On the morning of May 15, 1930, a crew of sixty men moved into the Meadowlands of New Jersey carrying wooden piles with steel tips and a pile driver mounted on a barge, and they began to build 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 the dumps that had been pouring their contents into the marsh for decades. The smell on a warm day was distinctive and filled the entire place.
The Meadowlands in 1930 was where New York and New Jersey put the things they did not wish to see, and they had put those things there long enough that the marsh itself had absorbed the character 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 had arrived, and the jobs available to a laborer without specific qualifications were shrinking week by week. The 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 highway of steel and concrete from Jersey City to Newark, crossing the Passaic and Hackensack rivers and the railroad tracks below without touching the ground for the entire distance. When it opened, 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 had driven 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 marsh, 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 made car ownership available to the working and middle classes in a way that had never existed 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 1920s had no settled tools for solving it. The approaches to New York from New Jersey were especially bad. Crossing the Hudson was done by ferry. The ferries could not keep up with the cars.
There were no highway bridges over the Hudson in the 1920s. There was no car tunnel until the Holland Tunnel opened in 1927. Every car that wanted to move from New Jersey to Manhattan waited its turn for the ferry, and the waits during rush 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 leading to it were already inadequate. Getting from Newark to Jersey City, a distance of eight miles, could take an hour on good days, and much longer on bad ones. The specific problem along the Newark-to-Jersey City corridor was not just volume; it was the railroad grade crossings. The road network through the Meadowlands ran at the same grade as the railroad tracks serving the industrial complex around Newark Bay.
Freight trains crossed the roads. Crossing gates came down. Traffic stopped. One freight train crossing a main 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.
The 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 share the grade with the railroad tracks, the road would not be at the grade at all. 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 end to end, entering Jersey City at the same elevation it left Newark without touching the ground between. No one in the United States had ever built a highway structure of that length or that height before. There were suspension bridges for railroads in the industrial Northeast.
There were elevated railroad lines in the cities. There were road overpasses at specific congested intersections. There was nothing like three and a half miles of continuous elevated highway, starting at ground level at both ends and rising to 135 feet at its center, designed from the start to carry high-speed automobile traffic 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 engineering precedent was the elevated railroad infrastructure of the Northeast’s 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 base of experience for a structure of this kind in the United States in 1928 was effectively zero.
The man charged with designing the structure was Sigvald Johansson, chief engineer of the Bridge and Structures Division of the New Jersey State Highway Department. Johansson was not a man famous in the way politicians are famous. He was a civil engineer, and his reputation was built on technical competence and on a particular kind of professional courage: the willingness to commit to a design before that design had a precedent to confirm it. He had built bridges and viaducts across New Jersey for years.
He knew what the ground under the Meadowlands was made of. He knew what clearances 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 grew heavier.
He designed the structure for future loads, not current ones. The geological problem that governed every other engineering decision in the project was the soil under the Meadowlands. The marsh soil under the Hackensack and Passaic Meadowlands 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 about ground level.
It is compressible in ways that structural engineers spend their careers designing solutions to avoid. If you place a load on Meadowlands peat, the peat compresses. If you place a large load on it, it compresses a great deal. If you place the weight of an elevated concrete-and-steel highway on it, it settles in ways that crack the concrete, distort the steel, and eventually fail the structure.
The solution was wooden piles. The bridge piers would not rest on the surface of the peat soil. They would rest on piles driven through the peat down to the bearing layer beneath it, which lay at depths ranging from thirty to seventy feet, depending on where the borings were taken along the route. The piles would transfer the structure’s loads through the soft peat to the material below that could actually support weight.
The piles Johansson specified were timber, specifically southern yellow pine, a dense resinous wood that resists decay in saturated soil better than most other species. Each pile was between sixty and eighty feet long, sharpened at the driven end 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 a cable on the pile-driving barge and dropped onto the top of the pile repeatedly until the pile reached refusal, a defined resistance criterion measured as a number of blows per inch of penetration. When a pile reached refusal, the crew trimmed it to grade and moved to the next position.
This work was done in the Meadowlands in 1930 and 1931 from barges and temporary trestle platforms built inside the marsh. The smell of the marsh in summer carried the odors of the refineries, the organic decay of the peat, and the chemical plant wastes coming down the rivers. The mosquitoes were present in numbers that workers in 1930 lacked the chemical tools to fully handle. Coal-tar creosote, the standard personal insect repellent for outdoor workers since the nineteenth century, was still in use.
It worked. But it stank, irritated the skin with repeated contact, and was mildly carcinogenic in ways no one in 1930 understood. In winter, working from barges in the tidal channels of the Hackensack and Passaic was another matter entirely. The channels froze over at the edges in cold snaps.
