Lincoln Tunnel

The Dutch and English who settled the bottom tip of Manhattan Island were in no hurry. Their tiny lanes rambled and twisted between their farms and homes. In 1807 New York City planners laid out a grid of narrow crosstown and wider up & downtown streets from 14th to 155th. The crosstown streets were placed at close intervals because it was thought that much of the town's up & downtown traffic would be borne by the Hudson River on the west, the East River on the east. The grid street plan worked very well for a century. Old photographs of Manhattan's thoroughfares up to 1900 are so placid they give the present-day spectator the impression they were taken on Sunday. Then the 20th Century came in and up shot skyscrapers, out roared automobiles.

Before 1929 some steps had been taken to solve Manhattan's intolerable traffic problem, immensely snarled by half-a-million daily commuters and the influx from twelve highways, led by great U. S. national No. 1. But not until the Depression loosed the public purse strings for work-making public works was there real accomplishment. Open for business 24 hours a day last month were five and one-half more miles--from 72nd Street to the George Washington Bridge--of the peripheral express highway which will someday ring Manhattan, vastly relieve the pressure of internal and through motor traffic (see map). Open for business last week was another important gateway to the teeming city--the brand-new Lincoln Tunnel nosing under the Hudson River at the west end of 39th Street.

Similar in design to the Holland Tunnel --under the Hudson between lower Manhattan and Jersey City, completed in 1927 and this year used by 13,000,000 vehicles (at 50-c-& up)--the Lincoln Tunnel was started in 1934 and has cost about $43,000,000 to date. Unlike the two-tube Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel has completed so far only one 21-ft. 6-in. tube, now carrying two-way traffic. The other will be finished in 1941, when each tube will carry one-way traffic. The completed structure lies under 20 feet of silt, 75 feet below the Hudson's surface. It is just over 1 1/2 miles long, ceilinged in glass tile, employed 1,300 WPA workers at an average $1 per hour, is fitted on the Manhattan side with approaches which fan into half-a-dozen little feeder streets. Authorized fortnight ago was construction of a cross-town vehicular tunnel which will connect the Lincoln Tunnel to the abuilding Queens Midtown Tunnel, another pair of tubes under the East River to the Borough of Queens. These additional arteries will channel through traffic from Long Island to New Jersey.

The new Lincoln Tunnel has another usefulness. Until last week, through traffic on U. S. No. 1 had the choice of using tedious ferries, the George Washington Bridge or the Holland Tunnel. The Holland Tunnel route is not so speedy as the bridge route. It will now be even quicker to use the East Side express highway & the Lincoln Tunnel than to use the bridge & U. S. No. 1 on the Jersey side. This may take some revenue away from the Holland Tunnel and the bridge, only completed in 1931. but the Port of New York Authority runs them all. is competing only with itself.

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