The Atlantic Avenue Tunnel

TRUE: a real 1844 tunnel, sealed 1861, rediscovered 1980

Under Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, between Columbia Street and Boerum Place, lies a stone tunnel about half a mile long, 21 feet wide and 17 feet high, that Guinness counts as the oldest subway tunnel in the world. It was built in 1844 for the Brooklyn and Jamaica Railroad, soon the Long Island Rail Road, as an open cut that let its steam trains pass beneath the crowded junction of Court Street and Atlantic on their way to the South Ferry. Around five years later the cut was roofed over. For a while it carried part of the first rail route between New York and Boston, by train across Long Island to Greenport, then ferry to Stonington, Connecticut, and rail again.

Its life was short. In 1861 the New York legislature banned steam locomotives inside the City of Brooklyn, and that autumn both ends of the tunnel were sealed. Walt Whitman wrote of the old tunnel, "dark as the grave, cold, damp, and silent," as already closed and soon to be utterly forgotten.

He was nearly right, though the tunnel kept its grip on the city's imagination. In March 1916 the Bureau of Investigation, suspecting German agents of making bombs inside, jackhammered through the roof, found nothing, put in an electric light and sealed it again. In the 1920s it was rumoured to hide mushroom beds and bootleg stills; in 1936 police tried and failed to get in to look for a buried gangster; later tales had the FBI hunting spies there. In the late 1950s two rail historians went looking and never reached it.

In 1980 a 20-year-old engineering student named Bob Diamond, who had heard of it through a novel in which John Wilkes Booth hides diary pages in an abandoned tunnel, spent eight months in the city archives and found it. With the help of a Brooklyn Union Gas crew he climbed down a manhole at Atlantic Avenue and Court Street, crawled through a filled-in gap less than two feet high, and broke through the bulkhead wall into the great dark hall beyond. From 1982 he led tours through the manhole, down a ladder and a staircase he and his colleagues built. Diamond has also argued that a locomotive from about 1836 lies sealed at the far end, and a 2011 magnetometer scan found a buried metal object the size of a train.

On 17 December 2010 the city's Department of Transportation revoked his contract on the Fire Department's recommendation, citing safety, and the only entrance was later sealed. The tunnel, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, lies under the traffic, sealed once more.