By Samantha Levine
To the tens of thousands of drivers who jostle to enter the Holland Tunnel every day, the tubes are less a marvel than a bottleneck. Most give hardly a thought to the fact that they're about to drive between Manhattan and New Jersey 94 feet below the surface of the Hudson River, in close quarters with hundreds of exhaust-spewing engines. Early in the 20th century, however, many experts regarded such a tunnel as a risky fantasy, doubting that drivers could survive the miasma of fumes. At that time, bridges and ferries--out in the fresh air--were considered the only safe way to carry internal-combustion vehicles across rivers.

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But this tunnel was born of desperation. By 1906--three years after Ford's Model A hit the road--the Hudson River's ferries were already overloaded, as cars and trucks added to the legions of horse-drawn buggies and wagons. Spanning the river with a bridge was out; the city's low-lying topography meant a bridge high enough to clear ship traffic could not be built at a reasonable cost. After seven years of study, engineers determined in 1913 that a tunnel was the only answer. It would double the traffic load across the river and cut the time needed to cross by ferry by more than half. But how could it be done without asphyxiating its users?

Enter 36-year-old Clifford Holland, an energetic engineer who had helped build the Big Apple's subway network. The task had given him unique experience in tunnel engineering and earned him a reputation that overshadowed his relative youth. In 1919, he was chosen to construct a Hudson River tunnel.

He and a team of experts embarked on research that included testing vehicle fumes on volunteer subjects. The group estimated the lethal concentration of carbon monoxide at just half a percent. Natural air circulation--all that railway tunnels used--would not be enough to keep the tunnel safe. So Holland and his men designed the first mechanical ventilation system for a tunnel, powered by 84 fans housed at the tunnel ends. Half the fans forced in clean air through ducts at road level. The other half drew off dirty air through ducts in the ceiling. The system, called transverse flow, refreshed the tunnel's atmosphere every 90 seconds.

Labor of love. It was brilliant and risky, and it worked. "It was a very bold move to do this job," says Norman Nadel, a New York City engineer who helped build several of Manhattan's newer subway tunnels. "It took a lot of courage."

Building the tunnel's two tubes was no cakewalk either. Holland monitored every square inch of construction. Floods when water broke in through the soft riverbed, sickness from the high air pressure used to keep the water out, heat, fumes--all plagued the workers and Holland himself. But Holland was in love. "When [he] talks tunnels, his listener is in danger of being convinced that tunnels are the only refuge for mankind," wrote a reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1920. "[B]y the time he has finished his hearer sees in a tunnel all the allurement which a mole finds in a nicely constructed burrow."

When completed in 1927, the four-lane, 1.6-mile tunnel was the world's first ventilated automobile tunnel, and it remains the model for modern passages. About 30 million vehicles now rumble through every year; 1.3 billion have used it since it opened. It was named a national historic landmark in 1993.

But Holland, a father of four girls, never saw that first vehicle (a Bloomingdale's truck) pay the 50-cent toll (now $6) and drive the eight minutes from state to state. He died of exhaustion at age 41, just two days before his diggers were scheduled to "hole through" deep under the Hudson to complete the tunnel. Two weeks later it was named for him.