Traveling Tuesday: New York City's Penn Station

Traveling Tuesday: 

New York City’s Penn Station

Next week’s Movie Monday will feature the 1945 film The Clock in which New York City’s Penn Station plays an integral role. Named for the Pennsylvania Railroad, the station’s builder and original owner, the structure was designed by McKim, Mead, and White, an architectural firm founded in 1879 that quickly rose in prominence. The design was (and still is) considered a masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style. The Beaux-Arts style is characterized by heavily ornamented surfaces and the use of elements from Greek and Roman architecture, such as columns, combined with French and Italian Renaissance and Baroque influences (also highly ornamental). The style is known for its symmetry, elaborate decorations and use of stone, iron, and glass.

Completed in 1910, the station occupied an 8-acre plot, had eighty-four Doric columns, eleven

platforms serving twenty-one tracks, and the central waiting room measured a block and a half long – the largest indoor space in the city. For the first time there was direct rail access to the city from the south. Before then the Pennsylvania Railroad’s network ended on the western side of the Hudson River in Jersey City, New Jersey, requiring passengers to board ferries to cross the river. New York Central Railroad was a rival, and their line ran from the north under Park Avenue and ended at Grand Central at 42nd Street. Proposals for a cross-Hudson connection were presented in the late 1800s, but the financial panics of the 1890s made potential investors gun shy about providing funds. Proposals for a bridge was also considered but ultimately rejected.

Then came Pennsylvania Railroad’s president Alexander Cassatt who announced in 1901, the company’s plans to tunnel under the river and build a “grand station” on the west side of Manhattan south of 34th Street, at that time a red-light district known for corruption and prostitution. Construction began in June 1903 and was completed in 1908. Unfortunately, having died in 1906, Cassatt did not live to see his dream fulfilled. Instead, his son, Edward, became president and finished the task.

Penn Station opened to the public on November 27, 1910, and by 1945, at its peak saw more than 100 million passengers pass through its doors. Tragically and despite “vociferous dissent,” the aboveground portions of the building were demolished between 1963 and 1966 to make way for a new building. More than one source indicated that the controversial demolition was the impetus for the 1965 New York Landmarks Law which saved Grand Central station and approximately 30,000 other historic buildings throughout New York City.

While growing up in New Jersey, my family and I traveled through Penn Station on numerous occasions. I wish I’d seen the original building.

Photo Credits:
By Bain News Service - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ggbain.09705. Public Domain

William J. Roege, Pennsylvania Station on Seventh Avenue, New York City, 1923. New-York Historical Society, Photographs from New York City and Beyond.

Penn Station, Train Concourse, ca. 1910, photograph, MMW Architectural Record Collection, NYHS Image #50718.

_____________________________

A Lesson in Love

He thinks he’s too old. She thinks she’s too young. Can these teachers learn that love defies all boundaries?

Born and raised in London, Isobel Turvine knows nothing about farming, but after most of the students in her school evacuate during Operation Pied Piper, she’s left with little to do. Then her friend Margery talks her into joining the Women’s Land Army, and she finds herself working the land at a manor home in Yorkshire that’s been converted to a boys’ school. A teacher at heart, she is drawn to the lads, but the handsome yet stiff-necked headmaster wants her to stick to farming.

Left with an arm that barely works from the last “war to end all wars,” Gavin Emerson agrees to take on the job of headmaster when his school moves from London to Yorkshire, but he’s saddled with the quirky manor owner, bickering among his teachers, and a gaggle of Land Army girls who have turned the grounds into a farm. When the group’s blue-eyed, raven-haired leader nearly runs him down in a car, he admonishes her to stay in the fields, but they are thrown together at every turn. Can he trust her not to break his heart?

Pre-order Link: https://amzn.to/3YHgUb0

Traveling Tuesday: The History of Train Travel

Traveling Tuesday: 

The History of Train Travel

I love trains! While growing up I visited the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore on countless occasions with my paternal grandfather, and he was a wealth of knowledge. Over the years, I’ve taken numerous trips on scenic railroads with varying levels of luxury – from hard wooden seats and tiny windows to padded reclining seats with glass, domed roofs. I never tire of the clickety-clack as we zoom along the tracks.

Did you know that railways go back as early as the mid-1500s? I was stunned by that fact. Known as wagonways or tramway, they featured wooden rails and were horse-drawn. Steam engines were introduced in England during the mid-1750s and a few years later, plates of cast iron were affixed to the top of the wooden rails. Cast iron is brittle, so it was replaced by wrought iron, then steel. By the nineteen century further improvements were made to the steel and became the standard. (According to author/historian Murat Ozyuksel, the expansion of the railroad industry is one of the main reasons for the success of the steel industry.)

Railroads came to the US in the 1820s and played a large role in the Industrial Revolution. Wealthy

men such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, James J. Hill, Jay Gould, Edward Harriman, and Leland Stanford were among the first to see the possibilities and invest in this new mode of transportation making them even wealthier.

