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B y most accounts, conditions in America during the late 1920s were about as good as they’d ever been, and it was hard for most people to accept the idea that things might not always be that way. World War I had ended about a decade earlier, new businesses were starting almost everywhere, and decent jobs were abundant. The automobile was beginning to provide families a mobility that promised to broaden their housing and employment options and enrich their lives. Along the lower Hudson, the Bear Mountain Bridge was up and running, the Holland Tunnel had just been completed, the George Washington Bridge was under construction, and planning had been started for building a second tunnel between New York and New Jersey. The proprietor of the ferry that had been operating between Tarrytown and Nyack for almost a hundred years is unlikely to have shared in all that optimistic thinking. Positioned about eighteen miles north of the George Washington Bridge and about as many miles south of the Bear Mountain Bridge, he hadn’t yet lost a signiWcant amount of ferry traªc to either of those new crossings. But he had recently been hearing and reading about a growing movement to build still another bridge, and this one was going to cross the river between Rockland County, on the west bank of the Hudson , and Westchester County, on the east bank. Such a bridge would be right on his doorstep, and it could reasonably have been a source of concern to him. As things would later play out, it should have been. In the 1920s support for such a bridge was limited. Rockland County was still largely rural and sparsely settled, and although many of its agricultural products were being trucked to New York, the George Washington c hap ter 11  The Tappan Zee Bridge 177 Bridge provided all the access it needed. Westchester was growing, but its interests lay mainly south, in New York, and there wasn’t yet much justiWcation or enthusiasm for a bridge to Rockland. But by the early 1930s, despite the depressed state of the economy, voices favoring such a bridge were becoming louder. A Rockland County legislator named Ferdinand Horn rallied some support for a bridge between Piermont and Irvington, across a reach of the river only a short distance south of the Nyack-Tarrytown line, and in 1932 he introduced (but failed to get ratiWcation for) a bill to authorize its construction. A few years of debate followed, and by 1935 the legislature had become convinced of the idea’s merit and established the Rockland-Westchester Bridge Authority. For the Wrst time, a bridge between the counties of Rockland and Westchester began to look like a real possibility.1 Such modestly increasing support, combined with a measure of legislative approval, brought out the opposition in force for the Wrst time. But before its leaders were able to organize much resistance, the bridge had become a casualty without their help. It was revealed that the bistate agreement that back in 1921 had established the Port of New York Authority (later called the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) had conferred on that agency exclusive responsibility for building and operating all Hudson River bridges and tunnels south of a line drawn between Nyack and Tarrytown. The simple truth was that no one but the Port Authority could build a bridge between Piermont and Irvington. That was bad news for the bridge supporters, who didn’t have anything against the Port Authority but were loath to lose control of the revenues they expected from their bridge. The rule was in fact entirely reasonable. It had been designed to prevent private-sector speculators and others from building bridges or tunnels that would compete for revenues with (and undermine the economic stability of ) what the Port Authority expected to be building. That bad news about crossing at Piermont didn’t stop the bridge boosters . They regrouped and renewed their campaign with a proposal to build north of the restricted zone instead, and late in 1935 they replaced the Wrst bridge authority with the Tarrytown-Nyack Bridge Authority and engaged engineers to do preliminary studies and take borings along a route that would directly connect those two towns. The opposition didn’t quit, either, and it was able to maintain a high proWle in the press and elsewhere with continuing anti-bridge pronouncements from local historical societies, 178 crossing the hudson [18.119.107.161...

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