Riding the LIRR Together

IN THE LATE spring of 1882, Chester A. Arthur, president of the United States, was invited to travel via a private express train to the Babylon estate of Austin Corbin, president of the Long Island Rail Road.

Although Arthur may have only anticipated catching trout in a lake on Corbin's 15-acre estate, the railroad's new savior had bigger fish to fry.

Both men were transplanted New Englanders in their mid-50s who had shrewdly found success in what was to be known as America's Gilded Age. Only in office eight months, Arthur's improbable rise to national prominence had come after he succeeded President James A. Garfield, the victim of an assassin's bullets. Corbin, meanwhile, a lawyer and financier, was 17 months into his presidency of a railroad that was all potential. Corbin was bent on erasing the LIRR's notorious image as ``two streaks of rust and a right of way,'' and on May 29, 1882, he wanted to demonstrate more than a well-stocked trout pond to the new president.

A man who always thought big, Corbin was thinking at the moment of creating a deep-water, international steamship port at Fort Pond Bay in Montauk - a terminal for which a refurbished Long Island Rail Road was a crucial link. But to accomplish his plan of a New York-to-London ``boat-train'' capable of speeding transatlantic passage of both people and freight, Corbin would need all the powerful friends he could get. You couldn't have a more powerful friend than the man in the White House.

Though there is no record of what the two men discussed during their visit, it's hard to imagine Corbin letting the opportunity pass without mentioning his grandiose idea - especially after arranging for rail traffic to be cleared so that the presidential party could make the 37-mile return trip from Babylon back to the railroad's depot in Long Island City in just 40 minutes.

``President Arthur's Excursion. Speeding Over Long Island at the Rate of About a Mile a Minute,'' was the headline that appeared several days later in the Brooklyn Eagle. In its account of Arthur's two-day Long Island sojourn, the newspaper reported that the president, whose permanent home was in Manhattan, had questioned how long it would take for Corbin's private coach to travel between the estate in Babylon and the city. Corbin saw his chance to show both the president and the influential former U.S. Sen. Roscoe Conkling of New York, who was traveling with him, exactly how much had been accomplished since he had taken command of a collection of bankrupt railroads that had been consolidated under one banner less than two years before.

According to the Eagle's account, Arthur's entourage marveled that ``they had never ridden so rapidly and did not think such great speed could be attained with safety on a Long Island railroad.''

Until his death in a carriage accident 14 years later, Corbin pursued his transatlantic dream relentlessly. Though he never achieved this goal, he did succeed in something ultimately much more significant for Long Island. He built the LIRR into a profitable enterprise, expanding routes pivotal to the development of the Island in the 19th Century, as well as setting the stage for the railroad to become America's busiest commuter line in the 20th Century.

Bald, bearded and brusque, Corbin was also something of a ruthless businessman who engineered a monopoly that made him at times a target of resentment and derision. At one point, he was sarcastically labeled the ``King of Long Island.'' And there is no question that he displayed ethnic prejudices that today would not be tolerated.

Nonetheless, in assessing Corbin's legacy to Long Island and to the railroad, Garden City historian Vincent F. Seyfried, author of a seven-volume history of the LIRR, concluded: ``It was Corbin who spent millions modernizing the roadbed and equipment and keeping the road in the forefront of first-class carriers. No other president of the road before or since commanded the immense wealth, wide influence, expert financial knowledge and potent political connections that Corbin did. Fittingly, his sixteen-year presidency of the road can be regarded as the Golden Age of the Long Island Rail Road.''

When he took over the railroad in 1881 at age 53, Corbin was the embodiment of what historian Daniel Boorstin identified as America's generation of ``go-getters.'' His father was a small-time New Hampshire lawyer and politician, but Corbin had emerged with greater aspirations, and pursued an ever-changing array of them throughout his life.

Born July 11, 1827, the year America chartered its first railroad, Corbin grew up in Newport, N.H. He taught school until he had enough money to attend Harvard Law School, and after graduating in 1849, went to work with Ralph Metcalf, who eventually became governor of New Hampshire.

In 1851, Corbin heard the siren song of America's western frontier, and moved with a friend to Davenport, Iowa. For the next 14 years, Corbin made his life in the Midwest, grabbing opportunities as they came. Within three years of arriving in Davenport, he was a partner in a banking firm. He was especially fond of purchasing tax liens on properties, which allowed him to develop skills in real estate speculation. And when the National Banking Law was passed at the height of the Civil War, Corbin was at the head of the line to acquire a federal charter, organizing the First Bank of Davenport.