Unfortunately, the American Civil War halted progression of the transcontinental railway, and it would not be completed until 1869. The Panic of 1873 and the subsequent depression stalled growth for several years, but the industry rebounded, and tracks soon crisscrossed the nation carrying goods, immigrants, and travels by the hundreds of thousands.

Initially, there were three classes of travel:

• First class offered upholstered seats, carpet, and curtains, with lots of space between seats. The décor used velvet, brass, and glass to convey luxury. Further luxury was available by purchasing seating in a Pullman sleeper or palace car. Some of the exceptionally rich, purchased a Pullman car and had it attached to the back of whatever train on which they were traveling.
• Second class also had upholstered seats, but they were not as nice, and the cars held more passengers.
• Third class, also known as emigrant class, had wooden benches and passengers were expected to bring their own food.

World War II saw a boom in railroad traffic with troop and hospital transports as well as good and war matériel. Afterwards many railroads were driven out of business with the advent of airlines, the increase in cars, and interstate highways. A rise in the trucking industry also impacted the railroads. Nowadays, passengers may choose first class or economy. According to Wikipedia, the US has approximately 160,000 miles of track and has the largest rail transport network in the world.

Have you ridden on a train?

___________________

The American WWII Home Front in 29 Objects

Unlike Europe the American mainland escaped physical devastation during World War II as it was not subjected to full-scale invasions. However, that didn’t mean the United States wasn’t impacted by the war. The ramifications of large economic, cultural, and societal changes forced Americans to reconsider entrenched beliefs and traditions.

Artifacts collected from across the nation tell the stories of the American people whose lives were shaped by this second “war to end all wars,” World War II.

Pre-launch page (Be sure to click notify me on launch): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lindashentonmatchett/the-world-war-ii-home-front-in-29-objects-illustrated-book

Photo Credits:

Locomotive on Bridge: Pixabay

Cornelius Vanderbilt: Courtesy Vanderbilt University

Hospital Car: Courtesy Gold Coast Railroad Museum

Traveling Tuesday: Train Travel in the 1870s

Traveling Tuesday: Travel in the 1870s

Pixabay/Ellen

After decades of traversing the American continent over bumpy roads by horse-drawn covered wagon or stagecoach, the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 slashed travel time from months to mere days. Long forgotten are the more than 20,000 Irish-American Civil War Veterans, freed slaves, Mormon pioneers, and Chinese laborers, who performed the back-breaking work. Estimates vary as to the project’s cost, but it was exorbitant: somewhere above $60 million (or $1.2 billion in today’s money). An additional cost was the more than 1,200 lives lost in the process of building the railroad.

James Meigs, senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal, likened the transcontinental railroad to the internet of the 19th century. An excellent analogy considering that the railroad created the opportunity to communicate and conduct commerce over great distances. Much like the internet, the railroad transformed the economy of the time.

The first passenger train on the like took 102 hours to travel from Omaha, Nebraska to San Francisco,

Pixabay/Brigitte Werner

and a first-class ticket cost $134.50 – about $2,700 today. Using the Overland Route, the train went across prairies, mountains, and deserts, exposing East Coast travelers to visions they’d never imagined. Celia Cooley Graves from Massachusetts wrote in 1875 “For hundreds of miles we saw no other persons except now and then a station with a few hovels about it.”

Mimicking ocean travel that transported millions of immigrants to the US and offered different fares for different classes, the railroads implemented a system of three classes. Third-class passengers paid half of what first-class passengers did to sit on benches and bring their own food. Second-class passengers had it a bit better in that their seats were upholstered.

Courtesy National Park Service

Those who could afford first-class traveled in opulent style with access to sleepers, dining cars, and parlor cars that were lavishly decorated and included brocade curtains or silk shades, chandeliers, plush upholstery, walls covered in dark walnut, velvet hangings, gilt-framed mirrors, and brass fixtures.

Historian Amy G. Richter made an interesting observation about George Pullman’s elaborate palace and the impact they had on women: the train cars’ home-like setting and the presence of women in the living-room-like cars legitimized train travel for {single} women and soothed those who feared that public life would endanger women and the moral order.

Eventually, railroad tracks crisscrossed the United States providing the opportunity to travel from coast to coast no matter what their economic status.

_______________

Beryl’s Bounty Hunter

Can a thief and a lawman find happiness?

Orphaned as a child, Beryl Atherton has lived on the streets of London as long as she can remember. Reduced to stealing for survival, she is arrested. During her incarceration one of her cellmates shows her a newspaper ad for an American mail-order bride agency. But all is not as it seems, and moments after landing in Boston, she must run for her life. Will things be no different for her in the New World?

Working as a bounty hunter since The War Between the States, Lucas Wolf just needs a few more cases before he can hang up his gun, purchase a ranch out West, and apply for a mail-order bride from the Westward Home & Hearts Mail-Order Bride Agency. While staking out the docks in Boston, he sees a woman fleeing from the man he’s been tailing. Saving her risks his job. Not saving her risks his heart.

Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/45CaZVo