David D'Onofrio:
Since 1830, with the listing of the Mohawk and Hudson, railroads have been coming to the NYSE to finance the linking of America. Now, buying stock in a freight railroad probably makes pretty much sense to most people. But if I told the average New Yorker that you could buy stock in the New York City Subway or Metro North or the LIR, they might think I'm crazy. But that's exactly what you could do, say, 100 years ago. And it's that investment by the investing public that made New York City's transit system a reality, and really started to bring this city to the rest of the world.
So today we're going to talk a little bit about the financing of those railroads and the imprint they have left on this great city to this day. I'm Dave D'Onofrio, Manager of the Archives at the New York Stock Exchange. Joining me today is Anna Melo, Curator of Historical Archives and Interactive Experiences. And our guest today is Justin Rivers, Chief Experience Officer at Untapped New York. Justin, welcome and welcome inside the ICE House.
Justin Rivers:
Thank you so much. Really honored to be here.
David D'Onofrio:
It's fantastic. Anytime I can sit down and talk to someone that has an interest in something that runs on rails is a good day.
Justin Rivers:
Me too. I'm there.
David D'Onofrio:
So like I said in the introduction, obviously railroads played a massive, massive role in the development of this city. Of course, not until 1830. So until that point, obviously we're still doing things by carriages, we're taking things by ferries. But then we start seeing names that probably to this day, most people probably wouldn't recognize. But again, if I said Metro North, people know exactly what I'm talking about. But the notion of buying stock in public transportation probably seems absolutely silly to most modern Americans, unless you're following the development of Brightline down in Florida and elsewhere. What I'd like to do is actually just talk about some of the key players in the development of this city.
As someone who works here in New York, I couldn't begin without mentioning the one that bears the name of this city and state, the New York Central. So 1874, New York Central decides to list, and I love this, a certain number of its bonds. You think that we here with accountants would have been able to actually count the number of bonds that they listed here on the New York Stock Exchange, but apparently not. A decade or two later, they come back with more bonds. 1893, they list $8.9 million in stock. And if you actually did the math, you're talking at an IPO of about $320 million. And so of course, in the end, they end up building such structures as Grand Central Station, one of the grandest transit hubs, not obviously in the city, but nationwide. And plenty of other nuggets of their footprint across the city.
I know that you do a lot of touring around the city and a lot of leading, and I know you probably spent a massive amount of time in that fantastic structure. And so I'd just love to just picture brain about, what can I know about that that I obviously don't? Because I know the financing, but probably only goes about that deep.
Justin Rivers:
All right. Well, I would say if you want to unpack the story of the New York Central Railroad, I would stand outside of Grand Central Terminal, 42nd Street facade, General Pershing Plaza right at the viaduct. If you look directly at the facade of Grand Central Terminal, you're going to see a statue of Cornelius Vanderbilt. He's in the center window. He is sculpted to appear Jeffersonian in the way that he's standing, but he's got his hand in his pocket, which looks a little Napoleonic, which I think is actually a really good metaphor for Cornelius Vanderbilt, especially the way that he did business. But you guys probably know more about that than I do, but he was definitely a cut-throat businessman. And that is the oldest piece of the New York central infrastructure that you can find besides the tunnel that is actually behind us.
But back to the statue, it was sculpted by Ernst Plassmann, and Ernst Plassmann actually did that Benjamin Franklin statue up a pace at Park Row, and Ernst Plassmann had created that to put at the Hudson Line Terminal, which is where we enter the Holland Tunnel now. And so what am I getting at? I'm getting at the fact that Cornelius Vanderbilt, to create the New York Central Railroad, had to piece together all these other smaller railroads in Manhattan. And that was his vanity glory piece that he put out, because the Hudson was really hard for him to get at. And the bane of Vanderbilt's existence was basically New York City Council, who kept moving him further north. He had three depots. The original Harlem Depot is where the New York Life Building is now, right north of Madison Square Park.
