Crossing Under the Hudson: The Story of the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels

Introduction

1 As he paced the platform, waiting for the Washington express, he remembered that there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York. They were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise predicted the building of ships that would cross the Atlantic in five days, the invention of a flying machine, lighting by electricity, telephonic communication without wires, and other Arabian Night marvels. —Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, 1920 In the epigraph above, Edith Wharton’s protagonist, Newton Archer, a gentleman lawyer of the late nineteenth century and scion of one of New York City’s best families, wonders about future inventions, including the possibility of a tunnel under the Hudson connecting New York to New Jersey. The remarkable thing is that all that Archer imagined has come true. The first attempt to construct a tunnel under the Hudson River was made in 1874, two years before General Custer died at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The plan was to build a rail tunnel from Hoboken, New Jersey, to lower Manhattan. The project was abandoned in 1892 as too expensive and difficult, but the rail tunnel was revived in 1902 as a pair of tunnels, which was completed in 1908–1909.1 About the same time, in the period of 1904 to 1910, the Pennsylvania Railroad built two tunnels for passenger trains—a double one under the Hudson River and a quadruple one under the East River. Because the trains ran on electricity, the tunnels could get by with natural air circulation; there Introduction I was no danger from lethal carbon monoxide. Both sets of tunnels ran to the Thirty-fourth Street location of Pennsylvania Station, then one of the great monuments of classical architecture in the United States, a copy of the baths built by the Emperor Caracalla in the third century a.d.2 The focus of this book, however, is not on rail tunnels but instead on the following generation of tunnels underneath the Hudson—those devoted to motor vehicles. The Pennsylvania Railroad completed its double electrified tunnel under the Hudson River in 1906. In the very same year, Henry Ford was secretly starting plans to build his Model T in Detroit, a development that would lead to a revolution in transportation. The first cars were delivered to customers on October 1, 1908. In that year, over 10,000 were sold. Demand was so heavy that Ford was forced to build a new and bigger factory in 1909. Production increased from 19,000 units in 1910 to 34,500 units in 1911 to an amazing 78,440 in 1912. Then sales records were shattered in 1913 when the company mass-produced 248,000 units. By 1914, the Model T, with its assembly line production, dominated the market.3 The inexpensive automobile placed motor transportation within reach of the average American. This near-universal ownership whetted the regional demand for a trans-Hudson crossing. The automobile was changing the material culture pattern of the region, and sure enough, in 1919 the states of New York and New Jersey signed an agreement to build what became the world’s first successful underwater vehicular tunnel. Today, the island of Manhattan is linked to the mainland all the way around with a network of bridges and tunnels. For the most part, the bridges get the glory and the tunnels are taken for granted. Tunnels simply do not have the stately majesty of high-arching bridges that reach to the clouds. While bridges soar, tunnels burrow. While we admire bridges as objects of beauty, we are interested in tunnels as artifacts of technology—and unattractive ones at best. It seems that human beings have always feared the places under the earth. Nearly every world culture has a myth of the underworld, a place of damnation or banishment. A cursory survey of Western literature shows many versions of some sort of hell far beneath the earth. We can begin with Virgil, born in 70 b.c.e., where protagonist descends to the Netherworld in Book VI of the Aeneid. We can continue, thirteen centuries later, with Dante’s Inferno, depicting a place where one could expect no pity. In modern literature, we find tunnels used as images of death, destruction, and fear. Given a choice, most people prefer bridges to tunnels. After all, a tunnel is a hole in...