Rise and Fall of Penn Station, The (2014)

[bunniefuu]

NARRATOR: November ,

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 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 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 , 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 , 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 th 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 , 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 -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 $ 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 .

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 -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 , the Pennsylvania Railroad

was the largest corporation in the world.

With over , employees, its operating budget was second

only to the federal government's.

Cassatt had been appointed president of the line in

at the age of .

His career hadn't followed the typical path.

Born into a wealthy family,

he had the means to retire at age

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 k*lling 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 th 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: 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 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 $ 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 th, early th 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 , 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 st Street to West rd Street

between th and th 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 s, DeWitt Clinton Haskin

had tried to build a tunnel under the Hudson River

and had suffered a series of blowouts,

one of which k*lled 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 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 $ 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 ,

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 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 , , 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 -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 <span tts:fontStyle="italic"> Engineering News</span>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 tons,

the shield was a steel cylinder with a diameter of 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 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 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.

[expl*si*n]

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 -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 , 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 <span tts:fontStyle="italic">New York Times,</span>

"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 , 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 , ,

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.

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 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 , ,

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 / of an inch.

TIROLO: Even today, an accuracy of /th 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 ,

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 .

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 ,

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 , tons of steel,

, cubic feet of granite,

, square feet of skylights

and million bricks.

REVELL: When the station is completed in , 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 <span tts:fontStyle="italic">New York Tribune,</span>

"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, 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 , more than 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 w*r II,

but at that moment of triumph,

the Pennsylvania Railroad was on the verge of decline.

And the next year, ,

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 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 , 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 , ,

the demolition began.

"Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced

that Penn Station really would be demolished,"

wrote the <span tts:fontStyle="italic">New York Times,</span>

"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 ,

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.