Written by Henry John Steiner Friday, 21 May 2010
The historic Tarrytown Train Station is 120 years old this year, and I recently reflected on my earliest experience with this landmark.
It was back in the early to mid-1950s, when I was a kid living in the Crest. On rare evenings, my mother would bundle her children into the backseat of the family car — a 1949 Plymouth — and drive down to the Tarrytown Train Station to meet my dad. There were no car seats or seatbelts then; I think my sisters and I used to stand or kneel on the backseat and watch the scenery through the windshield as the sedan cruised down Neperan Road and onto Main Street. On that stretch we could feel the rails of the old trolley line under the car tires. Usually, at that late evening hour, Main Street was subdued and dark, except for some bars, the marquee of the Music Hall, and the old incandescent street lamps.
We descended the long curve of Lower Main Street — known in the early twentieth century as “Post Office Hill” — and passed the vertical neon sign of “Doc Zigg's Health Farm.” Doc Zigg's was surely the most poetically- named bar in Tarrytown history. At the station, my mother took us out on the wooden platform behind the stationhouse where, for many years, there was one of those ancient, large wooden carts with big wheels. It was used, I guess, for taking freight and baggage on and off trains in the days before raised platforms.
On the dark platform, my mother faced us to the south and told us to watch for the train, but there was nothing much to see, only what seemed to me a small, still, silent light off in the distance that took forever to grow larger. And then later there was the mere suggestion of a rumbling sound that, in time, rose to a violent crescendo as the train entered the station. The train seemed like a huge, snorting impatient monster, disgorging a multitude of fleeing strangers wearing hats and suits. Among them, I saw my father who smiled and seemed delighted that we had all turned out to greet him.
To me, at that age, the station looked old, but it was only about as old as I am today. The Tarrytown Station was built in 1890, and it was the last in a succession of three stationhouses that stood in this general location.
At one time — about 160 years ago — the current stationhouse would have been submerged in the middle of Tarrytown Bay. It stands in a location connected with Tarrytown's Revolutionary War history. In 1781, American, French, and British forces struggled in bloody combat in that place for control of American supply barges headed for a dock once located on the east side of Tarrytown's brand new village hall. The barges were set afire by a British landing party, but the flames were then extinguished through the heroic efforts of the French and American defenders. This event has been named the “Action at Tarrytown,” and it was commemorated in 1899 with the dedication of a bronze tablet that was first affixed to the side of the station building. It was subsequently moved and is today displayed in front of the brand new village hall.
The first Tarrytown Train Depot was built by Seth Bird, a village contractor, in 1850. This was one year after rail service began between New York City and Peekskill. Details of its interior are lacking, but we know that it was located about 100 yards north of the present station, on the northern edge of the long cove that was formed by the laying of the rail line. Originally there was a single track with so-called "turnouts" to let trains pass each other.
A second, larger station was also built by Bird, opening on April 15, 1870; it was staffed by the first stationmaster, J. S. Morgan. The 1870 station was located virtually on the site of the present one. The original depot building was moved to the west side of the tracks and adapted for use as a workshop.
Then in 1890, an impressive new station was built; this is the one we are all familiar with. It was built of Massachusetts Granite and red sandstone and reportedly designed in the Richardsonian style, after Henry Hobson Richardson, an architect celebrated for his Romanesque approach. He was the chief designer of the New York State House in Albany, completed in the same period. Depot Square, the level area that lay before the new station, kept pace with this succession of station houses. The square became crowded with a growing number of commercial establishments — retail and wholesale concerns, rooming houses, hotels and taverns — linking up with the thriving, but now extinct, commercial district of Orchard Street. Not long after the completion of the new station, a handsome new fountain was placed in the square for watering horses — a mark that Tarrytown was indeed a modern, civilized place.
In 1891, twenty-six trains per day were stopping at Tarrytown's station on the Hudson Line. In May of that year, the stationhouse was only a year old when it became suddenly and horribly turned into a field hospital. A work detail of over thirty men, composed mainly of non-English speaking Italian laborers, was sent on a flatbed railroad car to the Rand Drill Works storage facility at Ludlow, in Yonkers. Rand had its pneumatic drill factory in Sleepy Hollow on the south border of the present G. M. site, but the company also sold explosives to be used with the drills. At Ludlow, the work crew loaded 500 pounds of dynamite and some fuse material onto the flatbed railroad car and the train then proceeded north toward Holmes Point (300 yards north of the current Tappan Zee Bridge).
