On this day in New York · November 13, 1927
The Holland Tunnel Opens Under the Hudson
At one minute past midnight, New York and New Jersey stopped needing a boat to shake hands.
The facts
- Opened
- 12:01 a.m., November 13, 1927 (ceremonially opened the afternoon before, November 12)
- Length
- North tube 8,558 feet (2,608 m); south tube 8,371 feet (2,551 m)
- Cost
- About $48 million in 1927 dollars
- First-day traffic
- 52,285 vehicles, each paying a 50-cent toll
The Holland Tunnel opened to vehicular traffic at 12:01 a.m. on November 13, 1927, after seven years of digging beneath the Hudson River to link Canal Street in Manhattan with Jersey City. It was the world's first tunnel built specifically for cars, and the first anywhere with mechanical ventilation strong enough to clear exhaust fumes from two tubes running more than 8,000 feet each. The man it's named for, chief engineer Clifford Milburn Holland, never got to drive through it: he died of a heart attack in 1924, three years before it opened, and the job of finishing the ventilation system fell to engineer Ole Singstad. On opening day, a Sunday, 52,285 vehicles rolled through, already blowing past what planners thought was the tunnel's ceiling.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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President Coolidge ceremonially opened the tunnel from his yacht by tapping the same telegraph key that had opened the Panama Canal in 1915
Describing the November 12, 1927 opening ceremony
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
The Holland Tunnel proved you could put thousands of gasoline engines under a river and keep the air breathable, a fix that made every underwater vehicle tunnel built since possible, from the Lincoln Tunnel to the Bay Area's. It's also the reason a New Yorker can still drive to Jersey City without touching a ferry.
Sources
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