Last Three Miles available on November 12 2016 from Buy for 12.62
The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America's First Superhighway available on November 20 2015 from Amazon for 11.99
ISBN bar code 9781595580986 ξ1 registered November 12 2016
ISBN bar code 9781595580986 ξ2 registered November 20 2015
Product category is Book
Manufacturered by New Press, The
Product weight is 0.8 lbs.
In the tradition of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, a sweeping, investigative history of the building of the road connecting Manhattan to the rest of the country. At the dawn of America's love affair with the automobile, cars and trucks leaving the nation's largest city were unceremoniously dumped out of the western end of the Holland Tunnel onto local roads wending their way through the New Jersey Meadowlands. Jersey City mayor Frank Hague--dictator of the Hudson County political machine and a national political player--was a prime mover behind the building of the country's first superhighway, designed to connect the hub of New York City to the United States of America. Hague's nemesis in this undertaking was union boss Teddy Brandle, and construction of the last three miles of Route 25, later dubbed the Pulaski Skyway, marked an epic battle between big labor and big politics, culminating in a murder and the creation of a motorway so flawed it soon became known as Death Avenue --now appropriately featured in the opening sequence of the hit HBO series The Sopranos. A book in the tradition of Robert Caro's The Power Broker and Henry Petroski's Engineers of Dreams, The Last Three Miles brings to vivid life the riveting and bloodstained back story of a fascinating chapter in the heroic age of public works.
^Steven HartThe Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America's First Superhighway, New Press, The. Amazon. ISBN 9781595580986 (revised Nov 2015)
I live in North Jersey, but this book is relevant to anyone interested in American history, the changes this country underwent when the automobile became commonplace, and the evolotion of modern machine politics and bossism. This exhaustively researched, yet economically written book is full of insight and fascinating information about the power struggles that ensued as American cities tried to cope with the changes wrought by the need for roads.Frank Hague is not..