After the war, Corbin, now married, decided to come back east and open a small private bank, moving his family to a house in Brooklyn Heights. But he discovered a completely new enterprise after his son, Austin Jr., took ill and Corbin brought his family to the Brooklyn seaside to help him recuperate.

Where others saw a barren beach, Corbin saw a new business opportunity: a grand resort only 10 miles from Manhattan. In the next two years, he solicited investors and patiently acquired nearly two miles of beachfront property that he would call Manhattan Beach. And that's how Corbin discovered railroads. He needed a way to get people to the hotels he was planning.

Corbin's first venture was to create the New York and Manhattan Beach Railway, purchasing leftover cars and engines from the 1876 Centennial Exposition of Philadelphia and building a railroad from Bay Ridge to his fledgling beach resort. On July 19, 1877, the 350-room Manhattan Beach Hotel opened on 600 acres of pristine property. Three years later, in 1880, Corbin opened a second, even more opulent resort, The Oriental. Two years later, he would build another mammoth hotel, the Argyle, in Babylon.

Corbin's resorts were a success, but they were seasonal. It was his tiny Brooklyn railroad that led him to a more challenging and potentially more lucrative enterprise: the takeover of the Long Island Rail Road. It was a risky idea, to say the least. The rail line that linked Long Island to Manhattan (by ferry) was in a sorry state. Never a smooth-running enterprise, the roots of its financial woes went back 50 years, to when the railroad's tracks were first laid.

The original route, planned in the 1830s, was designed not to move people around Long Island, or even to New York City, but to expedite passage between New York and Boston. It traversed the spine of the Island, from Brooklyn to Greenport, where a ferry brought passengers across Long Island Sound.

But when a faster, all-rail route to Boston supplanted the LIRR by bypassing the Sound, what remained was an operation with few local customers and huge debts, a railroad reluctant to expand to the relatively populous Long Island shoreline communities that it had intentionally ignored for quick but short-lived profits. In turn, while the LIRR struggled, other railroads -- the Flushing and North Shore, the Central and the South Side -- were constructed to serve those communities. But in the 1870s, cut-throat competition between the various lines was driving them all into bankruptcy. By 1877, a court-ordered consolidation was under way.

Corbin saw this situation as a fine personal opportunity. Even as he launched his bustling seaside resorts, he organized a syndicate of investors from New York and Boston to take over the railroad and complete the reorganization. On Dec. 31, 1880, he became the 46-year-old railroad's 17th president.

What awaited him was a hodgepodge of rail lines whose tracks were in disrepair and equipment was failing -- an anomaly in the golden age of railroad expansion. But with a ruthless eye on the bottom line -- and $1 million contributed by investors for improvements - Corbin began reviving the bankrupt enterprise.

Almost from the beginning, Corbin pursued a two-fold dream - consolidation of the various competitive railroads into a rational system that made money, and the grander vision of a Long Island with New York City at one end and a major port at the other. More than anyone else of his time, Corbin understood that Long Island was both dependent on the city and capable of creating its own local economy, and that the railroad was a key to both.

Within days of his arrival, Corbin reduced service to Greenport and arranged for trains to connect at junctions, shortening some routes. He even eliminated free passes to favored politicians, and then increased fares, having calculated that it cost the railroad about two cents a mile to carry each passenger. ``To accomplish the many improvements contemplated and furnish first class accommodations to the public, such measures were essential,'' Corbin said in a public statement early in 1881.

Not to mention making a profit. Corbin would spend years renegotiating what LIRR historian Seyfried calls ``a tangled patchwork of leases and sub-leases of many former competing roads. Within a year of Corbin's arrival, the railroad had turned a profit, and by 1886, it was $500,000 in the black.

Corbin saw a clear connection between a successful railroad and economic growth on Long Island - specifically in real estate values. It was something he knew could benefit many people - including himself. This was an age long before mass transportation became managed and subsidized by government.

This was free enterprise. With nothing holding him back other than his own imagination, Corbin began making trips to England to find sources of capital, first to develop resort property, then to realize his Montauk dream. As the railroad began prospering, Corbin bought thousands of acres in Medford and Southampton. Meanwhile, to further his Montauk plan, he looked to his friend Arthur Benson, president of Brooklyn Gas & Light Co.

In 1879 Benson had purchased at auction 10,000 acres of land in Montauk that had been held in trust for the Montaukett Indians, who had inhabited the land for centuries. A recent Newsday examination of the purchase found indications that the deal was based on a series of misleading promises - and a hidden deal with Corbin.

In 1882, Benson, as he had apparently planned from the beginning, sold a sliver of the Montauk land to Corbin's real estate enterprise for a railroad right-of-way. Corbin hoped it would be the catalyst for his transatlantic ``boat-train'' concept. The following year, he incorporated the Fort Pond Bay Rail Road Co. to extend the railroad from Bridgehampton to a proposed Montauk terminus and began lobbying various politicians for help in getting his deep-water port constructed.