And he was south of 42nd Street, and liked being there, because that was the heart of the city and that's where everybody was going. And they were chugging north on these steam trains, and it was causing noise pollution, smoke pollution. These engines were exploding on people. And of course, the affluent people of New York said, "No more of this." People in the middle of the island said, "We want these trains out of here." And Cornelius Vanderbilt has to keep moving north and north and north, and they give him this plot or he gets this plot at 42nd and 4th Avenue, and he hates it because he's like, "This is the boondocks." Middle of nowhere.
David D'Onofrio:
I've seen engravings of it. It looked like it was in the middle of nowhere.
Justin Rivers:
In the middle of nowhere. Literally, we have pictures that we show when we're doing tours, of cows grazing on the other side of Grand Central Depot, because the terminal itself that everybody knows and loves today that go into, they oogle the ceiling, Cornelius Vanderbilt never saw that. His descendants built that. He built a depot, which actually didn't work very well. It was too small. It had 12 tracks. Now, if you can imagine Grand Central Terminal is 64 tracks on two levels. 12 tracks. And from the minute it opened, it was running trains every 35 seconds to every minute, and it was a nightmare.
But back to what I was trying to say, which is when they built the depot, they put an enclave in the front of it, the center tower, to put Cornelius Vanderbilt's statue in there from the Hudson Depot that would eventually get destroyed, and he would consolidate all of his lines at 42nd and then what would become Park. There was an outcry from the public that said, "Once you put a monument to all the men, women, and children that you've maimed by your trains basically bulleting up the north side of Manhattan, then you can put your own monument to yourself." So they put it in mothballs. He never got to see it put on Grand Central Depot. Then we have Grand Central Station at the end of the 1800s, which only exists for about eight years and then it's demolished. And then William Wilgus comes in and is the chief engineer of the New York Central, and builds Grand Central Terminal, which opens in 1913. And then they decide, "I think we can put this in."
David D'Onofrio:
[inaudible 00:07:29]
Justin Rivers:
"We're pretty safe now. He sunk his tracks. We have Park Avenue." So the story of the entire New York Central Railroad, I say is in that statue, because looking at that statue, the oldest piece of the New York Central story is there.
David D'Onofrio:
Right. I had no idea that any part of any of the previous structures had ever been saved.
Justin Rivers:
That's it.
David D'Onofrio:
And that's it. That's the only piece-
Justin Rivers:
Well, and the eagle.
David D'Onofrio:
Right.
Justin Rivers:
There's an eagle at 42nd and Vanderbilt, and there's an eagle at Lexington, and those are from the station iteration. So two of them, there were 12, they got scattered to rich people estates, I like to say, all over the Tri-State Area, and two of them flew home, like I like to say.
David D'Onofrio:
Not the only eagles that survived a demolition of a train station here.
Justin Rivers:
Oh.
David D'Onofrio:
But we'll get to that one.
Anna Melo:
We'll get to that.
Justin Rivers:
Yes.
David D'Onofrio:
We'll get to that one later.
Justin Rivers:
Yeah.
Anna Melo:
So after they put the statue back out again, was there any kind of public outcry-
Justin Rivers:
No. No, at that-
Anna Melo:
... or at that point nobody cared?
Justin Rivers:
No, at that point Cornelius Vanderbilt had passed into myth, I like to say. And he became one of those mythological New Yorkers who, although he was real, get turned into legend.
Anna Melo:
Right.
Justin Rivers:
And Cornelius Vanderbilt's legend, especially for people in business even today, people look up to him in a way, but he was also a pretty awful human being the way that he treated his family and a lot of the people that he did business with. But he was critical in the development of travel infrastructure in the country and critical to the development of the city. So yeah, no one protested when it came out on Grand Central Terminal.
David D'Onofrio:
No, No, you look at just how many cities have been linked between here and the Great Lakes thanks to-
Justin Rivers:
Correct.
David D'Onofrio:
... New York Central.
Justin Rivers:
Chicago alone.
David D'Onofrio:
Yeah.
Justin Rivers:
Yeah.
