The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America's First Superhighway
290
The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America's First Superhighway
290eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
In the 1930s, as America’s love affair with the automobile began, cars and trucks leaving the nation’s largest city were dumped out of the Holland Tunnel onto local roads winding through New Jersey swampland. The Pulaski Skyway, America’s first “superhighway,” would change all that by connecting the hub of New York City to the rest of the country. But the corrupt and violent path to its completion would change much more for Jersey City’s residents and labor unions.
Jersey City mayor Frank Hague—dictator of the Hudson County political machine and a national political player—was a prime mover behind the ambitious transit project. Hague’s nemesis in this undertaking was union boss Teddy Brandle. Construction of the last three miles of the Pulaski Skyway, then simply known as Route 25, marked an epic battle between big labor and big politics, culminating in a murder and the creation of a motorway so flawed it soon became known as “Death Avenue”—appropriately featured in the opening sequence of HBO’s hit series The Sopranos.
A book in the tradition of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker and Henry Petroski’s Engineers of Dreams, The Last Three Miles brings to vivid life a riveting and bloodstained chapter in the heroic age of public works.
“A revealing look into how local politics can affect the design and construction of our national infrastructure, sometimes with disastrous results. Hart uses his considerable narrative talent to tell an engaging human story about what might seem otherwise to be but an enormous black steel structure.” —Henry Petroski, author of Engineers of Dreams and Success Through Failure
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781595587480 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New Press, The |
| Publication date: | 07/19/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 290 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Three Barriers
We should have a right to ask that this people which has tamed a continent, which has built up a country with a continent for its base, which boasts itself with truth as the mightiest Republic the world has ever seen ... we should have a right to demand that such a nation build good roads.
— President Theodore Roosevelt (1903)
Early in the afternoon of October 29, 1924, the shock wave from a dynamite explosion rippled through the silt and rock at the bottom of the Hudson River. Two crews, tunneling from the opposite banks — Canal Street in Manhattan and the Erie Railroad yards in Jersey City — had come within a few feet of each other after two years of labor beneath the river. The final blast cleared away the remaining rock and muck, and suddenly it was possible to walk from New York to New Jersey.
The foremen of the two crews also happened to be brothers: Harry Redwood of the New York crew, and Norman Redwood of the New Jersey work gang. They reached through the five-foot hole to clasp hands, grinning broadly, a hundred feet below the surface of the river.
Two years later, another handshake took place at the midway point beneath the river. The men clasping hands were the governors of the states linked by the tunnel, and on either side of them stood the commissioners appointed by New York and New Jersey to oversee the tunnel project. The photo session was the climax of an August 21, 1926, inspection tour in which the dignitaries walked along a passage now lined with tiles, paved, fully lighted, and ventilated by an innovative system of air shafts and blowers that would keep the tunnel clear of exhaust fumes from the steady flow of cars and trucks.
The men — all looking dapper in suits and high collars, most clutching fashionable Panama hats — arrayed themselves on either side of the mosaic tile boundary where New York theoretically meets New Jersey. Alfred E. Smith, serving his second term as the governor of New York, reached across the line to clasp hands with A. Harry Moore, likewise serving his second term as governor of New Jersey.
The two Democrats were also brothers of a sort in that they were products of political machines. Al Smith was a son of Tammany Hall, the New York Democratic club that took its name from a Delaware Indian chief and styled its officers as sachems and braves. A. Harry Moore was from Tammany's mirror image across the river: the Hudson County machine controlled by Jersey City mayor Frank Hague. A close friend of Smith, Hague would work for many years to acquire some of the easygoing style that came so naturally to the "Happy Warrior" of Tammany Hall.
The Holland Tunnel opened to cars and trucks at midnight on November 12–13, 1927. The weekend of the opening set off orgies of civic boosterism on either side of the tunnel. On the evening of Saturday, November 12, the tunnel was opened to pedestrians for two hours, during which time a pageant of civic leaders, area residents, and even a couple of marching bands ranged back and forth along the echoing passage. At 7 p.m. the tunnel was closed to foot traffic, and the Jersey City spectators headed to a fireworks show up the hill from the tunnel entrance.
