American Experience: Grand Central (5 of 24)

American Experience: Grand Central

The New York Times launches a campaign talking about the slaughters that are taking place as people are run down by Vanderbilt's ruthless railroads that are crushing the individual.
And you can see that the tensions of the age, the fear of the railroad as a corporation and as a force in society are being manifested in a very literal form of trains running down the helpless individual.
MORTON: Vanderbilt's reluctant response was to sink the railroad tracks just below street level.
From 45th to 56th Street, the New York Central built footbridges across the exposed tracks so that pedestrians could now cross the rail yard without risking life and limb.

North of 56th Street, tracks were covered, creating the Park Avenue Tunnel.
Vents were placed periodically along the tunnel to allow steam that the locomotives still belched to vent onto Fourth Avenue.
It was no solution.
STILES: Someone said that it was like a volcano going off every two minutes as the trains come through.
And that is something that the technology simply doesn't allow them to fix.
Once the trains were in what was essentially a tunnel, the steam that they generated was far too much to allow for visibility.
The tunnel is dark.
The tunnel is smoky.
SCHLICHTING: It's filled with steam.
People like sardines in a can, there's no relief from the heat.
And we have to endure it because the railroad has this monopoly.