for the ages,
would last only a few decades.
(whistle blowing)
NARRATOR:
In July 1901,
Alexander Cassatt and his family
began the first leg
of their journey to Europe
by boarding a train in
Philadelphia bound for New York.
(whistle blowing)
As happened every time
he traveled to the city,
Cassatt's train abruptly ground
to a halt in New Jersey,
on the western shore
of the Hudson River.
There was no way across
by train,
an increasingly
frustrating situation
for the president of the
nation's largest railroad.
Alexander Cassatt gets off
into just total chaos,
and what he and thousands of
people are going to are ferries.
CHURELLA:
Every ten minutes,
a Pennsylvania Railroad ferry
headed across the Hudson River,
threading a gauntlet
of oceangoing ships,
ferries operated by other
railroads, tugs, lighters,
car floats of one sort
or another.
The congestion of watercraft
on the Hudson River
was becoming intolerable.
NARRATOR:
By the turn of the 20th century,
New York had emerged as the
nation's preeminent metropolis,
rivaling the great cities
of the world.
Still, the Pennsylvania
Railroad,
which controlled
over 10,000 miles of track
extending through
the American heartland,
had no direct access
into Manhattan.
CHURELLA:
For Cassatt, it was a matter
of image and pride.
New York City was not just
the largest city in the country,
it was the nation's
commercial hub.
And for the Pennsylvania
Railroad to get so close,
just one mile short
of Manhattan,
was to him unthinkable.
NARRATOR:
As Cassatt looked
across the Hudson,
he was reminded
of his recent failure
to solve his company's
30-year problem.
A plan for a bridge across
the river had fallen through
when a consortium
of competing rail lines
balked at sharing the cost
of the $100 million project.
Cassatt realized if he wanted
to get his line into New York,
he would have to do it alone.
JONNES:
As Cassatt heads over to France,
he's really, really
disappointed.
This whole plan
has fallen apart
and they really have
no fallback plan.
NARRATOR:
The Cassatts started
their annual European holiday
in London,
then headed to Paris,
where they visited Alexander's
younger sister Mary,
who had built a reputation
as an Impressionist painter.
While in Paris,
Cassatt received a cable
from his vice president,
Samuel Rea,
who urged him to investigate
the new Paris train station,
Gare d'Orsay.
The celebrated train terminal
had been completed
for the Paris Exposition
of 1900.
The Gare d'Orsay's Beaux-Arts
architecture impressed Cassatt.
Even more stunning was
the station's innovative use
of electric traction
and tunnels.
JONNES:
Cassatt is an engineer.
He knows everything inside out
about railroads,
and he spends three days
inspecting every aspect
of these trains, the tunnels,
the whole system.
CHURELLA:
What caught Cassatt's attention
was that trains got there
through a long tunnel--
a tunnel that was smoke-free
because those trains were pulled
by electric locomotives.
NARRATOR:
Unlike coal-burning locomotives,
electric trains
did not run the risk
of asphyxiating their crew
and passengers
while passing through
long tunnels.
Up to this point,
they had primarily been used
for lighter trolleys.
Now Cassatt watched powerful
electric locomotives
pull 300-ton passenger cars
through a mile-long tunnel
running along the river Seine
to platforms below the station.
It was the idea
of going electric, I think,
that really brought
all this together for Cassatt.
NARRATOR:
Cassatt envisioned
his own electric trains
gliding through tunnels
under the Hudson River
into Manhattan.
He cabled Rea that he believed
this might be the solution.
JONNES:
The railroads completely
remade and redefined
every aspect of life in America.
They knit the whole country
together
and really created
an entirely new economy,
and it was a very
industrialized economy
and it was a very
urbanized economy.
As the nation's
largest railroad,
the Pennsylvania Railroad
played a bigger role than most.
The Pennsylvania Railroad
hauled more freight,
it transported more passengers
than any other railroad
in the United States.
NARRATOR:
By 1900, the Pennsylvania
Railroad
was the largest corporation
in the world.
With over 100,000 employees,
its operating budget was second
only to the federal
government's.
Cassatt had been appointed
president of the line in 1899
at the age of 59.
His career hadn't followed
the typical path.
Born into a wealthy family,
he had the means to retire
at age 42
before being persuaded to return
after the company's president
died unexpectedly.
JONNES:
The board of directors
asked him,
would he consider
taking on the presidency?
In a way,
this was no small thing
because almost every president
of the Pennsylvania Railroad
had died in office,
so it was literally known
as a killing job.
NARRATOR:
As a condition
for accepting the job,
Cassatt demanded free rein
to carry out his vision
for the company.
CHURELLA:
Cassatt certainly did believe
that he knew better than anyone
how things should be run.
He understood the organizational
and the financial complexity
of the railroad industry.
NARRATOR:
The railroad thrived
under Cassatt's leadership,
nearly doubling its income
in two years.
He's in a position to say,
"Let's do something
really extraordinary
that this company has been
trying to do for years."
DIEHL:
New York City at the turn of the
century was changing rapidly.
The entire city is pushing
itself into the 20th century.
He wants to be
part of the party.
He wants his railroad
to be part of that.
He was really obsessed
with taking his trains
into Manhattan.
NARRATOR:
To help realize
his new tunnel plan,
Cassatt tapped Samuel Rea
to oversee the project
and recruited Charles Jacobs,
one of the world's foremost
tunnel engineers.
Jacobs had become prominent
building a small natural gas
tunnel under the East River,
the first underwater tunnel
into Manhattan.
CHURELLA:
Charles Jacobs understood,
perhaps better than anybody else
in the world,
the practicalities of building
underwater tunnels.
NARRATOR:
The plan was daunting:
16 miles of tunnels
that would link the Pennsylvania
Railroad's sprawling system
to New York City
and New England.
Two tunnels would be bored
under the Hudson River
from New Jersey to Manhattan,
where they would open up
into tracks 50 feet
below street level,
leading to the railroad's
terminus
in the heart of the city.
Four tunnels would continue
under the East River
and emerge in Long Island,
where they would connect
with the recently acquired
Long Island Rail Road.
The final piece would be
the Hell Gate Bridge,
a span over the East River
extending the rail lines
northward to New England.
For the company's new terminal,
Cassatt envisioned
an architectural tour de force
along the lines of the Gare
d'Orsay, only twice as big.
The expected price tag
of the project was $50 million.
The Pennsylvania would take on
this massive venture alone,
giving it exclusive access
to the tunnels.
CZITROM:
The ambition and the scope
of the Pennsylvania
Railroad project
reflect something about America
at the turn of the century.
People identify
these same themes
with works like
the Brooklyn Bridge,
with the building
of the first subways,
with the building
of the Panama Canal.
But unlike some of the other
great engineering feats
of the late 19th,
early 20th century,
this is not being done
with any government subsidy.
This is being done
by a private corporation.
JONNES:
They feel as if they're doing
this great civic deed.
They are actually going to
finally attach New York City,
which is the most important city
in the country, to the mainland.
NARRATOR:
It began quietly.
In the fall of 1901,
three men went door to door,
buying up real estate
in the Tenderloin,
a working-class neighborhood
that was also one of Manhattan's
most notorious vice districts.
Snapping up shabby tenements,
saloons, dance halls,
gambling joints
and warehouses,
the men worked to get
the lowest prices possible.
JONNES:
They had no idea who they were
buying property for,
and they went out into these
blocks in the Tenderloin
and just began
looking for owners.
They had giant wads of cash,
and if someone was willing
to sell their building,
they would pay them on the spot.
NARRATOR:
The buyers needed to purchase
the four blocks
from West 31st Street
to West 33rd Street
between 7th and 9th Avenues.
The area was to be the site
of the Pennsylvania Railroad's
Manhattan terminal,
but that was
a closely guarded secret.
CZITROM:
The idea is that
once we buy these buildings up,
we're going
to tear them all down.
They want to do this
before it becomes publicly known
that they're buying
everything up.
