Class News
Angus Gillespie ’64 profiled on NY Port Authority blog
July 29, 2021
The Port Authority is This Professor’s Favorite Subject
Published in “Now Arriving,” the official blog of The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
By Amanda Kwan, Port Authority Media Relations staff
July 7, 2021
To most people, the Port Authority immediately calls to mind the Midtown Bus Terminal, not the bistate agency celebrating its centennial this year. Angus Gillespie, an American Studies professor at Rutgers University, thinks of the Twin Towers.
As a transplant to New Jersey from Richmond, Va. in 1973, Gillespie was fascinated by the massive towers — the world’s tallest at the time — that opened in April of that year. Curious about their architecture and construction, he discovered the builder was a unique entity called The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. That realization began a decades-long admiration for the agency that has resulted in two books on Port Authority facilities, with a third on the way.
Gillespie’s first book on the agency, The Twin Towers: The Life of New York City's World Trade Center, was written to fill what he saw as a lack of information on the towers’ unique design. The book came out in 1999 and sold modestly, then became a New York Times bestseller after 9/11.
Buoyed by its success and a Rolodex of Port Authority contacts made during its research, Gillespie proposed a second book on several of the Port Authority’s other crown jewels: its three Hudson River crossings. His publisher, however, rejected the idea as too expansive for one book and instead split it into two.
Gillespie’s friend — fellow Rutgers professor and writer Michael Rockland and a son of the Bronx — was selected for one of the books, about the George Washington Bridge. That left Gillespie to write Crossing Under the Hudson: The Story of the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, which came out in 2011.
From his decades researching both books, Gillespie, now 79 and a resident of East Brunswick, believes that the unique mandate and setup of the Port Authority as a bistate agency has resulted in a success unrivaled in any other region in the country.
“We in New York and New Jersey have not suffered so much from these infrastructure shortcomings,” Gillespie said. “We have airports, seaports, and bridges and tunnels, and we have done that without taxation. We’ve done it through user fees, and as a result, the New York and New Jersey region is way ahead of the rest of the country in terms of infrastructure construction and maintenance.”
Gillespie hopes that future generations will learn how much history has been made by and through the Port Authority, which was created in April 1921 by an act of Congress to build infrastructure benefiting both states within 25 miles of the Statue of Liberty.
His forthcoming book will be a history of Port Newark, which was taken over by the Port Authority in 1948.
Gillespie had been considering a book on Port Newark for decades, thanks to his father (a Naval officer) and a childhood interest in maritime history. In addition to his college courses on classic and sometimes weird American folklore — think Sasquatch and the Jersey Devil — he has taught maritime history and taken his students on field trips to the New Jersey Marine Terminal, which includes Port Newark, a facility that saw the first containerization of cargo in the country.
“It launched what became a worldwide revolution in intermodal transportation,” said Gillespie. “I think we as New Jerseyans can take a lot of pride that this earth-shattering change in transportation was launched right here in Port Newark, in the state of New Jersey. It’s changed not just the New Jersey landscape, but it’s changed the country and it’s changed the world.”
Read the professor’s op-ed column in the Star-Ledger on the Port Authority’s centennial.