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This essay is adapted from Chapter 25 of Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide. I’ve kept cross-references to other chapters in the book, all of which will eventually be updated and posted on this site. Click on “Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan book” in the Obsessions cloud at lower right to see which are already here.

• Sculptor: Ernst Plassmann.
• Dedicated: 1869.
• Medium and size: Bronze (8.5 feet), granite pedestal (approximately 9 feet).
• Location: South facade of Grand Central Terminal, at the level of the Park Avenue viaduct. Pedestrians can enter the Hyatt Hotel (42nd Street just east of Grand Central), go up the stairs on the left to the reception level, go up the escalator to the left of Concierge’s desk, then go through the revolving doors (ahead and to your right as you come off the escalator) to the sidewalk by the Park Avenue viaduct. Turn left on the sidewalk (toward 42nd Street), and follow the sidewalk around to the south side of Grand Central. The sidewalk ends almost across from the Vanderbilt statue. Subway: 4, 5, 6 to Grand Central – 42nd Street.

About the sculpture

Upright and alert, Vanderbilt surveys his domain: a wealthy, powerful, alert man whose presence you can’t fail to notice. Well, you couldn’t were he not placed where few pedestrians venture. Rightly proud of having worked his way up from poverty, he wears a bulky double-breasted coat with fur lapels and cuffs. As compared to the conventional business attire of Rea and Dodge (Chapters 20, 24), the coat suggests that he’s a hands-on manager, not content to run his business from behind a desk.

Like Ericsson, Farragut and Rea (Chapters 2, 19, 20), Vanderbilt’s upright posture speaks of confidence. The gesture of his left hand suggests he’s in the middle of an action – perhaps giving an order. For more on this gesture, see Columbus (Chapter 36).

Like Rea in his Penn Station niche, Vanderbilt was designed for an architectural setting, and meant to be seen only from the front. When dedicated in 1869, the sculpture was the centerpiece of a 150-foot-long, 31-foot-high pediment on Vanderbilt’s Hudson River Railroad Freight Depot, just south of Canal Street. (The history of the Hudson Rail Road Freight Depot and the line running north from it are intimately connected with the High Line and with Robert Moses’s West Side Improvement project [the Henry Hudson Parkway and expansion of Riverside Park]: see here and here.)

Bronze reliefs to either side showed sailboats, steamboats and railroads: the transportation industries in which Vanderbilt made his millions.

The fact that the sculpture appeared atop the third story of the Depot explains the relatively simple pose, the lack of small gestures and props and even the bulky coat. To be viewed at that distance, the sculpture needed something of the monumental simplicity of the Statue of Liberty (Chapter 1).

After the demolition of the Hudson River Railroad Freight Depot, Vanderbilt was eventually moved to the facade of the Grand Central Terminal, where you’re unfortunately likely to see him only as you rocket past on the Park Avenue Viaduct. Instructions for reaching the sidewalk opposite him are at the beginning of this post.

About the subject

Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), an uneducated farm boy, was worth about $100 million when he died – probably the wealthiest man in America. He earned his first million on the water, ferrying passengers by sailboat as a teenager, then switching to steam. So safe and efficient was the service Vanderbilt provided that a series of rivals either sold out to him or paid him to operate elsewhere. By age 45 (1841), the “Commodore” owned or had an interest in more steamboats than anyone else in the country.

Meanwhile, after Peter Cooper designed the first American-made steam locomotive in 1830 (Chapter 10), the railroad industry boomed. Small wonder: the trip by rail from Buffalo to Albany took a mere thirty hours, while the trip by the twenty-year-old Erie Canal (Chapter 48) took ten days. With the advent of railroads the cost of shipping – and hence the cost of goods – plummeted. Privately financed and privately built railroads spread across the country.

Vanderbilt, in his sixties, astonished contemporaries by selling his prosperous steamboat line and applying his formidable energy to the acquisition of railroads. By 1857 he was a director of one New York railroad line. By the early 1860s, he owned a controlling interest in the only two railroads that ran into Manhattan.