David D'Onofrio:
Now, of course, that's not the only thing in the city that they are, of course known for, although I think most people who go for a walk on the High Line probably aren't necessarily thinking of the New York Central when they walk up there. I listed only a couple of the times they listed here on the Exchange. Every railroad listed numerous, numerous times. But 1929, they put out an additional issue of stock, which I never actually have read the application, even though I have access to it. But I haven't actually read the application, but I think it's probably more than a coincidence that that stock issue came out the year they started construction on elevating that freight line. Which, of course, now these days people think of it as one of the gems of the New York City parks system. But no one was around a living memory to think of freight trains throttling up and down the streets of the West Side of Manhattan.
Justin Rivers:
No. And so there are some of us of a certain age, I'm in my late 40s now, who grew up in the Tri-State Area. I grew up in New Jersey. And I remember as a kid coming into the city and seeing the abandoned High Line. And I remember thinking to myself, this was also the time that the original Batman had come out, in like '87, '88, and I was a grade school kid and thinking, "This is a real Gotham city. I wonder what's going on up there," the overgrowth and everything. And I was like, "What are those? It's not a road. Why can't we drive on them?" And I'd remember asking, I think it was my father, and he'd say, "Oh, I think they used to run rail up there."
And when I got into what I got into later on in my career, right as phases of the High Line were coming into existence, the park version of it, I remember just 10th Avenue alone having this fascinating story, the fact that, again, it comes down to the fact that people were being injured or killed or harmed by trains taking up the same space as pedestrians, carriages, and then cars and horseless carriages. So at first, the New York Central and the city had this idea of creating what were called these 10th Avenue Cowboys. And these were literally guys on horses who would actually go in front of the trains, and there are pictures of them, you can look them up, and guide the train slowly down the avenue so that people were not getting hit.
David D'Onofrio:
Sort of like the early days of automobiles where you had to have someone with a flag in front of you.
Justin Rivers:
Exactly, correct.
Anna Melo:
Like hollering before the car-
Justin Rivers:
Yes, exactly.
Anna Melo:
... which is going 10 miles an hour maybe?
Justin Rivers:
Yes. Yeah. And it was called Death Avenue. And actually, I think there's still a bar somewhere right around Hudson Yards in the High Line that's called Death Avenue, because it was that dangerous. And so the New York Central for their own images, and of course safety and also convenience, decided to elevate the rails to bring in these freight trains. And mainly it was refrigeration at that time, which was a very new technology. So these refrigerated trains bringing in produce and goods and meat, and serve mainly a lot of meat because it was the meat packing district part of it, and mail, were created basically to have better access and keep people safe under. We look at the High Line today and people crowd onto it and they get all these great pictures and they see all these gorgeous buildings that have popped up around it, hotels and all these beautiful glass, but it was nothing like that at all.
It was seedy industry. Like I said, when I was a kid it was Gotham City, but the bad end of Gotham City. And the development of the High Line changed that side of Manhattan completely, and that remnant is there. I think the interesting thing to note if you go to the High Line today, is that the designers of the High Line, James Corner Field Operations, I believe, because I met with a bunch of those guys after they developed Domino and they walked me down the High Line, and they took the pieces of the rail piece by piece. They numbered them, took them up, created the park, and then laid them back down in the same exact spot.
David D'Onofrio:
In the same order.
Justin Rivers:
So if you see rail on the High Line, that's exactly where the freight rail was. It's right there. And the best place to see the interaction is if you go to the Spur of ... They call it the Spur, which was the last part of the High Line to debut, I think in 2018, 2019. There's an old postal building, a USPS building that had these giant bays that the trains would've parked right into. And now, of course, nobody's using them, but that is still a post office building. So there's still so much of it, if you just take a look, that is still devoted to this idea of raising the rail for safety purposes, and the fact that the coastline of Manhattan was devoted to industry up until the 1980s.
David D'Onofrio:
Right. Or if you just look at the remnants of all the piers along Hudson.
Justin Rivers:
Yeah, exactly. Right, exactly. And we think of, the closer we get to the water, the higher the real estate prices go. It's like, that's not-
David D'Onofrio:
That was not.
Anna Melo:
Not.
Justin Rivers:
... the way it goes, guys. The middle of the island was where you wanted to be if you were rich. The coast, not at all.
David D'Onofrio:
No, no, rivers were working waterways.
