I was watching a rerun of Cash Cab today and I saw something I had noticed before- Ben Bailey was driving along and he entered a tunnel. In this case he was heading south (they usually show a map of his route) from the area around the Chrysler building to the area near Union Square.
I’ve only been to New York once, about 8 years ago. I am not too familiar with Manhattan but I thought the only tunnels were those leading to New Jersey or Brooklyn & Queens. So my question is this- what tunnels for vehicular traffic exist entirely in Manhattan?
I’m not talking about subway tunnels or access tunnels for maintenance of utilities or whatever. I’m talking about tunnels for street traffic- cars, taxis, etc. Do they go under buildings or other structures? Are they there to expedite the flow of traffic from one part of town to another (like a bypass), reducing the number of vehicles in a particular local area?
Park Ave gets interesting around Grand Central Terminal, it becomes elevated, splits around the building, then goes under the building in the next block (45th to 46th). Maybe that’s where the cab was as it’s close to the Chrysler Building.
Well, that’s another thing I didn’t know existed in Manhattan- elevated streets. On my only visit I was staying with my nephew who was a grad student at Columbia. He took me to lots of cool places I wouldn’t have seen otherwise, but we usually took the subway. I did spend one day riding one of those sightseeing buses and saw most of the standard tourist sites.
If it was an old episode, it might have been the Park Avenue Tunnel. Until 2008 it carried both northbound and southbound traffic, but since then only northbound.
This is all very interesting and I’ve spent most of the last two hours on Google Maps scrolling around Manhattan (I can’t go strolling around town so I’ll settle for scrolling).
There’s a spot IIRC where the southbound west side road curves around the entrance to the tunnel under the harbour and into its own tunnel over that tunnel*, then curves northbound to become the east side expressway, FDR Drive. IIRC and google maps tells me, It’s the Battery Park Underpass.
The Hugh Carey tunnel - I’m sure dentists all over NYC chuckle over that name.
As penance, and because the Wiki x-ref to “1st Ave Tunnel” goes simply to Wiki 1st Ave (which I read in 0.0005 seconds and saw no mention of a tunnel, I supply a Google Map photo.
Since we’re getting all local and personal, that FDR short trip in the 50’s under the newly built outcropping of Cornell Weil Hospital has four things of note at least for me as I zoom through it. Spoiler because my work here is done and I doubt even the most intrepid tourist cares:
1. Coming uptown you get your first good view of the now-landmarked Pepsi sign
2. Where it begins you always think Henry Kissinger lives up there somewhere among the Gods in Sutton Tower, and I never actually have seen Sutton Tower up close (no-one has)
3. Where it turns off at the 58/59 ramp is the best animal hospital in the world, and the emergency room for all my dogs and where I had the sad honor of putting down my last dog
4. That colonnade supports the rooms of the hospital where pregnant mothers, my SIL among them, and less joyously, in-patients, occasionally such as myself, of Payne Whitney stay, and it’s a shame for real estate brokers and plutocrats that they’re hospital rooms because they have the most spectacular views two feet away and practically hanging over the river.
