On the morning of May 15, 1930, a crew of sixty men moved into the Meadowlands of New Jersey carrying wooden piles tipped with steel and a pile-driving rig mounted on a barge, and began building a highway in the air. The ground beneath their feet could not be called ground in any useful sense of the word. It was a tidal marsh, a flat expanse of salt grass, black mud, and standing water stretching three miles in every direction between two rivers, crossed by dozens of railroad tracks and ringed at its edges by oil refineries, chemical plants, processing works, and garbage dumps that had been pouring their contents into the swamp for decades. The smell on a warm day was distinctive and filled everything.
The Meadowlands in 1930 was where New York and New Jersey put the things they did not want to see, and they had been putting them there long enough that the marsh itself had absorbed the nature of what surrounded it. The men on the pile-driving barge did not have the luxury of an opinion about the place. They were working in 1930, which meant the Depression was on, and the jobs available to a laborer with no particular qualifications were shrinking week by week. A pile-driving job in a tidal marsh for the New Jersey State Highway Department paid thirty-five cents an hour.
Thirty-five cents an hour was better than nothing, and nothing was what a great many men had in the spring of 1930. They drove the first pile on May 15. What they were building was the Pulaski Skyway. It would be three and a half miles long when finished.
It would rise to 135 feet above the Passaic River at its highest point. It would carry four lanes of automobile traffic on an elevated steel-and-concrete highway from Jersey City to Newark, crossing the Passaic and Hackensack rivers and the rail corridors below without touching the ground for the entire distance. At its opening it would be the longest elevated highway ever built in the world. It would cost twenty-one million dollars to build.
And when the ribbon was cut on January 6, 1932, most of the men who drove the piles, poured the concrete, and riveted the steel were not invited to the ceremony. This is the story of how that road was built, what it cost, and what it cost the men who did the actual work. Their names are in the payroll books in the New Jersey State Archives. Those books are read by no one, and the names are unknown.
To understand why anyone decided to build a highway in the air over three and a half miles of New Jersey swamp, you have to understand what the roads between Newark and New York City were like in the 1920s. By 1925, automobile ownership in the United States had passed twenty million vehicles. The Ford Model T had put car ownership within reach of the working and middle classes in a way that had never happened before. The result of twenty million cars in a country built for horses and railroads was traffic congestion that modern commuters would recognize immediately, and the engineers of the twenties had no established tools for solving it.
The approaches to New York from New Jersey were particularly bad. Crossing the Hudson was done by ferry. The ferries could not keep up with the cars. There were no road bridges across the Hudson in the twenties.
There was no car tunnel until the Holland Tunnel opened in 1927. Every car trying to get from New Jersey to Manhattan waited its turn at the ferry, and the waits during peak hours ran to hours, not minutes. Hours. The Holland Tunnel relieved some pressure when it opened, but the tunnel’s capacity was not unlimited, and the approach roads feeding it were already inadequate.
Getting from Newark to Jersey City, a distance of eight miles, could take an hour on good days and considerably longer on bad ones. The specific problem along the Newark-to-Jersey City corridor was not just volume; it was the grade crossings. The road network through the Meadowlands ran at the same level as the railroad tracks serving the industrial complex around Newark Bay. Freight trains crossed the roads.
Crossing gates came down. Traffic stopped. A single freight train crossing a major road in 1926 could back up automobile traffic for half a mile in both directions. There were dozens of such crossings along the corridor.
The freight trains ran around the clock. The roads served both commuters trying to reach the ferries and the industrial traffic that kept the refineries, chemical plants, and piers operating. Everyone was trying to use the same roads at the same time at the same grade, and nothing was moving the way it should. Engineers at the New Jersey State Highway Department had been studying this problem for years.
The solution they arrived at was simple in concept and staggering in technical ambition. If the road could not coexist with the railroad tracks at grade, the road would not be at grade. The road would go over everything. Over the railroads, over the rivers, over the marsh itself.
An elevated highway supported on concrete and steel from one end to the other, entering Jersey City at the same elevation it left Newark without touching the ground in between. No one in the United States had ever built a highway structure of that length or that height before. There were suspension railroad bridges in the industrial Northeast. There were elevated railroad lines in cities.
There were highway overpasses at specific congested intersections. There was nothing resembling 3. 5 miles of continuous elevated highway that started at grade from both ends and rose to 135 feet at its center, designed from the start to carry automobile traffic at speed for the working life of the structure. The closest comparable structures in the world were in Europe.