Justin Rivers:
Yes, yes.
David D'Onofrio:
Long before the railroad, that was the engine of-
Justin Rivers:
Exactly.
David D'Onofrio:
... the development of the city.
Anna Melo:
And also, it's been so long since New York's environment has been cleaned up, that nobody has any kind of sense of the smell.
Justin Rivers:
Oh. Again, as a kid, you remember it. You remember looking at the Hudson. It looked dirty. It smelled bad. It's amazing the changes that have happened in the past 35 years.
Anna Melo:
Yeah. I grew up right by the Gowanus Canal, so not everything has changed.
Justin Rivers:
Ah, and I live near the Gowanus Canal now.
Anna Melo:
Oh, the smell is alive and well.
Justin Rivers:
It's a whole different neighborhood down there now. It's a whole new city.
David D'Onofrio:
I still distinctly remember, you mentioned the tracks literally going right into the post office, I remember before it was a park, literally just seeing an elevated railroad just going into the side of a building. And I'm like, "That doesn't make sense."
Justin Rivers:
Yeah. What are they doing?
David D'Onofrio:
Right.
Justin Rivers:
Yeah, that's right. Are they crashing into the building? They're just plowing right through. Yeah.
David D'Onofrio:
Now, of course, the High Line ends right up by Hudson Yards, and of course, at that point, you're getting awfully close to 34th Street. And of course, I mentioned earlier, Eagles, and another set that, of course, disappeared. So again, I come in from New Jersey to get into the city every day, so I am using usually some measure of trackage that was laid down by the Pennsylvania Railroad. So 1893, the Pennsy applies to list $38 million in bonds, and then they follow that up in 1900 with, let me make sure I get this number right, $150 million in capital stock. Which again, if you translated that to today, you're looking at about almost $5.8 billion. You're talking easily up with some of the top IPOs in history. And of course, this is at a time when we didn't talk about IPOs. We don't start using that term until mid-century. And so of course, you can't talk about the Pennsylvania Railroad without talking about Pennsylvania Station.
Justin Rivers:
No, you can't. And that's a very, very dangerous topic to go into with me because that's been basically the heart of my career.
Anna Melo:
Yeah. How much time do we have left?
Justin Rivers:
Yeah, exactly. So you're going to have to cut me off at some point, but I'll try to keep it brief. But I had just told you, I just came off of an anniversary reading. I had produced and wrote a off-Broadway show about the demolition of Penn Station, and it turned 10 this month. So we did a reading, which I just completed last night. I built my career on the remnants of the old Penn Station. That's how I started giving tours. I was like, "Maybe people care about this. I doubt it. If 30 or 40 people want to follow me around the current Penn Station to find out about the old one, maybe." And thousands of people have gone on it, which is amazing.
But the Pennsylvania Railroad, as you mentioned, was probably the most successful American business at the turn of the 20th century. What you just said proves that. But they had a really bad problem they needed to solve. The president of the Pennsylvania Railroad at the time was Alexander Cassat. If you recognize that name, you're probably an artist or you love art. He was the brother of Mary Cassat, the Impressionist painter. And actually, Mary was pivotal in a way for the creation of Penn Station, because Alexander Cassat, when he was solving his problem, which I'll get to in a minute, took his architects and engineers, architects were McKim, Meade & White, and they went to Paris to visit Mary. And Mary showed them d'Orsay, Gare d'Orsay, which is now Musée d'Orsay. And I always make the joke on my tour, the French turn their train stations into art museums and we turn ours into sports arenas. But there you go.
David D'Onofrio:
We are who we are.
Justin Rivers:
We are who we are. Own it.
Anna Melo:
Well, we turn them into piles of rubble and then we turn them into-
David D'Onofrio:
That's right. Yeah. Yeah.
