The New Yorkers: 31 Remarkable People, 400 Years, and the Untold Biography of the World's Greatest City by Sam Roberts

Author:Sam Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

20

William J. Wilgus

The Making of Midtown

While die-hard Brooklynites still lament consolidation with New York as “the Great Mistake,” the technological marvel that elevated the merger from Andrew H. Green’s decades-long dream of a single legal and political entity into reality began not in Manhattan but in Brooklyn.

In 1898, the year that the two cities were joined in their marriage of convenience, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company began converting its elevated trains to electric power, thanks to Frank J. Sprague. His vision for a “Dynamo Electric Machine” catalyzed urban development by perfecting both mass transit and elevators (and leaving a legacy to scientific progress through electricity much greater than David F. Launy’s earlier in the nineteenth century).

The switch to electricity from steam could potentially save New York City tons of coal and millions of gallons of water annually. Sprague’s invention also transfigured the cityscape. Now the proposed subways and commuter lines linking four of the boroughs of Greater New York (the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens) together and New York City with New Jersey could be safely placed in tunnels under rivers and city streets when necessary, without asphyxiating their passengers.

Burrowing underground was exactly what William J. Wilgus decided to do in 1902, to spare his bosses from prosecution.

Barely one week after the year began, on the morning of Wednesday, January 8, Train 118, the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad’s Manhattan-bound local from White Plains, was due at Grand Central Depot at eight fifteen A.M. Like the Delaware & Hudson train that would strike Charles Dowd in Saratoga Springs two years later, No. 118 was running late. It was further delayed at 110th Street, near the mouth of the congested Park Avenue Tunnel, to let another southbound local pass. When it finally emerged into Manhattan’s vast open-air train yard at Fifty-Eighth Street and Park Avenue, the engineer saw a red light but was going too fast to stop. No. 118 smashed into the rear of a Danbury commuter train, instantly killing fifteen passengers. The engineer was charged with manslaughter; a state commission accused the railroad of gross negligence. But the New York Central’s officers and stockholders escaped prosecution. This time.

To insulate them legally and aggrandize their properties, Wilgus, chief engineer of the New York Central Railroad, suggested a presumptuous and pricey solution: Raze the depot, which had opened only a generation earlier, had recently been renovated, and was the largest indoor space in the nation but already outmoded. Electrify the rails to make the tunnels smoke-free. Carpet the cavernous belowground train yards south of Fifty-Eighth Street by decking over the yawning valley of tracks with a luxuriant boulevard flanked by office buildings, hotels, and a civic center that would shift Manhattan’s cultural and commercial center of gravity from downtown to Midtown.

William John Wilgus was born in Buffalo in 1865, where his grandparents had transplanted themselves from Albany by way of the early nineteenth century’s greatest engineering feat in New York, the Erie Canal. As Kurt C. Schlichting noted in

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