“Oh, yeah. There were entire walls taken down; there were staircases constructed. The one on the concourse that leads up to the Apple store? That didn’t exist until a decade ago. It was part of the original plan but it wasn’t built till the terminal was restored. The original builders ran short on money for the Italian marble, so the blueprints will only get you so far,” Ledger said, poking his finger to the side of his head. “You got a few of us with institutional memory.”
“Good. Let’s get started now, but then we’ll meet you back here at eight A.M.,” Mike said. “You hang with us for a few days, okay?”
“If Mr. Gleeson frees me up to assist you, I’ll be here.”
“Anything the police need, Ledger. That’s what you’ll be doing.”
“Thanks to you both,” Mike said. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. Tomorrow the three of us-Mercer, Coop, and I-will start the day here. The commissioner will undoubtedly have teams saturating the station. Feds, too. First, Don, it would help if you give us some background. Help us figure how to get to know this place. We’ll be tripping all over one another if we don’t know half of what you do.”
Ledger leaned back in his chair and twisted the end of his white mustache. “That could take most of the night.”
Mike pulled his chair closer in to make his point. “We may not have that many hours, Don. Give us what we need to know.”
Ledger wagged his finger and practically put his nose against Mike’s. “You’ve got a colossus here, young man. One hundred years old and full of secrets. If you all don’t know what you’re looking for inside her walls, then how in hell can I pick out what’s important? I’d prefer to start at the get-go, run through it as fast as I can, then let you gents decide for yourselves.”
“Secrets?” Mike said, half grinning at the old man’s choice of words.
“Dead serious, young man. Don’t mock me. There’s basements you won’t find on any floor plan, hidden staircases, isolated platforms for dignitaries, and enough mystery down below us that Hitler thought he could change the course of World War Two by penetrating Grand Central.”
Don Ledger had me when he uttered the words “secrets” and “hidden.”
“You’re in charge, sir.”
Mercer handed me an extra steno pad, and Ledger got to work.
“The first rail line in New York City was laid in 1831, from Prince Street to Union Square. Until that time, steamboats ran passengers and freight up and down the Hudson, so no trains were allowed to operate on the west side of town near the river, as a matter of law.”
“Weren’t allowed to compete with maritime traffic?” Mercer asked.
“That’s right. It was such a primitive business that the first iron rails were shipped over from England-not even made here. And the man who owned the train line was Thomas Emmet. He had a younger brother you might have heard of named Robert.”
Mike smiled. “The great Irish revolutionary, executed for high treason for plotting a rebellion against the British. One of my mother’s heroes. And all the time his brother a wealthy entrepreneur over here? I never knew that.”
“The population of Manhattan was centered downtown then, as you probably know.”
The island had been settled at its southern tip, at the Battery, and had slowly moved northward with the influx of European immigrants.
Ledger went on. “By 1851, when there were several rail lines-the New York and Harlem, the Albany, the New Haven-the builders had finally blasted through rocks to lay rails up to Yorkville and later extended them through Harlem and across the river into the Bronx. A year after that, a New Yorker could travel by train from City Hall to Albany.
“But because the steam locomotives were so dangerous-starting fires, running over horses and people who dared cross the tracks to get to the other side of the street-they weren’t allowed to operate below 42nd Street.”
“So how did people get uptown, no less to Albany, from City Hall?” I asked.
“The depot that was built on this site was the end of the rail. It was horse-drawn carriages that took folk from here downtown. Part old-fashioned and the other part newfangled.”
“Think of it,” Mercer said, “it’s these railroads that created suburbs outside the city. Gave men the ability to live up in Westchester or Connecticut with their families but travel into Manhattan every day. It’s literally what made commuting possible.”
“But Cornelius Vanderbilt,” Mike said, “didn’t he make all his millions in steamboats?”
“The commodore, now there’s a man for you,” Ledger said. “Started life as a poor farm boy on Staten Island, descended from a Dutchman who came to America as an indentured servant. By the age of sixteen he had bought himself a flat-bottomed boat and was rowing people back and forth across the harbor to Manhattan. Just a kid with a long oar and a dream to make a buck. Twenty years later, he’d pocketed enough money to build his own steamboat.”
“When did he switch his interest to trains?”
“Began investing in them in the eighteen forties. While the Hudson River froze over in wintertime and steamboats couldn’t get to Albany, railroad trains could deliver their passengers practically on time. Twenty years later, Vanderbilt owned two lines in Manhattan with separate terminals and finally became president of a third line-the most powerful, New York Central-which is when he decided to merge them into a single building.”
“On this site?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. The commodore spent more than one hundred million dollars of his own money to pay for the depot, buying up all the land around. A real visionary. He saw the railroads as the future.”
“What became of the original station downtown?” Mike asked.
“Vanderbilt sold it to a fellow named P. T. Barnum. Heard of him?” Ledger said. “Remade it into the Hippodrome, for the circus and all his other spectacles. Till it became the first Madison Square Garden.”
“Where Harry Thaw murdered the great architect Stanford White,” Mike said, “over the girl on the red velvet swing.”
“I guess you guys see murder in everything.”
“Afraid I do, Mr. Ledger,” Mike said.
“Cornelius Vanderbilt came to understand that railroads were changing the face of America. Before the Civil War, we were an agrarian nation. We grew things, and we moved them around on horse carriages or by ships. It took five days to cross New Jersey by the Morris Canal in those days, from the Delaware River to the Hudson. Trains came along? It became a five-hour trip.”
“Moving people and freight at a new speed and efficiency.”
“Moving ideas, too. I think of the trains as the computer technology of their time,” Ledger said. “Now Vanderbilt’s station opened in 1871, so keep in mind, because 42nd Street then was in the middle of nowhere, you still had to shuttle people on streetcars and horse-drawn carriages from 42nd Street to downtown. It was pretty much a mess up here at the depot, even though his ownership of the train lines-and all the real estate-paid off. When the commodore died in 1877, he had a fortune greater than all the money in the US Treasury. And just as he passed away, a blizzard shattered the glass roof of his train station.”
“Time for a new plan, I guess.”
“But it didn’t happen quite yet, nor for that reason,” Ledger said. “Not till 1902. Just like today, there were only four tracks carrying trains down through the spine of Manhattan, even though there were sixteen million passengers a year by then.
“One January morning, a new engineer was making his first run piloting a passenger train-the local one-eighteen from White Plains. It was snowing out, the kind of thing that made the Park Avenue trenches especially murky, weather that left steam and vapors hanging in the air. The driver was speeding a bit, trying to make up for time lost on the route. Claims he never saw the train ahead of him-the Danbury express-that was parked on the same track, right up at 56th Street, waiting for a signal from the station to pull on in.”