Conquering Gotham: Building Penn Station and Its Tunnels Author: Jill Jonnes | Language: English | ISBN:
B000Q9J01K | Format: PDF
Conquering Gotham: Building Penn Station and Its Tunnels Description
"Superb. [A] first-rate narrative" (The Wall Street Journal ) about the controversial construction of New York's beloved original Penn Station and its tunnels As bestselling books like Ron Chernow's
Titan and David McCullough's
The Great Bridge affirm, readers are fascinated with the grand personalities and schemes that populated New York at the close of the nineteenth century.
Conquering Gotham re- creates the riveting struggle waged by the great Pennsylvania Railroad to build Penn Station and the monumental system of tunnels that would connect water-bound Manhattan to the rest of the continent by rail. Historian Jill Jonnes tells a ravishing tale of snarling plutocrats, engineering feats, and backroom politicking packed with the most colorful figures of Gilded Age New York.
Conquering Gotham will be featured in an upcoming episdoe of PBS's American Experience.
- File Size: 1326 KB
- Print Length: 384 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (April 19, 2007)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B000Q9J01K
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #175,151 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > World > Transportation > Railroads - #68
in Books > Engineering & Transportation > Transportation > History > Railroads
- #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > World > Transportation > Railroads - #68
in Books > Engineering & Transportation > Transportation > History > Railroads
This is a book that can be appreciated on many levels. First and foremost, it is the story of how the once mighty Pennsylvania Railroad brought East-West trains into Manhattan. Though it had become the greatest sea port in the nation, the country's financial and manufacturing hub, Manhattan had no terminal for East-West trains. The New York Central had its trains coming in from the north, but if you wanted to ride the train to Philadelphia and points west and south, you first had to take a boat across the Hudson River to New Jersey.
For decades, the leaders of the Pennyslvania Railroad had tried to come up with a way to bring their trains into Manhattan. A bridge over the Hudson was designed and then abandoned for lack of financial support from other railroads. A brilliant visionary, Alexander Cassatt, as President of the Pennsylvania convinced the board of directors on a great gamble: to invest millions in the building of tunnels under the Hudson, erection of a great station in Manhattan and extending the tunnels across the Manhattan and the East River to Long Island.
The stories are of the herculean engineering effort involved in designing and constructing the tunnels, since none that long had ever been attempted; the problems of dealing with the Democrat Party's corrupt Tammany political machine; the design and construction of the iconic Penn Station; Teddy Roosevelt's campaign against trusts and big business and more.
In short, Jonnes's history is epic because her subjects are epic.
Jonnes has a good writing style; she is able to breathe life into some relatively obscure subjects and does well at attempting to convey the nature of life in the early 20th Century.
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