The first fifty-cent toll was paid at midnight by Brigadier General George R. Dyer, chairman of the New York State Bridge and Tunnel Commission. A total of 51,748 vehicles passed through the tunnel on its first day. The Hudson River crossing, a passage that could take a half hour or longer by ferry, could now be accomplished in minutes.
But automobiles, having crossed one barrier, met a second as soon as they arrived in Jersey City and tried to head west: a tangle of narrow, traffic-clogged local roads, and a vast swamp beyond it. Cars and trucks bound for points west headed up the slope of Bergen Hill to Hudson Boulevard, the long avenue that ran along the spine of Hudson County. From there, they joined the lines of cars and horse-drawn carts working their way along Communipaw Avenue and the frequently opened drawbridges spanning the Hackensack and Passaic rivers. Even after 1930, when the inauguration of the H. Otto Wittpenn Bridge across the Hackensack River afforded some measure of relief, it could take westbound drivers as long as three hours to reach Newark — a distance of only four miles. In what would become the enduring theme of the automobile age, increased capacity in one area had created a bottleneck in another.
The bulk of Hudson County presents itself on maps as an irregular spear of land pointing at a slight southwest angle. It is bounded on the east by the Hudson River as it flows into Upper New York Bay; on the south by the narrow waterway called Kill Van Kull and Staten Island; and on the west by Newark Bay and the southern extreme of the Meadowlands, the huge swamp that has given New Yorkers (and hence the rest of the world) the image of New Jersey as a toxic marshland.
Jersey City dominates the center of the key-shaped peninsula; Bayonne occupies the extreme southern tip. North of Jersey City, the county becomes a patchwork of smaller cities: Hoboken, Union City, Weehawken, North Bergen, and West New York. The western portion of Hudson County extends into the Meadowlands proper to encompass Secaucus and Kearny.
A crow flapping due west from Battery Park in lower Manhattan would fly first over the Hudson River and the upper reaches of New York Bay, then the shoreline of Jersey City and the low trap rock ridge dubbed Bergen Hill by the early Dutch settlers — bergen being the Dutch word for a safe place — and now known to Jersey City residents as the Heights. That hill continues to the north, rising to join the spectacular Palisades.
Crossing Bergen Hill, the crow would pass over the Hackensack River, which meanders at a southwestern angle toward Newark Bay, and then the Passaic River, similarly meandering along a southeastern course to the same destination. The crow would then reach the northern end of Newark and the suburbs of Kearny and North Arlington, where an eight-mile-long ridge defines the western rim of the Meadowlands.
The thirty-two-square-mile basin of the Meadowlands, which tapers to a point at the head of Newark Bay, was viewed alternately as a garbage dump by New York City and the developing communities of northern New Jersey, and as a hindrance to travel. Its ponds bred clouds of mosquitoes so voracious that during the Colonial era, local farmers would punish disobedient slaves by leaving them chained in the open overnight. Travelers from New York in the 1700s often paused a few days in Newark so their horses could "blood up" after enduring the insect assault on the dirt roads crossing the area.
It was time-consuming but not impossible to cross the Meadowlands. Coaches crisscrossed the Meadowlands between "stages," stopping-off points where passengers would board a new coach with a fresh team of horses. One of the oldest roads in the country crosses the swamp, linking Paterson and Hoboken, and still bears the name of its original surface material: Paterson Plank Road. But the pace of travel across the marshes picked up only in the nineteenth century, when railroad tracks and trolley lines were cut through the creeks and quagmires. The western bank of the Hudson River — what would come to be known as the "gold coast" — bristled with ferry slips and railroad terminals. By the end of the nineteenth century, the waters of the Hudson River and Upper New York Bay were a riot of lighters, cargo ships, and tugboats, roiled by the occasional ocean liner or military vessel. The density of cross-river traffic was about to reach critical mass concurrent with the arrival of a noisy, sputtering technological interloper that seemed to inspire equal measures of love and hatred — another recurring theme of the automobile age.