While the Montauk plan sustained his interest during the next decade, Corbin also devoted his energies to the nuts-and-bolts of operating and expanding the LIRR. In the years he ruled the railroad, miles of new right-of-way were acquired and new track laid to extend service to Oyster Bay, Eastport, Wading River, Montauk and Cedarhurst.

At the same time, Corbin envisioned the first direct train route to Manhattan, making ferries obsolete by constructing a series of bridges and tunnels. His first move was to acquire a franchise from the state to construct tunnels and a terminal.

Meanwhile, Corbin was making money. A year after taking over the railroad, he bought his lavish estate in Babylon as a weekend and summer house. (His main residence was a $300,000 mansion on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.) But if he had a personal taste for luxury, it was perhaps most evident in the two extravagant private railroad cars the railroad owned. The Manhattan arrived in 1885, followed by the Oriental in 1890.

In 1885, the Hempstead Inquirer offered a de scription of Corbin's so-called palace on wheels, built in Wilmington, Del., by one of the premier railroad coach builders of the era, the Jackson and Sharp Co. It's a far cry from anything in service these days: ``The platforms are enclosed by railings and gates with silver-plated hand rails. The interior . . . made of Mexican mahogany . . . old brass is used in all metal trimmings, except the wash room, where they are silver plate. The floors are covered with fine Wilton carpets and the windows have India silk curtains.'' Historian Seyfried recounts how Corbin once boarded a Brooklyn-bound train and spied two young men with their baggage and feet propped on an overturned seat. He immediately chastised them, and then found a brakeman, who came over, fixed the seats and took one of the young men's passes. One of the two said to the brakeman, ``You'd think he owned the railroad,'' and the reply came, ``He does.''

Corbin was also a man of prejudice. Not long after his two Brooklyn hotels opened, according to Seyfried, Corbin ordered that Jews be excluded from accommodations. Typical of the times, he was also paternalistic -- a tough and demanding boss who distributed turkeys to his employees at Christmas. In 1889, when Corbin was 62, Harper's Weekly described him as ``large, athletic, well-preserved, moving like a man of 30. Prompt and decisive, he is somewhat arbitrary in his judgments, but just in his treatment of his employees. Imperious and somewhat brusque in his manner, he has the faculty of winning loyalty and esteem. Aggressiveness is said to be the secret of his success.''

By the 1890s, Corbin's autocratic rule and hard-nosed fare policies were generating denunciations. In 1892, the Long Island Farmer editorialized, ``The Long Island railroad monopoly has piled up abuses until they have become unendurable.'' Another newspaper, the New York Recorder, referred to him as ``Czar Corbin.''

Corbin ignored the complaints. Mostly, he was preoccupied with Montauk. By 1895, he published a private monograph entitled ``Quick Transit, New York-London,'' in which he declared: ``The universal demand is for the shortest possible sea passage for travelers and the quickest delivery of the mails between the two great distributing cities, London and New York.''

What followed was 29 pages filled with calculations and times, showing the advantages of his scheme. The same year, Corbin bought 4,000 of Benson's 10,000 acres in Montauk and a few months after that he began building a steel pier at Fort Pond Bay.

Though the Army Corps of Engineers warned that the Montauk waters were too rocky to accommodate a shipping port, Corbin managed to have a bill introduced in Congress establishing a duty-free port at Fort Pond Bay. By the spring of 1896, the bill seemed headed for passage.

But ultimately, the idea was only one man's vision, and it would die with him. A month before his 69th birthday, Corbin was visiting his birthplace in New Hampshire, where he had assembled a 24,000-acre nature preserve. On the afternoon of June 4, 1896, he and three friends set out in an open carriage, heading for a fishing expedition.

``The horses, which were being driven for the first time without blinders, shied and the carriage was overturned,'' the Long Islander later reported. ``Corbin's coachman was dead immediately, while Corbin was pronounced dead that night from head injuries.''

The Long Islander's obituary cited Corbin's zealous plans for Montauk, and in passing, noted another unfulfilled idea. ``The idea was to build under the East River and the North River connecting the Brooklyn terminus of the Long Island Rail Road with the Pennsylvania road in Jersey City.''

In this case, one man's vision was not left to die. Four years after Corbin's death, the Pennsylvania Railroad purchased the LIRR, mainly because of the Manhattan franchise he had acquired. A decade later, the first trains rumbled through an East River tunnel and pulled into the mammoth Pennsylvania Station, disgorging the first commuters from Long Island.

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