Street Level....Atlantic Avenue

n 1980, a 19-year-old engineering student named Bob Diamond brought workers from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and the gas company to open a long-abandoned manhole cover at the busy intersection of Court Street and Atlantic Avenue in downtown Brooklyn. Diamond wore a hazardous waste “splash suit” and breathed through an air hose as he entered the oldest subway tunnel in the world, long forgotten under Atlantic Avenue. He also carried a stick to fend off alligators.

Diamond laughs, recollecting the formal letter from the water department—which he still has—requiring him to carry the stick. A life-long Brooklynite, Diamond’s involvement with the tunnel began when listening to a radio broadcast in the summer of 1979 that mentioned the rumor of an abandoned Brooklyn subway tunnel. Diamond, then a student of electrical engineering and physics at City College, was hooked. He began a seven-month quest to find the tunnel, exhaustively researching records in books, articles and museums looking for a clue to the elusive tunnel’s location. His break came from the July 23, 1911, issue of the Brooklyn Eagle-a local newspaper that folded in 1955. (Today, there’s a paper with the same name that focuses on Brooklyn real estate and community issues.) Diamond found an article that carried pictures of the construction plans of the tunnel, which was built in 1844, and he eventually found a set of duplicate plans for the subway tunnel in the Brooklyn borough archives.

The Long Island Railroad built the Atlantic Avenue tunnel to link the growing Brooklyn waterfront to the main rail line that extended across Long Island, which was the fastest route to Boston at the time. Because early street trains were not powerful enough when fully loaded to climb the natural slope of Atlantic Avenue away from the waterfront, the rail went underground. Also, these early locomotives also lacked effective brakes. “The train was hitting people on the street,” says Brian Kassel, Director of Planning for the Brooklyn Rail. Though a main corridor of commerce not only for New York but also for the rest of the country, the tunnel’s use was short-lived; a new train station was built at Hunter’s Point, Queens, and the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel was abandoned. The last train rolled through in 1859, and by 1861 the tunnel ends were capped and backfilled, Kassel says.

After proving the tunnel’s existence, Diamond had to deal with the skepticism of city officials and engineers. He finally convinced the water department and Brooklyn Union Gas to open that abandoned manhole in the middle of Atlantic Avenue.

In 1982, Diamond established Brooklyn Historic Railway Association as a non-profit organization to excavate and rehabilitate the tunnel as well as to act as its custodian. In 1986, he leased the tunnel from the Department of Transportation, which was recently extended until June 2008. Diamond hoped to reestablished trolley service in Brooklyn that would connect Red Hook to downtown Brooklyn, ending in the Atlantic Avenue tunnel. Despite early successes, including public tours of the tunnel and a listing on the National Register of Historic Places, people have lost interest in recent years and, so far, no commercial trolley service exists.
A series of recent setbacks, including an inability to secure federal grants, an unresponsive administration at the Department of Transportation, which owns the tunnel property, a cancelled art show, and development plans have caused Diamond to consider leaving the tunnel behind. “I’ve gotten to the point that I just can’t deal with it anymore,” he said. If Diamond leaves, the fate of the tunnel is uncertain.

After initially guiding tunnel tours every weekend for six months of the year, Diamond now only runs tours bi-annually - once in the spring and once in the fall. The Atlantic Avenue Betterment Association used to help promote his tours, but as time passed, the merchants became less interested in tunnel tours, as did tourists. Because he’s “too busy trying to stop them from tearing it down,” Diamond says he has limited time to promote the Atlantic Avenue tunnel tours.

Last November, in an effort to again attract interest in the tunnel, Diamond teamed with Ars Subterranea, an arts preservation organization, to sponsor art exhibits and film festivals inside the tunnel. An event was scheduled for March 29 and 30 of 2003, but the plans fell apart, Diamond said, because the woman with whom he had signed a contract had left the group and transferred the rights to another party. This transfer voided the contract, and Diamond’s attempts to meet with the new leadership of the group were unsuccessful. (Ars Subterranea did not return messages to comment on this story).

Diamond then found out that the last federal grant he had applied for lost the sponsorship of the transportation department. He decided it might be time to move on. “There’s too much shenanigans in city politics,” he said. But on a recent visit to the tunnel, Diamond remained enthusiastic. He laughed at his own jokes and spoke fondly of the tunnel. On the way out, he said, “There might be a happy ending yet.”