Day 1. The Epic Lincoln Highway Road Trip starts today!
On the New York side, the former Lincoln Highway was re-routed from the Weehawken ferry to the Holland Tunnel after the tunnel was completed in 1927, and one started the westward journey by driving under the Hudson River to Jersey City through the new Holland Tunnel. It had a pioneering ventilation system and was considered an engineering marvel for its time. No underground vehicular tunnel of this length had ever been built before due to the previously unresolved engineering issues in properly ventilating the carbon monoxide. According to Wikipedia, President Coolidge – not one of our most memorable presidents (my comment but the view is widely shared) – ceremonially opening the tunnel from his yacht by turning the same key that had “opened” the Panama Canal in 1915 which in turn rang a giant brass bell at the tunnel’s entrances that triggered American flags on both sides of the tunnel to separate.
In the pictures you can see one of the four Holland Tunnel ventilation towers (with NJ in the background on the other side) in the Hudson River, and a detail of the art deco door to the Manhattan side land ventilation building, both taken from the New York side of the Hudson on a walk I did back in April starting out at the Holland Tunnel and then walking along the Hudson on the fantastic riverside walk there all the way to the Lincoln Tunnel (built later and despite the name never part of the Lincoln Highway) and then 42nd St., midtown. It’s a really great walk – they call it the Hudson River Greenway. There are some other shots from that walk, too.
I shall bypass the Holland Tunnel this morning, however, having no interest in crawling over the Manhattan Bridge, along Canal and then through the tunnel in morning weekday traffic which is always pretty bad. I plan to drive the Verrazano Narrows Bridge (named for the Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, whose name is misspelled – people need to check their work!) from Brooklyn to Staten Island and then from Staten Island I will cross over to New Jersey, getting on the Lincoln Highway route at Elizabeth. (When opened in 1964 – the last big Robert Moses project – it surpassed the Golden Gate Bridge as the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time, by 60 feet – boo. It may be a bit longer but the Golden Gate is and remains the more beautiful bridge.)
Today’s destination: Princeton, with a few stops on the way, including Menlo Park to see the Edison Memorial. I will try to post some pictures from April of Newark later today, Newark being on the Lincoln Highway route but not a planned stop today.
