Above: Men building the Lincoln Tunnel in New York City, a project financed by the New Deal's Public Works Administration (PWA), 1934-1937. Photo from the National Archives.
Above: Traffic moving through the completed Lincoln Tunnel, ca. 1937. Photo from the National Archives.
Above: The entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, on the New Jersey side, ca. 1937. Photo from: C.W. Short and R. Stanley-Brown, Public Buildings: A Survey of Architecture of Projects Constructed by Federal and Other Governmental Bodies Between the Years 1933 and 1939 with the Assistance of the Public Works Administration, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939.
Above: The "Broadway Low Level Tunnel" in Oakland, California, was another large project that received funding assistance from the PWA. Today it is part of an expanded tunnel system, and is called the "Caldecott Tunnel." See the Living New Deal's web page, "Caldecott Tunnel - Oakland CA" for more information. Image from a larger photo by Richard Walker, Living New Deal, 2020.
Above: Another large PWA-funded tunnel project, this one in Mobile, Alabama (the "Bankhead Tunnel"), ca. 1938. PWA projects created a lot of jobs for a lot of people. Photo from the National Archives.
Above: The description for this 1940 photograph reads: "PWA is financing the construction of the first subways in Chicago, a 7.7 mile double tube system consisting of two routes, State Street (Route 1) and Dearborn Street (Route 2). View of the State Street route cross-over at Clybourn Avenue and Goethe Street. This structure was built in open-cut, and connected with the double tubes that were mined in tunnel." ("Mined in tunnel" means boring through the ground, without removing the surface layer.) Photo from the National Archives.
Above: The Burnside Tunnel in Portland, Oregon, built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1940. Photo by Judith Kenny, 2015, Creative Commons.
Above: This photo and caption comes from a longer article about the dedication of the Burnside Tunnel (see previous photo), in The Oregonian newspaper, October 11, 1940, p. 6. Image from newspapers.com, used here for educational and non-commercial purposes.
Above: Tunnel work was among the most dangerous of WPA jobs. This newspaper excerpt is from the Associated Press, published in The Miami Herald, October 3, 1937, p. 1. Image from newspapers.com, used here for educational and non-commercial purposes.
New Deal Tunnels
Between 1935 and 1943, WPA workers built 1,057 new tunnels (source). About 23 of these tunnels were for vehicles, 181 for pedestrians, and the rest were classified as "other" (source). The category "other" seems to have consisted primarily of utility tunnels, such as those for water delivery, sewers, and connections between buildings, for example, between a hospital and its heating plant.
PWA funded at least 14 subways and tunnels (source), and this figure certainly doesn't include the many smaller tunnels that connected PWA-funded buildings (see, e.g., this PWA-financed hospital, with connection tunnel, in New Jersey).
Other New Deal agencies carried out tunnel work too. The Work Division of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) describes a tunnel it provided labor for, "In Brooklyn, N.Y., a 400-foot tunnel under one of the busiest streets, over the subway roof and under water and gas mains, has been constructed to connect the modern heating system of the new Municipal Building with the Hall of Records, the Borough Hall and the Supreme Court Building" (source). The Tennessee Valley Authority and the Bureau of Reclamation had large tunnel projects related to their dam and water delivery projects.
It's not clear exactly how many tunnels were built during the New Deal, but we know (thanks to WPA statistics alone) that it was well over a thousand.
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