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W hen Frederick Tench and the Harrimans had those first conversations about the Bear Mountain Bridge, they weren’t the only ones who had noticed that the automobile and the motor truck were transforming life in America, and they weren’t even the first. In New York, where rail traªc in the McAdoo and Pennsylvania tunnels was already exceeding expectations and ferryboats were carrying about six million vehicles across the river every year, the car and the truck had already begun to make their impact known in no uncertain terms. Henry Ford had produced almost fifteen million cars by then, times were good, and the emerging concept of installment purchasing was bringing the automobile within reach of the working family. Trucks along the New York waterfront were lining up for hours, waiting to be loaded or unloaded. The federal government had passed a national highway funding bill, so new roads would soon encourage people to move out to the suburbs and drive to work, and Jersey farmers would send their products into New York by motor truck. All anyone needed, it seemed, was a way to get all those cars and trucks into and out of New York without having to rely on the ferries. By 1913 New York and New Jersey were well past the question of whether or not they needed to build something. Instead, they were focusing on just what to build and where to build it. A bridge was clearly an attractive option, one that had been given a good deal of attention, but by 1913 the idea of a vehicle tunnel had been gathering support, too, encouraged by reports of successful tunnels in London, Glasgow, and Hamburg. To explore the matter, New York and New Jersey each established its own interstate bridge and tunnel commission. 106 c hap ter 7  The Holland and Lincoln Tunnels The bridge boosters had been at their task for a long time and maintained a comfortable lead in the competition for public support, although that gap had begun to narrow a little as the arguments of the tunnel boosters gained a wider audience. Still, the bridge case was strong, and there was no scarcity of designs. That challenge had been around for a long time and had attracted the attention of more than a few prominent engineers. As early as 1893, Union Bridge Company, builders of the much-admired Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge, had been in the hunt, o¤ering a design for a cantilever bridge to be located at Seventieth Street. The following year an exceptionally well-qualified board of engineers appointed by President Grover Cleveland produced a report that endorsed the feasibility of a cantilevered span as long as 3,100 feet. But the board ended up recommending a suspension bridge instead and proposed that it be built somewhere between Fifty-ninth Street and Sixty-ninth Street. Two years later George Morison, who had been a member of the board, presented his own design for such a bridge. An erudite, Harvard-educated bachelor who read Latin and Greek and had studied law before devoting himself to civil engineering , Morison had compelling credentials as the builder of railroad bridges across the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Ohio. Any design he proposed would be diªcult to ignore.1 Another bridge design presented in 1913 was the work of the eminent Gustav Lindenthal. Over the course of a long career, he had done a great deal of important work on bridges in New York and elsewhere without ever abandoning his passionate advocacy for the one he had first proposed to the Pennsylvania Railroad back in 1888. That structure, originally designed to bring all the railroads across the river at Twenty-third Street, had been compared by Scientific American with the pyramids of Egypt for its monumentality . Later, it would be modified for construction farther north, at Fifty-seventh Street, and would evolve into an even more ambitious concept that included eight sets of railroad tracks and two conveyor platforms on its lower level and four additional sets of tracks, six lanes of vehicle traªc, and two sidewalks on its upper level. By the time his Hudson River bridge was being considered as an alternative to the vehicle tunnels, Lindenthal had recovered (as much as he would ever recover) from the Pennsylvania’s 1902 decision to reject his bridge in favor of building its own tunnels, and he had busied himself ever since with other important work...

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