Page images
PDF
EPUB

the Harlem River crossing. The line followed to-day's route of the Fourth Avenue surface-cars as far north as Forty-second Street, and from there the present New York Central route to the Harlem River.

The first railroad-station in New York City was a small plain brick house which the Harlem Railroad leased at the corner of Center Street and Tryon Row where the Municipal Building now towers; a house with a low sloping roof and dormerwindows such as one sees still tucked away in the corners of old down-town streets. That house served for a few years; then it was torn down and replaced with a five-story station and office building for the railroad. But the city marched steadily northward. In a short time, traffic demanded another station farther up town; and the Harlem bought land and built a station at Twenty-sixth Street and Fourth Avenue, on land where later stood the Madison Square Garden, which has itself in this year 1926 vanished to make way for a giant officebuilding.

And steadily the city banished steam northward. In 1884 the Common Council forbade the further use of steam locomotives south of Thirtysecond Street. So, for many years, this was the point of shift from the horse to the iron horse. In the New York Central offices I was shown a clipping from an old newspaper picturing a crowd of ladies in hoopskirts and of gentlemen in skirted coats and top-hats at the corner of Thirty-second Street watching the locomotive as it was hitched on to the train which was to carry them northward "at a speed no horse-flesh can attain." Then, in 1857, the city

banished steam still further north on the Harlem line-to Forty-second Street.

Meantime two other railroads had made the great Manhattan venture. From New England came the New York & New Haven. It rented the use of the Harlem Railroad bridge across the Harlem River and of the Harlem tracks to the Twenty-sixth Street station. Down the Hudson from Albany came the Hudson River Railroad, crossed to the island's upper tip by a bridge at Spuyten Duyvil, and crept down the western shore to a terminal at Chambers Street.

In the late sixties, Cornelius Vanderbilt-financial power in the Hudson River Railroad and in various short lines between Albany and Buffalo-combined them all into the New York Central, thus creating a through line from New York to Buffalo. Now, obviously, a railroad of that importance needed a terminal nearer the center of the island. Vanderbilt cast his eye on the Harlem Railroad. Why not swing his main line east at Spuyten Duyvil, bring it down the east shore of the Harlem River, cross into Manhattan Island on the Harlem Railroad bridge, and come to the city on the Harlem line to a new union terminal at Fortysecond Street to be called Grand Central?

"Grand Central!" scoffed many people. "Better say the End of the World!"

Forty-second Street was indeed up town in the late sixties, so far up town that, says an old merchant of the street, the large wholesale houses sent their drummers there only when they were making their regular trips on to Albany or Boston! "When we

had to go down town for anything, we left the store about noon and were rarely back before eight o'clock. In very stormy weather in winter the snow made the trip practically impossible."

Yet Vanderbilt persisted. He put through a deal with the Harlem for the use of its lines and rebuilt the Harlem tracks from the Harlem River south to Forty-second Street to accommodate the increased traffic; and on a spot of ground that had been cluttered with squatters' shanties rose the first Grand Central, a structure whose great iron-arched trainshed, housing twelve tracks, was the marvel of the day.

On the high rocky land a few moments' walk east of the station rambled Mrs. White's famous herd of goats, which supplied the neighborhood with milk; on the west, where the Hotel Biltmore now stands, was a picket-fenced green, and now and then old Vanderbilt's son, William H., looked up from his papers to glance through the window at his favorite, Maud S., nibbling there in the sight of an admiring crowd!

This great union terminal brought into being a considerable train-yard north of it. As time went on and traffic grew, this yard spread till it was thirty tracks wide and extended north over half a mile. All this was at street-level, of course, and agitation rose against the crossing danger. Finally the city ordered the streets closed for the entire length of the yard. The tracks farther north, leading to the old Harlem tunnel, the city ordered depressed below street-level. Later the railroad roofed over this cut and thus increased the length of the tunnel from

less than six hundred feet to a total of about two miles.

But the closing of the streets and the roofing of the tunnel did not quiet, but rather increased, the irritation. Here was this sprawling railroad-yard, full of smoking locomotives, in what was becoming the heart of up town, dividing East Side from West Side, arresting the development of this part of New York. How long could it maintain itself here? How long before the city would attempt to banish steam still farther north?

