Appropiate To The Era

For the second time, I find myself writing about what can only be called hoax infrastructure, but in a different way than before. Previously, I talked about the great “Sawing Off Manhattan” hoax of 1824, which may never have happened even as a hoax. In other words, it’s a story that gets told about a hoax 202 years ago, but there’s really no evidence that the hoax actually occurred. Regardless, the concept of sawing off lower Manhattan, towing it into the bay, turning it around north-to-south, and putting it back in place is a great piece of fictitious civil engineering. On to more recent, if not quite present times, we have the genius that is the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel. This is a story told as history, of the construction in the early 1900s of a small diameter mail tunnel running in a straight line between the San Francisco Bay area and suburban New Jersey. The straight line would be a chord of the circular arc that connects those two points on the globe, and as such would…

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