Justin Rivers:
And then we turn them into sports arenas and office buildings. So his problem was that he couldn't get his riders into Manhattan directly. The New York Central could. The New York Central was getting people in and out of Manhattan via 42nd, which we talked about. The Pennsylvania Railroad had to come into a place called Exchange Place, which still exists in Jersey City today. They had to get on boats, cross the river. They came into depots at the edge of Manhattan and they had to fight their way into the island. And Alexander Cassat said, "This is a nightmare. I've got all these riders. 40% of my ridership wants to get from Philadelphia to New York, and I want to get them directly into New York." So he tries to figure out the best way to do that. Him and Gustav Lindenthal, who was at the time becoming, or already was, I believe, the commissioner of bridges for New York. And they had decided to build this gigantic mammoth of a bridge from 59th Street over to Hoboken. And we're talking 18 lanes, and 10 of those were going to be devoted to rail.
David D'Onofrio:
Yeah, I've seen those renderings.
Justin Rivers:
Yeah.
David D'Onofrio:
It's always mind-boggling to imagine just how much they would have had to just demolish it.
Justin Rivers:
Demolish on both sides.
David D'Onofrio:
Just to build the approach [inaudible 00:19:14]
Justin Rivers:
Hoboken would have been destroyed.
David D'Onofrio:
Would've been gone.
Justin Rivers:
Midtown Manhattan would've been destroyed. And imagine at each side, two Woolworth buildings as towers on this thing. And the city said, "No, absolutely not. You can't do this." The only remnant of that, if you go to Stevens Institute in Hoboken is a plaque. It was the cornerstone-
David D'Onofrio:
[inaudible 00:19:32]
Justin Rivers:
... of the bridge, which was laid down. That's the only thing that ever got laid down and it's there under a tree. So they went to d'Orsay, and they found in d'Orsay that Paris was bringing their trains in by tunnel underground. And they build these tunnel systems, which everybody said, "This is insane." Because he builds a tunnel from Jersey under the Hudson and then through the middle of the island and out the East River-
David D'Onofrio:
[inaudible 00:19:54]
Justin Rivers:
... to Long Island City. And then while they're at it, while they're constructing this absolute marvel of transportation engineering, they also decided to build the largest train station in the world. They destroy a neighborhood called the Tenderloin, which now sits from 8th to 9th Avenue from 31st to 33rd Street. It's a gigantic plot. It's two Penn Plaza, for New Yorkers who know, and Madison Square Garden behind it. Put it into perspective this way, you could fit three Grand Central Terminal buildings in the same footprint as the original Pennsylvania Station. And people who don't know may be listening and going, "What are you going on about? Because Penn Station is a basement. It's small and it's awful." But it wasn't. It was the largest and probably one of the most beautiful train stations in the world.
McKim, Mead & White designed a building that was mimicking the Brandenburg Gates on 7th Avenue of Berlin, the Roman Baths of Caracalla for the main waiting room, and then the back was d'Orsay, basically, the concourse. Also to put into perspective, if you stood in the middle of the main waiting room and looked up at the ceiling of the Roman Baths of Caracalla ceiling, that was 168 feet into the air. If you go to Grand Central Terminal today and look at the concourse up there, that's 120 feet in the air.
David D'Onofrio:
And to put that in perspective for people who ever come onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, our ceiling is only 72 feet tall from up- [inaudible 00:21:22]
Justin Rivers:
And it's an impressive ceiling. Yeah.
David D'Onofrio:
And when that opened, that was one of the biggest enclosed spaces in New York City. And then all of a sudden you have Penn Station come along just a few years later and absolutely just blow it out of the water.
Justin Rivers:
Let's put it this way. You guys opened about 10 years before Penn Station did. Penn Station comes onto the ground, and meanwhile, William Wilgus is trying to figure out what to do with Grand Central Station because they've got to electrify everything and they've had that accident in 1902 in the Park Avenue Tunnel. And all of a sudden, the Pennsylvania Railroad debuts their plans and everybody takes a collective, "Oh crap" and says, "We got to fight with this thing now?" They up the game. It's the reason why Grand Central Terminal looks the way it does, because everybody realized what the Pennsylvania Railroad was doing. They were blowing everybody out of the water.
Now, I totally suggest for people who are listening or watching and who may not know what the old Pennsylvania Station looks like, it's a very easy, cursory Google Search. You could spend hours looking at images of it and you probably won't believe what you'll see, but it was there. Now, of course, fast-forward to 1956 or '57 or so, the Pennsylvania Railroad's in a lot of trouble. We're post-war.