The wind off Newark Bay moved unobstructed across the flat marsh and hit the men on the exposed pile-driving barges with full force. The steam pile hammers worked through spray and steam in the cold air. The workers who handled the rigging on the barge decks in January 1931 had hands numb to the point of losing feeling in the fingertips, and dry to the point of cracking and bleeding where the skin had been stressed beyond what it could take for too long. They did not stop for 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 Pulaski Skyway foundation system was 74,000 wooden piles. Seventy-four thousand.
Each one driven by hand 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 twelve-hour shifts, because the work did not wait for daylight and the schedule did not allow for daytime work alone. Night-shift pile driving in the Hackensack Meadowlands in November 1930 was done under arc lights 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 heard even in their sleep. Above the driven piles, concrete pile caps were poured. A 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 bridge were poured in forms set at the tops of the piles below the marsh surface in some locations, inside excavations that filled with water from the moment digging began.
The men stood in those excavations amid the meadow mud to set the forms and pour the concrete. The water was tidal salt water mixed with everything the refineries had put into the Hackensack upstream. The men stood in it while setting forms and pouring concrete, stood in it in rubber boots that did not fully keep the water out, with hands already dry and cracked from the winter air. No one recorded their names in any publicly accessible document.
They exist in the payroll records. The payroll records are in Trenton. The concrete for the columns and spans of the elevated road was mixed on site with gasoline-powered mixers and poured by hand into wooden forms. Carpenters built the forms at each bridge site.
Concrete was poured through chutes and distributed in the forms by men using vibrators and hand tools, then left to cure before the forms were stripped and moved to the next location. Each bridge on the elevated structure was identical to the one before and after it. Johansson designed a standardized form system that could be built, stripped, and moved repeatedly along the elevated sections. The form crews became practiced at the sequence of work.
The concrete crews became practiced 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 advanced 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 this repetition. Identical columns. Identical spans. Each one poured by a different crew on a different day, but identical in dimensions because the form system imposed 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 full generation earlier by different men over open ocean with different tools but the same essential logic: identical work repeated one after another until the construction was complete. The approach spans brought the Skyway to the Passaic River. The Passaic posed a different engineering problem.
The Passaic at the Skyway crossing was a navigable waterway serving the industrial ports along its banks. Ocean ships moved up the Passaic from Newark Bay toward the refineries, chemical piers, and shipyards along the river. These ships had masts, superstructures, and cranes rising forty, fifty, sixty feet above the waterline. The highway crossing above them had to provide enough vertical clearance for the tallest ship that could reasonably be expected to use the river.
Johansson specified a clearance of 135 feet at the main span, 135 feet above the Passaic River. This is not an architectural choice. It is a navigational requirement. The height of the Skyway above the Passaic is the height imposed by the ships passing on the river.
Lifting a highway for automobiles to a height of 135 feet within a reasonable horizontal distance required grades that a loaded vehicle could climb. The approach grades of the Skyway are about 2. 7 percent, meaning the road rises 2. 7 feet for every 100 feet of horizontal distance.
This was suitable for most vehicles in 1930, and steep enough to require heavy trucks to hold the throttle fully open on the way up. The grade also meant that reaching 135 feet at the Passaic crossing required a very long approach, which is why the structure is three and a half miles long. The height is built up gradually over more than a mile of approach spans 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 cage around the driver.
Travelers crossing the Passaic on the Pulaski Skyway drove through a canyon of steel, with the river visible below through the openings in the trusses and the sky above through the same open structure. The total length of the steel truss spans over the Passaic was 3,568 linear feet. Each truss piece was fabricated in a steel plant on the mainland, loaded onto railroad flatcars, shipped to the job site in New Jersey, transferred to cranes and derricks, and lifted into place above the concrete bridge piers built at the river crossings. The steel erection over the Passaic was the work of the ironworkers.
The ironworkers who built the steel spans of the Pulaski Skyway were not a uniform 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 building of the Victoria Bridge across the St. Lawrence, where Mohawk men were hired as day laborers and demonstrated a skill at working at height that contractors noticed and hired them for.
By 1930, Mohawk ironworkers were a recognized and sought-after presence in high steel in the northeastern United States. They were at the Pulaski Skyway. They were at the Empire State Building, under construction at the same time in Manhattan. They were at 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 for a decade or two, whose sons were the first generation of their families to attend 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 on a construction crew because the classification system was designed to keep them there. The wage disparity was built into the payroll. Common laborers, the unskilled men who carried materials, cleaned forms, and did the work that required 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 were paid less than white workers in identical job categories.
