New York Buried a Rail Tunnel in 1861 and Lost It. In 1981 a Student Crawled In Through a Manhole

There is a manhole cover in the middle of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, at the corner of Court Street, that the City of New York would prefer you did not think about. Under it there is a railroad tunnel, seventeen feet high and twenty one feet wide, running sixteen hundred feet under the traffic, with the rails long gone and the dark intact. It was built in 1844 and closed in 1861, and the ends were filled in. For the next hundred and twenty years the city above it forgot it was there. Then a twenty year old engineering student found it on an old map, and in the summer of 1981 he went down that manhole with a crew from the gas company, who told him he had five minutes. This is not a tunnel that was lost the way things get lost in the mountains. It was lost under one of the busiest streets in the biggest city in the country, on purpose, by people who wrote the decision down and sent the bill to the neighbors. IF YOU ARE GOING UP THERE Ad. Pit Stop, the iPhone app that tells you what is at the next exits and warns you before a long stretch without gas: https://www.pit-stop-app.com/go/oldalignment As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. DeLorme New York State Atlas and Gazetteer: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1946494593?tag=oldalignment-20 WHERE IT IS Under Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, between Boerum Place and Hicks Street. The only entrance is a manhole in the roadway at Court Street. There is nothing to see from the street and there has been no public access since December 2010. Do not lift anything. PRONUNCIATIONS Boerum: BOR-um. Stonington: STON-ing-ton. Acheron: AK-er-on. Brinkerhoff: BRINK-er-hoff. A NOTE ON THE IMAGES The research and the script are mine, from primary records and archives, and the sources are listed below. Where no photograph of a place survives, and for this channel that is often, the images are period material from elsewhere rather than the place itself. SOURCES Gotham Center for New York City History, "Rapid Transit in the Steam Age: Brooklyn Steam Wars" National Register of Historic Places, Atlantic Avenue Tunnel, reference 89001388, listed September 7, 1989 Walt Whitman, "Brooklyniana", Brooklyn Standard, 1861 to 1862 Newsday, September 17, 1980, on the search for the tunnel Streetsblog NYC, "The real, unabridged, authorized, warts-and-all saga of Brooklyn trolley king Bob Diamond", September 6, 2021 Brooklyn Paper, "Brooklyn tunnel impresario, transit advocate Bob Diamond dies at 62", August 2021 Courthouse News Service, "Urban Explorer Fights to Save Railroad", December 14, 2011 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, "Court rules city within right to revoke a use of Atlantic Ave. subway tunnel", March 24, 2015 Jalopnik, "A Train From 1836 Could Be Buried In Brooklyn Because Of Petty Politics", March 27, 2015 (the January 2011 Brinkerhoff survey and the February 2011 DOT email) DNAinfo, "Atlantic Avenue Tunnel Should Be Reopened, Brooklyn Historical Group Says", April 10, 2014 The Morning News, "Tunnel Visions", November 19, 2002 Epoch Times, "This Is New York: Robert Diamond, On Finding the Lost Atlantic Avenue Tunnel" IF YOU WERE THERE If you took one of the tours between 1982 and 2010, stood in the line on Atlantic Avenue in November 2002, or have family who worked the gas crews under that street, I want to hear it. And if anybody has a photograph taken inside the tunnel of the west wall toward Hicks Street, I would very much like to know it still exists. Old Alignment. Abandoned American roads, railroads and infrastructure. New video every other day. #AtlanticAvenueTunnel #Brooklyn #AbandonedRailroad