PhillyHistory Blog

Alexander J. Cassatt (1839-1906) was not a Philadelphian.  He was a Pittsburgh transplant who had started his career as an engineer with the Pennsylvania Railroad, and proved himself to be a master of transportation logistics.  As vice president of “The Railroad,” Cassatt enjoyed the good life.  He was the proud owner of a Frank Furness-designed mansion on West Rittenhouse Square and bred hackney horses on the Main Line, which his company had developed in the 1880s.

Cassatt was first and foremost a workaholic — he received his academic training from the notoriously rigorous Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, the same school that produced Brooklyn Bridge designer Washington Roebling. In 1899, Cassatt came out of retirement to assume the presidency of the mighty corporation. “Mr. Cassatt is a man of wealth, independence, and social prominence,” The New York Times noted in 1899. “He is fond of the comforts and enjoyments which wealth enables its possessors to enjoy, and it was only a few years ago that he voluntarily retired from the post of First Vice President of the Pennsylvania system because the work had been too exacting. In his letter of resignation at that time he said, ‘My only object in taking this step is to have more time at my disposal than any one occupying so responsible a position in railroad management can command.”

It was a decision that ultimately cost Cassatt his life.

After assuming the presidency of the Pennsy, he started planning one of the greatest construction projects in the country, one that would push the limits of engineering and his emotional endurance: a new set of tunnels underneath the Hudson and East Rivers, crowned by a new railroad terminal in the heart of Manhattan. He would battle accidents, reversals, and the extortionist machinations of New York’s Tammany Hall.

During the second half of the 19th century, the Vanderbilt family’s New York Central had a monopoly on Manhattan railroad traffic.  Their Hudson River and Harlem lines leapfrogged into the city across relatively narrow river crossings on the northern end of the island and terminated at Grand Central Station at 42nd Street and Park Avenue.   The Pennsylvania Railroad, on the other hand, which approached New York from the southwest, was blocked by the mighty Hudson River, almost a mile wide at the line’s Weehawken terminus.  After disembarking from the train, passengers were herded into ferries that landed them in the midst of Manhattan’s “Tenderloin” district, which the New York Herald described as “Least wholesome spot in town, where vice and greed full many a man brought down…The iron horse has sent your dives to join the other nightmares of the Tenderloin.”  Even worse, freight had to be offloaded from cars and manhandled onto barges and pushed across the river by tugs. Most of the brothels and saloons paid protection money that flowed directly into the pockets of Tammany Hall and the police department.

For Cassatt, head of the largest corporation on the face of the earth, this was unacceptable for his passengers and shippers.  Excavation of the railroad tunnels under the Hudson River started in February 1904, under the direction of engineers C.M. Jacobs and George Gibbs.  Several blocks of brownstones, saloons, and wooden boarding houses were dynamited to make way for the new railroad station.  Oddly enough, Cassatt and the Pennsy board skipped over Frank Furness — designer of Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station and the president’s own Rittenhouse Square mansion —  and selected the august New York firm of McKim, Mead & White, whose most notable Philadelphia commission was the Germantown Cricket Club.  Perhaps Cassatt wanted to win political and cultural favor with New Yorkers by using a New York firm.  Moreover, by the early 1900s Furness’s wild, polychromed style was out-of-date compared to McKim Mead & White’s restrained, academic classicism. Charles Follen McKim, the firm’s most academic and tightly-wound partner, drew up an enlarged adaptation of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, built out  of solid pink granite and covering four square blocks of Manhattan.   The Pennsylvania Railroad declared that the designers of the station, “were at pains to embody two ideas.  To express in so far as was practicable, with the unusual condition of the tracks below the street surface and in spite of the absence of the conventional train shed, not only the exterior design of a great railway station in the generally accepted form, but also to give the building the character of a monumental gateway and entrance to a great metropolis.”

When New York’s Pennsylvania Station opened on September 8, 1910, it was heralded as the greatest railroad station in the world, “and the largest building in the world ever built at one time.”  Not only did trains arrive under the Hudson River from Philadelphia, but also from the recently-acquired Long Island Railroad.   The concourse, modeled on that of Paris’s Gare d’Orsay, was like the nave of a Gothic cathedral wrought of steel and glass rather than limestone.  And unlike Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station, trains did not have to pass over a hideous “Chinese Wall” viaduct. Rather, they ran silent and smokeless through tunnels, powered by electricity.

