Finally, he dies on this side of his Jordan River. Others are left to complete the dream. That's also how it was with the Holland Tunnel. In the Island of Manhattan, its population mushrooming, found it harder and harder to bring in supplies. After thirteen years of discussion, the young civil engineer Clifford Holland was given the job of drilling a highway tunnel under the Hudson River.
He began drilling two parallel thirty-foot-diameter tunnels, almost two miles long, under the Hudson River. But now such a tunnel faced a problem no earlier tunnel had ever faced. The automobile had come into its own.
This tunnel would have to carry forty thousand trucks and cars each day. Huge quantities of carbon monoxide gas had to be cleared out. Holland's great contribution would necessarily be a wholly new ventilation system to flush out exhaust gases.
His system was gargantuan. Forty-two fans, each eighty feet in diameter, replaced four million cubic feet of fresh air per minute. If all that air had been pumped in from the ends, it would've blasted through the tunnel at seventy-five miles per hour. To get around that problem, Holland pumped fresh air down a service tube below the tunnel. He scavenged bad air out through a second tube paralleling the tunnel from above. Electric motors with an output of 6, horsepower are needed to drive all of the fans at once, although the tunnel normally operates with some of the ventilation fans shut off and held in reserve.
Construction of the project, then known as the Hudson River Vehicular Tunnel, officially began with a groundbreaking ceremony on March 31, at the foot of Canal Street in Manhattan. The tunnel was dug out from beneath the riverbed using six shields, each of which was a large cylinder driven by 30 hydraulic jacks with a total force of 6, tons 5, t. Compressed air was used to pressurize interior of shield to keep out the water and muck; after segments of the tunnel are excavated, 2.
Five years into the project, chief engineer Clifford Holland suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of the tremendous stress demanded by the work, having spent long hours working at this desk and in the compressed air of the tubes. He was sent to a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan for rest but died of heart disease on October 27, at the age of His death occurred just two days before the tunnel was to be holed through, and the celebration that had been planned was canceled in respect for the chief engineer.
The two ends of the tubes from New York and New Jersey were joined together without fanfare, even though Holland's mathematical calculations led them to meeting within a fraction of an inch 1 cm of each other.
Following his death in October , President John P. The official proclamation issued by the commissions read as follows:. Following Clifford Holland's death, Milton H. Freeman took over as chief engineer of the Holland Tunnel but fell ill of acute pneumonia and died on March 24, He was succeeded by Ole Singstad, who oversaw construction of the Holland Tunnel for the next two and a half years until its completion.
The Holland Tunnel formally opened on the afternoon of November 12, when President Calvin Coolidge used a golden telegraph key from his yacht in the Potomac River to part two large American flags draped over the entrances to the tunnel the same key that was used to explode the final charge on the Panama Canal. Twenty thousand people walked through the tunnel during a two-hour period and viewed the engineering marvel before it was opened to vehicles at midnight.
The New York entrance plaza was named Freeman Square in memory of the tunnel's second chief engineer. A total of 5, feet 1, m of the tunnel's length is located underwater at a maximum depth of The Holland Tunnel relieved traffic strains on ferries crossing the Hudson River, which previously required a transit time of 18 minutes and sometimes required motorists to wait on line for hours.
John's Park Terminal , was demolished, and a new circular roadway was created in the city block bounded by Laight, Varick, Beach and Hudson Streets for traffic exiting the eastbound tube in Manhattan. Renovations to the rotary, which included adding a fifth exit, were completed in Originally used as the toll plazas for New Jersey-bound traffic, the small triangular patches of land at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel entrance had become fenced off by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
In , the Hudson Square Connection, the business improvement district for the area, collaborated with the Port Authority to open Freeman Plaza West to the public. It features umbrellas, bistro tables and chairs, and tree plantings.
In , the Hudson Square Connection added solar powered charging stations to both plazas, and introduced a summer lunchtime music series, called live lunch. For centuries, passage across the lower Hudson River was possible only by ferry. The Pennsylvania Railroad's twin tunnels, constructed to serve the new Pennsylvania Station , soon followed.
Once tunneling had been shown to be feasible, increasing automobile traffic led to interest in a roadway crossing the river as well. The concept for what would become the Holland Tunnel was developed in by a joint commission between New York and New Jersey.
The commission initially considered building a bridge for cost reasons, but this plan was abandoned in favor of a tunnel in when it was determined that the cost of land for accessways to a suitably raised bridge would be prohibitive as a height of ft 60 m was considered the minimum necessary to avoid interfering with shipping.
Over the next several years, a number of design proposals were evaluated for the new tunnel. The first two called for a single tube containing two levels of traffic. One, authored by engineer George Goethals specified that traffic on each level would travel in a different direction. The other, by the firm Jacobs and Davies, called for a slightly different tube diameter, with an "express" level and a level for slower traffic.
Both designs were eventually passed over in favor of a new type of design proposed by engineer Clifford Milburn Holland, in which two separate tubes would each contain two lanes both going in the same direction. Holland's proposal was adopted, and he was named Chief Engineer of the project. Promotional materials compared the diameter and capacity of the proposed tunnel with the smaller-diameter railroad tunnels.
Construction began on March 31, , with a crew of workers starting digging at the corner of Canal Street and West Street. On October 27, , the day before the two halves of the tunnel were scheduled to be linked, year-old Holland died of a heart attack in a sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan , attributed by individuals cited in The New York Times to the stress he endured overseeing the tunnel's construction.
Holland was succeeded by Milton Harvey Freeman, who died of pneumonia in March , after several months heading the job. After Freeman's death, the position was occupied by Ole Singstad, who oversaw the completion of the tunnel and designed its pioneering ventilation system.
Tunnel construction required workers to spend large amounts of time in the caisson under high pressure of up to On exiting the tunnel, the workers had to undergo controlled decompression to avoid the bends , a condition in which nitrogen bubbles form in the blood from rapid decompression. Fortunately, no workers died as a result of decompression sickness: the work involved ", decompressions of men coming out of the compressed air workings," which resulted in cases of the bends, none fatal.
Completion of the tunnel took nearly seven years and claimed the lives of 14 workers. The most significant design aspect of the Holland Tunnel is its pioneering ventilation system. At the time of its construction, underwater tunnels were a well-established part of civil engineering, but no long vehicular tunnel had been built: the technical hurdle was the ventilation required to evacuate the carbon monoxide emissions, which would otherwise asphyxiate the drivers.
There are four ventilation towers serving the two tubes of the tunnel, designed by Norwegian architect Erling Owre. Thomas Edison had contended it was impossible to ventilate a tunnel with the volume of traffic envisioned for the Holland Tunnel.
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