That's the way to keep
the prices down.
NARRATOR:
When news of the tunnels leaked
out, it stunned the public.
JONNES:
People still assumed
that somehow or another,
they were in pursuit
of a bridge.
The idea that you would build
tunnels was not on anyone's mind
because it was not viewed
as technically possible.
CHURELLA:
Cassatt certainly understood
that driving a tunnel
under the Hudson River
was a risky business.
In the 1870s,
DeWitt Clinton Haskin
had tried to build a tunnel
under the Hudson River
and had suffered
a series of blowouts,
one of which killed 20 people.
The project was abandoned--
proof, critics said,
that it just couldn't be done.
VINCE TIROLO:
The geologic conditions for the
Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels
in the Hudson River
were difficult.
The soil that you're mining
through is a soft silt.
So there was a lot of concern
about whether the tunnel
in that soft material
would stay in position
or would settle.
NARRATOR:
A typical Pennsylvania Railroad
passenger train
weighed 700 tons.
The tunnels would need
to withstand
hundreds of them every day.
REVELL:
Building a tunnel of that size
to handle that level of traffic
is going to be
an extraordinary undertaking.
When you put several hundred
tons of railroad car
underneath the river
in that silt,
the likelihood is that things
are going to start
to move around,
and you don't want a railroad
tunnel underneath the water
to start moving around.
CHURELLA:
What concerned Samuel Rea
was that the tunnels would fail,
and in failing
doom the entire project.
NARRATOR:
Cassatt had already spent
$5 million buying up land
for his Manhattan train station.
Now he was betting
ten times that amount
on what many considered
a mad and reckless pursuit.
(birds chirping)
NARRATOR:
On a spring day in 1902,
New York architect Charles McKim
was in Washington
to discuss a renovation
of the White House
with President
Theodore Roosevelt.
While there, McKim received
an unexpected telegram
from Alexander Cassatt,
requesting a meeting.
"I suppose President Cassatt
wants a new stoop
for his house," McKim joked.
McKim hurried to the
Pennsylvania Railroad's offices
in Philadelphia the next day.
He spent the morning
with Cassatt,
who described his plans
for a new railroad station
in Manhattan.
Alexander Cassatt
wanted a monument.
He didn't want a simple opening
into an underground space.
He wanted a monument
to his company
that could express
the importance of the railroad
and the ambitions
of New York City,
that captured its sense
of itself as a world capital.
GOLDBERGER:
Cassatt was a very unusual
executive.
He not only knew
how to run a railroad,
he really did have
a grand vision
and he wanted
the Pennsylvania Railroad
to stand for the grandest,
the noblest, the most elegant,
the most inspiring.
He saw in McKim
the kind of architect
who would give him that.
NARRATOR:
Along with Stanford White
and William Mead,
McKim had founded
one of the country's
most famous architectural firms.
GOLDBERGER:
McKim, Mead & White were
kind of the top guys in town.
And Charles McKim was a
strong-willed, earnest believer
in the nobility
of Classical architecture.
NARRATOR:
McKim had made his name
designing civic spaces
like the Boston Public Library
and the campus
of Columbia University.
Although he had never designed
a train station,
he created works
on a heroic scale.
By the end of their meeting,
Cassatt had commissioned McKim
to design Pennsylvania Station.
In the Tenderloin, about 500
buildings were soon torn down,
displacing hundreds of families
to make way for Cassatt's
new terminal.
McKim marveled
at the huge expanse:
a sprawling, blank canvas
on which he could design
a monument for the ages.
NARRATOR:
On June 24, 1903, Charles Jacobs
stepped up on a wooden platform
next to a large pneumatic drill
and began drilling down
into the bedrock of Manhattan.
The massive hole would soon be
a 55-foot deep shaft
for tunneling
under the Hudson River.
At the same time,
workers sunk a similar shaft
in Weehawken, New Jersey.
Construction had begun on what
Engineering News lauded
as "the most extensive
and difficult
piece of submarine tunnel work
ever undertaken."
The shafts would be
the access points
for simultaneously digging
two tunnels
that would meet up
under the Hudson River.
On the other side of Manhattan,
crews would burrow four tunnels
under the East River,
also starting from each shore
and connecting in the middle.
At the contractor's
field offices,
doctors began examining
hundreds of applicants
for jobs as tunnel workers,
called sandhogs.
The dangerous work drew men
from all different nationalities
and ethnic groups:
Irish, Italian, Polish,
West Indian, African-American.
At the shaft entrances,
a makeshift elevator
transported sandhogs
to the dank depths
of their underground work.
Tunneling never stopped:
three eight-hour shifts a day,
seven days a week.
Rows of steam engines pumped
the lifeblood of compressed air
into the tunnel below.
TIROLO:
Compressed air means
you're raising the pressure
of the air inside the tunnel
to a pressure that's equal
to the pressure of the water
trying to come in.
Now, the water's trying
to flow inside the tunnel
and you're pushing
on the face of the tunnel
with a pressure equal
to the pressure of the water.
That compressed air pressure
keeps the water from coming in.
NARRATOR:
To bore under the river,
the engineers used
a Greathead shield.
Weighing nearly 200 tons,
the shield was a steel cylinder
with a diameter of 23 feet
in which the tunnel
was constructed.
The head of the shield had
nine compartments with doors,
allowing for the extraction of
earth and rock, called "muck,"
from the face of the tunnel.
In the tail of the shield,
the tunnel was built
by assembling
a series of two-and-a-half
foot wide cast-iron rings,
each made up of 12 segments
bolted together by hand.
As each ring was put in place,
hydraulic jacks
pushed the shield forward
so that another ring
could be erected.
TIROLO:
The process is kind
of an inchworm process.
You erect a ring,
you jack forward,
you pull the jacks back,
you erect another ring.
And out the back of the shield,
you're getting this continuous
line of cast-iron rings.
NARRATOR:
In the beginning, it took
sandhogs about six hours
to put a ring segment in place.
With experience, they soon could
build one every 90 minutes.
TIROLO:
Excavation was essentially
hand labor.
Generally speaking,
it was done with a spade.
And the rock was drilled
by a pneumatic hammer
held by a sandhog.
SCOTT CHESMAN:
It's grueling.
There's tremendous power
down there that needs to be used
and if you're in the wrong spot
at the wrong time,
you're going to get crushed.
Equipment moving in and out,
muck cars full of muck--
I mean, they weigh tons.
If you're not paying attention,
you're going to get hit.
And when you're in a confined
space and anything can happen,
there is nowhere to run.
NARRATOR:
Concerned about the tunnel
settling in the soft silt,
Jacobs had engineers measure
the alignment and grade
every second to fourth ring.
As the enormous shields
crept towards each other,
Jacobs knew there was
no margin for error.
(explosion)
NARRATOR:
At the site of the new station
and its accompanying train yard,
work gangs began
to dig, drill, dynamite
and cart out tons of muck.
Construction crews
worked day and night
to excavate the 28-acre expanse.
JONNES:
It's just block after block
after block
that's going down, down, down.
They're having to prop up
entire avenues
including above the avenues,
the elevated railroads,
and then excavating
around all of the underground
infrastructure that's there:
the sewer pipes,
the water pipes.
It's an amazing
engineering feat.
CZITROM:
The construction site also
became an object of fascination
for ordinary passersby
who were just struck
by the breathtaking size
of this operation.
It was almost an unworldly scene
that was going on.
Nobody had ever seen
a hole this big
and nobody had ever seen
an excavation project
this ambitious.
The newspapers
and other observers
would constantly refer
to the excavation job
as being our own Panama Canal
here on the west side
of Manhattan.
NARRATOR:
Just blocks
from the excavation site,
Charles McKim was working
intensely on designs
for a lofty space
to celebrate what he called
"the entrance to one of the
great metropolitan cities
of the world."
For inspiration,
McKim studied the great
buildings of ancient Rome,
in particular
the Baths of Caracalla,
which he had recently visited.