They were shorter, lower, and carried lighter loads. The closest American precedent, technically, was the elevated railroad infrastructure in Northeast cities. But a railroad bridge and a highway bridge are different structures with different load requirements, different grade requirements, and different dynamic behavior under traffic. The experience base for a structure of this type in the United States in 1928 was effectively zero.
The man charged with designing the structure was Sigvald Johannessen, chief engineer of the Bureau of Bridges and Structures of the New Jersey State Highway Department. Johannessen was not a man famous in the way politicians are famous. He was a civil engineer, and his reputation rested on technical competence and a particular kind of professional courage: the willingness to commit to a design before that design had a precedent to validate it. He had been building bridges and viaducts across New Jersey for years.
He knew what the ground under the Meadowlands was made of. He knew what clearance the rivers required for navigation. He knew the load calculations for four lanes of 1920s automobile traffic. And he knew that the load calculations for 1920s automobile traffic would look inadequate within a decade as vehicles got heavier.
He designed the structure for future loads, not current ones. The geological problem that governed every other engineering decision on the project was the soil beneath the Meadowlands. The marsh soil under the Hackensack and Passaic Meadows is a deep layer of organic peat and estuarine silt accumulated over thousands of years as sea level changed and rivers deposited material at their mouths. It is saturated with water from the water table, which in the Meadowlands sits at roughly ground level.
It is compressible in ways that structural engineers spend their careers designing solutions to avoid. Put a load on Meadowlands peat and the peat compresses. Put a large load on it and it compresses a great deal. Put the weight of an elevated highway of concrete and steel on it and it settles in ways that crack concrete, distort steel, and eventually fail the structure.
The answer was wooden piles. The bridge piers would not rest on the peat surface. They would rest on piles driven through the peat down to the bearing layer beneath it, which lay at depths ranging from 30 to 70 feet depending on where the test borings were taken along the route. The piles would carry the structure’s loads through the soft peat to material below that could actually bear the weight.
The piles Johannessen specified were timber, specifically southern yellow pine, a dense, resinous wood that resists decay in saturated soil better than most species. Each pile was 60 to 80 feet long, tapered at the driven end, fitted with a steel shoe, and driven vertically into the marsh soil by a drop hammer. The hammer, a weight of cast iron, was lifted by cable on the pile-driving barge and dropped onto the top of the pile repeatedly until the pile reached refusal, a specific resistance standard measured in blows per inch of penetration. When a pile reached refusal, the crew trimmed the top and moved to the next location.
That work was done in the Meadowlands in 1930 and 1931 on barges and temporary trestle platforms built out into the marsh. The marsh smell in summer carried the odors of the refineries, the organic decay of the peat, and the wastes of the chemical plants upstream on the rivers. The mosquitoes were present in numbers that 1930 workers did not have the chemical tools to fully handle. Coal-tar creosote, the standard personal protection against insects for outdoor workers since the nineteenth century, was still in use.
It was effective. It was also foul-smelling, irritating to the skin on continuous contact, and mildly carcinogenic in ways no one understood in 1930. In winter, working on barges in the tidal channels of the Hackensack and Passaic was a different matter entirely. The channels froze at the edges in cold snaps.
Winds off Newark Bay moved unimpeded across the flat marsh and hit the men on the open pile-driving barges at full force. The steam pile hammers clanked through the spray and vapor in the cold air. The workers who handled rigging on the barge decks in January 1931 had hands so numb they lost some feeling in their fingertips, and so dry they cracked and bled where the skin had been stressed past its limit for too long. They did not stop for the cold.
There was no provision for stopping for cold. The work schedule did not include personal comfort as a variable. The final pile count for the foundation system of the Pulaski Skyway was 74,000 wooden piles. Seventy-four thousand.
Each one driven individually by a crew on a barge working in a tidal marsh for thirty-five cents an hour in 1930. The pile-driving crews worked two shifts of twelve hours each, because the work did not wait for daylight and the schedule did not allow for daytime-only operation. Pile driving on the night shift in the Hackensack Meadows in November 1930 was done by the light of arc lamps mounted on the barge. The sound of the machinery carried across the flat marsh with nothing to absorb it.
