Ira A. Place

Some of our fellow-citizens of high achievement, whose impress on finance and industry is actually of the first importance, live out their lives invisible to a public which would not even recognize their names, so completely has their personality been merged in that of the company whose policies they shape and whose position in the community they make possible. Ira Adelbert Place was thus identified with the New York Central, which he had served as intimate counsel, adviser, negotiator and executive during forty-four consecutive years. Place’s jurisdiction extended over the whole complicated network of subsidiary and affiliated lines controlled by the Central, but he made peculiarly his own such large undertakings as the creation of the new Grand Central Terminal and the plans for solving the seemingly hopeless problem of the tracks and terminals on the West side of Manhattan Island. The transformation of Park Avenue was a result of his patient and enlightened negotiations. So, later on, was the far-reaching program, on which substantial agreement with the city was his last achievement, for modernizing the Riverside traffic communications and removing the tracks from Eleventh Avenue, where the largest municipality in America still presents the incongruous spectacle of locomotives and freight trains proceeding calmly along the middle of a busy city street.

Outside of his official duties, the life of Ira Place was simplicity itself. He had a friendly nod and smile, a pleasant bit of badinage, for every friend, acquaintance or associate in his very large circle of human contacts; many of whom, valued by him among the highest, were in the Century.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1929 Century Association Yearbook