Henry Kinney’s tunnel? They also laughed at it.
FORT LAUDERDALE — The fussing and fighting has only just begun over the far-fetched idea of a tunnel to speed Tesla-riding passengers from downtown Fort Lauderdale to the city’s beachfront. But it calls to mind the story of Florida’s very first “tube,” the Henry E. Kinney Tunnel.
Before you dismiss a futuristic beach tunnel as pure folly, remember that people thought Kinney was crazy, too. But he was right.
How it all happened is a colorful saga of politics, persuasion and fear, and a fierce competition between two prominent opinion leaders: Kinney, the fiercely pro-tunnel editor of the Miami Herald’s Broward edition, and Jack Gore of the Fort Lauderdale Daily News, a forerunner of this newspaper, who wanted a high-level fixed bridge.
Their battle of wits played out on the front pages of the dueling dailies in a time when newspaper wars raged in cities all over the country.
The year was 1956.
“The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” was playing over at the Gateway Theater and “The $64,000 Question” was a TV sensation (before the quiz show scandals broke). The population of Fort Lauderdale was about 40,000 in those days before universal air conditioning, and it was still a primitive place by today’s standards, with dusty two-lane roads dotted by mom-and-pop storefronts. The exotic Mai Kai restaurant hadn’t even opened yet, and when it did, just after Christmas, Oakland Park Boulevard still seemed like the other end of the earth.
But the quaint Fort Lauderdale of the mid-1950s and today’s metropolis had one thing in common: Traffic was a nightmare.
It could take 20 minutes to drive from Broward Boulevard to State Road 84 in your Studebaker, which surely had no A/C. Some of the biggest bottlenecks were at the drawbridge over the New River at U.S. 1 and Las Olas Boulevard. Something had to change.
Even though a tunnel across the river at Las Olas was a lot more expensive than a fixed bridge, with a price tag of $4.5 million, it quickly gained political support and Kinney turned it into a daily crusade at a time when the Miami paper was working to gain a stronger foothold in Broward against the hometown Daily News.
As for the latest venture, our initial reaction to a 3-mile “tube” from west of downtown to A1A was skeptical, too, just like it was when the first tunnel in Florida was proposed. But unlike Jack Gore, we’ll keep an open mind. With a second tunnel proposed under the river for Brightline train passengers, at a preliminary cost of $3.3 billion, this subject will be around for a long time.
Like the “Tesla tunnel” of tomorrow, the Federal Highway tunnel was mocked as a boondoggle that would only soak taxpayers. Skeptics predicted it would cave in, or flood every time it rained, or kill people from carbon monoxide poisoning. But here we are 65 years later, and it’s impossible to imagine life in Fort Lauderdale without it.
The community appeared closely divided over the tunnel-vs.-bridge question, which explains why Gov. LeRoy Collins, running for a full four-year term that fall, did not take sides. But Wilbur Jones did.
Jones was chairman of the State Road Board, which in those days had huge political clout in Tallahassee. A shove from the board gave the tunnel a lot of momentum, and that only infuriated the Daily News’ Jack Gore all the more.
Fort Lauderdale officials, led by Mayor Porter Reynolds, decided to put the question to a citywide referendum, and it passed by about 600 votes, 7,008 to 6,401.
In his “All Over Town” column, Kinney consistently pushed back against critics who, he wrote, doubted that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, too. Gore fired back against the “wailings” of the Herald, a paper, he noted, that didn’t pay property taxes in Broward. It also ticked off Gore that tunnel backers enlisted cute-looking high school girls to wave signs in support of the referendum.
But Kinney had the last laugh.
The New River Tunnel opened in 1960 and has kept traffic moving across the river ever since (the Legislature named it for Kinney in 1986) and is undergoing major renovations with a pedestrian plaza being added. It takes less than 10 seconds to drive through it (I timed it the other day).
The people who created the first tunnel in Florida history made the right decision, but it didn’t happen easily. The next one will be tougher, and Fort Lauderdale officials should study their history and put the question to voters again.