The falling hammer struck the soft ground in a rhythm the men on the barge could hear even in their sleep. Above the driven piles, concrete pile caps were poured. The pile cap is the structural element that ties a group of individual piles together into a single foundation unit capable of supporting the column above it. The pile caps of the Pulaski Skyway bridges were poured in forms placed at the tops of the piles, below the marsh surface at some locations, inside excavations that filled with water from the moment digging began.
Workers stood in those excavations amid the meadow mud to place the forms and pour the concrete. The water was tidal saltwater mixed with everything the refineries had been putting into the Hackensack upstream. The men stood in it while placing forms and pouring concrete, stood in it in rubber boots that did not keep the water out completely, with hands already cracked and dry from the winter air. No one recorded their names in any publicly accessible document.
They exist in payroll records. The payroll records are in Trenton. The concrete for the columns and girders of the elevated highway was mixed on site in gasoline-powered mixers and poured by hand into wooden forms. Carpenters built the forms at the site of each bridge.
The concrete was poured through chutes and distributed into the forms by workers using vibrators and hand tools, then left to cure before the forms were stripped and moved to the next location. Each bridge of the elevated highway was identical to the one before and after it. Johannessen designed a standardized form system that could be built, stripped, and transported repeatedly along the sections of the elevated highway. The form crews became proficient at the sequence of work.
The concrete crews became proficient at the sequence of work. The work had the character of industrial production more than construction in the traditional sense. It was a factory producing identical concrete bridges. And the factory moved south, one bridge at a time, as the structure progressed from the Newark end toward the Passaic River.
When you stand under the elevated highway today and look at the concrete columns receding toward the rivers, you can see that repetition. Identical columns. Identical bridges. Each one poured by a different crew on a different day, but identical in dimension because the form system forced it.
The rhythm of the structure is the rhythm of industrial production applied to a piece of infrastructure. It is the same rhythm you can see in the arches of the Long Key Bridge in Florida, built a generation earlier by different men over open ocean with different tools but the same underlying logic: identical work repeated one after another until the construction was complete. The approach bridges brought the Skyway to the Passaic River. The Passaic was a different engineering problem.
The Passaic at the Skyway crossing was a navigable waterway serving industrial ports on its banks. Ocean-going ships moved up the Passaic from Newark Bay toward the oil refineries, chemical docks, and shipyards along the river. Those ships had masts, superstructures, and cranes reaching 40, 50, and 60 feet above the waterline. The highway crossing above them had to provide sufficient vertical clearance for the tallest vessel reasonably expected to use the river.
Johannessen set the clearance at 135 feet at the main span, 135 feet above the Passaic River. That is not an architectural choice. It is a navigational requirement. The height of the Skyway above the Passaic is the height dictated by the ships passing in the river.
To raise an automobile highway to 135 feet within a reasonable horizontal distance required grades that a loaded vehicle could climb. The approach grades on the Skyway are about 2. 7 percent, meaning the road rises 2. 7 feet for every 100 feet of horizontal distance.
That was suitable for most vehicles in 1930, and it was steep enough that heavy trucks required full throttle on the climb. The grade also meant that reaching 135 feet at the Passaic crossing required a very long approach, which is why the structure is 3. 5 miles long. The height is built up gradually over more than a mile of approach bridges before the structure reaches its maximum height at the river.
The main spans over the Passaic were steel, specifically steel truss spans, meaning the truss members rose above the roadway on both sides, framing a channel around the driver. Travelers crossing the Passaic on the Pulaski Skyway traveled through a canyon of steel, with the river visible below through the openings of the trusses and the sky above through the same open framework. The total length of the steel truss spans over the Passaic was 3,568 linear feet. Each truss member was fabricated at a steel mill on the mainland, loaded onto railroad flatcars, moved to the job site in New Jersey, transferred to cranes and derricks, and lifted into place above the concrete piers built at the river crossings.
The steel erection over the Passaic was the work of ironworkers. The ironworkers who built the steel spans of the Pulaski Skyway were not a homogeneous group. Mohawk ironworkers from the Kahnawake reserve in Quebec had been working on American steel structures since the 1880s. Their entry into structural ironwork began with the construction of the Victoria Bridge across the St.
Lawrence, where Mohawk men were hired as laborers and showed a skill for high work that contractors noticed and hired them for. By 1930, Mohawk ironworkers were a recognized and sought-after presence in high steel in the American Northeast. They were on the Pulaski Skyway. They were on the Empire State Building, then under construction at the same time in Manhattan.