GOLDBERGER:
The Romans believed
that public buildings
were inherently noble things.
They were not just functional.
He looked at the Baths
of Caracalla and decided
that there was the model for the
great space of a train station.
This is saying that we can evoke
the grandeur of ancient Rome
and make it part
of modern New York.
NARRATOR:
Cassatt had also visited
the Baths
and was equally taken with them.
CZITROM:
He was not solely interested
in aggrandizing power.
He was a man of culture,
of taste,
of fine art.
He paid tremendous attention
to aesthetics and beauty
and great architecture.
DIEHL:
Alexander Cassatt
and Charles McKim,
they both had a very deep,
keen respect for beauty.
They decided on how the station
should be built
with that same dream
in their heads.
NARRATOR:
McKim dreamed big.
His grand design
included importing
Italian travertine marble,
the same material used
in ancient Roman monuments,
for the interior.
For the exterior,
he chose lustrous pink Milford
granite from Massachusetts.
He built full-scale models
of the facade
to study the proportions
of his design.
When the railroad's
board of directors
pushed to include
a revenue-generating hotel
on top of the station,
McKim was appalled.
He argued that
this would compromise
the artistic integrity
of the building.
Cassatt was won over,
but his engineers also
gave him a practical reason
to oppose the hotel.
The additional support columns
needed, they told him,
would necessitate the removal
of two or more tracks.
Cassatt quickly dropped
the idea.
CHURELLA:
He was intimately involved
in the design of the structure
of Penn Station,
and Penn Station embodies
Alexander Cassatt's vision
as much as it does
Charles McKim's vision.
NARRATOR:
Tunnel construction
under the Hudson
had proved easier
and faster than expected,
and Charles Jacobs was exuberant
over the progress.
By the spring of 1906, New York
and New Jersey sandhog crews
raced to be the first to reach
the middle of the river.
On the other side of Manhattan,
however,
tunneling under the East River
was turning into a nightmare.
CHURELLA:
The tunnels under the Hudson
were easy
compared to the tunnels
under the East River.
The East River overlay
a complex strata
of gravel, clay, sand, silt,
bedrock, even.
And it was proving
extraordinarily difficult
for crews to tunnel
through that.
NARRATOR:
Every time the sandhogs hit
pockets of sand and gravel,
they ran the risk of air
leaking from the tunnels.
"The geysers formed
by the leaks,"
reported the New York Times,
"have made the water
in the ferry slips
look like boiling lakes."
Inside the tunnel,
sandhogs were constantly on the
alert for a whistling sound:
the telltale sign that
compressed air was escaping
and might at any moment punch
a hole through the riverbed--
what was known as a blowout.
It's like a ship
being hit by a torpedo.
When a ship gets hit
by a torpedo,
everybody runs to the opening
and they try to plug the leak.
They'll try using anything
they have on hand.
They'll use blankets,
they'll use hay,
whatever they can
to stop the air.
If a sandhog is unlucky enough
to be at that point
where the air is leaking
and all of a sudden
the air leaks at one time,
that man will be blown out
into the river with the air.
NARRATOR:
Constant blowouts put them
desperately behind schedule,
and costs were skyrocketing.
In April 1906,
the lead engineer told Cassatt
that work had stopped
on three of the four tunnels.
JONNES:
They find it very, very hard
to keep the compressed air
in these tunnels.
They're blowing all the time.
And there have been
a lot of deaths
and a lot of cases of the bends.
CHURELLA:
The situation
under the East River
was going from bad to worse.
In the absence of first-hand
information,
reporters often exaggerated the
number of deaths and injuries,
and this created
an intense public image problem
for the Pennsylvania Railroad.
NARRATOR:
As dawn broke on June 20, 1906,
ferry passengers heading across
the East River to Manhattan
heard a horrific roar.
(loud roaring and splashing)
An enormous geyser suddenly
erupted out of the water.
86 feet below the surface,
sandhogs scrambled for safety
as a massive blowout flooded
much of the southernmost
Pennsylvania Railroad tunnel.
Two sandhogs drowned.
Cassatt and Rea rushed
to New York.
Rea assured the press
that the tunnels were only
a few months behind schedule
and the delays
were not alarming.
A representative
for the contracting firm
admitted that 14 men
had died from the bends:
more than they expected,
but half as many as the
newspapers were claiming.
To help reduce blowouts,
he explained they would dump
tons of clay into the river
to seal the riverbed.
Still, Cassatt realized
he needed to counter
the mounting bad press.
Four months earlier,
he had hired Ivy Lee,
a pioneer in the field
of public relations.
Now Cassatt charged Lee
with managing the stories
swirling around the tunnels.
Later that summer,
for the first time
since the start of the project,
the Pennsylvania Railroad
allowed a journalist
to take a tour of the tunnels.
CHURELLA:
Ivy Lee understood
that the way to capture
the public's attention
was not to release
dry statistical data,
but rather to make sure
the public understands something
about the romance,
the excitement
and the adventure associated
with this great endeavor:
that this is a dark and
mysterious subterranean world
in which heroic men are carrying
forth the progress of a nation.
(drilling and hammering)
NARRATOR:
On the evening
of September 11, 1906,
after three years of tunneling
and a full year
ahead of schedule,
the two halves
of the north tunnel met
under the Hudson River.
Under Charles Jacobs'
careful eye,
their alignment was off
by only 1/16 of an inch.
TIROLO:
Even today, an accuracy
of 1/16th of an inch
in tunnels meeting
is still excellent.
So the fact that they were able
to do it back then,
it's amazing.
NARRATOR:
Jacobs led an inspection party
through the tunnel
from New Jersey to Manhattan.
The group cheered as the
engineer became the first person
to pass through
from one side to the other.
As others followed,
a cry went out:
"Three cheers for the sandhogs!"
CHURELLA:
Far from speculating about
how this project might not work
or might be too dangerous,
reporters gushed over
the marvels of the tunnels:
the sheer novelty
of being able to walk
underneath the Hudson River
from New York to New Jersey.
NARRATOR:
Noticeably absent
from all the celebration
were Alexander Cassatt
and Samuel Rea.
For the past five months,
they had been preoccupied
with troubling news.
Measurements showed that
the Hudson River tunnels
were shifting up and down
in the silty river bottom.
Cassatt had the engineers
increase the weight
of the cast-iron linings
to settle the tunnels,
but the shifting continued.
CHURELLA:
There is a very real fear
that the tunnels
would simply keep sinking,
the tunnels might crack,
they might lie forever broken,
flooded, abandoned
underneath the Hudson River,
a monument to the folly
of the Pennsylvania Railroad's
efforts to reach Manhattan.
NARRATOR:
Rea pressured his engineers
to find an answer.
Jacobs suggested attaching
screw piles to the bedrock below
to support the tunnels.
Rea was not convinced.
After months of measurements,
experiments and debate,
Jacobs finally figured out
what suddenly seemed obvious:
the tunnels were moving
with the tide.
When the tide came in,
the increased volume of water
pushed the tunnels down.
Then they would spring back up
as the tide receded.
This explained the shifting,
but a terrifying unknown
remained.
JONNES:
What does that mean for the
ultimate fate of the tunnels?
Are they going to keep sinking
once they have very heavy trains
going through them every day?
And the truth is no one knows.
So this is this terrible secret
that hangs over Samuel Rea.
NARRATOR:
Three days after Christmas
in 1906,
Alexander Cassatt was working
from his home in Philadelphia,
still weakened after a bout
with whooping cough
he had contracted
the previous summer.
Resting with his wife
by his side,
he suffered a heart attack
and died.
He was 67.
He had become the fourth
Pennsylvania Railroad president
to die in office.
JONNES:
Cassatt was enormously admired,
and he had this very unusual
and unique position
of being viewed almost as
a public servant,
and that his corporation
had this larger,
more idealistic role to play,
which was to help
make America great.
DIEHL:
Watching this building rise,
watching these
beautiful columns rise
almost like the temple
of Athena--
people must have been awestruck
by that.
