"A passage of Solemnity and Darkness..."

I never knew that right in the middle of the street where I do my grocery shopping, there lies a secret underground tunnel left over from the old Vanderbilt railroad empire! There is a manhole right next to the Trader Joe's where I buy my groceries, and I often wondered why it was left open. I had no idea the story behind it would be so interesting! Walt Whitman even wrote an article about it. I found out through the Curious Expeditions blog. In his article "A Diamond Below", you can read the full story and history of the tunnel.

To make the long story short, the Atlantic Avenue tunnel was conceived as a brainchild of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who wanted a more efficent way to run his train through Brooklyn. When Vanderbilt sought new plans of railroads out West, the tunnel was no longer needed and was left to decay. The trains in Brooklyn were declared a "nusiance" (let's not forget that Brooklyn and Manhattan were seperate cities at this point in history, with Brooklyn being the more desirable for living), and tunnel was to be filled in and officially put out of use. Due to the greed of a corrupt politician, the money set aside for the project was pocketed, and the tunnel only "filled" by means blocking off the manholes and shoddily assembled brick walls. The tunnel soon fell into obscurity, and remained a memory of the old railroad days, believed by almost everyone to have actually been filled in.

In the late 1970s, Bob Diamond, a Brooklynite heard news of the tunnel via the legend of John Wilkes Booth's missing journal pages and a 19th century steam engine which supposedly were hidden inside the secret underground tunnel. Diamond, with a passionate interest in history and trains, decided to take matters in his own hands and search for the long lost tunnel. After much research, he uncovered the original plans for the tunnel in the old archives of the Brooklyn Eagle. The plans lead him to a seemingly ordinary manhole right in the middle of Atlantic Avenue. Sure enough, after convincing the department of transportation to let him have a look, under the manhole was the legendary tunnel, buried beneath dirt and bricks.



Inside the tunnel, both ends are sealed off by brick walls. Diamond believes that on the other side of one of those walls lies the long lost Long Island Railroad steam engine and the pages of Booth's diary. This has intrigued me, and I plan to take a tour of the tunnel very soon, hopefully this month! They are currently raising money for the excavation of the wall.