I have recollections of traveling through highway tunnels on the then-relatively-new Pennsylvania Turnpike with my parents during one of our many summer vacations to the East Coast and New England. The only exciting thing for me was the tunnels. Of the seven along the original route, several have been abandoned and are now curious pieces of bygone architecture.
Although the turnpike was a four-lane, limited-access superhighway (the first of its kind in the U.S.), the tunnels were only two lanes wide, necessitating a narrowing of the road at the entrances and causing obvious traffic jams. The abandoned Rays Hill Tunnel is shown below, along with a following photo of its construction in the 1880s. It was originally built for the Southern Pennsylvania Railroad (with Andrew Carnegie posing in the foreground) and was later abandoned before being used for the new turnpike in 1940. It was abandoned again by the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1968:
Below is a view of four lanes converging to two lanes at Rays Hill:
In the 1960s, a new stretch of turnpike was constructed around the hills that had once been tunneled through, hence the reason for the abandonment. The map below shows the location of the abandoned Rays Hill Tunnel and the Sideling Hill Tunnel:
The red line indicates the abandoned portion of the original 1940 Pennsylvania Turnpike and the two tunnels. The green line indicates the new portion that tracks around the hills. The location in Pennsylvania is shown in red on the map in the lower-right corner.
The entrance to the abandoned Sideling Hill Tunnel is shown below. There are photos of the interior of this tunnel, showing graffiti and some semblances of art.
Regarding the wall art inside the Sideling Hill Tunnel that can be seen in the above-referenced link, I think the art does not compare favorably with the art on the tunnel walls in the abandoned railroad tunnels at Donner Pass. Just sayin’. That art can be seen in a previous post.
Since the turnpike was a limited-access toll road, travel plazas were provided, with Howard Johnson restaurants being the main attraction. A Howard Johnson Travel Plaza is shown on the right below, and a photo of all that remains of the Cove Valley Travel Plaza near the Sideling Tunnel entrance is shown on the left:
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The actual Cove Valley Travel Plaza before demolition can be seen on Facebook, where I have vague recollections of it.
One other note: Of the seven original tunnels, some remain but have a new adjacent two-lane tunnel bored through the hill, so all the remaining two-lane tunnels have been converted to four lanes.
And the original architecture of the toll plazas is classic:
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It’s interesting that the nation’s first federally funded highway, the National Road, passed through Pennsylvania in 1811, not far from what became the nation’s first superhighway 150 years later. The two maps below—the Turnpike on the left and the National Road on the right—show the similarities between the two:
Check out this complete history of the Turnpike. Plus the Wikipedia page dedicated to it.
Blog post written by Senior Architect, David Tritt.