David D'Onofrio:
And a lot of the railroads were here. It was-
Anna Melo:
Yeah.
Justin Rivers:
Everybody was. It wasn't just them.
David D'Onofrio:
Yeah. It wasn't just them.
Justin Rivers:
New York Central, everybody was in this, again, "Oh crap" phase where they're hemorrhaging money. The interstate highway system has now made it easier for people to drive in their cars. Airlines are being subsidized by the government at this point for airports to be built. So air travel is getting easier and cheaper.
David D'Onofrio:
And passenger rail was never really a huge moneymaker.
Justin Rivers:
It never was.
David D'Onofrio:
It was always the freight.
Justin Rivers:
All the money was made in the freight, correct. And so the image of it is, it's antique, it's old, people aren't doing it anymore. The spaces degrade. You look at, so again, do the same thing, put in Penn Station 1950s or '60s and you're going to see a really decrepit looking structure. Beautiful still, but decrepit.
David D'Onofrio:
And largely empty too. Most of the shots you see, there's no one walking on the concourse, no one in the waiting room.
Justin Rivers:
Correct, because nobody's using it that way. And it was designed for long distance travel. It wasn't designed for commuter travel. And still to this day, two-thirds of the travelers who use Penn Station then and now are commuters. But the Pennsylvania Railroad didn't really want to deal with that. So they have to figure out what they're going to do. They actually look to William Wilgus, who created Terminal City, air rights with Park Avenue, and they go, "Oh, we've got air rights. Let's sell the air rights." And who wants the air rights? Well, Madison Square Garden, for those sports fans who know it and love it-
David D'Onofrio:
NYSE listed.
Justin Rivers:
Good guess. That's the fourth Madison Square Garden. And you may say to yourself, "Well, Madison Square Park is down in the 20s."
David D'Onofrio:
It's nowhere near.
Justin Rivers:
"Why are they on 33rd Street?" Well, that was the fourth Madison Square Garden. The first two were at Madison Square Park. And actually, the first one was built on Vanderbilt's Harlem Depot, which I think is kind of funny, because then the fourth one lands on Pennsylvania Railroad's Station.
David D'Onofrio:
The irony is not lost.
Justin Rivers:
No, it's not. I tell people, and you always know when people laugh or go, "Ha ha," and then there are other people go "Uh," who really know their stuff and who care. But the third Madison Square Garden was 50th and 8th Avenue, which is now Worldwide Plaza. And that had awful sight lines. All of the support pillars were blocking everybody's views of concerts, rallies, whatever was going on there.
David D'Onofrio:
Oh, I know. My father had season tickets to the Rangers in the early 60s and he-
Justin Rivers:
Everybody hated it.
David D'Onofrio:
Yeah, no, he could only see half the game.
Justin Rivers:
Yeah, exactly. That was it. Marilyn Monroe sings happy birthday to JFK there. That's one of the last things that happened there. And people hated the sight lines. You could see so many complaints about it. So Madison Square Garden Corporation decides they're going to invest in a arena that's going to be the most architecturally advanced at the time. And they did it.
David D'Onofrio:
Yeah.
Justin Rivers:
That suspension roof there-
David D'Onofrio:
Is phenomenal.
Justin Rivers:
It's an architectural marvel. And Charles Luckman designed it. He's the same guy who also designed the flying saucer at LAX.
David D'Onofrio:
Yeah, you go into almost any other arena, you see a truss work of ... Not a thing of beauty above your heads. And then you walked into the Garden and you're like, "Wow, this is ..."
Justin Rivers:
Not that. Yeah.
David D'Onofrio:
And even compared to other versions of that style of roof ... Because there's plenty of other cable-stayed roofs like that. I can't remember the name of it now, but what had been at one point the Great Western Forum out in Los Angeles.
Justin Rivers:
Sure.
David D'Onofrio:
Same style, but not nearly as well-executed.
Justin Rivers:
No, no. And do you know what? This is a real high nerdery. The inspiration for that suspension roof was actually Philip Johnson's New York Pavilion.