Why only two? Because in the 1830s, New York politicians decreed who could build lines into Manhattan, how far south steam locomotives could run (at first to Canal Street, later only to 42nd), and whether existing lines could merge. Such political control was often employed as a weapon by Vanderbilt’s enemies, although seldom with success.

On lines he controlled, Vanderbilt improved service and equipment by doubling tracks (for passengers and freight) and by upgrading rolling stock and bridges. Curmudgeonly Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune (Chapter 7), a regular commuter on Vanderbilt’s Harlem Railroad, commented in 1867 that

We lived on this road when it was poor and feebly managed – with rotten cars and wheezy old engines that could not make schedule time; and the improvement since realized is gratifying. It is understood that the road now pays, and, if so, we are glad of it.

Under Vanderbilt’s leadership, railroads linked New York to Albany in the 1850s and to Chicago by the early 1870s. So efficiently did he run his railroads that even in the depression of the 1870s, they paid dividends of six to eight percent. Soon Vanderbilt was known as “The Railroad King” as well as “Commodore.” Grand Central Depot, completed at Forty-Second Street in 1871 as the New York terminal of Vanderbilt’s railroads, was one of the largest enclosed spaces in the world. Within a few years, it became too small for its volume of traffic. (See Commerce, Chapter 26.)

New York Times eulogized Vanderbilt:

What he bought he bought to keep, to build up, and to make more productive. … It required skill, patience, and that mental quality which we call forethought, to conduct successfully such vast concerns as those which employed Vanderbilt’s energies. Every movement of his will was perceptible in the fleets which covered the waters, or in the network of rails which enmeshed the land. By him, therefore, the movements of population, the currents of trade and travel, and the requirements of commerce, must have been clearly seen and understood. It was his business, in a large way, to anticipate and meet all these requirements and changes. He did this so well that he is now set down as a highly successful man. (1/5/1877)

Often reviled as a “robber baron,” Vanderbilt was in fact a trader who offered high-quality services to a public eager to buy them.

Currier & Ives Celebrate Progress

Although today we associate Currier & Ives with quaint images on cookie tins, no other publisher so enthusiastically captured the thrill of American industrial progress during the 19th century. The Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division has a fabulous collection of Currier & Ives prints, including this one from 1874 that expresses the wonder of high-speed travel: “American Railroad Scene: Lightning Express Trains Leaving the Junction.”

Railroads in the United States

A mere 37 years earlier, when railroads had just begun to spread across the continent (see Cooper), this was the “high speed” train run by the Erie Railroad.

Mass transit? Hardly. Faster and more comfortable than a horse and buggy? Definitely.

Vanderbilt became involved in the Erie Railroad in the 1860s, when he waged a widely publicized battle for control of it with Daniel Drew, James Fisk, and Jay Gould. In this cartoon, Vanderbilt and Fisk are shown as cowboys riding locomotives.

Vanderbilt’s Obituary in the New York Times

When Vanderbilt died in 1877, the New York Times praised him for all the right reasons:

What he bought he bought to keep, to build up, and to make more productive. … It required skill, patience, and that mental quality which we call forethought, to conduct successfully such vast concerns as those which employed Vanderbilt’s energies. Every movement of his will was perceptible in the fleets which covered the waters, or in the network of rails which enmeshed the land. By him, therefore, the movements of population, the currents of trade and travel, and the requirements of commerce, must have been clearly seen and understood. It was his business, in a large way, to anticipate and meet all these requirements and changes. He did this so well that he is now set down as a highly successful man. (New York Times 1/5/1877)

More

• Ernst Plassmann (1823-1877), a native of Sondern, Westphalia, trained in Germany and Paris. Manhattan has his Vanderbilt, 1869, and Benjamin Franklin, ca. 1872 (Park Row at Nassau Street).
• Highly recommended: The First Tycoon, T.J. Stiles’s biography of Vanderbilt, which uses much newly discovered archival material.
• In Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love, I demonstrate a method for looking at sculptures in detail, in depth, and on your own. Learn to enjoy your favorite sculptures more, and find new favorites. Available on Amazon in print and Kindle formats. More here.
• Want wonderful art delivered weekly to your inbox? Check out my free Sunday Recommendations list and recurring support: details here.