What Furness thought about his rival’s Pennsylvania Station is unknown.  What is certain is that by 1900, Furness had fallen upon hard times, and was struggling for commissions.   Thankfully, Cassatt did select Furness to design the 13-story Arcade Building at 15th and Market, cheek-by-jowl with his older (and increasingly soot-stained) Broad Street Station.

Yet the project mastermind did not live to see his dream come true.  Cassatt died of heart failure 1906 at his home on Rittenhouse Square, one of several Pennsylvania Railroad presidents who dropped dead on the job due to stress and overwork.  A colleague eulogized Cassatt as “the only railroad statesman this country has ever produced.” The thousands of men slaving away in the tunnels battled mud, physical overexertion, and decompression sickness, otherwise known as “the bends.”  In addition, the residents of the area who did not lose their homes had to endure dangerous blasting; on November 19, 1904, Bridget Markey suffered severe lacerations to her face when a flying rock smashed through her window.  “Families living near that spot said yesterday that their houses might be on the same layer of rock,” The New York Times reported, “for whenever a blast when off it shook their pictures off the wall and shook everybody up.”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDQY3JjX508?rel=0&w=480&h=360]
Excavating the Pennsylvania Station tunnels, 1905.

Cassatt’s above-ground architectural legacy did not fare well after his death.  Broad Street Station and the Arcade Building came down in the 1950s, replaced by the bland office towers of Penn Center.  In 1961, amid much public protest, the ailing and bog-bound Pennsylvania Railroad ripped down their New York terminal and replaced it with an office tower and sports complex.  Finally, in 1972, the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania, owners of Alexander Cassatt’s mansion on Rittenhouse Square, tore down the old brick structure and replaced it with a high-rise hotel. By that time, the Pennsylvania Railroad, which had merged with the New York Central in 1968, had collapsed into bankruptcy, never to emerge again.

The statue of Alexander Cassatt that once graced Pennsylvania Station now resides, lonely and out-of-context, at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Lancaster County.  It bears the following inscription:

Alexander Johnson Cassatt, President of the Pennsylvania Railroad 1899-1906. Whose Foresight, Courage and Ability achieved the extension of the Pennsylvania Railroad into New York City.

Four of the pink granite eagles that once adorned the facade of Penn Station are now perched on the Market Street bridge over the Schuylkill River.  The rest of the station’s remains ended up in the swamps of the New Jersey Meadowlands.

Today, the name Cassatt is usually associated with Alexander’s sister Mary, the famed Impressionist painter.  Penn Station might be a distant memory, but for the 300,000 people who travel through the Hudson and East River tunnels every day, Alexander Cassatt’s legacy has stood the test of time.

Even if they do, to paraphrase historian Vincent Scully, come and go like rats rather than gods.

Sources:

“Alexander J. Cassatt,” The New York Times, June 18, 1899.

“Houses Set A-Tremble from a Heavy Blast,” The New York Times, November 19, 1904.

“New Pennsylvania Station is Opened,” The New York Times, August 29, 1910.

Jill Jonnes, Conquering Gotham, A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels (New York, NY: Viking Press, 2007), p.129, p.244.

Noble, Alfred (September 1910). “The New York Tunnel Extension of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The East River Division.” Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers 68. Paper No. 1152.

William Warren Gibbs arrived in Philadelphia around 1880 with little more than a smooth tongue and gas-making equipment for sale.  Born in 1846 in the small town of Hope, New Jersey, Gibbs dropped out of school to work in a local store, and then married Frances Ayres Johnson, the daughter of a prominent Hackettstown merchant.  Not content with a life in central New Jersey farm country, he wanted to move to the thriving “Workshop of the World “and become a wealthy entrepreneur.

