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The Cross-Harbor Rail Tunnel: What Might Have Been; Could There Still Be One?
October 9, 2007, Brooklyn Daily Eagle
By Dennis Holt
BROOKLYN -- The report last week that the city is trying to figure out how to deliver 43,000 tons of steel to the World Trade site by first barging the steel to Brooklyn and then using a rail system in Brooklyn to move it on other barges for orderly shipment to lower Manhattan reminds one how easy it could have been, and still be.
In 1921, the city commissioned a study and a work team to build rail tunnels for freight and passengers from Staten Island to Brooklyn. A small piece of one tunnel was actually built. Then, the Port Authority was formed primarily to build those tunnels and nothing happened.
In recent years, the need for a freight tunnel has resurfaced, led by Congressman Jerry Nadler. The immensity of the idea and bizarre politics have slowed things down, but who knows what will happen? Bay Ridge resident and architect Lawrence Stelter, an employee of the Buildings Department, managed to find in the bowels of the Buildings Department the original reports from that 1921 effort. They make fascinating reading, and one wistfully realizes how so many things could have been different had those tunnels been built.
What follows is a simulated news story that could have been written in 1921 about the announcement of plans to build those tunnels:
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The City of New York announced on June 17, 1921 that $150,000 has been authorized by the Board of Estimate and Apportionment to study development plans for the long-contemplated Brooklyn-Richmond freight and passenger rail tunnel.
This rail tunnel would connect the Stapleton area of Staten Island to the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn under the Narrows part of New York Harbor. The tunnel would be extended for passengers to the Fourth Avenue subway, thus providing direct rail connection to Manhattan and all other boroughs.
The purpose is to establish direct rail connections from the rest of the country to the Northeast and New England as well as Long Island.
A secondary purpose would be to create an unbroken commercial rail link along Brooklyn’s waterfront from Bay Ridge to Newtown Creek.
Since June, a study has been under way by a special committee whose report was issued on October 15 to Mayor Hylan with the following recommendation:
"In the judgment of your Committee, the project as outlined in the accompanying report should be pressed to a successful conclusion as being advantageous to every interest affected, and as representing the greatest stride that has ever been taken toward the proper solution of the Port of New York problem."
The forecasted cost of building this rail connection is expected to be $141 million. It will take five to six years to complete.
The report listed 10 reasons why this tunnel system should be built including getting trucks off the streets of lower Manhattan and elsewhere; decrease in the total city cost of rail service; being able to connect the city extensively by rail to the rest of the country; and a most valuable factor in the defense of the city in case of war.
Since June, the special committee has concluded that rather then one tunnel to be shared by freight and people, two tunnels will really be needed which is already reflected in the anticipated costs.
The tunnel would be built under largely undeveloped areas of Staten Island to the new Stapleton piers and from there to about 70th Street in Bay Ridge. The freight tunnel is proposed to connect onto Second Avenue and follow the working part of the waterfront all the way to Newtown Creek as well as to connect to the LIRR rail systems heading to Queens, the Bronx, Long Island, and New England.
The passenger tunnel is planned to connect to the Fourth Avenue subway around Senator Street.
Numbers of passengers are yet to be calculated, but the new freight tunnel is anticipated to carry 22,500,000 tons per year.
In the October report, the following command was given:
"The Board of Estimate and Apportionment of the city of New York shall within two years after the taking affect of this act begin the construction of a Railroad Tunnel under New York Bay between the Boroughs of Richmond and Brooklyn. The said Board may select the sites necessary for such tunnel and the terminals thereof."
The initiative for a modern cross harbor freight tunnel is based largely on one conclusion. A large, efficient containerport could exist somewhere in Sunset Park bringing Brooklyn meaningfully into the freight hauling business. But this is only possible should there be a rail connection from New Jersey to Brooklyn.
The highway system is overwhelmed now; it could not handle the thousands of trucks a large containerport would need. Build a tunnel and the containers will come; don’t build, and nothing will come.
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