Holland Tunnel Opening Day: Celebrating the World's First Subaqueous Vehicular Tunnel

On November 13, 1927, President Calvin Coolidge pressed a ceremonial golden telegraph key in Washington, D.C., officially opening the Holland Tunnel to motor traffic under the Hudson River between Jersey City, New Jersey, and lower Manhattan, New York City. On its opening day, over 51,000 vehicles and tens of thousands of pedestrians surged through the revolutionary underwater twin tubes. Prior to its construction, crossing the mighty Hudson River was entirely dependent on slow, weather-dependent ferryboats. The monumental project was masterminded by chief engineer Clifford Milburn Holland, who solved what the world's leading engineers considered an insurmountable hurdle: how to safely vent deadly carbon monoxide exhaust fumes generated by thousands of internal combustion automobiles trapped underwater. Holland and his team collaborated with Yale University physiologists and the U.S. Bureau of Mines to invent a pioneering transverse mechanical ventilation system, using 84 massive fans to completely replace the tunnel's air every 90 seconds. Tragically, Clifford Holland worked himself to physical exhaustion and suffered a fatal heart attack in October 1924, just two days before the underwater tubes met; the tunnel was posthumously named in his honor. Designated a National Historic Landmark, the Holland Tunnel stands as a monument to visionary American civil engineering.