They were on every major steel structure going up in the region. They worked alongside Italian immigrants, men from northern New Jersey communities who had been in the United States a decade or two, whose sons were the first generation of their families in American public schools. They worked alongside men from the Black communities of Newark and Jersey City, men who had come north from Georgia and South Carolina in the Great Migration and found themselves competing for the lowest classifications in the construction crew because the classification system was designed to keep them there. Pay disparity was built into the payroll.
General laborers, unskilled men who carried materials, cleaned forms, and did work requiring endurance rather than training, earned thirty-five cents an hour. Skilled concrete workers earned more. Ironworkers earned more than concrete workers. Foremen earned more than ironworkers, and within every classification, Black workers earned less than white workers in identical job categories.
This was not hidden. It was policy, recorded in payroll records without comment or justification. The specific work of the ironworkers was riveting. A riveting gang consisted of four men working as a unit.
The heater stood at a small portable coal or coke furnace and brought the rivets to an orange-white heat, meaning the steel was soft enough to be formed. The passer picked the hot rivet from the heater with tongs or a small concave tool and carried it to the rivet location, a distance that had to be short enough for the rivet to retain its working heat on arrival. The bucker-up held a heavy iron bar against the prepared hole to provide the resistance needed to form the rivet. The riveter drove the rivet into place with an air hammer, its air hose running down to a compressor below deck, forcing the tail of the rivet against the bucking bar to form a second head that closed the joint.
Every rivet in the steel bridges of the Pulaski Skyway was installed by a four-man gang working this way. The rivet count in the steel spans over the Passaic alone ran to tens of thousands, each one heated, passed, bucked, and driven in sequence, one after another, over the months of steel erection in 1931. This work was done 135 feet above the Passaic River. There were no guardrails in the modern sense around the work areas on the steel structure.
There were wooden work platforms in some areas and exposed steel in others. There was safety netting below some sections of work, in compliance with what New Jersey had required the contractor to provide in 1931. The netting coverage was not comprehensive. A man who fell from the steel over the Passaic found the Passaic below him.
Falling 135 feet into water produces the same physiological result as falling 135 feet onto concrete. The impact velocity is sufficient to be fatal regardless of what is underneath. This was understood by every man working on the steel. That understanding did not stop the work.
Work stopped briefly when a man fell, for the necessary procedures, and then resumed. The accident records for the construction of the Pulaski Skyway are incomplete. The New Jersey State Highway Department submitted accident reports to the state labor department for accidents that entered the formal system. A death on the job site required a coroner’s investigation and generated official paperwork.
A serious injury requiring hospitalization also generated paperwork. These events are documented in state records, partially and with varying degrees of completeness depending on who filled out the forms and in which year of the project the accident occurred. What the records do not capture are the deaths that never produced formal proceedings. A worker who fell into the Passaic at night and was carried away by the current before anyone could reach him might appear in internal company correspondence.
He might not. His name, if given correctly to the payroll clerk at hiring, might be in the payroll record. It might not. The payroll system in 1930 did not require document verification.
A man gave his name and started work. If he died before his next payday, his name might remain in the record. If he died after receiving his pay and before anyone formally processed his absence, his record in the system ended with the last check he received. Researchers who have examined the available records have estimated the total death toll in the construction of the Pulaski Skyway at between twelve and twenty men.
The exact number has never been determined. It cannot be determined from the surviving records, because that would require a completeness of documentation that the construction system of 1930 did not produce. The deaths of twelve to twenty men for a 3. 5-mile elevated highway over a tidal marsh were considered an acceptable outcome in the context of major American infrastructure projects of that era.
That era had different standards for what constituted acceptable outcomes than the era that followed. The Hackensack River crossing, east of the Passaic, presented a different set of problems at the foundation level. The Hackensack at the Skyway crossing was a shallower, less commercially active waterway than the Passaic, but it was still navigable and required adequate clearance height for the vessels that used it. The steel spans over the Hackensack were shorter than those over the Passaic, reflecting the lesser navigation requirements of the Hackensack.
But the foundation conditions in the Hackensack Meadows were more difficult than anywhere else along the route. The peat layer under the Hackensack approach sections was deeper and softer than the peat on the Passaic side. Johannessen’s survey crews’ test borings found bearing material at depths reaching 60 and 70 feet at some locations. Driving piles to 70 feet in saturated Hackensack peat was slower than driving to 30 feet.