JONNES:
It really looks like some aspect
of ancient Rome is rising
in the middle of what's left
of the Tenderloin.
And it began to sink in that
something truly extraordinary
was happening in Manhattan.
NARRATOR:
By the time the masonry work
started on Pennsylvania Station
in 1908,
sandhogs had joined the tunnels
under the East River,
making it possible
to travel underground
from New Jersey to Long Island.
CHURELLA:
At the time
Penn Station was built,
most people believed
that railroads
were symbols of progress,
symbols of modernity,
symbols of what the United
States could achieve.
NARRATOR:
It had taken four years to build
Pennsylvania Station.
McKim's colossal structure
used 27,000 tons of steel,
500,000 cubic feet of granite,
83,000 square feet
of skylights
and 17 million bricks.
REVELL:
When the station is completed
in 1910, Samuel Rea says,
"We started this project
"with a great deal of skepticism
from onlookers.
"They now see that we have built
for the future.
It's part of a system that's
going to be here for years."
NARRATOR:
On opening day, thousands
of entranced spectators
wandered through the station.
"They flooded the acres
of its floor space,"
reported the New York Tribune,
"gazed at the vaulted ceilings
far above them,
"and pressed like caged
creatures against the grill
"which looked down upon
subterranean tracks,
trains and platforms."
GOLDBERGER:
Pennsylvania Station
was a symbol
not only of the greatness
and power of the railroad,
but also of the greatness
and power of the city.
It was a gift to the city
as well as a creation
of a corporation
and this notion that private
enterprise and the public good
didn't contradict each other,
they in fact reinforced
each other.
My first memory of Penn Station
is one that is indelible.
I was about ten years old.
I walk into this train shed.
I felt such a sense
of wonder and motion.
The late morning sun
is coming in
and all the little particles
of dust are frozen there--
they're just sort of dancing
in the air--
and I'm just saying to myself,
"This is a wondrous place."
(hammers pounding)
NARRATOR:
Seven years
after Penn Station opened,
Samuel Rea, now president
of the railroad,
dedicated the last piece
of Cassatt's grand plan:
the Hell Gate Bridge.
The world's longest
steel arch bridge at the time,
it finally connected
the Pennsylvania Railroad
to New England.
By then, 18 million people
traveled through Penn Station
every year,
and hundreds of trains
rumbled through the tunnels
day after day.
Rea's worst fears
had been unfounded.
The tunnels held up.
Traffic particularly exploded
on the Long Island Rail Road,
which brought an increasing
number of commuters
into Manhattan
through the East River tunnels.
Within a decade,
two-thirds of the passengers
arriving in Penn Station
were coming from the suburbs.
CZITROM:
The creation of Penn Station
in some ways
had a greater impact not on
the city but on the suburbs.
The opening up of Queens
and Long Island and New Jersey
was in some ways, I think,
an unintended consequence
of all this.
NARRATOR:
By 1945, more than 100 million
passengers a year
traveled through Penn Station,
exceeding Cassatt's
wildest dreams.
DIEHL:
Penn Station was a place
not only of journeys,
but a place of memories.
Those walls actually held the
history of the country in a way.
It held time
in that it held memory.
GOLDBERGER:
Great architecture
can imbue daily life
with a sense of wonder
and majesty and joy.
Penn Station was perhaps
the greatest single
public space of all.
CHURELLA:
There's a great irony
that Penn Station
was finally used to capacity
during World War II,
but at that moment of triumph,
the Pennsylvania Railroad
was on the verge of decline.
And the next year, 1946,
the company lost money for
the first time in its history.
Cassatt planned his program
of improvements perfectly
for the world he believed would
exist 50 years in the future.
He never envisioned a world
in which more people
would travel by car
or by plane than by train.
NARRATOR:
Within the lifetime of many
who had seen it open
came the end
of Pennsylvania Station.
What was supposed
to last forever
to herald and represent
the American empire
was slated for destruction.
BALLON:
The Pennsylvania Railroad
was struggling,
and it's in desperate
financial condition.
It could no longer forfeit
the real estate revenues
of its site in Manhattan,
something it had forgone
when the railroad
was originally built
but which now is impossible.
Their job was not to preserve
the architectural landscape
of New York City.
Their job was to protect
their company.
DIEHL:
The Pennsylvania Railroad
owned it.
The Pennsylvania Railroad
could therefore destroy it.
It was a very, very tough thing
to understand
because it was a public space.
Even though it was built for us,
we didn't own it.
We just used it.
NARRATOR:
In 1961, the financially
strapped Pennsylvania Railroad
announced it had sold
the air rights
above Penn Station.
The company would tear down what
had once been its crowning jewel
to build Madison Square Garden,
a high-rise office building
and sports complex.
A few people protested,
but to no avail.
On the rainy morning
of October 28, 1963,
the demolition began.
"Until the first blow fell,
no one was convinced
that Penn Station really
would be demolished,"
wrote the New York Times,
"or that New York would permit
this monumental act of vandalism
against one of the finest
landmarks of its age."
BALLON:
The demolition
of Pennsylvania Station
represented a tremendous
loss of hope for the city:
that it has surrendered
one of its great pieces
of public architecture.
DIEHL:
For most people,
it wasn't until
that station was torn down
that they understood
what was taken from them.
Vincent Scully said,
"Where once we entered
like kings, we exit like rats."
You never get over the fact that
such a wonderful place is gone.
GOLDBERGER:
Penn Station was really
the great martyr
of historic preservation,
the building that died
so that we might save others
in the future.
What Penn Station was
was the tipping point:
something that people simply
wouldn't accept anymore.
And so then there was
the political will
to do something about it.
NARRATOR:
In the wake of the destruction,
New York City established
the Landmarks Preservation
Commission.
Grand Central Terminal
was designated a historic
landmark in 1967,
sparing it from the fate
of Penn Station.
CZITROM:
It does help inspire
a whole new consciousness
about the importance
of saving great buildings.
But anybody who knows New York
understands
that that's always
an uphill battle:
that the power of commerce,
the devotion to change,
the fetish of what's coming next
really worked against what McKim
and Cassatt had created.
CHURELLA:
The architectural edifice
of Penn Station may be gone,
but the tracks
and the tunnels remain
and carry millions of people in
and out of Manhattan every year.
That was the most valuable part
of the entire project,
and that survives.
GOLDBERGER:
Penn Station
represents the aspiration
of doing something monumental
and noble,
of private enterprise
creating something extraordinary
for the benefit of the public.
It was an investment
that generations that followed
would benefit from.
The challenge is
how you balance the need
to preserve what's best,
what's most important,
and the need to continually
invent and change and grow,
because that's what
living places have to do.
November 27, 1910
was a day New Yorkers
had been anticipating
for nearly a decade.
Pennsylvania Station,
a monumental train terminal
in the heart of Manhattan,
finally opened to the public.
The excitement was palpable.
LORRAINE DIEHL:
There were throngs of people
in the station that day.
It was as if someone took them
to ancient Rome
and ancient Greece.
I mean, they'd never seen
anything like that.
NARRATOR:
Covering nearly eight acres,
the building was the fourth
largest in the world.
The main waiting room,
which extended the length
of two city blocks
and rose 150 feet high,
was comparable to the nave
at St. Peter's in Rome
in both size and splendor.
A French visitor openly sobbed,
noted a reporter,
"Because such a beautiful affair
was just a railway station."
Perched above the crowd
was a statue of the man
who had died bringing
the station to life.
Alexander Cassatt, president
of the Pennsylvania Railroad,
had defied legions of skeptics
and gambled millions of dollars
to link the nation's
biggest railroad
to America's greatest city.
It was a rare example
of a private investment
that would clearly
benefit the public.
ALBERT CHURELLA:
Cassatt believed that he was
performing a valuable service
not only for his company
but a valuable service
for the country.