The train was approaching Holmes Point, where work progressed on the installation of a third track, when a spark from the steam locomotive settled on the explosives. A terrific explosion jolted the entire community and most of the workers on the flatbed were either instantly killed or fatally injured. The rail bed was littered with bodies and wreckage. A rescue crew from the Tarrytown Station gathered the dead and injured and brought them to the new stationhouse. The victims were triaged on the waiting room floor. Of the injured, some were sent for treatment to the Provident House Hospital in Tarrytown. When those resources were overwhelmed, a special train conveyed the other victims to New York and Belleview Hospital. A day after the explosion, bodies were still being searched for in the river and the neighboring estate pond of millionaire inventor Robert Hoe.
This event appears to have been Tarrytown's deadliest catastrophe. There followed a lively discussion in the community about where to lay the blame for the tragedy. Who was to be held responsible? The workers? The foremen? The railroad management? After due consideration, the coroner's inquest came to the egalitarian view that all were to blame.
There is obviously more to this story. One can only imagine the personal and financial impacts suffered by the families of the victims and the aftershocks felt within the corporate offices of the New York Central Railroad. In one particular sequel, the Holmes Point Disaster was to leave its mark on the Tarrytown school system for years to come. Apparently the shockwave of the explosion severely damaged the foundation of a new public school that had just been constructed at Broadway and Franklin Street — the Cobb School. So, a new school building was planned for the corner of Broadway and Hamilton Place, and it was built four years later, the first Washington Irving School, aka Pierson School, aka the Landmark Condominiums.
Life continued and it brought new changes. In 1897, east-west connecting service by trolley was established from White Plains. Prior to that, connecting service was provided by the P. W. Hawkins Overland Stage. In that day, theatrical wannabees hanging about the Music Hall might have been told, "You know, you should be on the stage — and there's one leaving in ten minutes."
In 1905, a thirty-acre freight yard was created south of the Tarrytown Station with silt pumped into the cove from the river. Six years later, in 1911, the line was electrified and a roundhouse was added to the freight-yard.
In March of 1912, then village president, F. R. Pierson, petitioned the railroad for a pedestrian tunnel under the tracks at lower Main Street as a safer alternative to the hazardous street-level crossing. The request was denied. Two years later, in March of 1914, Judge Frank Millard, the Tarrytown village attorney, became another casualty of the dangerous crossing when he was killed by the Wolverine Express Ltd. Soon, a pedestrian overpass and tunnel were finally built. A vehicular overpass was built at Cortlandt Street in 1925.
From the beginning, and for the next 100 years, the Nyack Ferry provided east-west connecting service from Rockland County. In more recent times, the Tappan Zee Bridge has been the Rockland connection, but when the old pedestrian underpass at the station was closed in 1973, the tunnel still exhibited a sign directing walkers to the long defunct Nyack Ferry.
About thirty years ago, during the 1980s, a fire gutted the stationhouse interior. Before long the waiting room had attractive new wood paneling that is still there today. Now as Hudson Line station improvements and modifications reach completion to the north and south of Tarrytown, Metro North is planning to begin extensive work on Tarrytown's historic stationhouse. According to the railroad's representatives, the large restoration project is spurred in part by a recent substantial increase in ridership from Tarrytown Station.
Through the years, Tarrytown Station has been an emblem of the Village's identity and civic pride. At the time the stationhouse was built, during the Guilded Age, Tarrytown was riding the crest of its ascent as an important Westchester commercial center. The building embodies Tarrytown's continued cultural and economic link to Manhattan, a history that began with the first colonial market sloops. I hope this lovely historic stationhouse remains an evocative landmark of Tarrytown for decades to come.
Henry John Steiner is the village historian of Sleepy Hollow and the managing broker of Steiner
Real Estate Associates; Henry@SteinerRealEstateAssociates.com
