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B y the beginning of the twentieth century, bridge building on the Hudson River had shut down for a while. The crossings that had started with a modest wooden span at Waterford in 1804 had by the early 1890s become a series of bridges that laced together the banks of the upper and middle sections of the river, expanding commerce and increasing prosperity in much of the Hudson Valley. But since completion of the bridge at Poughkeepsie in 1888 there had been signs that the engine that had been driving almost a century of bridge building might have run out of steam. The motivation behind almost all the bridges that had been built was the need to carry railroads across the river. Once that need had been met at Poughkeepsie, investors just didn’t see any promising places for new bridges anywhere between there and New York City. Not that there hadn’t been plenty of growth and development along that approximately seventy- five miles of river between Poughkeepsie and New York, but the need to get across anywhere along that stretch was essentially a local one that was being e¤ectively met by well-established ferry systems.1 Between the new bridge at Poughkeepsie and the northern boundary of New York City, there wasn’t a single place where railroads had reached the water’s edge (or were planning to reach it) and were looking for a way to get across. The picture was radically di¤erent along the stretch of river that separates New Jersey from New York. New York City had grown explosively. By the late nineteenth century, having absorbed the neighboring city of Brooklyn, it was home to a population of about 3.4 million, up from about 1 million only twenty-five years earlier and more than ten times the combined populations c hap ter 5  The Railroad Tunnels 72 of all the upriver towns where bridges had already been built.2 By the turn of the twentieth century, it had become the largest and most important city on the continent, a center of domestic and international trade, finance, manufacturing, science, and publishing, awash in theaters and new museums and rich in talent. By then, New York was developing and manufacturing much of what the rest of the country would need to move into the new century, and it was doing some of it in buildings that had elevators and telephones. Everything was very much up to date in New York, but no one had yet built a bridge across the Hudson to New Jersey. That certainly wasn’t because there were no railroads positioned to cross the river at New York. The Hudson River coast of New Jersey was almost always crowded with long trains that had brought passengers and freight from all over the country but were prevented from continuing on into or beyond New York by the impossibility of crossing the river. There were ten of those big railroads, including such giants as the Pennsylvania, the Lackawanna, and the Erie, but for the most part their managements accepted with apparent contentment an arrangement that allowed their huge, eastbound trains to travel only as far as the ornate rail and ferry terminals that lined the Jersey shore of the Hudson. There, passengers and freight transferred to ferryboats that took everyone and every thing across the river. That same fleet of ferryboats then brought back westbound passengers and freight for transfer to westbound trains in New Jersey. It was an archaic system that was years behind the times; inherently slow and inconvenient, it was characterized by often rough and sometimes dangerous trips across the river and by a low degree of reliability that is not surprising where ice, fog, wind, and other natural enemies of modern marine transportation can wreak havoc with schedules. But for the most part it was a system that was accepted by the traveling public without much protest. The elegant terminals and most of the ferries were owned or controlled by the railroads themselves. Given the high level of popular acceptance and the profitability of the system, there was little incentive to find a better way. That complacency didn’t discourage everyone, however, and ideas for alternative approaches had been surfacing fairly regularly over the course of the nineteenth century, ever since John Stevens had proposed his muchmaligned pontoon bridge back in 1805. But the problem was far from simple . The river was over a mile wide at New...

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