New York City’s bridges receive heaps of well-deserved praise. They’re elegant, soaring structures that thread the city together with steel and lend a sense of romance and beauty.
Gotham’s tunnels? Not so much. These narrow passageways connect the city as well—except they do it buried in the silt of a riverbed in poorly lit tubes that can turn into parking lots at rush hour.
But with a birthday coming up, it’s time to give one specific tunnel its due.
December 22 marks the 88th anniversary of the opening of the first tube of the Lincoln Tunnel. Reaching 97 feet under the Hudson River, this crucial artery was rightly honored with speeches, a military parade, and commemorative medals during a dedication ceremony at the Hotel Astor.
The Lincoln Tunnel wasn’t the first to lace Manhattan and New Jersey, of course. The Holland Tunnel opened 10 years earlier and several miles to the south in 1927.
But what was called the Midtown Hudson Tunnel had already been proposed. Delayed by the Depression, construction of the first tube, designed to run 1.5 miles, began in 1934 thanks to a Public Works Administration loan.
The success of the Holland Tunnel helped guide the engineers working on what would later be renamed the Lincoln Tunnel. But building it still posed many challenges, particularly to the lives of the sandhogs who did the hard labor. Compression sickness was a constant threat.
To get to work, sandhogs had to descend under the river very carefully. “Crews entered air locks, one at a time, after which the doors at each end were sealed,” explains the website for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the tunnel.
“An air pipe started hissing, and the men’s ears would pop as the air pressure climbed until it equaled that of the adjoining lock. The workers were then able to safely open the connecting door and crowd into the next section, where the entire ordeal would be repeated.”
“While one crew worked from the Jersey side, another proceeded toward them from the New York side,” continued the Port Authority website. “The first ‘hole through’ was achieved on August 3, 1935, when a hydraulic engineer in the New Jersey end was pushed by his feet through an opening to meet the New York crew.”
Since its 1937 debut (above), the original tube was joined by two more in 1945 and 1957 respectively. The toll for a car to travel to New York in the 1930s? Fifty cents.
For that price tunnelers were treated to an Art Deco entrance that symbolized the might and power of the modern era. The same entrance still exists on the Weehawken side, but the toll to enter is considerably higher—upwards of $16.
Besides the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, New York City now has the Queens Midtown Tunnel and the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, in additional to several tunnels reserved for subway and commuter trains. The engineering breakthroughs and labor of thousands of workers making these crossings possible are often taken for granted.
One curious relic of New York City’s tunnels comes from images like the one below, which shows a Port Authority policeman patrolling the Lincoln Tunnel in a toy-like vehicle from the elevated side rail in the 1960s.
They were known as “catwalk cars,” according to auto website The Drive, first used by officers to patrol the Holland Tunnel in 1954. Four years later, similar catwalk cars were introduced to the Lincoln Tunnel.
Propelled by an 8-horsepower engine and balanced on a single wheel, the catwalk cars could hit 35 miles per hour. The last of these lilliputian novelties was taken out of service in 2011, according to a New York Times article.
I would have thought they were decommissioned earlier. In my entire life of thousands of Lincoln Tunnel crossings, I’d never seen one in use!
But back to the building of the tunnel. This 20-minute promotional video put together by the Port Authority in 1937 tells its story with lots of fascinating footage and visuals.
[Top image: Port Authority website; second photo: Wikipedia; third image: MCNY, X2011.34.3753; fourth image: Port Authority Portfolio; fifth image: NYPL Digital Collections; sixth image: Associated Press/Anthony Camerano via The Drive]
Tags:Building the Lincoln Tunnel, Catwalk Cars Lincoln Tunnel, Lincoln Tunnel Entrance Art Deco, Lincoln Tunnel History, New York City Tunnels History, Sandhogs Lincoln Tunnel, Story of the Lincoln Tunnel NYC
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