Bob Diamond had been guiding tours in an abandoned subway tunnel under Atlantic Avenue for almost 30 years when he was blindsided by a phone call from a New York Daily News reporter asking him how it felt to get kicked out.
Diamond was confused. His relationship with the city was getting increasingly rocky, but he had a contract for use of the tunnel.
Look, its a misunderstanding, he told the reporter. They didnt kick us out. Why would they?
But the reporter was right. The next day, December 17th, 2010, Diamond got a letter from the Department of Transportation (DOT) informing him that his contract had been revoked. The letter included a note from the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) that strongly recommends
that the present use of the tunnel is discontinued forthwith due to safety concerns. There was no other explanation.
The Atlantic Avenue Tunnel was sealed in 1861, shortly after Brooklyn banned steam locomotives within city limits. Legend has it that the tunnel was reopened in the 1920s when it was used for mushroom growing and bootlegging, and in the 1940s when the FBI opened it looking for Nazis. But soon after, it was lost. In the 1950s two historians attempted to find it and failed.
When Diamond rediscovered the tunnel in 1980, he was just a 20-year-old engineering student on a scholarship. The media made him a hero. He decided to restore the tunnel for the city instead of taking an engineering job. Gradually he built a career and an identity around the 169-year-old underpass.
If you went on one of Diamonds tours, which ran between 1982 and 2010, you could see why the FDNY was concerned. Hed lug three plastic orange barricades out to the middle of Atlantic Avenue, pry off the manhole cover with a crowbar, and steady a thin ladder into the narrow shaft, the only entrance to the tunnel. Tourists would line up in the middle of the busy road, descending one by one into a tight passageway. It led to an Alice in Wonderland-sized doorway that opened up on a large staircase, built by Diamond and his colleagues in the 80s. The stairs lead down into a massive, spooky hall that is 2,570 feet long, 21 feet wide, and 17 feet tall.
The tunnel was built in 1844 as part of the Long Island Railroad, a commuter line that delivered passengers from Boston to New York. The train ran through the riverfront area that is now Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill, which soon became the most densely populated part of Brooklyn. The neighborhoods Court Street and Atlantic Avenue intersection was so thick with pedestrians that a tunnel had to be dug so the locomotive could travel under it without killing any children or livestock. Trains in those days didnt have good brakes.
The Atlantic Avenue Tunnel holds the Guinness world record for "oldest subway tunnel," predating the Tremont Street subway in Boston from 1897, the 312-foot Beach Pneumatic Transit tunnel in Manhattan from 1869, and the first subway in the London Underground, which was built in 1863. "Trains actually passed through it, preceded by a man on horseback," wrote the Brooklyn Eagle in 1911. "Later [it was] used by smugglers and thieves."
