Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America

by Henry Petroski

  “Tunnels and Bridges of Manhattan Already Finished or in Process of Completion” in 1908, with an unnamed suspension bridge shown at about 179th Street (photo credit 5.5)

  In the meantime, Boller & Hodge, consulting engineers to the New York and New Jersey Interstate Bridge Commission, had submitted their report on “the most feasible sites for bridges across the North River.” The engineers recommended that three bridges be built: one at 57th Street, one at 110th Street, and one at 179th Street. (In the same report, Boller & Hodge also, presciently, identified the most feasible sites for bridges between New Jersey and New York’s Staten Island: at Bayonne, at Elizabethport, and at Perth Amboy.) With regard to Lindenthal’s 57th Street Bridge, though Boller & Hodge acknowledged its $75-million cost to be an impediment, they saw its location, in line with the Queensboro Bridge on the other side of Manhattan Island, to be a strong point. The engineers estimated the 179th Street bridge to be the least expensive to build, and they rejected the possibilities of a tunnel above 34th Street because they believed that the high cliffs known as the Palisades on the Jersey side made the idea impractical.

  Among those interested in a bridge across the Hudson was Robert A. C. Smith, “the steamship and tobacco man,” who had a summer residence in New Jersey. Smith thought the best view of the prospective bridge sites was from the deck of his steam yacht. Thus, on a sunny day in June, the governors of New York and New Jersey boarded the vessel as the guests of the commissioners, who had brought along their chief engineer, Henry Hodge: “In honor of Gov. [Charles Evans] Hughes, the Privateer carried at her foremast a square of deep blue bunting, with a white New York State shield in the middle of it. At her mizzenmast she carried another blue flag with a white New Jersey State shield in honor of Gov. [Franklin] Fort.” As soon as they were under way, Hodge got out maps and papers and began to talk about bridges, but Hughes apparently did not want to be “talked at.” Instead, the governor talked:

  The problem we want to settle right here is what is going to justify the building of the bridge and the choice of its site. You say that Fifty-seventh Street is a desirable location. But no one wants to go to Fifty-seventh Street per se. What class of people are going to use such a bridge, and how are they going to get from its termination at Fifty-seventh Street and Tenth Avenue to places downtown where they really want to go to? Will enough people use the bridge to make it pay from the taxpayers’ viewpoint? If a ferry won’t pay, a bridge won’t pay.

  I understand that so few people of late years have been going over the Forty-second Street and Weehawken Ferry, for example, that its service has been practically abandoned. I rather like the 179th Street bridge plan, on the other hand. It might not be so popular among New Jersey people. But it would connect New York City with the other New York State counties on the other side of the Hudson and help them to bring their farm produce into Manhattan.

  According to the reporter, the Privateer was passing the 179th Street site at this time, and Hodge pointed out a castlelike structure on a wooded hill about a mile farther up the river. It had been built by an Italian immigrant named Paterno, who in twelve years had worked himself up from a day laborer to a wealthy building contractor, and who had hired Hodge to make plans for “first-class apartment houses all over the city.” Hughes first wanted to know how long it would take to build a bridge, however, and only after Hodge told him about five years did the governor look up at Paterno’s “white, hill-crowning ‘castle,’ with a thoughtful smile,” presumably thinking of how the hills of New York’s Orange and Rockland counties could one day be dotted with symbols of other success stories. The governor of New Jersey remained in favor of the 57th Street site.

  Although these men of influence and power were talking on the deck of a steam yacht as if they were in a smoke-filled room, and although their interests were selfishly directed toward those of their respective states, the process was not without a redeeming social value. There was no single absolutely correct answer as to where a bridge should be located. Clearly, technical, financial, and economic issues—not to mention social, aesthetic, and metaphorical considerations—left plenty of permutations and combinations of assertion and opinion about what was the right thing to do.