David D'Onofrio:
Oh, Pavilion out in Queens.
Anna Melo:
Oh.
Justin Rivers:
Out in Queens. So if you want to see the first real suspension roof that was designed, it is the Tent of Tomorrow, which you can still see out there. Do a World's Fair tour as well. That was an inspiration to Luckman to say, "Yeah, we could do this. We can make this work." So in the process of doing that, they demolished the station. Sink everything underground, where it is to this day still. And at the time, there's no landmarks preservation legislation that protects the building. 1965 in the center, basically dead middle of the demolition process, they do pass national preservation legislation. So we all in our business say that Penn Station was the sacrificial lamb that has protected so many other buildings, including Grand Central Terminal.
David D'Onofrio:
Every movement need its martyr.
Justin Rivers:
Yeah. So I think that's the best way to sum it up before going into a lot more other stuff, but that is the meat and bones of it.
David D'Onofrio:
So what's left to this day? I know of one or two pieces, only because ... I mentioned eagles. And having grown up in Northern New Jersey, I actually have come across two of them on a very regular basis, because two of them somehow end up out at the New Jersey Botanical Garden.
Justin Rivers:
Which is in my hometown.
David D'Onofrio:
In Ringwood.
Justin Rivers:
Yes. Yeah.
David D'Onofrio:
So I get to see those all the time.
Justin Rivers:
Yep.
David D'Onofrio:
But I am curious, I know there's a couple stairwells here and there, but what else still survives down there?
Justin Rivers:
The whole entire 7th Avenue side of Penn Station is actually encased under Madison Square Garden in the old concourse section of the original station. People don't realize it, but when you're in the 7th Avenue side of Penn, in that main waiting room area now, low ceilings, bad lights, the whole thing, you are standing on the original glass block floor of the Pennsylvania Station concourse, and it's terrazzo'd over, and I should probably just do a brief explanation of what that was. McKim, Mead & White designed a concourse that took light from-
David D'Onofrio:
[inaudible 00:28:19] and brought it ...
Justin Rivers:
... the 150-foot beehive glass ceiling. And then there were two concourses. There was an arrival concourse on the top, and an arrivals ... I'm sorry, departure concourse on the top, an arrivals concourse in the middle. And so they had a glass block floor that transfused the light from the sky down under the track level. It was beautiful, beautiful stuff. When they created Madison Square Garden, we don't have that light anymore. We don't need it. They terrazzo it over. But if you know where to look, there's still glass block you can see. This was the first tour I developed now out of many, and I always call all my tour aha moments the glass block floor moment. Because when I take people through Penn Station and I'm showing them pictures of the old station, the glass block floor, people sitting on it, people walking on it, and then I show it to them and they all go, "Huhhh." Literally like, "Oh my God, really?" It's still there. Multiple staircases, as you mentioned. Tracks haven't moved, everything, the lower you get in Penn, that's all 1910 structure.
David D'Onofrio:
More original. I guess it's just like any archeological dig-
Justin Rivers:
Correct.
David D'Onofrio:
... the lower you get, the more you get, the more you get to ...
Justin Rivers:
The lower you get, the older you get, and the more ... Because when they were demolishing Penn in the mid '60s and building Madison Square Garden, not one day of train transit could be disrupted by that. So hundreds of thousands of people are using Penn while they're building Madison Square Garden around them and demolishing the station. So you couldn't touch things like staircases and floors and track.
David D'Onofrio:
Because they still had to be used.
Justin Rivers:
They had to be used. And then basically, they just build caissons and supports and build Madison Square Garden while people are still commuting. So that's why I always tell people, "The lower you go, the more remnants you'll find." There's signage, there's so much stuff, we could go on forever. But I always like to say the 1910 station is a former whisper of itself, but still there.
David D'Onofrio:
Well, I'd be remiss to not point out a couple of parallels actually here to the Stock Exchange, because we had to go through our own massive renovation beginning in 1979. So if you go onto the trading floor now, you see this massive steel framework above everyone's heads that did not exist before that. You used to look straight up to a gilded ceiling. And we had no place else to go. We had to stay open, just like Penn Station had to stay open. Brokers had to keep trading on the trading floor. And so all of that had to be installed essentially dangling above everyone's heads while trading continued.
