Highly Recommended Reading About an Interesting Episode in New York City History

books:


	• Conquering Gotham: A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels Jill Jonnes Viking Adult, 2007 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

great read

definitely an enjoyable and readable book. The focus is definitely on the tunnel construction---less focused on Penn Station itself.

A pearl of great price

Jill Jonnes has written a very engaging book about the construction of the late great Penn Station and its tunnels. She captures the language and textures of the late 19th and early 20th century when this monumental undertaking took place. Not surprisingly, she focuses on the railroad king, Alexander Cassatt, who had the audacity to challenge Cornelius Vanderbilt's monopoly on the railroad lines entering Gotham. She charts the various attempts to bridge over and tunnel under the Hudson but best laid engineering attempts had been laid to waste. That was until Charles Jacobs entered on the scene, who had an ego to match Cassatt and the will to complete the tunnels in spite of all criticism to the contrary.

Jonnes also gets into the many political machinations that took place, not least of all Tammany Hall, which pretty much ruled the roost. But, Cassatt was determined not to coddle these power brokers, seeing to it that he built the tunnels honestly. I'm not sure how noble a man Cassatt was, since Jonnes is not overly critical of him. She paints him in heroic terms as she does Jacobs for daring to defy engineering convention and building tunnels through the primordial ooze that underlay the Hudson River.

She spends less time on the great station itself, noting that it was the grandest station of its day and giving the reader a dutiful description of its architect, William McKim, who was considered by many the leading architect of his day. He apparently formed a close working relationship with Cassatt but Jonnes prefers to focus on the engineers that made history by completing the tunnels that fed the station, eventually to be named after each of the engineers that were part of the project.

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An Excellent History of Penn Station

I want to point out a couple things about this book, first, most of the information on the tunnel construction focuses on the tunnels under the Hudson and little to the construction of Penn Station proper. I was a little disappointed by that. Jones also spends few pages on the tunnels under Manhattan and the four tunnels under the East River. However, it is well written and gives a great peek inside the PRR itself and the politics of the time, as well as the men behind Penn Station's construction. Despite its abbreviated narrative on certain subjects, I gave it a 5 because I had a hard time putting it down.

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Highly Recommended Reading About an Interesting Episode in New York City History

There was a point while I was reading Jill Jonnes', "Conquering Gotham", that I wished I could reach back through time, grab old Penn Station and plunk it back down onto its comfortable spot at 7th Avenue and West 32nd Street. Not the tawdry Penn Station I remember walking through as a child of eight or nine with my mother on the way to visiting my father at his showroom around the corner on West 31st Street, the one with the dusty, decrepit old signs, the misplaced ticket counters blocking one's way , and the general filth and neglect following years of the financial decline of its eponymous Railroad company owner. No, it would be the pristine building with the tremendous open spaces that must have awed travelers to New York and that can only be seen now in old black and white photos. Or, it would have been the restored Penn Station that almost surely would have been had it only survived a few more years into the 1980's or 1990's, and just as actually did happen to that other great New York Train station a few blocks to the northeast.

The story related by the author was really about the dream of one man, Alexander Cassatt, President of the Pennsylvania Railroad to connect the greatest, best run railroad in America, to its greatest city. In an era when most railroad heads were Robber Barons who manipulated their company's stock to enrich themselves and who cared nothing or little for their shareholders, employees or passengers, Cassatt was a statesman who ran the `Pennsy', as it was affectionately called, always with the goal of improving it.

For his project, Cassatt was able to turn to an outstanding team of engineers including the great English tunnel builder, Charles Jacobs, bridge builder Alfred Noble and James Forgie. To design his new train station, Cassatt hand-selected Charles McKim, senior partner of the greatest architectural firm in New York, and maybe the nation, McKim, Mead & White, partly because he wanted and needed a New Yorker to build the station, but also because of McKim's knowledge of things classical and sense of beauty. McKim gave Cassatt and his railroad a monumental building, a truly magnificent visual symbol of the project for all who walked or rode through it.

Penn Station was, of course, just part of the tremendous engineering project its owner took on. In scope, the project ranked with the building of the Brooklyn Bridge as one of the two great construction projects of its era. In addition to McKim's station, the project required buying up hundreds of buildings secretly and anonymously over several blocks of what was then the city's tenderloin district, getting the city to close off and demap three long blocks of West 32nd Street, tunneling under two rapidly flowing rivers and through the rocky heights of the New Jersey Palisades and under the entire width of an already heavily built up part of Manhattan near 31st Street. The project also included a connection to the Long Island Rail Road in Queens, and a new bridge over the Hell Gate that would give the Railroad a direct, through connection to Boston and the rest of New England. The project cost the lives of dozens of workers to accidents and the dreaded Caisson's disease, also known as "the bends." Among those who died was the only son of Samuel Rea, one of Cassatt's chief lieutenants and future president of the Railroad.

Neither Cassatt nor McKim would live to see the project's completion. Cassatt died of a heart attack just after Christmas in 1906, the strain of bringing his massive project to completion coupled with investigations of false allegations that his railroad had resorted to bribing Tammany Hall, New York's often corrupt Democratic Party machine, in order to get the political favors necessary to secure approval for the project, proved to much for him. The chronically sickly McKim died in 1909, having never really recovered from the murder of his great friend and business partner, Stanford White, in 1906 by financier Henry Thaw, over a sordid romantic encounter White had once had with the young address Thaw would marry.

Penn Station lasted a marvelous half-century, but as the final chapter in the book so eloquently points out there were a number of factors that ultimately doomed it. Most importantly, despite its magnificence as architecture, Penn Station never functioned perfectly well as a railroad station. The Architecture critic, Kidder Smith, once wrote that while Grand Central "works superbly," [Penn Station], "picturesquely stuffed into a Roman bath, did not."

In addition Penn Station's location never became as central to the city as did Grand Central's. It took a decade before subway service passed through the station and while the area gradually improved, the old tenderloin district became a gritty manufacturing area rather than an area of first rate office buildings and hotels. Unlike the New York Central Railroad, which bought land surrounding its new terminal to ensure such structures would be built,the Pennsylvania Railroad would not, or could not do the same for its station.

Will "Conquering Gotham" ever become a landmark book on New York City history in the same way that both "The Power Broker", Robert Caro's exhaustively researched and ultimately devastating indictment of New York Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, or David McCullough's romantic, novel-like, "The Great Bridge", about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge have become? Maybe not, but Jonnes' book is an excellent, highly recommended read about an important part of New York City history, and one that gets better as one reads on.

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Fascinating

I loved her book on Edison/Westinghouse and this one is great as well - - very well done - thanks !

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

?Superb. [A] first-rate narrative? (The Wall Street Journal ) about the controversial construction of New York?s beloved original Penn Station and its tunnels\

As bestselling books like Ron Chernow?s Titan and David McCullough?s The Great Bridge affirm, readers are fascinated with the grand personalities and schemes that populated New York at the close of the nineteenth century. Conquering Gotham re-creates the riveting struggle waged by the great Pennsylvania Railroad to build Penn Station and the monumental system of tunnels that would connect water-bound Manhattan to the rest of the continent by rail. Historian Jill Jonnes tells a ravishing tale of snarling plutocrats, engineering feats, and backroom politicking packed with the most colorful figures of Gilded Age New York.

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