Book excerpt: The Last Three Miles

In my last entry, I talked a bit about the roads in Northern New Jersey, in particular the Pulaski Skyway. It's not an easy road to drive—however, since I grew up driving these roads, I don't see them as such a big deal. While I had my learner's permit, even, I often had to navigate 13-lane toll plazas on the Turnpike in order to get to the mall. Ain't no thang. As a result, driving anywhere else in the country is downright simple. LA? You don't scare me none. Boston is downright user-friendly. Let's go tour around Oklahoma City, it's all good. See what I mean? Daaaamn right.


In that spirit, I'd like to present you with an excerpt from Steven Hart's book, The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America's First Superhighway, a book about the Pulaski Skyway. I started reading it upon coming home, and admittedly I stalled (no pun intended) on page 100 of the 192-page book; it was a little dry for my taste and I couldn't really get into it. I'd be willing to give it another go, however, after rediscovering this passage, which is a truly evocative description of driving from the Holland Tunnel and across the Skyway. (The author is a born-and-bred New Jerseyan.)


Below is the excerpt, in bold.

For drivers leaving Manhattan to begin the Skyway tour—and this is a trip for drivers only: no pedestrians allowed—it all begins with the first glimpse of daylight while rounding the gleaming, tilted curve at the western end of the Holland Tunnel. The driver emerges into a realm of expansive gas stations and boxy warehouses,  which he dare not study for more than a few seconds because experienced drivers are already crisscrossing his path, jockeying for position across the five lanes of traffic as it begins the climb to Bergen Hill. [...] For sociological purposes, this stretch helps maintain New Jersey's reputation as a Hobbesian wilderness recast in asphalt—a wasteland of automotive bullies, where every car trip is nasty, brutal, and long.

Hurtling westward, the driver must cut to the left. Too far to the right, he will be caught in the flow onto the Turnpike Extension; even lingering in the third or fourth lane carries the risk of being channeled up the center ramp and onto State Highway, and Jersey City's sclerotic network of traffic-clogged local streets. [...] Here the driver can either bail out to the left, or hit the gas and surge forward, leaving his fate to the gods of physics.

If all goes well, the driver hits the steep ramp rising from Jersey Avenue and follows the curving road sharply left, keeping a wary eye on the lanes to his immediate right, where other drivers are trying to bull their way through by sheer intimidation. The two lanes then cut sharply to the right, and the driver enters a tunnel of high concrete walls, just wide enough for two lanes of traffic. The correct name for this is the Hoboken Avenue Viaduct, but engineers often call it 'the depressed roadway'—one of those accidentally poetic technical terms the scientific world occasionally yields up, like 'cloud chamber' or 'hopeful monsters.'

[...] Emerging from the tunnel, the driver passes beneath the overpass for JFK Boulevard and crosses into the realm of big engineering. Beneath his tires, lines of Pratt trusses supported by brawny concrete piers are carrying him above the Conrail Viaduct and its canyon of railroad tracks. He may not even notice the rail lines below, because two off-ramps for traffic frequently clog up with long lines of waiting cars, and he must be wary of impatient drivers impulsively veering into his path. [...]

The Skyway proper begins above Tonnele Circle, the ground-level rotary that channels and directs traffic to the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels [...]—directs it, but slowly, like a cholesterol-clogged heart with an erratic beat. [...]

The mood of the drive, which has been tense since leaving the Holland Tunnel, now enters true white-knuckle territory. An access ramp, rising from Broadway in Jersey City at a steep 5.5 percent grade, debouches onto the Skyway, practically at the foot of the Hackensack River span. In defiance of every current traffic safety principle,  the ramp opens into the left lane—the passing lane, the fast lane, with oncoming vehicles racing around a slight bend in the causeway. Meanwhile, the driver attempting to join the traffic must turn his head completely around to see oncoming vehicles.

The cars then hurtle up the Hackensack River span at an angle that sometimes defeats older vehicles—stalled and overheated vans and cars are not uncommon on the Skyway. The two narrow lanes of traffic in each direction are penned in by a wall down the center of the causeway—an aluminum version of the inverted-Y safety wall known across the country as the Jersey barrier. There are no shoulders, just a three-foot-high steel curb designed to keep careening vehicles from breaking through the railings and tumbling down to the streets below. Here, through the miracle of twentieth-century engineering, it is possible to experience claustrophobia while driving over a hundred feet on the air.

Police generally do not patrol the Pulaski Skyway—pulling someone over for a ticket is tantamount to suicide in these closely packed, high-velocity lanes—and drivers usually lead-foot it through the entire three-mile stretch, whether to take advantage of their freedom to speed or to get the ordeal done with as quickly as possible.

Cresting over the Hackensack River span, the driver glancing over his shoulder is treated to a vista of storage tanks, container farms for tractor-trailers, and sparkling, dioxin-tainted river water, all flickering like a Zoetrope image through the steel I-beams lining the road. […]

Now the driver descends as the causeway crosses the Meadowlands town of Kearny, and a new worry appears: an on-off ramp for Kearny, opening off the left lane, causes a break in the line of the Jersey barrier. When traffic is slow or jammed up, drivers will sometimes use this gap to cross over to the other side of the viaduct. This brings them into the oncoming fast lane and a good chance of a fatal collision as oncoming cars roar down the blind curve.

The roadway rises again, not quite so steeply, for the second span over the Passaic River, then descends to rejoin US Route 1-9 just north of Newark Liberty International Airport. During this descent there will be abrupt slowdowns for a right-lane turnoff onto Raymond Boulevard in Newark, and a final jolt of fear as the Skyway, curving sharply to the left, meets an eight-lane divided facility that sorts out Turnpike-bound traffic from vehicles headed for Route 22 and the Garden State Parkway. Inevitably, at least one driver in the left lane will realize he needs to be in the right lane, and in cutting over will set tires screeching and middle fingers jabbing a final time.

Few traffic facilities offer a driving experience as hairy as the Pulaski Skyway, and leaving it, many drivers probably wonder, ‘What idiot designed this thing?’ or think, ‘Anybody could have done a better job than that.’

From The Last Three Miles by Steven Hart - The New Press, 2007.