E. H. Outerbridge

When last November’s election results showed that, as against Mr. Lehman’s plurality in New York City of 896,752 votes over all other candidates for governor, the same ticket’s candidate for Mayor polled only 130,826 more than the combined vote of his opponents, it had all the force of a popular verdict against Tammany. Considered along with the 232,000 votes “written in” against the Tammany candidate, the result stirred justifiable hopes of a larger reckoning next November. Unfortunately, these revolts of the electorate occur only at widely-separate intervals; it usually requires financial crisis or an intolerable scandal to make them formidable. As to how New York City manages to achieve real municipal development, in the long intervening periods, when the political vampires rule unmolested, every one knows it is because even Tammany recognizes that some things must be done rightly, and because there are New York citizens of the highest quality who are willing to give their service unremittingly to the city’s greater enterprises. Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge was one of these bulwarks of New York’s municipal achievement.

Himself a highly successful merchant in the ocean trade, it was natural that his service to the city should have been directed to its commerce. He was originator of the plan to link the East and West banks of the Hudson by such engineering works as the Holland Tube and the Washington Bridge. Outlined less than a dozen years ago, these projects have already solved the inter-state transportation problem. If his vision of unified trunk line terminals was not realized, at least the choked-up railway tracks on the Riverside are in the way to disappear. That he should have developed, in the chairmanship of the Port Authority, a new arm of government in the field of municipal development, followed naturally. Yet even these achievements did not obscure Outerbridge’s earlier and important public service in the crucial strain on New York’s port facilities during war-time, in the averting of coal famine during the labor uprising of 1922, and in conducting during 1909 the citizens’ campaign to reform the city government. Many fellow-Centurions who sat by Outerbridge at the Century’s lunch-table and exchanged views with their quiet and unassuming neighbor on questions of the day, were probably unaware of how large a figure he had cut in the city’s history.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1933 Century Association Yearbook