User:Djflem/Holland Tunnel Rotary



The Holland Tunnel Rotary is a traffic circle at the eastern end of the Holland Tunnel in Lower Manhattan in New York City, United States. Owned and operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey it serves as an entryway into the city at the end of Interstate 78. The rotary is within the city block in Tribeca bounded by Laight, Varick, Beach and Hudson Streets. The land which it is situated has undergone several significant transformations since the American colonial era, having been farmland, a city square, and a rail freight depot.

New Netherland and the English crown
New Amsterdam was established as the capital of New Netherland at the tip of the island of Manhattan circa 1625. The land on which the rotary sits was originally part of a larger 62 acre land grant to the the Norwegian New Netherlander Roelof Jansen in 1636 by Director of New Netherland Wouter van Twiller. Jansen died a year later and left the land to his widow, Anneke Jans. A contemporary manuscript describes the earliest development of the land in 1639, stating the "plantation [was] new and consist[ed] of recently cleared land [and had] a tobacco house and [was] fenced." Jans's claim was renewed when Peter Stuyvesant granted her a patent in 1654. Jans, who died in 1663, stipulated her last testament that the land should be liquidated, with the proceeds going to the children from her first marriage. The heirs sold the property in March 1670 to Francis Lovelace, but he lost it when the Dutch recaptured New Amsterdam in 1672. After England re-aquired the entire territory through treaty in 1674, and Governor Edmund Andros claimed the land for the Duke of York, who later became James II of England.

Hudson Square/St. John's Park
This property stayed in possession of the crown until 23 November 1705, when Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, then captain-general and Governor of the Province of New York and New Jersey, acting for Queen Anne, made it part of a larger 212 acre grant to Trinity Church

Trinity held the parcel as farmland until 1800, when it began to develop the land as New York expanded northwards. In 1803 Trinity built a new church, St. John's Chapel, on the Varick Street and staked out a new square. The park was intended to spur local residential development, which attracted many upscale residents. By 1807, the park and the neighborhood that developed around it was known as Hudson Square and later as St. John's Park. In 1827 the church granted use of square to the 64 landowners around the perimeter became an upscale neighborhood.. The name Hudson Square is used for the northern part of district above nearby Canal Street, with much of the real estate owned still owned by the church In addition to serving the local residents, the park was used for church events, including annual festivals for children of the parish. During the coldest winters, the park trustees flooded the park to create a large public ice skating rink.

St John's Park Terminal
The Hudson River Railroad (HRR) from Chambers Street in New York to Albany was completed in 1851. The track was laid at grade along Hudson, Canal, and West Streets, to Tenth Avenue and then north. As port and the city grew, an expanding warehouse district began to encroach on the neighborhood, and its seclusion was shattered with the laying of the rail line. Rich homeowners moved elsewhere, and St John’s Chapel went into financial difficulty. Land in Lower Manhattan became increasingly valuable, and in 1867 Trinity sold the park to the HRR for $1 million, split between the church and the park users. and built a 4 acre, $2 million freight depot to terminate the new West Side Line. The name "St. John's Park Terminal" was retained when the New York Central Railroad, successor to HRR, built a new terminal at Spring Street opened in 1934. Portions of freight line have become an elevated linear park known as the High Line.

Holland Tunnel
In 1920 the New Jersey Interstate Bridge and Tunnel Commission and the New York State Bridge and Tunnel Commission appropriated funds and began construction on what was then referred to as the Hudson River Vehicular Tunnel, and is now the Holland Tunnel. Soon after it's opening in 1927, the freight terminal was removed to make room for the eastbound exits in the of the form a one -way circular road, or rotary. Traffic patterns were re-assigned in 1958. Renovations to the rotary which included adding an additional, or fifth, exit were completed in 2004. The inner portion of the rotary is not accessible to pedestrians.

Sculpture
The interior of the rotary was the site of St. John's Rotary Arc, a sculpture by Richard Serra, from 1980 to 1987.

Joie de Vivre, a sculpture by Mark di Suvero, was situated in the rotary between 1998 and 2006.