September 29 - October 21, 2023: Our Fall Trip to Ecuador
	August 24-28, 2023: Prudence's Birthday in San Antonio
	Return to the Index for 2023

Well, the renovations of the Ecuador house are done, and Fred and I are going to head down there on September 29th to spend three weeks. As we did earlier this year, we plan on flying JetBlue roundtrip from Fort Lauderdale. This means that we won't be taking any cats with us to Florida, as there would be no one to take care of them while we are in Ecuador.

Getting to Fort Lauderdale

If you've been through more than a year or two of this photo album, you are undoubtedly familiar with our route to Florida. Years ago we used to fly, but that has gotten to be such a hassle (and a good deal more expensive) that now we drive. On most trips, this allows us to take all kinds of things with us- including our two youngest cats, Bob and Cole. But since we will be going back and forth to Ecuador from Fort Lauderdale this time, we have had to leave all four cats at home in the care of our long-suffering pet sitter/good friend, Lynne Richardson.

The trip is routine; we stop at the same places to eat and to stay- almost without exception. And it's an easy route, too. Getting out of Dallas is easy if a bit congested, sometimes. We usually leave about nine-thirty, and by ten or so are on I-20 heading east towards Shreveport. We usually turn southeast on I-49 about one in the afternoon, reaching Lafayette and I-10 east along about three-thirty. Baton Rouge can be very slow if we don't get through there by four-fifteen or so, and then it is another 90 minutes to get across Louisiana to the Mississippi border.

Mississippi and Alabama are an hour each, so we are heading east from Mobile about six-thirty or seven. This puts us north of Pensacola right about dinnertime about eight. After dinner, we have now developed the habit of continuing on to Tallahassee, ariving there about midnight.

We usually get away from the hotel in Tallahassee about nine or so for the 150-mile drive to Jacksonville, which we usually reach about noon. Then we take I-295 around Jacksonville to the south, going through Orange Park. This 14-mile stretch is kind of neat, mostly because of the long bridge that crosses the St. Johns River as it opens out into a large lake southwest of the city. (It narrows as it approaches and flows around downtown Jacksonville to eventually empty into the Atlantic.) I-295 connects up with I-95 south of the city and we simply take that south for another kind of boring 300 miles down to Fort Lauderdale. We usually get to the condo around 5PM, depending on traffic in Fort Lauderdale on I-95 (which can be horrendous).

We unloaded everything at the condo and the laptops all set up, and then retired to the dock for a celebratory frozen drink. Then, as is our custom, we headed down to the Floridian Restaurant for dinner. I wish we had transporter technology, but the drive is not a hard one- although sections of it can be boring.

We have been here to Florida so many times that we have pretty much photographed everything worthwhile anywhere nearby. The pictures we take now are just candid shots around the condo, at the dock, on the Riverwalk, or perhaps at an Art Fair or other event that occurs while we are here. So I've begun the practice of just grouping the pictures for these Florida trips by topic.

The Tunnel Top Park

You have seen lots of pictures from our trips to Florida in the last year showing the construction work on the Tunnel Top Park, which is being built on top of the Henry E. Kinney tunnel that carries US1 (Federal Highway) under the New River. The work is nearing completion, and so today I want to not only show you our pictures from this part of our Fort Lauderdale trip, but also give you some historical background (all of which is being taken from some new signage that has been erected in the Laura Ward Park as part of the new construction).

Before we talk about Tunnel Top Park, let's talk about the tunnel itself. And that story begins with the highway that goes through it- US 1 (known locally as Federal Highway).

US 1

I am pretty sure that most of my site's visitors have traveled along at least portions of US 1. If you live anywhere north of North Carolina, it is very hard to avoid it.

The direct predecessor to US 1 was the Atlantic Highway, an auto trail established in 1911 as the Quebec–Miami International Highway. In 1915, it was renamed the Atlantic Highway. Due to the overlapping of auto trail designations, portions of the route had other names that remained in common use, such as the Boston Post Road between Boston and New York City, the Lincoln Highway between New York and Philadelphia, the Baltimore Pike between Philadelphia and Baltimore, and the Dixie Highway in and south of eastern Georgia.

When the New England road marking system was established in 1922, the Atlantic Highway within New England was signed as Route 1, and New York extended the number to New York City in 1924. Other states adopted their own systems of numbering, usually changing numbers at the state line. A final numbering was adopted in 1926 and the Overseas Highway from Miami to Key West was completed in 1938 and soon became a southern extension of US 1.

