Despite their dour expressions, the motorists in this 1909 photograph were completing a feat unheard of until that moment. The driver and his dapper passengers were the first to travel by automobile between New York and New Jersey beneath the Hudson River. Their journey, in a Lozier automobile, did not take place in a tunnel designed for motor-vehicle traffic; not for another eighteen years would the Holland Tunnel make such trips routine. How then did these gentlemen do it?
The Hudson River had long stymied the Pennsylvania Railroad’s efforts to provide uninterrupted rail service into New York City. The Pennsylvania’s rails ended at water’s edge in New Jersey; from there passengers took railroad-owned ferries into Manhattan. A tunnel beneath the Hudson had been considered, but the soot and smoke produced by steam locomotives made the idea impractical, even dangerous. Railroad officials had proposed a suspension bridge for rail traffic across the Hudson; but such a structure would have been enormously expensive, and the War Department objected to a bridge as a potential obstruction to navigation.
The advent of clean electric locomotives made tunneling a viable solution. Beginning in 1903, the Pennsylvania Railroad mounted a major improvement project that included a grand terminal, Pennsylvania Station, in Manhattan and much-needed storage yards in Queens. The entire system would be joined by tunnels under the Hudson and East rivers.
Construction of the Hudson River tunnels began in the spring of 1904. Hydraulic jacks forced large, cylindrical steel tunnel shields through the silt beneath the river. In the open spaces created as the shields moved forward, semicircular cast-iron segments were bolted together to form the actual tunnel. Lined with concrete, the two tubes of the tunnel each got a flat floor and conduits for electrical and communication lines.
The motoring expedition took place on June 21, 1909. As the acetylene headlamp aimed at the ceiling indicates, the journey was primarily an inspection trip. The car belonged to the man in the driver’s seat, Fred Gubelman, vice-president of the company that had built the tunnel. The car was lowered by a derrick to the bottom of the construction shaft in Weehawken, New Jersey. The smooth concrete floor of the tunnel (prior to the laying of ballast, sleepers, and rails) made an ideal roadway.
Gubelman and his chauffeur took a test run through the tunnel to Manhattan and out into the open, unfinished yard behind the new station, then returned to the tunnel and came to a stop beneath Tenth Avenue. There they were joined by no less than Samuel Rea, vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and an entourage including the chief engineer. They traveled the dimly lit two-and-one-half-mile route to the New Jersey portal at Bergen Hill. After turning the vehicle around, they drove back to New York. There James Forgie photographed the party by flash. Rea and the other principals went on to their club for lunch. The chauffeur, who stands beside the vehicle, yet again motored to New Jersey and drove up the incline leading from the tunnel and back onto the street. This man and his boss were the first people to drive an automobile to and from Manhattan across the Hudson.