NARRATOR:
The unveiling of the station
represented the culmination
of an unprecedented
engineering project:
the building of 16 miles
of underground tunnels.
Seven miles were under
the Hudson and East rivers,
two of the busiest
and most geologically complex
waterways in the world.
KEITH REVELL:
When the Pennsylvania Railroad
undertakes to build tunnels
where nobody thought tunnels
could be built,
it's almost as though they are
going to go to the moon.
JILL JONNES:
The scale of this was pharaonic.
It was huge.
It was the biggest civil
engineering project of its time.
PAUL GOLDBERGER:
Pennsylvania Station is
one of the greatest symbols
of monumental public space that
any American city has ever had.
It ennobles the acts
of daily life.
It makes every citizen
feel important.
DIEHL:
We were poor.
We didn't have very much.
My aunt said to me
when I walked into Penn Station,
I felt like a queen
because I felt as if someone
had done that for me.
NARRATOR:
As 100,000 people
streamed through its doors
on opening day,
a half-dozen granite eagles
peered down on each entrance.
DIEHL:
The eagles represented
the Caesars
when they conquered
new territory.
So here Alexander Cassatt
finally conquered New York,
and he'd surround his station
with eagles.
NARRATOR:
Yet what no one that day could
know was that Penn Station,
built for the ages,
would last only a few decades.
(whistle blowing)
NARRATOR:
In July 1901,
Alexander Cassatt and his family
began the first leg
of their journey to Europe
by boarding a train in
Philadelphia bound for New York.
(whistle blowing)
As happened every time
he traveled to the city,
Cassatt's train abruptly ground
to a halt in New Jersey,
on the western shore
of the Hudson River.
There was no way across
by train,
an increasingly
frustrating situation
for the president of the
nation's largest railroad.
Alexander Cassatt gets off
into just total chaos,
and what he and thousands of
people are going to are ferries.
CHURELLA:
Every ten minutes,
a Pennsylvania Railroad ferry
headed across the Hudson River,
threading a gauntlet
of oceangoing ships,
ferries operated by other
railroads, tugs, lighters,
car floats of one sort
or another.
The congestion of watercraft
on the Hudson River
was becoming intolerable.
NARRATOR:
By the turn of the 20th century,
New York had emerged as the
nation's preeminent metropolis,
rivaling the great cities
of the world.
Still, the Pennsylvania
Railroad,
which controlled
over 10,000 miles of track
extending through
the American heartland,
had no direct access
into Manhattan.
CHURELLA:
For Cassatt, it was a matter
of image and pride.
New York City was not just
the largest city in the country,
it was the nation's
commercial hub.
And for the Pennsylvania
Railroad to get so close,
just one mile short
of Manhattan,
was to him unthinkable.
NARRATOR:
As Cassatt looked
across the Hudson,
he was reminded
of his recent failure
to solve his company's
30-year problem.
A plan for a bridge across
the river had fallen through
when a consortium
of competing rail lines
balked at sharing the cost
of the $100 million project.
Cassatt realized if he wanted
to get his line into New York,
he would have to do it alone.
JONNES:
As Cassatt heads over to France,
he's really, really
disappointed.
This whole plan
has fallen apart
and they really have
no fallback plan.
NARRATOR:
The Cassatts started
their annual European holiday
in London,
then headed to Paris,
where they visited Alexander's
younger sister Mary,
who had built a reputation
as an Impressionist painter.
While in Paris,
Cassatt received a cable
from his vice president,
Samuel Rea,
who urged him to investigate
the new Paris train station,
Gare d'Orsay.
The celebrated train terminal
had been completed
for the Paris Exposition
of 1900.
The Gare d'Orsay's Beaux-Arts
architecture impressed Cassatt.
Even more stunning was
the station's innovative use
of electric traction
and tunnels.
JONNES:
Cassatt is an engineer.
He knows everything inside out
about railroads,
and he spends three days
inspecting every aspect
of these trains, the tunnels,
the whole system.
CHURELLA:
What caught Cassatt's attention
was that trains got there
through a long tunnel--
a tunnel that was smoke-free
because those trains were pulled
by electric locomotives.
NARRATOR:
Unlike coal-burning locomotives,
electric trains
did not run the risk
of asphyxiating their crew
and passengers
while passing through
long tunnels.
Up to this point,
they had primarily been used
for lighter trolleys.
Now Cassatt watched powerful
electric locomotives
pull 300-ton passenger cars
through a mile-long tunnel
running along the river Seine
to platforms below the station.
It was the idea
of going electric, I think,
that really brought
all this together for Cassatt.
NARRATOR:
Cassatt envisioned
his own electric trains
gliding through tunnels
under the Hudson River
into Manhattan.
He cabled Rea that he believed
this might be the solution.
JONNES:
The railroads completely
remade and redefined
every aspect of life in America.
They knit the whole country
together
and really created
an entirely new economy,
and it was a very
industrialized economy
and it was a very
urbanized economy.
As the nation's
largest railroad,
the Pennsylvania Railroad
played a bigger role than most.
The Pennsylvania Railroad
hauled more freight,
it transported more passengers
than any other railroad
in the United States.
NARRATOR:
By 1900, the Pennsylvania
Railroad
was the largest corporation
in the world.
With over 100,000 employees,
its operating budget was second
only to the federal
government's.
Cassatt had been appointed
president of the line in 1899
at the age of 59.
His career hadn't followed
the typical path.
Born into a wealthy family,
he had the means to retire
at age 42
before being persuaded to return
after the company's president
died unexpectedly.
JONNES:
The board of directors
asked him,
would he consider
taking on the presidency?
In a way,
this was no small thing
because almost every president
of the Pennsylvania Railroad
had died in office,
so it was literally known
as a killing job.
NARRATOR:
As a condition
for accepting the job,
Cassatt demanded free rein
to carry out his vision
for the company.
CHURELLA:
Cassatt certainly did believe
that he knew better than anyone
how things should be run.
He understood the organizational
and the financial complexity
of the railroad industry.
NARRATOR:
The railroad thrived
under Cassatt's leadership,
nearly doubling its income
in two years.
He's in a position to say,
"Let's do something
really extraordinary
that this company has been
trying to do for years."
DIEHL:
New York City at the turn of the
century was changing rapidly.
The entire city is pushing
itself into the 20th century.
He wants to be
part of the party.
He wants his railroad
to be part of that.
He was really obsessed
with taking his trains
into Manhattan.
NARRATOR:
To help realize
his new tunnel plan,
Cassatt tapped Samuel Rea
to oversee the project
and recruited Charles Jacobs,
one of the world's foremost
tunnel engineers.
Jacobs had become prominent
building a small natural gas
tunnel under the East River,
the first underwater tunnel
into Manhattan.
CHURELLA:
Charles Jacobs understood,
perhaps better than anybody else
in the world,
the practicalities of building
underwater tunnels.
NARRATOR:
The plan was daunting:
16 miles of tunnels
that would link the Pennsylvania
Railroad's sprawling system
to New York City
and New England.
Two tunnels would be bored
under the Hudson River
from New Jersey to Manhattan,
where they would open up
into tracks 50 feet
below street level,
leading to the railroad's
terminus
in the heart of the city.
Four tunnels would continue
under the East River
and emerge in Long Island,
where they would connect
with the recently acquired
Long Island Rail Road.
The final piece would be
the Hell Gate Bridge,
a span over the East River
extending the rail lines
northward to New England.
For the company's new terminal,
Cassatt envisioned
an architectural tour de force
along the lines of the Gare
d'Orsay, only twice as big.
The expected price tag
of the project was $50 million.
The Pennsylvania would take on
this massive venture alone,
giving it exclusive access
to the tunnels.
CZITROM:
The ambition and the scope
of the Pennsylvania
Railroad project
reflect something about America
at the turn of the century.
People identify
these same themes
with works like
the Brooklyn Bridge,
with the building
of the first subways,
with the building
of the Panama Canal.
