By Henry. M. Holden                       

     In 1920 the New Jersey Interstate Bridge and Tunnel Commission and the New York State Bridge and Tunnel Commission appropriated funds and began construction on what was then referred to as the Hudson River Vehicular Tunnel. Opening in 1927, the tunnel operated under the supervision of the two state commissions until the Port Authority of NY & NJ (the Port of New York Authority, at the time) took over operations in April 1930.

The first Hudson River automobile crossing, the Holland Tunnel connects Canal Street in Manhattan with 12th and 14th streets in Jersey City, NJ. It is considered an outstanding engineering achievement. As a tribute, it bears the name of its first chief engineer, Clifford M. Holland, who with his team surmounted many previously unsolved tunnel engineering problems. Unfortunately, Holland died before the tunnel’s completion, and his successor, Milton Freeman, died five months later. The tunnel was finished under the leadership of the project’s third chief engineer, Ole Singstad.

 The Lincoln Tunnel provides direct access from Weehawken,  New Jersey, to 34th St. in Manhattan. Its purpose was to lessen the congestion at the Holland tunnel during rush hour, and the necessity of traveling the crowded downtown area of New York City. These factors all gave fuel to the idea that New Jersey and New York needed another tunnel to ease the congestion.

The Lincoln Tunnel is the last underground tunnel built between New York and New Jersey. It is buried 20 feet below the mud bed of the Hudson River. Built in four years by the Port Authority of New York it cost over $45 million and 15 lives.

While one crew worked from the Jersey side, another proceeded toward them from the New York side. Alignment of both ends vertically and horizontally took considerable engineering skill and care. The first “hole through” was achieved on August 3, 1935, when a hydraulic engineer on the New Jersey end was pushed through an opening to meet the New York crew.

The sandhogs who made this possible dug a tunnel that is still colloquially known—as dangerous, claustrophobic, and tedious. Just entering and exiting the tunnel was time-consuming. Crews entered air locks, one at a time, after which the doors at each end were sealed. 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. Once at the forward end of the tunnel, the men had to work quickly because they could handle the increased pressure only briefly. Compression and decompression had to be reached in safe, short increments.

It must have been close to this spot that Colonel John Stevens, the Hoboken inventor and engineer planned to lay his vehicle tunnel under the Hudson in 1906, but the site has only two similarities. The iron and concrete of the Lincoln Tunnel did not do much to foster a good relationship with the wooden tube that John Stevens proposed lay on the Hudson Riverbed.         

Stevens drew up plans for a tunnel with an eight-foot diameter that could be constructed in six sections and sunk to the river bottom. The tubes would be  constructed in sections, and Stevens even took depth soundings to show his project would not interfere with river shipping. One thing he did not count on was the difficulty of getting American entrepreneurs to pony-up $45,000,000 for such a novel and fantastic scheme. He never got the money but eventually the federal government stepped in to fund the effort.

Technical advances made a tunnel underneath the Hudson River a reality in 1908, when the Morton Street tube of the Holland and Manhattan Railroad went into service. Facilities for individual vehicles, something John Stevens had dreamed of, were not provided, however, until 1927, when the Holland Tunnel was finished.  

Inside the tunnel, rock drills roared, tram cars rattled back and forth, and air lines hissed as a shield pushed the tunnel forward until it could be braced like the hull of a ship. Through this din, men bolted rings into place, poured cement behind the new lining to seal out the river, prepared for the next shove, and dynamited in front of the shield when the going got tough.

While one crew worked from the Jersey side, another proceeded toward them from the New York side. Alignment of both ends vertically and horizontally took considerable engineering skill and care. 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.

The first tube of the Lincoln Tunnel-the center tube-opened to traffic two years later, on December 22, 1937. The north and south tubes opened on February 1, 1945, and May 25, 1957, respectively.

 Soon after the Port Authority of NY & NJ acquired the Holland Tunnel in 1930, New York and New Jersey authorized the agency to proceed with its plan to build what was then called the Midtown Hudson Tunnel. Creating a 1.5-mile-long structure, even above ground, would be no small accomplishment, but to build it under a riverbed was a monumental task. Hundreds of huge iron rings, each weighing 21 tons, had to be assembled and bolstered together on-site to form the lining of the tunnel.

The first tube of the Lincoln Tunnel-the center tube-opened to traffic two years later, on December 22, 1937. The north and south tubes opened on February 1, 1945, and May 25, 1957, respectively.

Designed by Ole Singstad, the same chief engineer who supervised the creation of the Holland Tunnel. The tunnel was built by shield-and-compressed-air methods to hold back the outside water pressure.

The tunnel consists of three vehicular tubes, each of which carries two lanes of traffic. It is about 1.5 miles long and lies 97 feet below the river’s surface. The central tube was the first to open in 1937 and had reversible traffic lanes; it is the longest of the three tubes, 8,216 feet. The north tube, which opened in 1945, carries westbound traffic and is 7,482 feet long. The south tube, opened in 1957, carries eastbound traffic and is 8,006 feet long.

One day, water pouring into the Lincoln Tunnel connecting New York City and New Jersey necessitated emergency maintenance and prompted a social media blowup when video of the rushing water was posted.