Penetration rates dropped with pile length because the friction of the surrounding soil worked against the pile being driven from above, in addition to providing tip resistance as the pile forced its way downward. The long piles in the deep soft soil required more blows per foot than the short piles in the shallow soft soil. The pile-driving crews on the Hackensack sections drove their piles slowly, and they had a great many piles to drive. The pile caps on the deepest Hackensack foundations were formed and poured at levels well below the marsh surface.
Workers dug into peat that immediately tried to close in around the excavation, shoring the walls with timber as they placed the forms. The excavation filled with water as fast as the pumps could remove it. They pumped the water, poured concrete in whatever dry conditions they could maintain, then stripped the forms and backfilled the excavation, leaving the pier built on a pile cap permanently below the water level of the Hackensack Meadows, in a condition that would remain as long as the structure stood. Those concrete pile caps are still there.
They have been in the ground since 1931. The peat around them has compressed slightly over nine decades of continuous loading. The piles beneath them have not moved. Southern yellow pine below the permanent water table in saturated soil resists decay.
The biological processes that destroy wood require oxygen. Timber permanently saturated below the water table exists in an environment almost devoid of available oxygen. It survives. It has survived.
If the Pulaski Skyway were demolished tomorrow, which it will not be, the timber piles in the Hackensack Meadows would remain until someone made the effort to extract them. And if no one extracted them, they would remain for centuries. Johannessen’s design for the whole structure included a complication that the approach bridges and the main river spans did not fully account for on their own: the transition between the two systems. A concrete approach bridge and a steel truss span are different structural types with different load paths and different deflection characteristics.
Where they met, the structure had to accommodate the different behaviors of the two systems. The bearing details at the ends of the steel spans, where the truss rests on the concrete piers, were designed to allow the steel to expand and contract with heat without transmitting those forces into the concrete. Steel expands noticeably with temperature change. A steel truss structure 3,568 feet long crossing a river in New Jersey experiences temperature swings from January to August that would move the steel several inches if the movement were unconstrained.
Constrain the steel’s movement and the forces become enormous. Allow it to move and those forces dissipate. Johannessen’s bearing details allowed the steel to slide on polished bearing plates at the expansion ends of each span. The dead end, the fixed end of each span, was bolted down.
The expansion end was free to move. The total thermal movement of the steel spans over the Passaic over the annual temperature cycle is several inches. The bearings that accommodate that movement were fabricated in a shop on land and installed on the concrete piers before the steel was placed. These details are invisible from the road.
Drivers crossing the Pulaski Skyway today have no way of knowing that the steel beneath them is moving millimeter by millimeter with temperature. They feel no difference. The structure was designed so they would feel no difference. The movement happens at the bearings, isolated from the roadway.
The road remains smooth. The men who made the bearing assemblies in a Newark shop in 1930 knew what they were building. They knew the precision their work required. Their names are not on the structure.
The project moved south through 1930 and into 1931, peaking at a workforce of about 2,500 men. That number was not constant. Depression-era construction projects were characterized by high labor turnover. Not because workers chose to leave, but through the natural attrition of injuries, illness, and the periodic layoffs that occurred when material deliveries lagged or weather stopped operations.
A worker who put in three months on the project and suffered an injury requiring more than a day to recover was taken off the payroll until he was ready to return. Any vacancy was filled from the pool of men who were always waiting at the site entrance for exactly that opportunity. The labor pool in New Jersey in 1931 was enormous. The Depression was two years old.
The industrial plants around Newark Bay, which had employed a hundred thousand workers in 1928, were running at reduced capacity or closed outright. Men who had worked in the refineries, chemical plants, and shipyards were looking for work. Public works projects were the primary source of construction employment the state could offer them. The Pulaski Skyway workers did not live in camps on floating barges the way the workers of the Florida East Coast Railway had lived in the Keys.
They lived in boarding houses and crowded tenements in Newark, Jersey City, Kearny, and Secaucus, in the working-class neighborhoods of the industrial cities around the Meadowlands. They took streetcars and walked to the site entrance. They spent their evenings in the neighborhoods where their communities were concentrated: Italian workers in Italian neighborhoods, Polish workers in Polish neighborhoods, Black workers in Black neighborhoods, neighborhoods that were not a matter of preference so much as the product of formal and informal exclusion from better housing elsewhere. Some had families.