This was not hidden. It was a policy recorded in the payroll registers without comment or justification. The specific work of the ironworkers was riveting. A riveting gang consisted of four men working as a team.
The heater stood at a small portable coal or coke furnace and brought the rivets to a glowing orange-white temperature, meaning the steel was soft enough to form. The passer picked the hot rivet from the heater with tongs or a small cupped tool and carried it to the riveting position, a distance that had to be short enough for the rivet to retain its working heat on arrival. The holder-on held a heavy iron dolly against the prepared hole to provide the resistance needed to form the rivet. The riveter drove the rivet into place with an air hammer, with the air hose running to a compressor below, pressing the tail of the rivet against the dolly to form a second head that closed the joint.
Every rivet in the steel spans of the Pulaski Skyway was installed by a four-man gang working this way. The number of rivets in the steel spans over the Passaic alone reached tens of thousands, each one heated, passed, placed, and hammered in sequence, one after another, over 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 bare steel members in others. There was a safety net under some sections of the work, required by the state of New Jersey of the contractor in 1931. The safety net 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 speed is sufficient to be fatal regardless of what is below. This was understood by every man who worked on the steel. That awareness did not stop the work.
The work stopped briefly when a man fell, for the necessary procedures, and then resumed. The accident records for the Pulaski Skyway construction are incomplete. The New Jersey State Highway Department submitted accident reports to the state Department of Labor for accidents that entered the official system. A death at the work site required a coroner’s investigation and generated official paperwork.
A serious injury requiring hospitalization also generated paperwork. These events are documented in the state records partially and with varying degrees of completeness depending on who was filling out the forms and in which year of the project schedule the accident occurred. What the records do not capture are the deaths that did not generate official 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 a company’s internal correspondence.
He might not. His name, if he had given it correctly to the payroll clerk when hired, might be in the payroll record. It might not. The payroll system in 1930 did not require document verification.
A man gave a name and started work. If he died before his next payday, his name might still be in the record. If he died after collecting his pay and before anyone formally processed his absence, his record in the system ended with his last payment. Researchers who have examined the available records have estimated the total number of deaths 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 between twelve and twenty men for a three-and-a-half-mile elevated highway over a tidal marsh was 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 crossing of the Hackensack River, east of the Passaic, posed 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 remained navigable and required sufficient clearance height for the vessels using it. The steel spans over the Hackensack were shorter than those over the Passaic, reflecting the lesser navigational requirements of the Hackensack. But the foundation conditions in the Hackensack Meadowlands were more difficult than anywhere else along the route.
The layer of peat under the Hackensack approach sections was deeper and softer than the peat on the Passaic side. The borings made by Johansson’s survey crews found bearing material at depths reaching sixty and seventy feet in some locations. Driving piles to seventy feet in saturated Meadowlands peat was slower than driving them to thirty feet. The penetration rate dropped as pile length increased because the skin friction of the surrounding soil acted against the pile being driven from above, in addition to providing resistance at the pile tip as it worked its way down.
The long piles in deep soft soil required more blows per foot than the short piles in shallow soft soil. The pile-driving crews in the Hackensack sections drove their piles slowly, and they had a great many of them to drive. The pile caps were formed and poured on the deepest Hackensack foundation piers at levels far below the marsh surface. The men dug into peat that immediately tried to close back in around the excavation, shoring the excavation walls with timber planks as they set the forms.
The hole filled with water as fast as the men could pump it out. They pumped the water and poured concrete in whatever dry conditions they could maintain, then the forms were removed, the excavation was backfilled, and the piers were built above the pile cap that had settled permanently below the water level of the Hackensack Meadowlands, in a condition it would remain in 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 somewhat 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 is in an environment almost devoid of available oxygen. It survives. It has endured. If the Pulaski Skyway were demolished tomorrow, which it will not be, the timber piles would remain in the Hackensack Meadowlands until someone made the effort to extract them.
And if no one extracted them, they would remain for centuries. Johansson’s design of the entire structure included a complication that the approach spans and the main river crossings did not fully take into account individually: the transition between the two systems. A concrete approach span and a steel truss span are two different structural types with different load paths and different deflection characteristics. Where they met, the structure had to absorb the different behaviors of the two systems.
The bearing details at the ends of the steel spans, where the truss rested on the concrete bridge piers, were designed to allow the steel to expand and contract with heat without transferring those forces into the concrete. Steel expands noticeably with temperature change. A 3,568-foot steel truss structure crossing a river in New Jersey experiences temperature swings from January to August that would move the steel several inches if the movement were unrestrained. Restrain the steel and the forces become enormous.
Allow it to move and those forces vanish. Johansson’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 could move.