It seems strange now, but the unbreakable union of Americans and automobiles was not a case of love at first sight.
The first cars were unlovely things: loud, smelly, demanding to operate, and difficult to keep going once they were started. Drivers went out muffled in hats, goggles, and travel clothes; as often as not they returned mummified in mud and road dust. The engine noise frightened horses and aggravated anyone else using the road. Cars were regularly denounced as dangerous toys for people with too much money. The sight of a goggled motorist clattering down the street was "a picture of the arrogance of wealth," groused Woodrow Wilson in 1908, while he was president of Princeton University. "Nothing has spread socialistic feeling more in this country than the automobile."
Henry Ford, with his aggressive pricing strategies and standardized designs, is rightly credited with putting cars within the reach of the middle class. Ford's company was not the first automobile firm in the United States: that position is held by the Duryea Motor Wagon Company of Peoria, Illinois, launched in 1895 by Charles Duryea. But Ford's endless tinkering produced the first popular mass-market car: the Model T, first marketed late in 1908. Yet the Model T still required a degree of athleticism to operate: the driver had to hand-crank the engine from the front, then leap behind the steering wheel to manipulate the choke. During cranking, the engine could backfire with enough force to break the operator's wrist; if the car stalled, the whole routine had to be repeated. This was only the beginning of the Model T's eccentricities, which seem to have inspired as much affection as exasperation, and called forth great wellsprings of ingenuity from its owners. Celebrations of the Model T and its quirks are a lively subgenre of American literature, highlighted by E. B. White's 1936 essay "Farewell to Model T" and an amusing chapter of John Steinbeck's 1945 novel Cannery Row, in which a driver solves a technical challenge by completing a ride through the countryside in reverse gear.
It remained for Charles F. Kettering to design the first reliable self-starter, which appeared in the Cadillac in 1912. Demountable rim- and cord-tires followed, making it easier to change flat tires and making a car trip that much less of an adventure.
But the car truly began to transform America when enclosed vehicles became affordable. Enclosed cars, which provided shelter from the elements and privacy for young couples, accounted for only 2 percent of the vehicles sold in 1916; ten years later, they accounted for three-quarters of all sales.
The love affair had begun. And, as with most love affairs, one of the involved parties soon felt the need for a makeover. That makeover would take the form of ribbons of asphalt crisscrossing the countryside.
Cars were fixtures of the twentieth century, but America's roads remained fixed in the nineteenth. Most of them were unpaved dirt lanes: dusty when the weather was dry, quagmires when it rained. During the first decades of car use, drivers routinely packed a small arsenal of tools to carry out roadside repairs.
No national system of roads existed. An abortive bid to create one started when President Thomas Jefferson inveigled Congress into passing the Enabling Act of 1802, which authorized an east–west route from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, West Virginia — a thoroughfare that would be called the National Road. Subsequent presidents took widely divergent views on whether states or the federal government should pay for such improvements. James Monroe vetoed funds to improve the National Road; his successor, John Quincy Adams, restored the funding. Andrew Jackson opposed all such measures, arguing that states should shoulder the costs. By 1850, the National Road — which by then theoretically extended all the way to Indianapolis — was so degraded that settlers were planting crops and building houses in its right-of-way. The railroads had started winding the countryside in bands of steel, and any thoughts of coordinated road building fell by the wayside. The railroad network grew from about nine thousand track miles in 1850 to nearly two hundred thousand by the turn of the century. America's rail system was world-class, but its road infrastructure was frequently compared, unfavorably, to those of barely developed nations.
Even so, there were doughty souls ready to use their primitive automobiles to live out the all-American fantasy of a cross-country road trip. In 1903, a Vermont physician named H. Nelson Jackson accepted a bet of fifty dollars to prove that he could drive from San Francisco to New York. He set out on May 23 with a hired mechanic, Sewell K. Croker, and a twoseat open-top Winton purchased on Croker's recommendation. They arrived in New York on July 26, accompanied by a stray bulldog they had picked up in Idaho and named Bud. (He was given his own set of goggles to protect his eyes from road dust.) Of the sixty-five days it had taken them to cross the sixthousand-mile route, a total of about three weeks had been taken up by stops for repairs, rest breaks, and long waits for the arrival of replacement parts.