And more especially irritation rose against the long smoky Park Avenue tunnel through which all passengertrains must enter the city. The tunnel was not only uncomfortable but dangerous. Though the railroad had devised a careful system of signals, yet at times locomotive engineers, blinded by tunnel smoke, overran their signals and barely avoided accident.

Then came one of those strokes of chance that sometimes change or hurry history. On January 8, 1902, on a morning thick with smoke and fog, the engineer of an incoming train missed the warning of another train halted in the tunnel and crashed into it, killing seventeen people. A sharp outcry against the Central rose throughout the city and in the press. "The tunnel, the dreadful smoke-filled tunnel against which all New York has long stormed and protested, is responsible for the murderous collision of yesterday," exclaimed the "New York Times,' and it demanded that the railroad "be compelled by law to abandon the use of steam locomotives for hauling trains through the tunnel." The

[ocr errors]

outcry astonished and pained the Central. Not only had it taken every reasonable care against tunnel accident, but its engineers actually had been for some time at work on a plan to eliminate steam from the tunnel. The public knew nothing of these plans. It assumed that the railroad had been pursuing its course, callous to the comfort and safety of its passengers. But the accident did stimulate the railroad into greater speed in its plans. Only a week later came the announcement of a plan not only for the electrification of traffic into the station but for a revolution of the whole terminal.

[ocr errors]

The Central faced several acute problems: to bring into the station in safety through a narrow throat a stream of traffic that had already mounted almost to six hundred trains a day; to provide a greater station building for the coming and going of its army of passengers; to eliminate the railroad-yard at street-level and give back to the city its severed cross-streets. At first plans were vague; slowly they became definite. At one time it was proposed to separate the suburban traffic from the through traffic by swinging the suburban tracks far to the west under Madison Avenue to an entirely separate suburban station to be built on the site of the present Hotel Biltmore. But a happier idea was hit upon an idea unique in railroad terminals a two-level arrangement, suburban tracks on the lower, through tracks on the upper level. And along with that two other ideas, also unique-separation of incoming and outgoing trains, and turning

[ocr errors]

loops under the station so that an incoming train when unloaded might swing around and pull out into the yards, leaving the track on which it had entered free for another incoming train.

So, in the following years, there rose in place of the old Grand Central, itself many times enlarged, the greater Grand Central so amazing to the new-comer.

North of the station, the Central bought generous strips of land on each side of its existing yard, giving it a total width of 840 feet, a space for forty tracks side by side, and a total length of 4500 feet. The upper level of the protected yard was to be twenty-four feet below the street, the lower level twenty-four feet below that. This, of course, meant the excavation of the whole immense area. And this tremendous lowering of the yard must be accomplished without interrupting the movement of more than six hundred trains a day in and out of the station-a feat demanding the most skilful coordination of operating and construction departments.

Work began on the east side of the yard. As soon as the excavation of a narrow strip was completed to the required depth, the lower and upper levels were constructed of steel and concrete, like two floors of a building one above the other. When a section of sufficient width was finished, the two levels were laid with tracks and traffic diverted to them, releasing more of the yard for excavation.

And as these steel and concrete floors advanced westward, the broken cross-streets were carried out on steel stilts above the upper-level tracks.

Steadily the work advanced westward until the whole area had been converted into a two-level yard and until the cross-streets reconnected East and West Sides. Park Avenue, which the yard had broken in two for half a mile or so, marched down over the tracks on steel pillars to become a great north and south thoroughfare. Thus the whole region north of the station took on a surprising appearance-a crisscross of streets supported on pillars above the tracks, streets inclosing not rectangular buildings but rectangular apertures through which one could see, far down, the trains of the upper level glide to and fro.

