Check it out, it’s our very first guest blog post! Our first guest blogger is RICK!, talking about the The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel. – Scott
Scott posted about the Telectroscope, an art project allowing London dwellers to connect visually with New Yorkers, which reminded me the 30th anniversary of the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel is coming up. Idle Words commemorates the date with an excellent overview of the project which saved East Coasters from inferior Mexican cuisine.
In 1911, the celebrated British civil engineer Basil Mott approached the plutocrat Andrew W. Mellon with an audacious plan to build a straight-line tunnel 2500 miles long connecting New York City with San Francisco, allowing packages to be sent between the two cities using only compressed air and gravity.
But the tunnel, when it was completed in 1933, was already obsolete due to the emergence of airmail. Though airmail took a few hours longer, shipping was cheaper and packages traveling through the tunnel often were singed due to the proximity Earth’s hot magma. Tunnel operations ceased in 1936.
For years, ideas for reopening the tunnel were bounced around, but it wasn’t until the 1970’s when New Yorker, Robert Cavanaugh, disappointed with the lackluster burrito offerings in the Big Apple put together a consortium to reopen the tunnel for the delivery of fresh, hot burritos to the East Coast.
The inaugural burrito (carnitas with lettuce, salsa and avocado, no beans) was loaded into the breech at the Alameda terminus at 10:05 AM and was served to a beaming Cavanaugh, Vice President Walter Mondale and New York mayor Ed Koch in Weehawken 64 minutes later. Two hundred burritos followed that same day; by the end of the decade the tunnel would be delivering over two thousand burritos an hour.
The unique path of tunnel, while damaging mail in the 30’s, was ideally suited to keeping the burrito hot during its 1 hour journey across America. Shipping nearly 2000 burritos per hour the New Jersey has almost been too much of a success for the small taqueria’s in Mission District.
“The New York metro area has fifteen million people,” explains Javier Corrientes, manager of Cancun Burrito on Valencia Street. “San Francisco is barely a tenth of that size. You got all those people out drinking on a Friday night who want a burrito at ten o’clock, just when the dinner rush is starting here, there’s no way we can keep up.”
images via Idle Words
Related Posts:
- The Telectroscope, A Viewing Tunnel Between London & New York
- Detroit Metro Airport’s Psychedelic Tunnel
- AirMail, A MacBook Air Sleeve in the Shape of a Manila Envelope
- Mission-Style Burritos, In Berlin!
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Brilliant…absolutely brilliant!!!! And so very much more practical than any old telectroscope. (and where is the actual tunnel portal that is in the photo?)
The return-side of the tunnel could be used to send some decent bagels to the west coast — we could sure use them.
The article actually mentions attempts to send bagels and knishes through, but the burritos unique shape and tin foil packaging made it an ideal candidate.
San Francisco will start making good bagels when NY stops putting carrots, white rice and snap peas in their burritos. {shudder}
We could use some decent pizza out here as well.
score
Now NYC needs to start sending their pizzas through to california!
“saved East Coasters from inferior Mexican cuisine” – Inferior from what? Coca-Cola and Apple Pie? Tell that too your fat white family and friends who like up at fake Mexican eateries like Taco Bell or Chili’s everyday or weekend…
Having been one of those effected by the shortages of burritos in California, I have always been very bitter about the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito tunnel.
let me explain. When I was a kid, my parents would give me a dollar twenty five for mowing the yard. It was a large yard, with hills and valleys, and sometimes, even if I only stopped once to take a water break, i wouldn’t finish until nightfall. I didn’t care however. I was just happy to get money, so could afford a burrito at Freddy’s (the neighborhood burrito stand all the kids went to)
Many nights I would enthusiastically run w/ my allowance at hand to the musical-fruit & tortilla merchant only to be turned away once again with “sorry sr. ricardo. no more burritos. ¡they gone!”
I would get so pissed. And I still do! I can’t believe so much of our tax dollars was spent on building such an evil evil tunnel!
And for what? A tunnel to just basically transport burritos. That is so stupid. Could we have just spent HALF the money TEACHING east coaster’s to MAKE burittos?! It’s not that hard!
So when is someone going to mention the temperature differentials potential to generate electricity for both San Fran and New York? Pipe water in, draw water out, run a turbine?
Actually, using only gravity any object would take 42 minutes to move from 1 point on Earth to another point on Earth through a tunnel through the Earth. Doesn’t even matter where the entry/exit is, it will always take 42 minutes. Seems the New Yorkers should be asking for a 42 minute guarantee on their burritos.
That is the east portal to the moffat tunnel in Colorado, longest railroad tunnel in the US. Here is the original pic: http://brandon.fuller.name/photos/2003/2003-10-04–Moffat_Tunnel.jpg