What major New York City feat of engineering opened eighty-one years ago today?
Hint: the ceremony involved President Calvin Coolidge and a golden lever which parted American flags on either end. (Answer after the jump.)
THE HOLLAND TUNNEL
The Holland Tunnel was the first vehicular tunnel to connect Manhattan and New Jersey. (Two tunnels built for the Pennsylvania Railroad completed over a decade earlier demonstrated that tunneling beneath the Hudson River was possible.) Digging began at Canal and West Streets in 1922 for what was then called the Hudson River Vehicular Tunnel Project. Quite a mouthful.
Despite the city's Dutch history, the name of the tunnel does not come from the Netherlands but from the name of the chief engineer who designed the two tubes that carried traffic in opposite directions. Clifford Holland died of a heart attack the day before the two halves of the tunnel were connected in 1924. He was only forty-one years old.
His first successor died the following year from pneumonia, but his second successor, Ole Singstad, brought the work through completion and was responsible for designing the ventilation shafts that make the Holland Tunnel so revolutionary. There had never been an underwater vehicular tunnel of this length and some kind of system was required to pump out the carbon monoxide and pump in the fresh air; otherwise, the daily traffic jams resulting from hundreds of asphyxiated drivers would have been unbearable.
One more bit of trivia: After a day of pedestrian-only traffic, the first vehicle to pass through the tunnel was a delivery truck bound for Bloomingdale's.
One last bit of trivia: One of the ventilation shafts for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, the longest underwater tunnel in the United States, was used as the headquarters in the Men in Black movies.
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