  Among the remaining open technical questions were the relative riverbed conditions at the competing sites. Information about the 57th Street site was in hand, but borings at the 179th Street site still had to be done in order to confirm that a bridge could be built there for the estimated cost of $10 million. In 1910, after boring had gone as deep as 180 feet, nothing but sand and mud was discovered where Hodge had hoped to found a bridge tower. Though the site was not described as abandoned, the office of Boller & Hodge announced that plans were being made to explore other possibilities. Within a week, however, George F. Kunz, chairman of the Geological Section of the New York Academy of Sciences and president of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, disclosed the engineering report to the press. According to Kunz, bedrock was too far below the surface of the Hudson River to allow the building of a practical bridge south of about West Point, and he believed that ten tunnels could be built for the cost of one bridge. The geologist Kunz was not shy about estimating the cost of tunnels, and the conservationist Kunz was not disappointed that a bridge would not despoil the natural beauty of the Hudson. The day following Kunz’s exposé, McDougall Hawkes, chairman of the New York section of the Interstate Bridge Commission, confirmed reports that, because of the depth of bedrock, it did not look as if a bridge could be built at a reasonable cost at any of the proposed sites.

  Following these reports, Gustav Lindenthal wrote a letter to the editor emphasizing that it was indeed possible to build a long-span bridge without piers in the river, but it would cost on the order of $100 million when land and approaches were added to the basic price of the bridge. He believed that only a lack of capital, not of technical knowledge, had kept the project from proceeding, and he admitted that the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels then under construction “had ended for the present all prospect for a bridge across the North River,” because he continued to see the railroads as an essential technical and financial component of a viable bridge scheme. In the meantime, Lindenthal’s North River Bridge Company charter was running out, though after some opposition and debate in the Senate it would be extended for another decade.

  Geological cross section at the site of proposed bridge at 179th Street (photo credit 5.6)

  Lindenthal continued to push his bridge plan, arguing in a long letter to the editor of The New York Times in late 1912 that tunnels were not enough, but he was losing credibility, and some readers at least were losing patience with his diatribes. John F. Stevens, who was identified as a “civil engineer,” but whom everyone must have known to be the one who got the Panama Canal project back on track before Goethals took it over, immediately wrote a terse letter in response, calling schemes to bridge the Hudson “archaic” in a time when “the designing, construction, and operation of sub-aqueous tunnels have reached such a plane that in comparison a bridge is almost a joke.” Not all engineers were so opposed to bridges, however, and though Hodge agreed with the feasibility of a tunnel at Canal Street, he also argued for the desirability of a bridge at 57th. Plans prepared by Boller & Hodge showed a braced-chain suspension bridge, with a 2,880-foot center span, that was estimated to cost $30 million. It would have trolley but not railroad tracks, and its cost would be offset by the “increased valuation of property and the increased population.”

  Though the bridge-tunnel debate was interrupted by World War I, the lower initial cost estimate of a tunnel, albeit one of limited traffic capacity, was in the end what led to the Holland Tunnel. However, Hodge had clearly become established, both technically and politically, as a prime candidate for the job of bridge builder when the time came, and he had shown himself to be more temperate and flexible than Lindenthal. Hodge would no doubt have been an obvious choice for the Port Authority to have looked to when that body
became disenchanted with the tunnel solution in the early 1920s and reopened in earnest the question of bridging the Hudson. Henry Hodge would have been in his mid-fifties then, with just the right balance of experience and age to lead an ambitious bridge-building program like the one the Port Authority was to undertake. In 1917, Hodge resigned the position of public-service commissioner, to which he had recently been appointed by the governor of New York, to go to France and join General Pershing’s staff as director of military railroads and bridges. Before the domestic bridge-building business recovered from the hiatus caused by the war, however, Hodge became ill with an embolism, and died after a six-week illness late in 1919. The untimely death of “one of the foremost American engineers in bridge building” left the field open to others.

