Pulaski Skyway
The Pulaski Skyway is a four-lane bridge and causeway in the northeastern part of the U.S. state of New Jersey, carrying a freeway designated U.S. Route 1/9 for most of its length. The structure has a total length of. Its longest bridge spans. Traveling between Newark and Jersey City, the roadway crosses the Passaic and Hackensack rivers, the Kearny Point peninsula between them, and the New Jersey Meadowlands.
Designed by Sigvald Johannesson, the General Casimir Pulaski Skyway opened in 1932 as the last part of the Route 1 Extension, one of the first freeways or "super-highways" in the United States, to provide a connection to the Holland Tunnel. One of several major projects built during the reign of Hudson County political boss Frank Hague, its construction was a source of political and labor disputes. The viaduct is listed in the state and federal registers of historic places.
Unpredictable traffic congestion and its functionally obsolete design make the Skyway one of the most unreliable roads in the United States., the bridges handle about 74,000 crossings per day, none of which were by trucks since they had been barred from the road in 1934. The bridges have been altered little since opening. In 2007, the New Jersey Department of Transportation began a rehabilitation program, which it estimated would cost more than $1 billion and required intermittent closures. The Skyway was closed to eastbound traffic from 2014 to 2018.
Description
Sources differ on the length and terminal points of the skyway, which was built as part of the long Route 1 Extension. The National Bridge Inventory identifies the Hudson County section as long and the Essex County section as. In a historic roadway and bridge study for NJDOT, it was described as long. NJDOT has indicated the overall length of the bridge structures to be and identified the Hudson County section as long. Other sources, along with the National Register of Historic Places, The New York Times, and The Star-Ledger, describe it as being long.The four-lane skyway carries the US 1/9 concurrency for most its length, and a short section of Route 139 for the rest. While the skyway generally runs east–west between Newark and Jersey City, US 1 and US 9 are generally north–south routes. The west end of the skyway begins as US 1/9 roadway ascends and passes over Raymond Boulevard in Newark's Ironbound neighborhood. At Tonnele Circle, US 1/9 exits to grade and follows Tonnele Avenue north towards the Lincoln Tunnel and George Washington Bridge as Route 139 begins on the skyway, over the traffic circle. While the road continues to the Holland Tunnel, the skyway soon comes to its eastern end at a cut in Bergen Hill, just west of John F. Kennedy Boulevard, where Route 139 runs under the viaduct of Route 139U. In addition to crossing the Hackensack and the Passaic, the skyway also passes over, not under, the Chaplain Washington-Harry Laderman Bridges and the New Jersey Turnpike, with which it has no interchange. Under most of the skyway in Newark is other vehicular, rail, maritime, and industrial infrastructure built on landfilled wetlands of the New Jersey Meadowlands.
Some maps, including one of Newark and one of Elizabeth, labeled the US 1/9 southern approach starting north of Newark Airport as the Pulaski Skyway. An NJDOT single line diagram shows the General Pulaski Skyway starting at mile post 49.00 of U.S. 1/9, which is just north of the renamed Newark Liberty International Airport. Google Maps includes the Route 139 eastern approach.
There is limited intermediate access to the skyway: two single-lane ramps rise to the inner lanes of the elevated structure, requiring traffic to enter or exit from the left providing access at the Marion Section of Jersey City and South Kearny.
Trucks have been prohibited for the "safety and welfare of the public" since 1934 because of the state's approval of a local ordinance that was championed by Frank Hague, mayor of Jersey City. They are detoured to use U.S. Route 1/9 Truck, along the route of the Lincoln Highway that carried traffic before the skyway's construction. Pedestrians and cyclists cannot use the road as there are no dedicated bicycle lanes or sidewalks. The speed limit on the skyway is, but is generally not enforceable as there is nowhere for police to pull over speeders because of the absence of shoulders.
In 2011, the Texas Transportation Institute determined that the Skyway was the sixth-most unreliable road in the United States because of the unpredictability of traffic congestion and therefore travel times.