The total thermal movement of the steel spans over the Passaic over the annual thermal cycle amounts to several inches. The bearings that accommodate this movement were fabricated in a workshop on dry 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 moves millimeter by millimeter with the temperature.
They feel no difference. The structure was designed so that they would feel no difference. The movement happens at the bearings, which are isolated from the roadway. The road stays smooth.
The men who made the bearing assemblies in a Newark workshop 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, with the construction force peaking at roughly 2,500 men.
This number was not constant. Depression-era construction projects were characterized by high workforce turnover. Not because workers chose to leave, but because of natural attrition from injuries, illness, and periodic layoffs that occurred when material deliveries lagged or operations shut down for weather. A man who spent three months on the project and suffered an injury serious enough to require 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 chance. The pool of labor in New Jersey in 1931 was huge. 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 shut down entirely.
The men who had worked in the refineries, chemical plants, and shipyards were looking for work. Public works projects were the main source of construction employment the state could offer them. The Pulaski Skyway workers did not live in camps on floating barges the way the Florida East Coast Railway workers had lived on 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 that were not so much a preferred choice 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 construction before and knew the rhythm of the work. Some had never worked on a construction project and were learning on the job. The foremen who ran the crews were experienced men who had worked their way up. They knew how to push a crew without exhausting it.
They knew how many hours a man could endure pile driving or concrete work before his productivity dropped and his risk of accident rose. They pushed the work 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 beyond that limit caused accidents. Accidents cost time and generated paperwork, and sometimes resulted in the replacement of the foreman.
Managing human endurance was one of the skills of the job. It was not recorded in the engineering documents. It left no trace on the steel or 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 entrance 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 motorcade 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 above the rooftops of Jersey City. Johansson 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. Johansson stood somewhere in the middle of the motorcade, watching 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 it was designed for. 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 including them in the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the infrastructure they had built. They had finished their work, collected their pay, and dispersed back into the Depression labor market. The job was done.
The ceremony was for someone else. The first drivers to cross the Pulaski Skyway reported their experience in newspapers and letters. They noted the extreme height. Many mentioned the feeling of the structure moving in the wind, a slight flex in the roadway noticed by attentive passengers.
The New Jersey State Highway Department explained in public statements what Johansson 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 avoided 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 with the wind.
Traffic data from the first months of operation show use increasing gradually as drivers made the crossing once, tested the bridge’s solidity, then repeated it, and stopped thinking about the height and began noticing how fast they moved compared to the surface roads. Within a year, the Skyway was carrying more traffic than any comparable road section in New Jersey. The surface grade-crossing conflicts were entirely gone. The 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 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s was not benign. The refineries and chemical plants surrounding the Meadowlands produced sulfur dioxide and other compounds that accelerated corrosion. The salt air off Newark Bay carried chlorides to every exposed steel surface. The paint systems of the 1930s were better than no paint at all, but they were far less durable than the coating systems structural steel would receive later in the century.
The maintenance cycle of the Pulaski Skyway began the year after it opened and never ended. Paint crews have worked on the structure in every decade of its existence. Inspection crews have examined the welds and rivets and bearing assemblies and concrete columns and timber piles, to the extent that timber piles can be inspected, in every decade of its existence. The maintenance record of the Skyway in the files of the New Jersey Department of Transportation is evidence of sustained 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 expanded. The four lanes that Johansson designed into the deck remain unchanged. The traffic volumes that have grown far beyond anything the traffic engineering of 1930 anticipated use this four-lane section 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 the structural deficiencies identified in engineering inspections over the previous decade. Corroded steel was replaced, concrete was repaired, and bearing assemblies were rebuilt or replaced. The project cost approximately one billion dollars. One billion dollars to rehabilitate a structure that cost twenty-one million dollars to build in 1930.
The ratio of a thousand to one between original cost and rehabilitation cost is not only about inflation. The restoration project replaced elements of the structure 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 they use materials that were not available in 1930 and levels of precision that were 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 stress were halted. There is a specific thing that happens when you drive across the Pulaski Skyway today. You are on Routes 1 and 9 in Newark inside the industrial corridor, and the road begins to rise.
It rises gradually at first, the grade so gentle that it feels no different from the regular road, but the elevation accumulates and the ground drops away beneath you, and within a few hundred yards the streets and cars and warehouses are below, the marsh grass appears ahead, and you find yourself on the elevated bridge. The approach span section crosses the marshes on concrete columns standing amid the salt hay and reeds. The Hackensack River appears and passes beneath you. Then more approach spans.