With the construction of the Interstate Highway System in and after the 1950s, much of US 1 from Maine to Miami was bypassed by I-95, and a great deal of the traffic from US 1 moved to that highway. This spurred the commercialization of US 1, which now carried mostly local traffic. In Florida, from Hobe Sound to the Overseas Highway, US 1 is a four- or six-lane highway with traffic lights and every business and shopping area known to man appearing multiple times along it. In Fort Lauderdale, it enters from the north, turns west on Sunrise Boulevard, and then south again to cross Broward Boulevard to the New River.

The Federal Aid Highway Bridge

As you read above, with the designation of US 1 as the major easternmost north-south road in the United States, a bridge was built to carry it across the New River. Previously, traffic that came down the street that became Federal Highway had to jog west a few blocks to cross the river on the Andrews Avenue Bridge. The importance of US 1 pretty much required a bridge over the river to eliminate that bypass. Here are two views of that bridge

This view looks west along the New River. The future site of Riverview Gardens is just below the aircraft.

This view looks north across the bridge. The Stranahan House is on the north shore, to the west of US 1.

Both of the pictures were taken in the late 1940s. What I find amazing is not what is in the pictures, but rather what isn't. What isn't in the pictures are all the buildings and highrises that weren't even a dream of the city fathers at the time. In fact, the only building I can place as existing today is the Stranahan House.

Compare this view from 2022 with both of the pictures above. As you can see, nothing is the same. Oh, the streets are pretty much the same. You can pick out Las Olas and also see SE 4th Street, where our condo is; find the street that angles down and then straightens out. Some of that angled part is still there, behind the Riverside Hotel, but some of it was straightened to allow for the construction of the apartments and condos that sprang up along the New River.

You can barely pick out the Stranahan House. Now, it is dwarfed at the base of the Icon Las Olas, between that skyscraper and the yet-to-be-built Riverside Hotel on the east side of US 1.

I know it has been eighty years between the two pictures of the bridge and the current picture, but it still amazes me. You should know that very few of those towers had been constructed even as late as when we purchased this condo in 1990. The low buildings along Las Olas, the Riverside Hotel, and the low-rise condos along the river east of US 1 were here when we bought, but almost everything over fifteen stories tall west of US 1 is a product of the last thirty years.

The Henry E. Kinney Tunnel

The Henry E. Kinney tunnel was the first vehicular tunnel constructed in the state of Florida. Built to replace an aging drawbridge, the tunnel project was not without controversy. Citizens and community leaders were divided over whether a tunnel or a new bridge was the best solution to the problem of severe traffic congestion on Federal Highway crossing the New River. Ivy Stranahan, who lived in the nearby Stranahan House, opposed the proposed tunnel project because she feared the tunnel construction would damage her home.

After years of fierce debate, in which the two main newspapers, The Fort Lauderdale News and The Miami Herald, took opposing stands, residents approved the tunnel in a special election on November 20, 1956. Tunnel supporters won by a slim majority- 7,008 votes for the tunnel and 6,401 votes for the bridge.

Construction on the four-lane tunnel, built 35 feet below the New River in the heart of downtown Fort Lauderdale, began in August 1958. At left you can see a picture of the tunnel under construction in early 1960. The tunnel was opened and dedicated by Florida Governor Leroy Collins on December 9, 1960 and named the New River Tunnel. Twenty-six years later, it was renamed the Henry E. Kinney Tunnel, in honor of The Miami Herald journalist who led the pro-tunnel campaign.

At right is the north portal of the tunnel as it appeared shortly after the opening. (I might point out that when Grant and I first came to Fort Lauderdale, the Food Fair market had been rebuilt as the Hyde Park Market- downtown Fort Lauderdale's only supermarket.

The new Tunnel Top Plaza now incorporates the area from the New River and Laura Ward Plaza, north through the area between the Riverside Hotel and the Icon Las Olas (built on the site of the former Hyde Park Market), across Las Olas, and then onto a new raised area that extends perhaps a hundred feet north of Las Olas. In the picture of the North Portal above, right, much of the approach you see in the picture is now covered. The covered area had to be sloped up to the north so as not to impede high vehicles from still being able to use the tunnel.

The Laura Ward Plaza

The Laura Ward Plaza has actually been in existence for quite some time; about six or eight years, I think. It was made part of the Riverwalk when the Icon Las Olas was constructed in the 2010s, and the Riverwalk was extended east around it's river side to Laura Ward Plaza.

So you can see where Laura Ward Plaza is, take a look at the picture at left.

In this picture, I am standing on the north side of Las Olas just at the south end of the new tunnel top extension out over the north portal approach to the tunnel. I am looking south, and of course the tunnel is beneath me. The street you see in front of me is actually SE 4th Street, even though at this point it is running north-south for a short distance; north-south streets in the Fort Lauderdale street grid are "avenues", while east-west streets are "streets". But here, there is no available avenue number, since 5th Avenue is to my right and 6th Avenue is to my left. So this has always been SE 4th street, and as you follow it south in the picture it quickly turns to the east, running through the Riverside Hotel Building and continuing east to Riverview Gardens where our condo is.

