Conquering Gotham: A Gilded Age Epic by Jonnes Jill

Author:Jonnes, Jill [Jonnes, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Politics
ISBN: 9781429528863
Goodreads: 17774197
Publisher: Viking Books
Published: 2007-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

“DISTURBED ABOUT NORTH RIVER TUNNELS”

On Monday April 2, 1906, an anguished Samuel Rea sat at a wooden desk in his spacious Bryn Mawr home and considered how best to begin his letter to Alexander Cassatt. Outside, after days of rain and squalls, it was a cold spring afternoon suffused with clear light. The PRR’s third vice president was bone tired, recovering from tonsilitis, and feeling steady twinges of rheumatism in his knees, his back, and now his arm. His doctor was pressing him to go away for a bit, to make a quick but restful sail down to the warmer climes of Jamaica. Rea wearily took up his fountain pen, scrawled “Confidential” in his neat small script atop the half sheet of lined paper and paused. He decisively underlined “Confidential,” and then plunged in: “Dear Mr. Cassatt, I have been disturbed about North River tunnels for some time—since I told you that General [Raymond] thought they were rising—He has verified this & Jacobs told me on the phone last Friday I think that he had suspended work and he thought they had risen about 6 inches, but he thought they would come to rest.”

This was typical of Charles Jacobs—always sanguine. But Samuel Rea had just learned in a deeply distressing tête-à-tête that the eminent but prickly Brigadier General Charles Raymond very strongly begged to differ. Raymond, balding, his remaining good eye steadily dimming with its thickening cataract, was a formidable and punctilious military engineer. He was so esteemed that the PRR had pleaded with the War Department to borrow him to serve as chair of the PRR’s board of engineers. In 1904, just before his military retirement, Raymond’s stellar forty years of public service had been rewarded by promotion to brigadier general.

General Raymond had traveled especially to Rea’s home to report his decided professional opinion that the as-yet-unfinished tunnels on the Weehawken side were shifting dangerously about in the river’s infamous alluvial silt. Raymond, employing a large magnifying glass to aid his diminished vision, had painstakingly reviewed the daily figures and data produced by Charles Jacobs’s own alignment crews. He had slowly come to believe that something was alarmingly amiss. Five days earlier, Raymond had for the first time confronted Jacobs with these disturbing facts at a board of engineers meeting. Both Alfred Noble and Jacobs scoffed, Rea told Cassatt in this letter, expressing such utter skepticism that they declined even to include Raymond’s doubts or his data in the board’s written minutes. But, wrote Rea, the “General was insistent on management being advised.”

During their just-concluded private meeting, Rea wrote to Cassatt, Raymond had also revealed that his figures for the Weehawken tunnels showed “there had been a rise of about 2 feet in one place—This is alarming…If General was correct we must change method of construction—devise some way of anchoring tunnel and possibly doing that work as the driving of the tunnel progresses and that of course the work of driving must be suspended…Jacobs and Noble are now alive to the situation but for a long time didn’t have much faith in General’s theory or his results.

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