Then the structure begins to climb 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 curves and the stacks of the plants that have operated on those banks for over a century. Then the steel truss spans begin. The trusses rise on either side of the road. The truss members pass overhead at the peaks.
The river is below, 135 feet down. And 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 below the roadway. Then the spans end and the trusses descend back 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-driving crews drove the first pile on May 15, 1930, and drove the last of the 74,000 piles sometime in the winter of 1931. The concrete crews poured their identical spans across the marsh for about a year.
The ironworkers heated, passed, placed, and hammered rivets through the cold winter months erecting the steel over the Passaic. The foremen pushed their crews to the limits of endurance to keep the schedule moving. Between twelve and twenty men did not complete this project. They were buried where that era buried construction workers: without much ceremony and without records that would allow anyone to find them now.
All of it resulted in the four minutes you experience on the Skyway today. There is a truth about infrastructure that the people who use it often do not realize, but the people who build it know well. Any structure built by human hands in a particular place in a particular year carries the conditions of its construction into the future. The concrete of the Pulaski Skyway’s bridges was mixed in gasoline-powered mixers in 1930 and 1931 and poured by hand into wooden forms in the Meadowlands.
And the concrete poured then is the same concrete now in the parts of the structure that 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, throughout nine decades. The concrete poured in 1930 is now stronger than it was when it dried.
The timber piles are in the same condition they were in the 1930s, in the sense that the conditions preserving them have not changed. They are wet. They will remain wet. The peat around them has not dried and will not dry as long as the water table of the Hackensack Meadowlands stays at its current level.
The men who drove those piles built a foundation meant to last for an indefinite period, which is the best that can be built in a tidal marsh. And that indefinite period has now lasted ninety years and counting. The rivets in the steel spans were examined repeatedly as part of the restoration program and found to be serviceable except those replaced for corrosion or stress 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 superintendent, 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 who held the dolly behind the hole.
That rivet is now ninety years old and holds a steel joint that thousands of vehicles cross daily over the Passaic River. The names of those four men are not inscribed on the rivet. The Meadowlands surrounding the Pulaski Skyway have changed more than the structure itself. In 1930, the Meadowlands was an undifferentiated sacrifice zone, a landscape defined by what had been put into it rather than by any quality it possessed.
The refineries, chemical plants, and dumps were the frame through which the Meadowlands was seen by everyone who had occasion to think about it, which was few. The Clean Water Act of 1972 and subsequent environmental legislation of the 1970s began a slow process of changing what the rivers and marshes received from the surrounding industrial plants. Industrial wastewater declined. Water quality improved slowly over decades.
The biological communities of the marsh, suppressed by pollutant loads, began to recover. Herons appeared, then ospreys, then muskrats and river otters. Phragmites, the common invasive reed that is the signature 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 grasses, and ecologists work to manage it.
But its presence indicates at least a wetland clean enough to support dense vegetation in a way that was not possible when refinery discharges were at their peak. The Hackensack Meadowlands, established as a district 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 densest urban region in the United States, directly beneath the Pulaski Skyway.
The concrete columns of the approach bridge stand amid the salt grasses. The steel trusses hang over the river. Herons hunt in the tidal channels that flow around the bases of those columns, in the same water where the pile-driving barges were anchored in 1930. The same water where the foundation crews stood when they poured the pile caps below ground level.
The herons do not know any 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. It is all one scene to the bird in the water.
The author wants to tell you something about the records. The payroll books of the Pulaski Skyway construction are in the New Jersey State Archives. Reading them is a unique experience. 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. Some are compressed and hurried.
Some names are spelled one way in one entry and a different way in another, 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 one the clerk spoke. The men in those columns drove the piles. They poured the concrete.
They set the rivets. They worked the winter shifts on the Passaic, in cold that made touching the steel with bare hands painful. They went home to Newark and Kearny and Secaucus at the end of their shifts, ate what their 1931 wages provided, slept, and came 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 to explain why. The Pulaski Skyway rests 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 thirty-five cents an hour was what you could get.
If you cross the Pulaski Skyway today, which you can do on Routes 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 Meadowlands 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 set by workers in four-man gangs at 135 feet above the Passaic River, without guardrails as we know them today, with a safety net covering some sections of the 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 either side of the road, you will see the concrete piers of Sigvald Johansson’s elevated bridges standing amid the marsh grass and tidal channels of the Hackensack Meadowlands. They have stood there since 1931.
The birds hunt around them. The tides move around them twice a day as they have since the day the forms were removed. 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 with their stacks rising above the marsh. And the road rises above it all, above the timber and concrete and steel that men erected and poured and riveted in 1930 and 1931.
Men whose names are not on the structure. Men whose names are found in the columns of the account books 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.
