Hoboken Terminal - History

History

Until the opening of the North River Tunnels and the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad tubes around 1910 travel to Manhattan from most of the continental USA required a transfer to a ferry at the Hudson River, at the time often called the North River. The site of the terminal has been used as a landing since the colonial era, accessible via turnpike roads, and later plank roads (namely the Hackensack, the Paterson and a spur of the Newark Plank Road). John Stevens, founder of Hoboken and inventor, launched steamboat service in 1811. During the next 100 years cuts or tunnels were constructed through Bergen Hill to terminals on the west bank of the river and the Upper New York Bay. One of the Bergen Hill Tunnels under Jersey City Heights were opened in 1876 by the Morris and Essex Railroad. A parallel tunnel was added in 1908 by Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad (DL&W). Both were used by the Erie Lackawanna Railway and by New Jersey Transit today.

Hoboken Terminal was one of several terminals with ferry slips owned by competing railroad companies. Two are still standing (the other being the Central Railroad of New Jersey Communipaw Terminal); Hoboken is the only one still in use. Numerous streetcar lines (eventually owned and operated by the Public Service Railway), including the Hoboken Inclined Cable Railway, originated/terminated at the station until bustitution was completed on August 7, 1949. The Phoebe Snow was a premiere passenger train that departed daily from the station. In 1956, four years before its merger with the DL&W, the Erie Railroad began shifting its trains from its Jersey City terminal to Hoboken. Trains to Chicago and Buffalo were discontinued on January 5, 1970.

The timetable for 27 April 1952 shows 134 weekday departures including four to Buffalo, one to Binghampton and one to Scranton. None of the other trains ran beyond Washington or Branchville; 43 ran to Montclair.

In October 1965 (after the Erie trains had moved from Jersey City) five weekday trains ran to Midvale, three to Nyack, three to Waldwick via Newark, two to Essex Fells, two to Carlton Hill, and one to Newton. All those trains were dropped in 1966.

In 1967 ferry service ended; it resumed in 1989 on the South side of the historic terminal and moved back to the restored ferry slips inside the terminal December 7, 2011.

Hoboken Terminal, like Hoboken itself, is a place of "firsts". One year before his death, Thomas Edison was at the controls for the first departure, in 1930, of a regular-service electrified train from Hoboken Terminal to Montclair, New Jersey. The first installation of central air-conditioning in a public space was at Hoboken Terminal, as was the first non-experimental use of mobile phones.

The station has been used for film shoots, including Funny Girl, Three Days of the Condor, Once Upon a Time in America, The Station Agent, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Julie & Julia, Rod Stewart's Downtown Train video (1990) and Eric Clapton's video for his 1996 single "Change the World". The terminal was parodied in Grand Theft Auto IV as the "Liberty Ferry Terminal", although the waiting room and the train Terminal are non-existent.