But unlike some of the other
great engineering feats
of the late 19th,
early 20th century,
this is not being done
with any government subsidy.
This is being done
by a private corporation.
JONNES:
They feel as if they're doing
this great civic deed.
They are actually going to
finally attach New York City,
which is the most important city
in the country, to the mainland.
NARRATOR:
It began quietly.
In the fall of 1901,
three men went door to door,
buying up real estate
in the Tenderloin,
a working-class neighborhood
that was also one of Manhattan's
most notorious vice districts.
Snapping up shabby tenements,
saloons, dance halls,
gambling joints
and warehouses,
the men worked to get
the lowest prices possible.
JONNES:
They had no idea who they were
buying property for,
and they went out into these
blocks in the Tenderloin
and just began
looking for owners.
They had giant wads of cash,
and if someone was willing
to sell their building,
they would pay them on the spot.
NARRATOR:
The buyers needed to purchase
the four blocks
from West 31st Street
to West 33rd Street
between 7th and 9th Avenues.
The area was to be the site
of the Pennsylvania Railroad's
Manhattan terminal,
but that was
a closely guarded secret.
CZITROM:
The idea is that
once we buy these buildings up,
we're going
to tear them all down.
They want to do this
before it becomes publicly known
that they're buying
everything up.
That's the way to keep
the prices down.
NARRATOR:
When news of the tunnels leaked
out, it stunned the public.
JONNES:
People still assumed
that somehow or another,
they were in pursuit
of a bridge.
The idea that you would build
tunnels was not on anyone's mind
because it was not viewed
as technically possible.
CHURELLA:
Cassatt certainly understood
that driving a tunnel
under the Hudson River
was a risky business.
In the 1870s,
DeWitt Clinton Haskin
had tried to build a tunnel
under the Hudson River
and had suffered
a series of blowouts,
one of which killed 20 people.
The project was abandoned--
proof, critics said,
that it just couldn't be done.
VINCE TIROLO:
The geologic conditions for the
Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels
in the Hudson River
were difficult.
The soil that you're mining
through is a soft silt.
So there was a lot of concern
about whether the tunnel
in that soft material
would stay in position
or would settle.
NARRATOR:
A typical Pennsylvania Railroad
passenger train
weighed 700 tons.
The tunnels would need
to withstand
hundreds of them every day.
REVELL:
Building a tunnel of that size
to handle that level of traffic
is going to be
an extraordinary undertaking.
When you put several hundred
tons of railroad car
underneath the river
in that silt,
the likelihood is that things
are going to start
to move around,
and you don't want a railroad
tunnel underneath the water
to start moving around.
CHURELLA:
What concerned Samuel Rea
was that the tunnels would fail,
and in failing
doom the entire project.
NARRATOR:
Cassatt had already spent
$5 million buying up land
for his Manhattan train station.
Now he was betting
ten times that amount
on what many considered
a mad and reckless pursuit.
(birds chirping)
NARRATOR:
On a spring day in 1902,
New York architect Charles McKim
was in Washington
to discuss a renovation
of the White House
with President
Theodore Roosevelt.
While there, McKim received
an unexpected telegram
from Alexander Cassatt,
requesting a meeting.
"I suppose President Cassatt
wants a new stoop
for his house," McKim joked.
McKim hurried to the
Pennsylvania Railroad's offices
in Philadelphia the next day.
He spent the morning
with Cassatt,
who described his plans
for a new railroad station
in Manhattan.
Alexander Cassatt
wanted a monument.
He didn't want a simple opening
into an underground space.
He wanted a monument
to his company
that could express
the importance of the railroad
and the ambitions
of New York City,
that captured its sense
of itself as a world capital.
GOLDBERGER:
Cassatt was a very unusual
executive.
He not only knew
how to run a railroad,
he really did have
a grand vision
and he wanted
the Pennsylvania Railroad
to stand for the grandest,
the noblest, the most elegant,
the most inspiring.
He saw in McKim
the kind of architect
who would give him that.
NARRATOR:
Along with Stanford White
and William Mead,
McKim had founded
one of the country's
most famous architectural firms.
GOLDBERGER:
McKim, Mead & White were
kind of the top guys in town.
And Charles McKim was a
strong-willed, earnest believer
in the nobility
of Classical architecture.
NARRATOR:
McKim had made his name
designing civic spaces
like the Boston Public Library
and the campus
of Columbia University.
Although he had never designed
a train station,
he created works
on a heroic scale.
By the end of their meeting,
Cassatt had commissioned McKim
to design Pennsylvania Station.
In the Tenderloin, about 500
buildings were soon torn down,
displacing hundreds of families
to make way for Cassatt's
new terminal.
McKim marveled
at the huge expanse:
a sprawling, blank canvas
on which he could design
a monument for the ages.
NARRATOR:
On June 24, 1903, Charles Jacobs
stepped up on a wooden platform
next to a large pneumatic drill
and began drilling down
into the bedrock of Manhattan.
The massive hole would soon be
a 55-foot deep shaft
for tunneling
under the Hudson River.
At the same time,
workers sunk a similar shaft
in Weehawken, New Jersey.
Construction had begun on what
Engineering News lauded
as "the most extensive
and difficult
piece of submarine tunnel work
ever undertaken."
The shafts would be
the access points
for simultaneously digging
two tunnels
that would meet up
under the Hudson River.
On the other side of Manhattan,
crews would burrow four tunnels
under the East River,
also starting from each shore
and connecting in the middle.
At the contractor's
field offices,
doctors began examining
hundreds of applicants
for jobs as tunnel workers,
called sandhogs.
The dangerous work drew men
from all different nationalities
and ethnic groups:
Irish, Italian, Polish,
West Indian, African-American.
At the shaft entrances,
a makeshift elevator
transported sandhogs
to the dank depths
of their underground work.
Tunneling never stopped:
three eight-hour shifts a day,
seven days a week.
Rows of steam engines pumped
the lifeblood of compressed air
into the tunnel below.
TIROLO:
Compressed air means
you're raising the pressure
of the air inside the tunnel
to a pressure that's equal
to the pressure of the water
trying to come in.
Now, the water's trying
to flow inside the tunnel
and you're pushing
on the face of the tunnel
with a pressure equal
to the pressure of the water.
That compressed air pressure
keeps the water from coming in.
NARRATOR:
To bore under the river,
the engineers used
a Greathead shield.
Weighing nearly 200 tons,
the shield was a steel cylinder
with a diameter of 23 feet
in which the tunnel
was constructed.
The head of the shield had
nine compartments with doors,
allowing for the extraction of
earth and rock, called "muck,"
from the face of the tunnel.
In the tail of the shield,
the tunnel was built
by assembling
a series of two-and-a-half
foot wide cast-iron rings,
each made up of 12 segments
bolted together by hand.
As each ring was put in place,
hydraulic jacks
pushed the shield forward
so that another ring
could be erected.
TIROLO:
The process is kind
of an inchworm process.
You erect a ring,
you jack forward,
you pull the jacks back,
you erect another ring.
And out the back of the shield,
you're getting this continuous
line of cast-iron rings.
NARRATOR:
In the beginning, it took
sandhogs about six hours
to put a ring segment in place.
With experience, they soon could
build one every 90 minutes.
TIROLO:
Excavation was essentially
hand labor.
Generally speaking,
it was done with a spade.
And the rock was drilled
by a pneumatic hammer
held by a sandhog.
SCOTT CHESMAN:
It's grueling.
There's tremendous power
down there that needs to be used
and if you're in the wrong spot
at the wrong time,
you're going to get crushed.
Equipment moving in and out,
muck cars full of muck--
I mean, they weigh tons.
If you're not paying attention,
you're going to get hit.
And when you're in a confined
space and anything can happen,
there is nowhere to run.
NARRATOR:
Concerned about the tunnel
settling in the soft silt,
Jacobs had engineers measure
the alignment and grade
every second to fourth ring.
As the enormous shields
crept towards each other,
Jacobs knew there was
no margin for error.