Some were single men who had come to New Jersey looking for whatever work they could find, found the Skyway, and were grateful for it. Some had worked on construction projects before and knew the rhythm of the work. Some had never worked a construction project and were learning on the job. The foremen who ran the crews were experienced men who had worked their way up through the trade.
They knew how to push a crew without exhausting it. They knew how many hours a man could sustain pile driving or concrete work before his output dropped and his accident risk rose. They pushed to that limit because the schedule required it and because the contractor’s fee was tied to the schedule. A foreman who pushed his crew past that limit caused accidents.
Accidents cost time and paperwork, and sometimes cost the foreman his job. Managing human endurance was one of the skills of the job. It was never recorded in the engineering documents. It left no trace on the steel or the concrete.
It is one of the things that happened on the project that its records do not contain. The Pulaski Skyway opened on January 6, 1932. The opening ceremony was held at the Newark end in cold, overcast weather, typical January weather for New Jersey. The governor of New Jersey gave a speech.
County officials gave speeches. The mayor of Newark gave a speech. A military band played. The ribbon was cut.
A convoy of cars drove the length of the structure from Newark to Jersey City for the first time. The drivers looked down at the Meadowlands, at the industrial skyline around them, and at the Manhattan skyline, visible on a clear day to the east over the rooftops of Jersey City. Johannessen was there. He was not the central figure of the ceremony.
He was the engineer. The ceremony was for the politicians who had authorized and funded the project. Johannessen stood somewhere in the middle of the convoy and watched the opening of his structure, presumably feeling what any man feels who has spent four years designing and building something unprecedented when it is finally used for the purpose for which it was designed. The workers were not there.
Not as a matter of deliberate exclusion, exactly. There was no invitation that was withheld. There was simply no mechanism for notifying 2,500 construction workers or involving them in the ribbon-cutting for the infrastructure they had built. They had finished their work, been paid, and dispersed back into the Depression labor market.
The job was over. The ceremony was for someone else. The first drivers across the Pulaski Skyway reported their experience in newspapers and letters. They noted the height.
Many mentioned feeling the structure move in the wind, a slight flex in the roadway that attentive passengers noticed. The New Jersey State Highway Department explained publicly what Johannessen could have explained to any of them directly: the movement was designed into the structure. The steel expanded and contracted with temperature. The structure responded to wind loads by deflecting slightly and returning.
This was not a defect. This was the structure working correctly. Some drivers did not find this explanation reassuring. Some drivers did not use the bridge for weeks after it opened, preferring the congested surface roads to the feeling of being 135 feet above the Passaic on a road that moved in the wind.
Traffic data from the first months of operation shows usage rising gradually as drivers made the crossing once, tested the bridge’s solidity, then did it again, and stopped thinking about the height and started noticing how fast it was compared to the surface roads. Within a year, the Skyway was carrying more traffic than any comparable stretch of road in New Jersey. The surface-grade crossing conflicts were gone entirely. Freight trains now passed under the structure instead of through it.
Ships moved under the main spans without difficulty. It worked. The Pulaski Skyway worked for decades, and the decades worked on it in turn. Elevated steel structures corrode in salt-air environments.
The air around Newark Bay in the thirties, forties, and fifties was not benign. The refineries and chemical plants surrounding the Meadowlands produced sulfur dioxide and other compounds that accelerated corrosion. Salt air from Newark Bay carried chlorides onto every exposed steel surface. The paint systems of the thirties were better than no paint, but far less durable than the systems structural steel would receive later in the century.
The Pulaski Skyway’s maintenance cycle began the year after it opened and never ended. Painting crews have worked on the structure in every decade of its existence. Inspection crews have examined the welds, rivets, bearing assemblies, concrete columns, and timber piles, to the extent timber piles can be inspected, in every decade of its existence. The Skyway’s maintenance record in the files of the New Jersey Department of Transportation is a record of continuous attention to an aging structure that was never allowed to deteriorate to the point of structural danger.
The structure was not widened when the surrounding highway network was widened. The four lanes Johannessen designed on the bridge deck remain four lanes. Traffic volumes that have grown far beyond what 1930 traffic engineering anticipated use those four lanes every day. The Skyway is a bottleneck, and has been for decades, and solving that problem is complicated by the fact that the structure is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and cannot simply be demolished.