Design and construction
Except for crossings over Jersey City rail lines and the Hackensack and the Passaic, the main part of the skyway is a steel deck truss cantilever bridge, supported by concrete piers. Each of the two river crossings is a combination of a subdivided through Pratt truss between the supports and a basic Pratt truss structure connecting each end to the deck truss part of the skyway. Spanning the rivers, they reach a clearance height of. In Jersey City, three short Pratt through truss spans take the roadway over rail lines, the westernmost passing over the Port Authority Trans-Hudson rapid transit line and the Conrail Passaic and Harsimus Line. The two easternmost Pratt through truss spans are in the vicinity of Marion Junction, one of which passes over the Marion Running Track, to the east of which the skyway is low enough to use simple vertical supports.Design began in 1919 for the Holland Tunnel, the first fixed roadway connection between New Jersey and New York City; construction began in 1922, and the tunnel opened in late 1927. To provide for a continuous highway connection on the New Jersey side, the New Jersey Legislature passed a bill in 1922 authorizing the extension of Route 1 from its end at Elizabeth through Newark and Jersey City to the proposed tunnel. It was conceived as the nation's first "super-highway". State highway engineer Hugh L. Sloan appointed old acquaintance Fred Lavis, a consulting engineer who had worked on foreign rail lines and the Panama Canal and written four books on locating and designing rail lines, to design this Route 1 Extension. Sigvald Johannesson designed the Skyway portion.
Frank Hague, mayor of Jersey City and boss of the state's political machine, directed the state to avoid the open cuts that were already common where the railroads crossed Bergen Hill, and to include an access ramp in Kearny to spur industrial development. Construction of the highway, which was mostly raised on embankments and passed through Bergen Hill in a cut, began in mid-1925. The two major eastern and western sections in Jersey City and Newark—including the viaduct leading to the "covered roadway" and the embankments in eastern Newark—were opened on December 16, 1928, about a year after the tunnel opened. Traffic was still required to use the Lincoln Highway to cross the Hackensack and the Passaic on the since-replaced drawbridges that frequently stopped traffic to allow ships to pass.
Lavis's design for the final viaduct passageway, which would be raised on concrete piers across the Meadowlands, included two vertical-lift bridges above the Passaic and Hackensack rivers, sufficient for the majority of ships to pass underneath. He resigned in 1928, believing his task was complete, but in January 1929 the War Department objected to the continued existence of the Lincoln Highway bridges once the skyway was complete. Since the Route 1 Extension was not intended for local traffic, and replacing the vertical-lift bridges with tunnels would have been expensive, a compromise was worked out by late 1929 to raise the river bridges to while allowing the Lincoln Highway drawbridges to remain in place. The concrete jacketing of the steel was removed from the plans since it would make the taller fixed bridges heavier. This resulted in more maintenance.
Four companies—the American Bridge Company, McClintic-Marshall Company, Phoenix Bridge Company, and Taylor-Fichter Steel Construction Company—were awarded contracts for the so-called "Diagonal Highway", with construction to start in April 1930. The two river bridges, McClintic-Marshall's portion, were completed first, and the $21 million road was opened at 8:00 a.m. on November 24, 1932, after an official ceremony the previous day on the Kearny ramp. Owing to the Great Depression and problems with funding, Governor A. Harry Moore directed the Highway Commission on October 25, 1932 to make a formal request to the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads to charge tolls on the Diagonal Highway. It was thought that tolls would be illegal because of the use of $600,000 of federal aid to build the road, but that it might be possible to transfer this funding to other projects. A bill was introduced into the state legislature on May 1, 1933, to add tolls to the road, at a rate of 10 cents for cars and 20 cents for trucks. The legal obstacle to federal aid was resolved by gaining approval to transfer the funds.
During planning and construction, and for about half a year after opening, the road had no official name and was known as the Diagonal Highway, Newark–Jersey City Viaduct, or High-Level Viaduct. On May 3, 1933, the New Jersey Legislature passed a bill sponsored by Assemblyman Eugene W. Hejke of Jersey City naming the road the General Casimir Pulaski Memorial Skyway after Casimir Pulaski, the Polish military leader who helped train and lead Continental Army troops in the American Revolutionary War. An official ceremony was held on October 11, 1933, including the unveiling of signs with an abbreviated designation, Gen. Pulaski Skyway.
Surveys taken during 1932 and 1933 proved that the skyway saved time on the new and old routes. Not only was the distance shortened by, but it took at least six minutes less to travel the new route during regular traffic. Trucks gained even more time, saving anywhere from five to eleven minutes. During times of previous traffic congestion on weekends on the old route, the viaduct saved around 25 minutes or more from the elimination of traffic congestion. In addition, the new route did not have the much longer delays and traffic back-ups that were caused whenever the bridges on the old highway were opened. It was found that the skyway also diverted a good deal of traffic from other routes.