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Conquering Gotham Building Penn Station and Its Tunnels by Jill Jonnes w/DJ
Conquering Gotham A Gilded Age Epic by Jill Jonnes
Conquering Gotham
A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and its Tunnels
Jill Jonnes
Hard Cover dust jacket
368 Pages
Copyright 2007
Contents
List of Illustrationsxiii
PART I. HOW SHALL WE REACH GOTHAM?
1. "We Must Find a Way to Cross"5
2. Haskins's Tunnel and Lindenthal's Bridge15
3. "The Ablest Man This Railway Ever Produced"31
4. "The North River Bridge Matter"38
5. "A Severe Disappointment"50
6. "It Might Offer the Solution"55
7. "Get a Little of the Tenderloin"63
8. "Crooked and Greedy"73
9. "Someone in the Penn Is Leaking"82
10. "The Town Is On Fire"87
11. "We Shall Make Our Fight Aboveboard"99
12. "Ugly Rumors of Boodle"106
PART II. THE CROSSING
13. "We Are Not Making a Mistake"127
14. "A Work Unsought"139
15. "Drilling of First Hole"151
16. "The Shield Is Ready to Be Shoved"165
17. "Slow Progress Has Been Made"181
18. "Disturbed about North River Tunnels"191
19. "Would Mr. Cassatt Be Resigning?"202
20. "Death Stalks Alongside Them"210
21. "The Shields Have Met Exactly"219
22. "The Only Railroad Statesman"233
23. "New York City Shaken"248
24. "The Way Is Stony and Wet"260
25. "Officially Declare the Station Open"277
26. Coda296
Acknowledgments317
Notes319
Bibliographic Notes353
Index355
AS THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ENDS,
Pennsylvania Railroad president Alexander Cassatt seeks some wayother than huge fleets of ferries from New Jersey--to bring the PRR's tens of millions of passengers into water-locked Gotham. By 1901, the brilliant Cassatt has embarked on a course so ambitious, so visionary that it is denounced as corporate folly. Under his direction, the PRR will build a monumental system of electrified tunnels under the Hudson River, Manhattan, and the East River to Long Island, capping them all with the crown jewel of Pennsylvania Station:
At the close of the nineteenth century, Alexander Cassat-brother of the painter Mary, and president of the Pennsylvania Railroad-sought to connect railroad passengers to Manhattan. His vision-to run trains through a monumental system of electrified tunnels beneath the Hudson and East rivers-was denounced as folly. Peopling her tale with the most colorful figures of the age, historian Jill Jonnes thrillingly recreates the ultimately successful struggle between the nation's most powerful corporation and the unruly forces of both Tammany Hall New York and the city's ancient rivers to change Gotham's physical and psychological geography forever.
"A readable and human account of how a few visionaries from the Pennsylvania Railroad connected the rest of the country to the nation's greatest port, and how their Philadelphia-centric perspective doomed the world's largest train station."
-Sam Roberts, The New York Times
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