The other parallel I actually see is one that gives me some hope for those glass blocks, because we had something similar where we have in our boardroom, a stained-glass skylight, that after the Wall Street bombing back in 1920, that got boarded over. And you could say today, "Well, you could never relight it because there's no more light shaft above it." But all it takes is a few LEDs and all of a sudden you have what looks like a functional skylight again. So something tells me there are options out there to make those a reality.
I know we're probably not going to talk about the path here, but to just drive home how dire the position was of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1903, the predecessor of the path, the Hudson and Manhattan Railway, on their stock certificates, literally they have a picture of the Pennsylvania Railroad's Exchange Place terminal on their stock certificate. Which, I feel like today you would never do that. You wouldn't advertise another company on your own.
Justin Rivers:
Exactly.
David D'Onofrio:
But it's almost like they were thumbing up and saying, "See, they can only get you so far."
Justin Rivers:
Exactly.
David D'Onofrio:
"And we're going to take you the rest of the way."
Justin Rivers:
Yeah, exactly. And I mean that was the H&M, which is not the clothing brand.
David D'Onofrio:
Right.
Justin Rivers:
When I talk about that on tours, everybody and the young people go, "H&M was in trains." And I'm like, "No, no, no-
David D'Onofrio:
Different. Different.
Justin Rivers:
... the Hudson and Manhattan, not the clothing brand." They saw a need for commuters for Jersey and they created the path tunnels that we call PATH today, Port Authority Trans-Hudson Line, which is what PATH stands for, but that's a newer name for it, because the Pennsylvania Railroad just didn't believe in appealing to the commuter at that point. Which was one of their shortcomings, actually. May have helped them a little bit down the line, but so those PATH lines were designed to get people from places like Hoboken and Jersey City directly into Manhattan and down south. And there was a beautiful complex at Cortland Street where the beautiful building, tall skyscraper, that was a terminal for the H&M, which is now completely gone. It was completely wiped out during the construction of the original World Trade Center. And I had been fishing for remnants for it for a long time, but there's not much left.
David D'Onofrio:
I thought I had read somewhere that there was like one or two sidings that had survived that got turned into a loading bay for the World Trade Center.
Justin Rivers:
Yes. Right.
David D'Onofrio:
But then those survived 9/11, but then I think got demolished-
Justin Rivers:
They did. They got-
David D'Onofrio:
... afterwards.
Justin Rivers:
From what I know and what I had heard from people who were on the new World Trade Center project, they were destroyed in creating the new World Trade Center project. So everywhere you go, there's history. And what's interesting about the H&M tunnels or the PATH tunnels, is their construction is actually more in line with the vehicular tunnels that cross under the Hudson. They're circular, the steel plating on the sides. It's very different from what the subways were doing here in New York under the East River, which is interesting.
David D'Onofrio:
Right. Yeah, because there was traditional, what they called like shield construction.
Justin Rivers:
The shield construction. It was quicker and safer to do shield, but they weren't doing shield to create the IRT or the BMT systems here.
David D'Onofrio:
Right, right. And man, I would love to talk about the IRT and the BMT, because you talk about things that, also listed here. The tremendous, just sheer number of the BMT alone originally listing as the Brooklyn Rapid Transit. They listed the Brooklyn Elevated Railroad, the Brooklyn Union Elevated Railroad, the Brooklyn City Railroad, eventually Brooklyn Manhattan Transit, the Brooklyn Queens Transit, the Kings County Elevated Railroad. Just phenomenal. But at this point, I think I hear the chime saying that the doors are about to close and this train's about to leave the station.
Justin Rivers:
Uh-oh.
David D'Onofrio:
I could do this all day, but-
Justin Rivers:
Well, you can do a part two someday. Or we do just subways someday.
David D'Onofrio:
Man, I would absolutely love to.
Justin Rivers:
Let's do it.
David D'Onofrio:
Justin, it has been an absolute pleasure.
Justin Rivers:
It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much, David.
Anna Melo:
Thank you.