Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [751]
Neither existing terminal seemed suitable. Tenth was too far west, and 26th too far south, given that the city still required that any train running below 42nd Street be hauled by horsepower, not steam power. So Vanderbilt settled on Fourth Avenue and 42nd Street as a suitably central location. To make the East Side venue accessible to his West Side line, he had tracks laid along the north bank of the Harlem River from Spuyten Duyvil to Mott Haven. This allowed Hudson trains coming south from Albany to enter the city via the Harlem’s Fourth Avenue route.
Construction of Grand Central Depot began in 1869. It took two years and three million dollars to finish, a sum raised partly by selling off the old station at 26th Street, which was soon converted into the first Madison Square Garden. When the depot opened in 1871, the five-acre complex included a brick and granite neo-Renaissance station, twelve parallel tracks, and an immense iron vaulted shed, the largest enclosed space on the North American continent and a close runner-up to London’s St. Pancras as the biggest train station in the world.
After Grand Central Depot opened, a hundred trains rattled to and fro each day, creating such a din that Columbia College, near the tracks at 49th Street, couldn’t conduct classes. Under mounting pressure, Vanderbilt agreed to sink the tracks—if the city came up with half the six-million-dollar price tag. The municipality grumbled but paid, and by 1876 the tracks dropped below ground at 56th, not to emerge again until 96th. With his usual keen eye for developmental possibilities, Vanderbilt began buying up land cheaply along the still-unappealing Fourth Avenue—the future Park Avenue.
Way downtown, meanwhile, Vanderbilt was building a new freight terminal for the Central and Hudson. He purchased the once exclusive suburb of St. John’s Park from Trinity Church and its co-owners for a million dollars. In its place he erected a massive three-story granite structure, topped with a 150-foot bronze pediment memorializing his achievements on land and sea, featuring a giant statue of himself. (“As a work of art,” grumbled George Templeton Strong after the 1868 opening, “it is bestial.”)
The new terminal revolutionized the Lower West Side. An enormous complex of grain depots, stockyards, and stables arose along the waterfront. Here, also, midwestern cattle, sheep, and hogs—fifteen thousand head each week—were dispatched in efficient new assembly-line abattoirs and dressed for transshipment to European markets.
The transport complex acted as like an enormous magnet, pulling wholesalers and related businesses west from old haunts near the East River seaport. Access to the national rail grid had already transformed commercial relations between New York and the interior. Before the war, rural shopkeepers had made semiannual pilgrimages to Manhattan to purchase imported consumer goods for the coming season at Pearl Street auction houses. With the spread of rail and telegraph links, the city went to the countryside instead. Wholesale merchants—jobbers—bought goods en masse from manufacturers; unlike the old commission merchants, jobbers actually took title to the commodities, pleasing manufacturers, who no longer had to await a final sale for payment. Then merchants like A. T. Stewart and H. B. Claflin established nationwide sales networks of “drummers.” In the late forties such men had drummed up business from country merchants lodged at Broadway hotels. Now they swarmed west and south, displaying samples, reporting back on changing demand. Rural stores and urban shops then wired in orders to jobbers, who dispatched shipments immediately to the buyer’s doorstep, no longer constrained by the seasons. The same rail-and-wire system would make it feasible