A project carried out between 2013 and 2016 addressed structural deficiencies identified in engineering inspections over the previous decade. Corroded steel was replaced. Concrete was repaired. Bearing assemblies were rebuilt or replaced.
The project cost roughly one billion dollars. One billion dollars to rehabilitate a structure that cost twenty-one million dollars to build in 1930. The thousand-to-one ratio between original cost and rehabilitation cost is not only about inflation. The restoration project replaced structural elements with modern equivalents that are more durable and more sophisticated than the originals.
The bearing units, for example, are no longer polished steel plates. They are engineered rubber bearing pads with internal reinforcement. They perform the same function as the original bearings, but using materials that did not exist in 1930 and precision that was impossible to manufacture then. The restoration project also addressed decades of deferred maintenance, the accumulated cost of years in which the structure was safe enough, but not so safe that the slow processes of corrosion and fatigue stopped.
There is something specific that happens when you drive across the Pulaski Skyway today. You are on Route 1 and 9 in Newark inside the industrial corridor, and the road begins to rise. It rises gradually at first, the grade so gentle you do not feel a difference from ordinary road, but the elevation accumulates and the ground falls away beneath you, and within a few hundred yards the streets and cars and warehouses are below, the meadows open out ahead of you, and you find yourself on the elevated bridge. The approach bridge section crosses the marsh on concrete columns standing in the salt hay and reeds.
The Hackensack River appears and passes beneath you. Then more approach bridges. Then the structure begins to rise more steeply toward the Passaic crossing, and the industrial landscape opens around you, and you can see south toward Newark Bay and north toward the river’s bends and the smokestacks of the installations that have worked those banks for over a century. Then the steel truss spans begin.
The trusses rise on both sides of the road. The truss members pass over your head at the peaks. The river is below, 135 feet down. The water is moving with the tide.
If you look over the edge at the right moment, you can see the water through the gaps in the bridge structure beneath the roadway. Then the spans end and the trusses come down to road level, and the structure begins its long descent toward Jersey City. The entire crossing takes four minutes in light traffic. Four minutes.
The pile crews drove the first pile on May 15, 1930, and they drove the last of the 74,000 piles sometime in the winter of 1931. The concrete workers poured their identical spans across the meadows for about a year. The ironworkers heated, passed, bucked, and drove rivets through the cold winter months of steel erection over the Passaic. The foremen pushed their crews to the edge of endurance to keep the schedule moving.
Between twelve and twenty men did not finish this project. They were buried the way that era buried construction workers, without much ceremony and without record-keeping that would allow anyone to find them now. All of it produced the four minutes you spend on the Skyway today. There is a truth about infrastructure that the people who use it rarely recognize, but the people who build it know well.
Any structure built by human hands in a particular place and a particular year carries the conditions of its construction into the future. The concrete of the Pulaski Skyway bridges was mixed in gasoline-powered mixers in 1930 and 1931 and poured by hand into wooden forms in the Meadowlands. The concrete that was poured then is the same concrete still present in the parts of the structure the 2013 restoration did not replace. The chemistry of that material has been working on itself for ninety years.
The calcium silicate hydrate that gives concrete its strength has continued to develop, very slowly, over nine decades. The concrete poured in 1930 is now stronger than it was when it cured. The timber piles are in the same condition they were in the thirties, in the sense that the conditions preserving them have not changed. They are wet.
They will remain wet. The peat surrounding them has not dried and will not dry as long as the water table in the Hackensack Meadows remains at its current level. The men who drove those piles built a foundation intended to last indefinitely, which is the best that can be built in a tidal marsh. That indefinite period has so far lasted ninety years and counting.
The rivets in the steel spans were inspected repeatedly under the restoration program and found to be serviceable except those replaced for corrosion or fatigue cracking. A rivet driven in 1931 is a piece of steel heated in a portable furnace by a man who earned more than a pile driver and less than a foreman, passed by another man who carried it hot across the exposed steel, then driven by a third man with an air hammer against a fourth man holding the bucking bar behind the hole, and that rivet is now ninety years old and carrying a steel joint that thousands of vehicles cross daily above the Passaic River. The names of those four men are not engraved on the rivet. The Meadowlands around the Pulaski Skyway have changed more than the structure itself.