  Lindenthal made one of his more reasoned and objective arguments for his bridge in a paper read before the annual meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers held in New York late in 1920. An abstract of his paper, published in Engineering News-Record, began with some hard, up-to-date data and continued with a fair and convincing argument:

  The Hudson River is a barrier which must be crossed daily by 700,000 passengers, by 3,000 freight cars and by 8,000 to 10,000 vehicles. Of the passengers about one-half come through six submarine tunnels, four of the Hudson & Manhattan R.R. and two of the Pennsylvania R.R. All of the rest of the passengers, all vehicles and all railroad cars come over, as they did 80 years ago, on floating equipment along a river front of 12 miles. The congestion and the delays act as a deterrent to the spreading of population into New Jersey, where there is ample room within one hour’s travel from New York for at least 4,000,000 people to live in suburban comfort. The two vehicular tunnels just started will, when completed in three or four years, add only four lines of traffic for vehicles, a mere drop in the bucket. The two tubes with approaches will be 10,000 ft. long and cost $28,000,000.

  Compare with this backward condition the crossing facilities over the East River, for a population of 2,500,000 on Long Island. There are here besides numerous ferries four large municipal bridges (ignoring the Hell Gate railroad bridge) with, together, thirty-six tracks for rail cars and sixteen lines for vehicles, besides sixteen subway tunnels—all together, 52 lines of traffic, along a river front of only 6 miles. Two additional bridges and sixteen additional subway tunnels across the East River are under contemplation.

  It is easy to see that if the 2,000,000 people in New Jersey are to be accommodated in the same proportion we must have across the North River, in addition to the above-mentioned railroad and vehicular tunnels, at least fourteen railroad tracks and twelve lines for vehicles. If put into tunnels these twenty-six lines would require twenty additional submarine tubes.

  Let us assume that all these twenty tunnels would be about the same length and have the substantial construction of the Pennsylvania tunnels, or as proposed for the vehicular tunnels just started. That would make the cost of the twenty tunnels about $240,000,000.

  But the higher shores of the North River above 23d Street would require most of these tunnels, with approaches, to be much longer than 10,000 ft. Some of them would have to pass under the Palisades on the New Jersey side, like the Pennsylvania tunnels, making them, with approaches, 15,000 to 16,000 ft. long, so that the total cost of these twenty tunnels would be nearer $400,000,000.

  Lindenthal was being the consummate engineer, showing with hard numbers that the main objection to his bridge—namely, its cost—should in fact be a greater objection for tunnels of the same aggregate traffic capacity. Furthermore, he pointed out, his bridge would have a moving passenger platform, an idea of long standing. With renewed vigor, Lindenthal pushed for his bridge “in the vicinity of Fifty-ninth Street,” which he estimated would cost only about $100 million, and it was to work on this new project that Othmar Ammann was called back from the clay mine. What Lindenthal did not allow for or calculate, however, was traffic trends and alternatives to a single bridge for combined rail and vehicular traffic.

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  As construction of the Holland Tunnel progressed, it continued to confirm the feasibility of vehicular tunnels, but it also revealed their true cost, even higher than Lindenthal’s estimate. Although the financial climate was still not right for his ambitious plan, Lindenthal continued to seek support for his bridge-and-terminal project, whose total cost was to be on the order of half a billion dollars. And he would talk to whoever would listen about the frustrations of having economics stand in the way of a great engineering achievement, on one occasion telling a Lions Club audience in West Hoboken that “it was possible to bridge the Atlantic Ocean, but impossible to finance such an undertaking.”

  Perhaps Ammann saw a resolution to the financing impasse at the Hudson River in a less ambitious bridge, or perhaps he simply recognized the need for a bridge whose main traffic was vehicular. In any case, he began to work on such a plan independently of Lindenthal, who had not been able to retain him full-time. Ammann had his own stationery printed, identifying himself as “O. H. Ammann, Consulting Engineer,” with offices at 7 Dey Street, which was also the address of the North River Bridge Company. In early January 1923, he was using this stationery with the Dey Street address corrected to 470 Fourth Avenue, the location of a separate office that had been loaned to him. On January 9, 1923, he wrote on this letterhead a personal note to newly elected New Jersey Governor George Silzer, whom he knew, of course, from the clay-mine enterprise, that there had been a very successful meeting with the Board of Freeholders of Bergen County regarding a bridge at Fort Lee, across the river from Manhattan’s 179th Street. Ammann alluded to the governor’s policy that no money be spent on new vehicular tunnels until the one under construction had proved itself, and he passed on the suggestion of the freeholders that a bill be introduced in the legislature supporting a bridge at Fort Lee.