Returning to the picture at left, Laura Ward Plaza is the area just beyond the curve in SE 4th Street all the way to the river. As part of the Tunnel Top Plaza project, the ventilation building you see in the picture was cleaned up, new signage (some of which you've seen on this page) was erected, and artificial turf was put down in the plaza, replacing the bare concrete that had been there. Also in that picture, the Riverside Hotel is at the left, and the Stranahan House is at the right.

The Stranahan House

The Plaza Between Laura Ward Plaza and Las Olas

Most of the area here is taken up by SE 4th Street, but there is an area between the Riverside Hotel that is used partly as outdoor seating for the Cheesecake Factory and partly as a part of the Tunnel Top Park. Here are two views of this area:

Looking North from Laura Ward Plaza

Looking South from Las Olas

As you can see in both those pictures, there is an area west of SE 4th St. that is brick; it's the area where the lampposts are. Actually, much of the Riverwalk is paved with that same brick. But these bricks are special. There has been, ever since the first sections of the Riverwalk were constructed in the mid-1990s, a program in place to allow people to order personalized, engraved bricks to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and any other occasion imaginable.

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A large number of these bricks simply commemorate one individual or another. To date, some twenty-five thousand bricks have been ordered and placed from one end of the Riverwalk to the other. The easternmost bricks are here, in Tunnel Top Park near the Cheesecake Factory, while the westernmost are near the Symphony Condominiums at Sailboat Bend.

When Fred and I lost our two best friends here in Fort Lauderdale- Ty Ferel and Scott Dole- we decided to commemorate them with one of these bricks. Had not Ty and Scott moved here in 1988 from Dallas, Grant and I would never have been influenced to buy our own little place here, and all the trips here that you've seen in this album would never have happened. They certainly had an outside effect on my life, Grant's life, and Fred's life, too. So getting a commemorative brick for them and placing it here in this busy part of the Riverwalk seemed a good way to honor them.

Please take a minute to watch the movie at left.

The New Extension Over the North Portal

The most dramatic change, and really the core of Tunnel Top Park, is the new extension that was constructed that essentially covers a hundred feet or so of the descending approach to the tunnel. This extension had to slope upward so as not to compromise the clearance for tunnel vehicles. This took quite a bit of engineering work, and the tunnel has been a mess for the last couple of years. But now, it is essentially done, and the results are pretty impressive (if a bit lacking in ornamentation).

This view looks northeast from the deck extension. In the distance is the Amaray Apartment highrise, and nearby is a beautiful mural that has been on the side of that building for many years.

This view looks north and shows you the new tunnel top extension. There is some artificial turf and a raised performance/seating area at the north end.

Finally, here is a panoramic view of this section of Tunnel Top Park:

Along the Riverwalk

We didn't take many pictures on the Riverwalk this time, but we do have a few. The newest portion of the Riverwalk connects what used to be the beginning at 5th Avenue and the river with Laura Ward Plaza; it is a wide walkway, bricked like the rest of the Riverwalk, that goes between the Icon Las Olas and the Stranahan House and the river. Here are a couple of pictures of this section of the Riverwalk:

Looking West from Stranahan House

Looking East from Icon Las Olas

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As it turned out today, there was a "Fall Festival" going on at the Stranahan House, and they'd set up a lot of booths and stuff on there own walkway between the Riverwalk and the house itself. I made a movie, and you can use the player at left to watch it.

At the far left is a new condo tower going up right next to the Water Garden. When it is topped out, it will be the tallest in town. That is the relatively new Alluvion in the background in this view that looks west. At the near left is the tallest building south of the river- the new Regatta on New River. And finally, the picture below looks back east from the end of the Riverwalk at Sailboat Bend.

Around the Neighborhood

We usually take a few pictures around the condo or the local neighborhood, and this stay was no exception.

Every other day or so, it's a frozen drink at the dock...

...watching boats like The River Queen go by.

Looking South at the Kinney Tunnel from the intersection of Federal Highway and Broward Boulevard.

When we get a "King Tide", parts of our dock are actually underwater. This is happening more and more frequently.

As always, we enjoy our time in Florida. On the 29th, we flew on JetBlue to Quito to see all the renovations that have been underway all spring and summer.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	September 29 - October 21, 2023: Our Fall Trip to Ecuador
	August 24-28, 2023: Prudence's Birthday in San Antonio
	Return to the Index for 2023