In 1930, the Meadowlands were an undifferentiated sacrifice zone, a landscape defined by what was put into it rather than by any feature it possessed. The refineries, chemical plants, and dumps were the frame through which the Meadowlands were viewed by anyone who had occasion to think about them, which was not many people. The Clean Water Act of 1972 and subsequent environmental legislation of the seventies began a slow process of changing what the rivers and marsh received from the industrial facilities around them. Industrial discharge declined.
Water quality improved slowly over decades. The biological communities in the marsh, suppressed by pollutant loads, began to recover. Herons appeared, then ospreys, then muskrats and otters. Phragmites, the common invasive reed that is the hallmark of disturbed wetlands in the Northeast, colonized the drier marsh edges in dense stands.
Phragmites is not native; it crowds out the native salt hay and cordgrass, so ecologists work to manage it. But its presence at least indicates a wetland clean enough to support dense vegetative growth that was not possible when refinery discharges were at their peak. The Hackensack Meadowlands, established in 1969, is now managed as a mix of industrial land use, residential development, sports facilities, and wildlife habitat. The New Jersey Meadowlands Commission tracks nesting bird species, water quality, and invasive plant management alongside the zoning and development permits that are part of its other duties.
The largest urban wildlife refuge on the East Coast sits in the middle of the most densely populated urban area in the United States, directly below the Pulaski Skyway. The concrete columns of the approach bridge stand in the salt grass. The steel trusses hang over the river. Herons fish in the tidal channels that flow around the bases of those columns, in the same water where the pile-driving barges anchored in 1930.
In the same water where the foundation crews stood when they poured the pile caps below the ground surface. The herons know none of this. The structure is simply part of the landscape they live in. The landscape includes the sky, the water, the marsh grass, and the concrete columns of a ninety-year-old elevated highway.
All of it is one scene to the bird in the water. I want to tell you something about the records. The payroll books for the construction of the Pulaski Skyway are in the New Jersey State Archives. I have worked with construction records of this kind on other projects, and the experience of reading them is a particular one.
The records are handwritten in most cases. Names in columns, job classifications in columns, daily or weekly wages in columns. The handwriting varies because different payroll clerks wrote different sections over the two years of construction. Some entries are neat and legible.
Others are compressed and hurried. Some names are spelled one way in one entry and another way in a different entry, because the payroll clerk wrote the name as he heard it from the worker. And the name had a spelling in a language different from the clerk’s own. The men in those columns drove the piles.
They poured the concrete. They drove the rivets. They worked winter shifts on the Passaic, in cold that made touching steel with bare hands painful. They went home to Newark, Kearny, and Secaucus at the end of their shifts, ate what their 1931 wages provided, slept, and reported back the next morning.
Between twelve and twenty of them did not come back from work on some mornings. Their entries end. The columns stop. There is no note in most cases explaining why.
The Pulaski Skyway stands on those columns, on the foundation piles those men drove, the concrete they poured, the steel they riveted, and on the lives those men spent in the Meadowlands of northern New Jersey in 1930 and 1931, when the Depression was in its second year and what you could get was thirty-five cents an hour. If you cross the Pulaski Skyway today, which you can do via Route 1 and 9 between Newark and Jersey City, here is what you are crossing. You are crossing 74,000 wooden piles driven into the soil of the Hackensack and Passaic Meadows by men earning thirty-five cents an hour in the second year of the Great Depression. You are crossing concrete poured in wooden forms by workers whose names are in records in Trenton that no one reads.
You are crossing steel rivets installed by four-man gangs 135 feet above the Passaic River, without guardrails in the modern sense, with safety netting covering some sections of work and not others. You are crossing a structure that cost between twelve and twenty lives to build. The exact number cannot be recovered from the surviving records. You cross it in four minutes, and if you look to the sides of the road, you will see the concrete piers of Sigvald Johannessen’s bridges standing in the marsh grass and tidal channels of the Hackensack Meadows.
They have stood there since 1931. Birds hunt around them. The tides move around them twice a day as they have moved since the day the forms were stripped. Phragmites grows in the marsh, ospreys hunt over the water, and the refineries, the few that remain, still stand at the edges of the protected area, their smokestacks rising above the marsh.
And the road rises above all of it, over the timber, concrete, and steel that men erected, poured, and riveted in 1930 and 1931. Men whose names were never written on the structure. Men whose names sit in the columns of the ledgers in Trenton. Men who built something that has outlived everything else their hands touched.
Four minutes. The Meadowlands are still there. The structure is still there.
The names are gone.