  The story of Ammann’s behind-the-scenes involvement in the political machinations that were necessary to get a Hudson River crossing approved and financed has been told in considerable detail by the political scientist Jameson Doig, most recently in collaboration with the structural engineer David Billington. Ammann engaged in what can only be described as a deliberate campaign to promote his own plans for a bridge, a campaign not unlike the one Joseph B. Strauss was engaged in almost contemporaneously on the other side of the continent to promote his dream of a span across the Golden Gate. As late as 1923, Ammann appears to have been willing to work with Lindenthal, perhaps partly out of loyalty and partly out of pragmatism, for his septuagenarian mentor was still the pre-eminent bridge engineer in America, and any technical and financially reasonable plan supported by him would no doubt have been seen as technically credible by the politicians and financiers whose support was essential. In March, Ammann revealed his thinking to Lindenthal, whose quick response the younger engineer recorded in his diary:

  March 22/1923

  Submitted memo. to G.L., urging reduction of H.R.Br. program, dated Mar. 21.

  G.L. rebuked me severely for my “timidity” & “shortsightedness” in not looking far enough ahead.

  He stated that he was looking ahead for a 1000 years.

  Ironically, it was Lindenthal who was being shortsighted; New York, like the rest of the country, was witnessing the beginning of the era of the truck and automobile, which would ensue at the expense of the railroads, and a vehicular and light-rail bridge was an appropriate solution to the problem of communication between New York and New Jersey. Ammann would break with Lindenthal over the issue, and he worked independently on his plans for a more modest proposal. He had also begun to establish his own identity as an independent engineer.

  Unlike the prolific Lindenthal and in spite of the praise heaped upon the Hell Gate Bridge report, Ammann had to this time published few pieces of technical advocacy, his two reviews of David Steinman’s book on suspension bridges being the exception. Perhaps the attention Steinman’s book had received or the notice those reviews had gotten Ammann prompted
him to write a “think piece” on the “Possibilities of the Modern Suspension Bridge for Moderate Spans,” which was published in Engineering News-Record in June 1923. He argued that, contrary to the conventional wisdom of bridge literature, according to which suspension bridges were suitable only for very long spans, recent years had seen the construction of a number of highway and light-railway suspension bridges with spans in the three-to-eight-hundred-foot range. He took a long historical view—albeit idiosyncratic, as his history was wont to be—of the suspension bridge, and discussed such questions as aesthetics, safety, stiffness, and economy. Whether designed to or not, the paper would give him credibility as a suspension-bridge designer somewhat beyond his years or his experience with the form.

  The year 1923 was a busy one for Ammann, and he had had no time to communicate with his mother before the approaching holidays prompted him, in mid-December, to write and post a letter right away, so she might receive it in Switzerland by Christmas. In spite of his growing reputation, he explained that “the giant project” for which he had “been sacrificing time and money for the past three years” then lay “in ruins” because of Lindenthal, who remained unnamed:

  In vain, I as well as others, have been fighting against the unlimited ambition of a genius that is obsessed with illusions of grandeur. He has the power in his hands and refuses to bring moderation into his gigantic plans. In stead, his illusions lead him to enlarge his plans more and more, until he has reached the unheard of sum of half a billion dollars—an impossibility even in America.

  However, I have gained a rich experience and have decided to build anew on the ruins with fresh hope and courage—and, at that, on my own initiative and with my own plans, on a more moderate scale. It is a hard battle that I have already been fighting for six months now, but the possibility of success is constantly increasing, so that I do not allow myself to be frightened in spite of the great handicaps and my shrinking finances. I wait and hope that the New Year will finally bring my work to fruition.