Well, the New York Central had accomplished its purpose. It had eliminated the steam locomotive from the center of the city-a cause of irritation ever since the Harlem Railroad first began operation. It had made its tunnel clean and safe. It had given the city back its broken cross-streets. For men without imagination, this might have been enough. But here were these rectangular apertures above the tracks. Should they be left as they were? Perhaps they could be sold as building-sites. Building-sites-why not? If streets could be supported on steel stilts above the tracks, why not buildings too? Electrification made a complete roofing over of the yard possible. To test the practicability of this idea, the New York Central erected on the east side of the yards, facing Lexington Avenue, supported on steel pillars over the tracks, a building known as Grand Central Palace. It happened that this rebuilding of Grand Central and its yards coincided with the movement of smart

New York from the West to the East Side. There was a sharp demand for luxurious living quarters east of Fifth Avenue yet near it. Grand Central Palace demonstrated that buildings could be built over railroadtracks and that their supports could be immunized to train vibration. And so such skeptics as had scoffed at the salability of these rectangular apertures above the tracks were very soon proved wrong. The New York Central found it not difficult but easy to lease at high rates the roof of its railroad-yard, and in these years following the completion of the new Grand Central the area north of it has acquired, by filling in the apertures of the yard-roof, such a semblance of solid earth that not only is the stranger deceived but even the New Yorker, who knew the old railroad-yard in its heyday of noise and dirt, forgets that it was ever there. To-day the roofing over is complete save for the two apertures directly north of the station, on which the New York Central plans to erect an extraordinary building of its own, straddling Park Avenue, forming an end to the severe vista of yellowish brick and whitish stone that its architectural censorship of buildings above its train-yard has created.

Curious paradox! In my youth, in all the towns I knew, "over by the railroad-tracks" meant shanty-town just such a shanty-town as once sprawled over the rocks the rocks where Grand Central now stands. In the New York of to-day, "over by the railroad-tracks" is no less a social indicator of distinction, however, not of stigma. The modern New Yorker who wishes to bowl you over with his social geography gives

you an address not on Riverside Drive, not on Fifth Avenue, not in Gramercy Park, but "over by the railroad tracks." Only he will call it Park Avenue!

[ocr errors]

Whose idea was this, this gorgeous idea of renting out the roof of a railroad-yard? "It was Bill Newman's idea," one New York Central man told me. "No," said another, "Ira Place thought it out.' But nothing is clearer than that it was no one man's idea. It just grew. And certainly no one foresaw the richness of the reward. Grand Central Terminal cost $75,000,000, yet, as I have said, the revenue from the sale of "air rights" makes the terminal property a richly profitable enterprise instead of a carrying-charge. Nor is the outcome to the city any less fortunate. The valuation of the terminal zone-this City within a City with a population of fifty thousand people-the station, the hotels, clubs, apartment-houses, office-buildings, surmounting it and its yards (and of a narrow strip on each side whose value has been lifted by it) has increased from $77,631,787 in 1903, when the work on the terminal began, to $327,951,701 in 1925, a rate of increase more than twice that of the city as a whole in the same period. A city tax of $830,ooo collected on the zone in 1903 has multiplied tenfold to $8,350,000 in 1925. The railroad has converted smoldering irritation into good-will and has been paid for it in dollars. For American corporations sometimes fall into fortune, partly through plan, partly through luck.

23

With a guide, I made an exploration of that strange underground

railroad-yard. I hopped over third rails, dived through concrete archways, and my guide, pointing upward, said: "At this moment we are walking beneath the forested courtyard of a de luxe apartmenthouse on Park Avenue." I saw iron boxes bolted to the concrete roof which, he explained, were the cellars of the shops along Vanderbilt Avenue! I penetrated the extraordinary underground train-tower where a director sits manipulating the trains over that underworld intricacy of tracks. I climbed down a succession of iron ladders into a power-house ninety feet below street-level, one of the two which supply heat and power to the station and the buildings that roof its yard. I was led into a region below the lower level where we followed a maze of steam-pipes labeled "Yale Club," "Hotel Roosevelt," "Hotel Biltmore," "Paterno Apartments,' "Park Lane," "Postum Building," "Hotel Commodore."

"Some of these people in these underground regions must see mighty little daylight," I ventured to my guide as we pushed on through a dim cave where two workmen were bent over some mysterious task.

"Have you ever heard of Tony Agherti?" he retorted. "No, who is he?"

"Well, I don't know where Tony was born, probably in the subway. The first we knew of him he turned up as a boot-black in a booth on one of our underground streets. Next I heard he'd got a job tending fires in that power-plant underneath the Commodore, ninety feet below streetlevel. Later on he took a turn as helper to that pair of blacksmiths we just saw. One day a year or so later

« PreviousContinue »