Tunnel Talk

Steven Hart, “The Last Three Miles”

June 24, 2012

Award-winning journalist Steven Hart visits the Museum on Sunday, Jun. 24, at 4 p.m., to share some of the juicy details from his acclaimed book The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America’s First Superhighway (The New Press, 2007). The book details the epic battle between big labor and big political bosses over the construction of a superhighway needed to carry the traffic to and from the western mouth of the Holland Tunnel.

Built at the dawn of America’s love affair with the automobile, the tunnel’s planners at first didn’t consider the impact on local Hudson County roads feeding into the tunnel. Cars and trucks leaving the nation’s largest city found themselves in a maze of local roads wending their way through the New Jersey Meadowlands.

Jersey City mayor Frank Hague—undisputed boss of the Hudson County political machine—was a major advocate for the construction of the country’s first “superhighway” to connect New York City to the rest of the country. Hague’s nemesis was union boss Teddy Brandle, and construction of the last three miles of Route 25, later dubbed the Pulaski Skyway, pitted their respective forces in a bitter battle that resulted in a motorway fittingly made notorious in the opening sequence of the HBO series The Sopranos.

Steven Hart has written for the New York Times, Salon, and the Home News Tribune in New Jersey’s Middlesex and Union counties, among other publications. He lives in New Jersey.