Soon after arriving in Philadelphia, Gibbs quickly gained a reputation as one of the most persuasive men in the city, able to sell anything to anyone, especially influential men with money. Those around him realized that Gibbs had a real knack at setting up companies and issuing securities. He teamed up with another up-and-coming Philadelphia businessman — Peter Arrell Brown Widener — and formed the United Gas Improvement Company, a massive trust that sought control over the city’s gas mains.  Another vested interest in UGI was W.G. Warden of John D. Rockefeller’s powerful Standard Oil Company.  The arrangement worked well for Widener, who parlayed the fortune he gained supplying meat to the Union Army into trolley lines and new real estate development in North Philadelphia.   By the 1890s, UGI had helped make Widener and his cronies extremely wealthy.  According to contemporary reports,  UGI was “the most successful enterprise of its kind in the country, already owning and controlling the gas works of about fifty important towns and cities.” That year, the outstanding stock of the United Gas Improvement Company was worth $5 million and sold “at a high premium, while the actual assets will aggregate at a much larger sum.” Eventually, the United Gas Improvement Company solidified its position by getting a 30 year lease on Philadelphia’s entire gas lighting system.  It also had a reputation for political corruption. In 1903, for example, UGI was accused of making an illegal $20 million profit on the sale of stock in the United Electric Company of New Jersey.

The business and social bonds between Peter Widener and William Warren Gibbs probably explain why they owned neighboring mansions on North Broad Street during the 1880s– Widener at 1200 and Gibbs at 1216.

In 1888, Gibbs struck pay dirt again when he trotted out the Electric Storage Battery Company, which made batteries for industrial uses. According to business historian Alfred Chandler, Gibbs “quickly worked out an agreement with leading Philadelphia capitalists to raise $4.0 million” in 1893, much of it from Widener and Elkins, who needed batteries to power their electric streetcars. With this money, Gibbs purchased several smaller companies and bought out patents belonging to Brush Electric, Edison Electric, and other American electric manufacturers.” He then supervised the creation of a network of factories and distributers to manufacture and sell these electric batteries to big clients such as General Electric and Westinghouse.  The company proved to be a great success, bolstering its organizer’s reputation and enriching him further.

Yet Widener and Gibbs’s paths diverged by the early 1900s.  Widener invested in companies for the long term, branching out into steel, oil, and steamships (including his friend Clement Griscom’s International Mercantile Marine — owner of Britain’s White Star Line ).  By 1912, when Widener lost both his son George and grandson Harry in the Titanic disaster, he had a highly-diversified portfolio worth over $100 million. William Warren Gibbs, on the other hand, remained a serial entrepreneur, and had little interest in active management in his start up’s affairs after it went public.  He became known — perhaps somewhat mockingly — as the man who sat on more boards of directors than any other man in America.  One his more far-fetched schemes was financing the construction of a massive bridge across the Hudson River at Poughkeepsie. Although the structure was a wonder of engineering, the bridge company itself went into receivership and left Gibbs $100,000 poorer, and had “cost lots of big men big fortunes.”   This misadventure probably deepened Gibbs’s lack of respect for engineers.

By 1900, William Warren Gibbs had amassed enough clout (and a $15 million fortune) to purchase a mansion from banker Anthony Drexel Jr.  at 1733 Walnut Street, on the northeast corner of Rittenhouse Square.  The house, built in 1847 when Rittenhouse Square was on the edge of the countryside, was now surrounded by some of the finest homes in the city,  Gibbs and his made their own lavish improvements to the house, which already boasted ceiling frescos, plaster moulding, solid walnut doors, and gold and silver leaf stenciling.  They also added a high iron fence, gate, and a new stone port-cochere at the rear of the house, and a raised portico at the Walnut Street front door.  Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs, as well as their five children still living at home, enjoyed the most modern amenities: electronic service bells to summon five live-in servants, steam heat, hot and cold running water, and gas lighting.  He joined the Union League, his wife threw lavish parties at hotels, and his young boys William Francis and Frederic Herbert learned how to play tennis at prestigious suburban country clubs.  Their eldest daughter Augusta May married the son of a prominent banker in 1899, and a local paper described her as “a splendid musician [who] paints beautifully and rides and drives well.”

Yet Gibbs’s inability to invest in a company for the long-term finally caught up with him.  He invested in more and more peculiar ventures — dye, gunpowder, and cellulose battleship insulation —  and seemed more interested in playing the market than creating sustainable companies that actually made things.  The Philadelphia Inquirer observed in 1901 that, “the days of skylarking for these stocks are over, and lacking the support of Mr. Gibbs, each issue is heavy in the market.  Not, so far as is known, are they likely to receive any support which will make them attractive as speculative issues, stocks which a person may buy and sell quickly at a handsome profit…” The same article also noted due to some suspect financial activities, “It is quite likely that some of the shareholders of record of the Alkali Company unite in a defense and make a test case.”