(explosion)
NARRATOR:
At the site of the new station
and its accompanying train yard,
work gangs began
to dig, drill, dynamite
and cart out tons of muck.
Construction crews
worked day and night
to excavate the 28-acre expanse.
JONNES:
It's just block after block
after block
that's going down, down, down.
They're having to prop up
entire avenues
including above the avenues,
the elevated railroads,
and then excavating
around all of the underground
infrastructure that's there:
the sewer pipes,
the water pipes.
It's an amazing
engineering feat.
CZITROM:
The construction site also
became an object of fascination
for ordinary passersby
who were just struck
by the breathtaking size
of this operation.
It was almost an unworldly scene
that was going on.
Nobody had ever seen
a hole this big
and nobody had ever seen
an excavation project
this ambitious.
The newspapers
and other observers
would constantly refer
to the excavation job
as being our own Panama Canal
here on the west side
of Manhattan.
NARRATOR:
Just blocks
from the excavation site,
Charles McKim was working
intensely on designs
for a lofty space
to celebrate what he called
"the entrance to one of the
great metropolitan cities
of the world."
For inspiration,
McKim studied the great
buildings of ancient Rome,
in particular
the Baths of Caracalla,
which he had recently visited.
GOLDBERGER:
The Romans believed
that public buildings
were inherently noble things.
They were not just functional.
He looked at the Baths
of Caracalla and decided
that there was the model for the
great space of a train station.
This is saying that we can evoke
the grandeur of ancient Rome
and make it part
of modern New York.
NARRATOR:
Cassatt had also visited
the Baths
and was equally taken with them.
CZITROM:
He was not solely interested
in aggrandizing power.
He was a man of culture,
of taste,
of fine art.
He paid tremendous attention
to aesthetics and beauty
and great architecture.
DIEHL:
Alexander Cassatt
and Charles McKim,
they both had a very deep,
keen respect for beauty.
They decided on how the station
should be built
with that same dream
in their heads.
NARRATOR:
McKim dreamed big.
His grand design
included importing
Italian travertine marble,
the same material used
in ancient Roman monuments,
for the interior.
For the exterior,
he chose lustrous pink Milford
granite from Massachusetts.
He built full-scale models
of the facade
to study the proportions
of his design.
When the railroad's
board of directors
pushed to include
a revenue-generating hotel
on top of the station,
McKim was appalled.
He argued that
this would compromise
the artistic integrity
of the building.
Cassatt was won over,
but his engineers also
gave him a practical reason
to oppose the hotel.
The additional support columns
needed, they told him,
would necessitate the removal
of two or more tracks.
Cassatt quickly dropped
the idea.
CHURELLA:
He was intimately involved
in the design of the structure
of Penn Station,
and Penn Station embodies
Alexander Cassatt's vision
as much as it does
Charles McKim's vision.
NARRATOR:
Tunnel construction
under the Hudson
had proved easier
and faster than expected,
and Charles Jacobs was exuberant
over the progress.
By the spring of 1906, New York
and New Jersey sandhog crews
raced to be the first to reach
the middle of the river.
On the other side of Manhattan,
however,
tunneling under the East River
was turning into a nightmare.
CHURELLA:
The tunnels under the Hudson
were easy
compared to the tunnels
under the East River.
The East River overlay
a complex strata
of gravel, clay, sand, silt,
bedrock, even.
And it was proving
extraordinarily difficult
for crews to tunnel
through that.
NARRATOR:
Every time the sandhogs hit
pockets of sand and gravel,
they ran the risk of air
leaking from the tunnels.
"The geysers formed
by the leaks,"
reported the New York Times,
"have made the water
in the ferry slips
look like boiling lakes."
Inside the tunnel,
sandhogs were constantly on the
alert for a whistling sound:
the telltale sign that
compressed air was escaping
and might at any moment punch
a hole through the riverbed--
what was known as a blowout.
It's like a ship
being hit by a torpedo.
When a ship gets hit
by a torpedo,
everybody runs to the opening
and they try to plug the leak.
They'll try using anything
they have on hand.
They'll use blankets,
they'll use hay,
whatever they can
to stop the air.
If a sandhog is unlucky enough
to be at that point
where the air is leaking
and all of a sudden
the air leaks at one time,
that man will be blown out
into the river with the air.
NARRATOR:
Constant blowouts put them
desperately behind schedule,
and costs were skyrocketing.
In April 1906,
the lead engineer told Cassatt
that work had stopped
on three of the four tunnels.
JONNES:
They find it very, very hard
to keep the compressed air
in these tunnels.
They're blowing all the time.
And there have been
a lot of deaths
and a lot of cases of the bends.
CHURELLA:
The situation
under the East River
was going from bad to worse.
In the absence of first-hand
information,
reporters often exaggerated the
number of deaths and injuries,
and this created
an intense public image problem
for the Pennsylvania Railroad.
NARRATOR:
As dawn broke on June 20, 1906,
ferry passengers heading across
the East River to Manhattan
heard a horrific roar.
(loud roaring and splashing)
An enormous geyser suddenly
erupted out of the water.
86 feet below the surface,
sandhogs scrambled for safety
as a massive blowout flooded
much of the southernmost
Pennsylvania Railroad tunnel.
Two sandhogs drowned.
Cassatt and Rea rushed
to New York.
Rea assured the press
that the tunnels were only
a few months behind schedule
and the delays
were not alarming.
A representative
for the contracting firm
admitted that 14 men
had died from the bends:
more than they expected,
but half as many as the
newspapers were claiming.
To help reduce blowouts,
he explained they would dump
tons of clay into the river
to seal the riverbed.
Still, Cassatt realized
he needed to counter
the mounting bad press.
Four months earlier,
he had hired Ivy Lee,
a pioneer in the field
of public relations.
Now Cassatt charged Lee
with managing the stories
swirling around the tunnels.
Later that summer,
for the first time
since the start of the project,
the Pennsylvania Railroad
allowed a journalist
to take a tour of the tunnels.
CHURELLA:
Ivy Lee understood
that the way to capture
the public's attention
was not to release
dry statistical data,
but rather to make sure
the public understands something
about the romance,
the excitement
and the adventure associated
with this great endeavor:
that this is a dark and
mysterious subterranean world
in which heroic men are carrying
forth the progress of a nation.
(drilling and hammering)
NARRATOR:
On the evening
of September 11, 1906,
after three years of tunneling
and a full year
ahead of schedule,
the two halves
of the north tunnel met
under the Hudson River.
Under Charles Jacobs'
careful eye,
their alignment was off
by only 1/16 of an inch.
TIROLO:
Even today, an accuracy
of 1/16th of an inch
in tunnels meeting
is still excellent.
So the fact that they were able
to do it back then,
it's amazing.
NARRATOR:
Jacobs led an inspection party
through the tunnel
from New Jersey to Manhattan.
The group cheered as the
engineer became the first person
to pass through
from one side to the other.
As others followed,
a cry went out:
"Three cheers for the sandhogs!"
CHURELLA:
Far from speculating about
how this project might not work
or might be too dangerous,
reporters gushed over
the marvels of the tunnels:
the sheer novelty
of being able to walk
underneath the Hudson River
from New York to New Jersey.
NARRATOR:
Noticeably absent
from all the celebration
were Alexander Cassatt
and Samuel Rea.
For the past five months,
they had been preoccupied
with troubling news.
Measurements showed that
the Hudson River tunnels
were shifting up and down
in the silty river bottom.
Cassatt had the engineers
increase the weight
of the cast-iron linings
to settle the tunnels,
but the shifting continued.
CHURELLA:
There is a very real fear
that the tunnels
would simply keep sinking,
the tunnels might crack,
they might lie forever broken,
flooded, abandoned
underneath the Hudson River,
a monument to the folly
of the Pennsylvania Railroad's
efforts to reach Manhattan.
NARRATOR:
Rea pressured his engineers
to find an answer.