The water spilling over the Lincoln Tunnel walkway was caused by a water main rupture in a facility room of, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. which operates the tunnel, told an NBC affiliate in New York. Water was pumped back out of the tunnel after the break was repaired and normal traffic flow resumed the same evening. While contacted by phone for details, the Port Authority did not provide additional information regarding the incident to Newsweek prior to publication.

A July 1934 article in The New York Times inaugurated the next phase of construction, describing the placement of a 600-ton caisson—a watertight “bright red, hollow cube of steel” floated upriver from its New Jersey fabrication site and nudged into position with tugboats. The caisson acted as a prefabricated shaft, which could be extended down through river water, mud and muck until workers could reach the bedrock 20 feet beneath the riverbed and begin tunneling toward New Jersey.

Angus K. Gillespie’s 2011 book Crossing Under the Hudson: The Story of the Holland Lincoln Tunnels described the grueling work sandhogs who went down into the pressurized shaft performed, working for $10 a day in two three-hour shifts, with a three-hour break in between. Tunnel diggers—including Irish, Italian, Black and Polish workers—blasted through and cleared between 25 and 35 feet of bedrock a day, assembling 21-ton iron rings (2,370 in total) to line the tunnel as they went. But just getting into and out of the tunnel was a tedious and dangerous process, with an airlock used to incrementally adjust to the high pressure maintained to keep the shaft from collapsing.

A frightening sight to onlookers and catastrophizers on social media, the Lincoln Tunnel leak may have been a relatively minor incident but also reminded people of the astounding physical feat embodied in driving through a tunnel 97 feet beneath a river.

Building the Lincoln Tunnel was a herculean project, which posed far more danger to its builders than getting their tires wet.

“The turnover of workers was unbelievable,” an anonymous sandhog told Paul E. Delaney in Sandhogs: A History of the Tunnel Workers of New York, 

“Men would work an hour or maybe a shift, and they’d never be seen on the job again. Even the strongest men were tired after fifteen or twenty minutes in the air. And there was always the worry of being fired. If a man went for more than two sips of water during a shift, he was told to collect his wages and go home.”

Tunnel workers were susceptible to decompression sickness, more commonly kn0wn as “the bends,” which can create nitrogen bubbles capable of lodging in the body, sometimes causing paralysis if they work their way into the spinal column or brain. Known as “caisson disease” in the context of tunnel workers, the effects on workers were so dramatic that they sometimes collapsed on the streets or were arrested for seemingly drunk and disorderly behavior.

Such occurrences were common enough that after work sandhogs wore metal badges, advising anyone who found them “stricken on the street” to rush them to an airlock on 38th street. “DO NOT send him to a hospital,” the badge advises. But while decompression sickness killed dozens of sandhogs during earlier public works projects, shorter high-pressure shifts and closer monitoring mitigated the deadliest effects during the construction of the Lincoln Tunnel.

Still, the hard work sometimes led to deadly accidents, including three sandhogs killed in the first year of construction. Three more died in April 1935, when 133 pounds of dynamite was set off too close to five tunnel workers. A total of 15 workers died constructing the first two tunnels.

While no one died during the third tube’s construction, the project wasn’t without incident. In January, several months before its completion, the Hudson River poured in from the Manhattan side and three workers, the Associated Press described at the time, had to “swim for their lives.”

Sandhog construction projects continue to be dangerous, with union Local 174 workers—many second or third generation sandhogs—still at risk from deadly accidents.

New Yorkers and visitors can pay their respects at the Tunnel Workers Memorial, located at the northeast corner of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. Adjacent to a bus turnoff, the memorial commemorates the 23 men who died between 1970 and 2000 building the City Water Tunnel No. 3, which connects New York City to its upstate water supply via a 60-mile tunnel, supplementing the leaking and overtaxed water tunnels completed in 1917 and 1936. The memorial includes 23 manhole covers with the names of the dead and a flagpole with a base made of stone from the tunnel.

“The story of the Sandhogs is the story of New York,” Sandhogs Local 147 says on their homepage. “The city above grew where the sandhogs ventured below. For generations we have risked our lives to make this great city work. Building tunnels is tough and dangerous work, so to protect ourselves we formed a union – Local 147 of the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) and we strive to make our job as safe as it can be.”

One of the most significant challenges was how to ventilate the 1.6-mile tunnel. With the dawn of the automobile age, it was imperative to find a way to remove potentially dangerous automobile fumes. Singstad’s solution was to design a circular tunnel with an automatic ventilation system. Four ventilation buildings, two on each side of the Hudson River, house 84 immense fans that provide a change of air every 90 seconds, keeping air quality well within established safety limits. This innovation made the Holland Tunnel the first mechanically ventilated underwater vehicular tunnel. The methods used to design and build it still form the basis for the construction of many underwater vehicular tunnels throughout the world.

In 1984, because of its valuable contribution to tunnel design and construction, the Holland Tunnel was designated a National Historic Civil and Mechanical Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil and Mechanical Engineers. And in 1993, it was designated a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Department of the Interior.