Such cross-country feats required a combination of experience, patience, clairvoyance, and simple dumb luck. Local roads tended to radiate outward from railroad stops, providing links for farmers to get their produce and stock to market but offering no direct path for anyone passing through. Even when roads were improved with gravel, macadam, or wooden planks, it was not uncommon for such niceties to end abruptly at county and state lines. It was also not unheard of for a property owner to put a fence across a road that ran through or along his land. Litigation over roads and the responsibility for their upkeep is a major part of the American historical record. Even when a slightly more orderly system of taxes was created to fund the maintenance of local roads, the question of which roads to improve became a political issue, particularly in New Jersey, where political disputes are the very stuff of life. Whole towns voted themselves into existence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because of disputes over roadmaintenance funds and how to use them.
The renewed push for a better system of roads came not from car owners, but from bicyclists. The passion for bicycle riding had grown during the late nineteenth century, and by the 1890s roughly four million Americans owned bicycles. They didn't much like muddy roads, and since bicycling was a pastime of the middle and upper classes, their complaints tended to find sympathetic ears in government. One national cyclists club, the League of American Wheelmen, evolved into a pressure group for road improvements: the name of its in-house publication, Good Roads, became the banner for the growing national movement.
The rise of the "Good Roads" movement paralleled interest at the federal level. The year 1893 saw the launch of the Office of Road Inquiry, a precursor to the Federal Highway Administration, which sought to build public support by demonstrating how paved roads could be maintained far more cheaply than unimproved dirt tracks. The first such "object lesson road" was built by the ORI in June 1897, at the entrance to the New Jersey Agricultural College and Experiment Station at New Brunswick, New Jersey (later to become part of Rutgers University). The ORI's man in the field, General E. G. Harrison of Asbury Park, New Jersey, applied six inches of ground traprock, or macadam, to a 660-foot section of the main road running from the city center to the college farm. States followed suit with their own road agencies, goosed along by the Post Office Appropriations Act of 1912, which allocated funds to improve roads for rural free delivery routes, and the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, which required that states have an official highway department, staffed with qualified engineers, in order to receive federal money for public road projects.
All the while, the role of the automobile continued to expand in America. By 1912, roughly 180,000 registered automobiles were registered in the country. Affiliated industries — service stations and other car-related businesses — were taking shape. Private companies were interested in using motorized trucks to haul goods. It was inevitable that drivers would begin dreaming of a transnational highway.
One such dreamer was Carl Graham Fisher, athlete, entrepreneur, and owner of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which he had paved with bricks in 1911 to improve the driving surface for an annual race he dubbed the Indianapolis 500. A man with a nose for publicity stunts and hype — he had once tied a Stoddard-Dayton automobile to a hot-air balloon and lofted it across Indianapolis — Graham enlisted automobile manufacturers in his plan to promote what he called the Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway. Henry Joy, president of the Packard Motor Car Company, and Goodyear president Frank Seiberling pledged money to the project, which Graham hoped to see finished in time for the Pan-American Exposition of 1915. That timetable was scotched when Henry Ford refused to participate — he felt taxpayers would never fund road projects if they thought private industry would carry the burden — but the trio continued to lobby Congress for help in realizing the road, which they dubbed the Lincoln Highway.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Last Three Miles"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Steven Hart.
Excerpted by permission of The New Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Dedication,
Introduction,
CHAPTER 1 - The Three Barriers,
CHAPTER 2 - The Horseshoe Against the World,
CHAPTER 3 - The Slanted Road,
CHAPTER 4 - Rice Pudding,
CHAPTER 5 - Burned Bridges,
CHAPTER 6 - The War of the Meadows,
CHAPTER 7 - High, Wide, and Handsome,
CHAPTER 8 - The Nightstick Must Prevail,
CHAPTER 9 - Death Avenue,
CHAPTER 10 - Steel and Ghosts,
Acknowledgments,
NOTES,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
INDEX,
Copyright Page,