Jacobs suggested attaching
screw piles to the bedrock below
to support the tunnels.
Rea was not convinced.
After months of measurements,
experiments and debate,
Jacobs finally figured out
what suddenly seemed obvious:
the tunnels were moving
with the tide.
When the tide came in,
the increased volume of water
pushed the tunnels down.
Then they would spring back up
as the tide receded.
This explained the shifting,
but a terrifying unknown
remained.
JONNES:
What does that mean for the
ultimate fate of the tunnels?
Are they going to keep sinking
once they have very heavy trains
going through them every day?
And the truth is no one knows.
So this is this terrible secret
that hangs over Samuel Rea.
NARRATOR:
Three days after Christmas
in 1906,
Alexander Cassatt was working
from his home in Philadelphia,
still weakened after a bout
with whooping cough
he had contracted
the previous summer.
Resting with his wife
by his side,
he suffered a heart attack
and died.
He was 67.
He had become the fourth
Pennsylvania Railroad president
to die in office.
JONNES:
Cassatt was enormously admired,
and he had this very unusual
and unique position
of being viewed almost as
a public servant,
and that his corporation
had this larger,
more idealistic role to play,
which was to help
make America great.
DIEHL:
Watching this building rise,
watching these
beautiful columns rise
almost like the temple
of Athena--
people must have been awestruck
by that.
JONNES:
It really looks like some aspect
of ancient Rome is rising
in the middle of what's left
of the Tenderloin.
And it began to sink in that
something truly extraordinary
was happening in Manhattan.
NARRATOR:
By the time the masonry work
started on Pennsylvania Station
in 1908,
sandhogs had joined the tunnels
under the East River,
making it possible
to travel underground
from New Jersey to Long Island.
CHURELLA:
At the time
Penn Station was built,
most people believed
that railroads
were symbols of progress,
symbols of modernity,
symbols of what the United
States could achieve.
NARRATOR:
It had taken four years to build
Pennsylvania Station.
McKim's colossal structure
used 27,000 tons of steel,
500,000 cubic feet of granite,
83,000 square feet
of skylights
and 17 million bricks.
REVELL:
When the station is completed
in 1910, Samuel Rea says,
"We started this project
"with a great deal of skepticism
from onlookers.
"They now see that we have built
for the future.
It's part of a system that's
going to be here for years."
NARRATOR:
On opening day, thousands
of entranced spectators
wandered through the station.
"They flooded the acres
of its floor space,"
reported the New York Tribune,
"gazed at the vaulted ceilings
far above them,
"and pressed like caged
creatures against the grill
"which looked down upon
subterranean tracks,
trains and platforms."
GOLDBERGER:
Pennsylvania Station
was a symbol
not only of the greatness
and power of the railroad,
but also of the greatness
and power of the city.
It was a gift to the city
as well as a creation
of a corporation
and this notion that private
enterprise and the public good
didn't contradict each other,
they in fact reinforced
each other.
My first memory of Penn Station
is one that is indelible.
I was about ten years old.
I walk into this train shed.
I felt such a sense
of wonder and motion.
The late morning sun
is coming in
and all the little particles
of dust are frozen there--
they're just sort of dancing
in the air--
and I'm just saying to myself,
"This is a wondrous place."
(hammers pounding)
NARRATOR:
Seven years
after Penn Station opened,
Samuel Rea, now president
of the railroad,
dedicated the last piece
of Cassatt's grand plan:
the Hell Gate Bridge.
The world's longest
steel arch bridge at the time,
it finally connected
the Pennsylvania Railroad
to New England.
By then, 18 million people
traveled through Penn Station
every year,
and hundreds of trains
rumbled through the tunnels
day after day.
Rea's worst fears
had been unfounded.
The tunnels held up.
Traffic particularly exploded
on the Long Island Rail Road,
which brought an increasing
number of commuters
into Manhattan
through the East River tunnels.
Within a decade,
two-thirds of the passengers
arriving in Penn Station
were coming from the suburbs.
CZITROM:
The creation of Penn Station
in some ways
had a greater impact not on
the city but on the suburbs.
The opening up of Queens
and Long Island and New Jersey
was in some ways, I think,
an unintended consequence
of all this.
NARRATOR:
By 1945, more than 100 million
passengers a year
traveled through Penn Station,
exceeding Cassatt's
wildest dreams.
DIEHL:
Penn Station was a place
not only of journeys,
but a place of memories.
Those walls actually held the
history of the country in a way.
It held time
in that it held memory.
GOLDBERGER:
Great architecture
can imbue daily life
with a sense of wonder
and majesty and joy.
Penn Station was perhaps
the greatest single
public space of all.
CHURELLA:
There's a great irony
that Penn Station
was finally used to capacity
during World War II,
but at that moment of triumph,
the Pennsylvania Railroad
was on the verge of decline.
And the next year, 1946,
the company lost money for
the first time in its history.
Cassatt planned his program
of improvements perfectly
for the world he believed would
exist 50 years in the future.
He never envisioned a world
in which more people
would travel by car
or by plane than by train.
NARRATOR:
Within the lifetime of many
who had seen it open
came the end
of Pennsylvania Station.
What was supposed
to last forever
to herald and represent
the American empire
was slated for destruction.
BALLON:
The Pennsylvania Railroad
was struggling,
and it's in desperate
financial condition.
It could no longer forfeit
the real estate revenues
of its site in Manhattan,
something it had forgone
when the railroad
was originally built
but which now is impossible.
Their job was not to preserve
the architectural landscape
of New York City.
Their job was to protect
their company.
DIEHL:
The Pennsylvania Railroad
owned it.
The Pennsylvania Railroad
could therefore destroy it.
It was a very, very tough thing
to understand
because it was a public space.
Even though it was built for us,
we didn't own it.
We just used it.
NARRATOR:
In 1961, the financially
strapped Pennsylvania Railroad
announced it had sold
the air rights
above Penn Station.
The company would tear down what
had once been its crowning jewel
to build Madison Square Garden,
a high-rise office building
and sports complex.
A few people protested,
but to no avail.
On the rainy morning
of October 28, 1963,
the demolition began.
"Until the first blow fell,
no one was convinced
that Penn Station really
would be demolished,"
wrote the New York Times,
"or that New York would permit
this monumental act of vandalism
against one of the finest
landmarks of its age."
BALLON:
The demolition
of Pennsylvania Station
represented a tremendous
loss of hope for the city:
that it has surrendered
one of its great pieces
of public architecture.
DIEHL:
For most people,
it wasn't until
that station was torn down
that they understood
what was taken from them.
Vincent Scully said,
"Where once we entered
like kings, we exit like rats."
You never get over the fact that
such a wonderful place is gone.
GOLDBERGER:
Penn Station was really
the great martyr
of historic preservation,
the building that died
so that we might save others
in the future.
What Penn Station was
was the tipping point:
something that people simply
wouldn't accept anymore.
And so then there was
the political will
to do something about it.
NARRATOR:
In the wake of the destruction,
New York City established
the Landmarks Preservation
Commission.
Grand Central Terminal
was designated a historic
landmark in 1967,
sparing it from the fate
of Penn Station.
CZITROM:
It does help inspire
a whole new consciousness
about the importance
of saving great buildings.
But anybody who knows New York
understands
that that's always
an uphill battle:
that the power of commerce,
the devotion to change,
the fetish of what's coming next
really worked against what McKim
and Cassatt had created.
CHURELLA:
The architectural edifice
of Penn Station may be gone,
but the tracks
and the tunnels remain
and carry millions of people in
and out of Manhattan every year.
That was the most valuable part
of the entire project,
and that survives.
GOLDBERGER:
Penn Station
represents the aspiration
of doing something monumental
and noble,
of private enterprise
creating something extraordinary
for the benefit of the public.
It was an investment
that generations that followed
would benefit from.
The challenge is
how you balance the need
to preserve what's best,
what's most important,
and the need to continually
invent and change and grow,
because that's what
living places have to do.