County commissioners suffer from New River tunnel vision

Before Broward County commissioners kill the New River railroad tunnel, they should consider the less-than-prescient words of Robert H. Gore.

“An extravagant monstrosity,” Gore said. In 1956, his words mattered. R.H. Gore was a local real estate developer, an insurance magnate, an orchid hybridizer, the former governor of Puerto Rico (1933-34), owner of the Governors Club Hotel (tallest building in town). And he was publisher of the Fort Lauderdale News (since absorbed by the Sun Sentinel).

Gore loathed the notion of digging a highway tunnel beneath the New River. In a 1956 editorial, his newspaper warned, “One sure way to help this community die on its feet is to tax our people $1,000,000 merely for the purpose of speeding transients though a super-duper $5,000,000 luxury facility on an already outmoded highway.”

It’s a cautionary tale for our county commissioners. Hey, gang. Be careful what you say when you diss the notion of digging another super-duper subterranean passage beneath the New River. Years from now, some journalist will do to you what I’m doing to Governor Gore and dredge up your improvident remarks just for laughs.

Gore had wanted a taller draw bridge to replace a narrow, 1926 span said to be the worst tra c-clogging bottleneck along Federal Highway “from Florida to Maine.”

Fortunately, Henry Kinney, Broward editor of the rival Miami Herald, countered with a build-the-tunnel crusade. In a 1956 referendum, county voters agreed with Kinney: 7,040 for, 6,443 opposed. Four years later the tunnel opened. Just as Gore had warned, it had been a very pricey endeavor.

But by 1985, it had become obvious that the $7.5 million price tag was not such an extravagant cost. So the tunnel was named for Henry E. Kinney. (Journalists no longer enjoy such esteem, although in 2002, Grand Rapids, North Dakota, named a sewage treatment plant after a Herald humorist: the Dave Barry Lift Station Number 16.)

In 2014, an under-the-sea-bed passage linked the MacArthur Causeway with the Port of Miami. But no other tunnels since, despite the state’s glut of tra c-impeding draw bridges and wildly impatient drivers.

Maybe Broward County commissioners will consider, or rather reconsider, a tunnel under the New River to replace the creaky, 45-year-old FEC railroad bridge that in the down position blocks all boaters not in kayaks.

Boating interests complain that without a tunnel, when the planned Coastal Link commuter trains share the FEC tracks with Brightline and freight trains — 200 crossings a day — marine tra c will be hopelessly encumbered. (South Florida motorists might not be sympathetic when told of yachters, sunning on teak decks and sipping Beluga Vodka martinis, delayed by a railroad bridge. Boaters gobbled up chunks of our lives as we idled before open bridges, waiting for fabulous yachts to cruise through. Karma, baby. Karma.)

Last month, Broward commissioners indicated they were unhappy about the cost of a tunnel. Bridges are much less expensive.

But a railroad bridge tall enough to allow most yachts to pass through unimpeded would require a long, gradually ascending approach to the apex, from both north and south. The 1.5 mile-long bridgework would divide the city along the very same railroad tracks that separated Black and white neighborhoods back in Jim Crow days. And an unlovely wall is bound to hinder the recent burst of revitalization along Sistrunk Boulevard and Northwest Seventh Avenue. The old phrase “from the other side of the tracks” would have a modern application.

A long, long upward-sloping concrete barrier severing the heart of Fort Lauderdale would have the e ect of the elevated freeways that devastated urban neighborhoods in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Except other major cities are now spending billions to rip down those crumbling old structures to create walkable, humanscale, connected city neighborhoods.

Seattle has diverted the crosstown Alaskan Viaduct into a two-mile tunnel. Boston’s Big Dig routed I-93 into an underground highway, opening up 300 acres of land and the city waterfront — albeit with infamous delays and cost overruns. San Francisco, Bu alo, Kansas City, Syracuse, Rochester, Arlington, New Haven, Dallas, Austin and Detroit are planning to demolish the elevated freeways that defiled their towns.

Yet the time-traveling Broward County commissioners may teleport downtown Fort Lauderdale back to the 1960s.

A tunnel is indeed expensive. Two or three billion. A lot, though some of the cost could be o set by developing the mile of right-of-way freed up by the tunnel, some bordering properties worth $200 a square foot. R.H. Gore would find this tunnel an even more “extravagant monstrosity.”

Then again, he called the 1960 New River tunnel extravagant, and it was the deal of a lifetime.