Tunneling Under

"All these decades later — as our love affair with cars and airplanes has soured — there is hope that New York can once again reclaim the grandeur of arriving by train in Gotham."

In "Conquering Gotham: A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels" (Viking, 384 pages, $27.95), a well written, and very well-researched though imperfect book, Jill Jonnes tries capture that grandeur. She writes of the turn of the previous century with a sense of awe. Unfortunately, some sense of wonder that Ms. Jonnes tries to convey is undercut by sloppy editing that occasionally mars an otherwise exemplary narrative.

By the beginning of the 20th century, New York City was already the Empire City, the jewel of America, if not the world, the place where millions of people aspired to be. The problem was, to get there, you had a choice of traveling by boat or, pretty much, by boat.

The one exception (other than the Brooklyn Bridge, which only helped those traveling from Long Island) was the Vanderbilt-owned New York Central Railroad which took passengers over the Harlem River and into the Vanderbilt owned Grand Central in what was then, uptown.

"For decades, men of ambition had stood upon Gotham's poorly maintained wooden piers to wonder how they might breach the beautiful and strategic Hudson River," Ms. Jonnes writes.

For Alexander Cassatt, the president of the Pennsylvania Rail road, the situation was a travesty He became obsessed with trying to find a way to move his company's clients into Manhattan. Along with the other railroad companies (except the Central) the Pennsylvania brought people as far as New Jersey, where they met ferries operating around the clock to complete the journey into Manhattan.

Ms. Jonnes chronicles the false starts — the plan to build a tunnel that had to be abandoned when engineers realized that there would not be enough oxygen to power the steam engines, and the proposal to build a bridge over the North River. The eureka moment came when Cassatt, in Paris visiting his sister, the painter Mary discovered the electric engine.

"Conquering Gotham" is filled with a cast of characters that leaves the reader with little doubt why New York has captured the imagination of people for such a long time. The book focuses on the back-room machinations of the Tammany Society and its grip on New York Democratic politics Ms. Jonnes also shows how Cassatt and company were aided by Seth Low, the newly elected reform mayor of the still somewhat new Greater New York.

"As the young Republican reform mayor of Brooklyn in the early1880s," she writes, Low "had gained a firsthand education in the pitfalls of ‘doing business with Tammany. Bribes were not enough. These venal men wanted rigged bidding, padded payrolls and whatever else could line their pockets." Together, Ms. Jonnes writes, Low and Cassatt agreed to work together against the Tammany machine.

As Ms. Jonnes takes us below ground for the harrowing experience of digging the tunnels, she al so expertly guides us above ground as Charles McKim's grand Pennsylvania Station emerges from the heart of the Tenderloin growing into a magnificent structure that New Yorkers never truly embraced until it was torn down in 1963, just 53 years after it opened.

We are witness to when McKim who had battled for years to keep his legendary partner Stanford White on the straight and narrow receives the unexpected call from a reporter informing him that White had been gunned down at Madison Square Garden by the jealous husband of a dancer White had seduced. And we learn how Cassatt, whose dream was Pennsylvanian Station and a direct train service to Manhattan, dies four years before the first train rumbled under the Hudson.

The only real knock on this book comes from what, given the strength of most of the writing must be written off as lazy editing The reader does not need to be told more than once that we are reading about the gilded age and certainly only needs one description of City Hall as "Italianate."

Ms. Jonnes has previously written about New York and this period of time — most notably in "Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World" (2003) — with "Conquering Gotham," she gives us a book not on the level of David McCullough's "The Great Bridge" (1982) but certainly worthy of sharing space on the shelf with it.