(The following story by Raanan Geberer appeared on the Brooklyn Daily Eagle website on April 14, 2009.)
BOERUM HILL, N.Y. — The Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) is best known for serving, in the words of its famous 1950s ad campaign, the “dashing commuter” from Nassau, Suffolk or Eastern Queens. But the LIRR was also instrumental in the growth of Brooklyn. Actually, Brooklyn was where it all began.
This was brought out Monday at the preview of the New York Transit Museum’s newest exhibit, “The Route of the Dashing Commuter: The Long Island Rail Road at 175.” It will run through Sept. 13 at the museum in the decommissioned Court Street subway station, whose entrance is at the corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street.
According to transit historian Dan Morrison, the railroad was chartered in 1834, and was conceived as a quick route from New York and Brooklyn to Boston. Steamboats and ferries from Washington, D.C., and New York let their passengers off at the LIRR’s original terminal at the foot of Atlantic Avenue. From there, they took the train to Greenport, where they caught another boat to Connecticut. Finally, they took another rail line to Boston.
This worked until the 1840s, when the New Haven line built a land-based route to Boston. From that time on, the LIRR concentrated on local travel and freight — farmers often shipped their produce from eastern Long Island to Brooklyn.
One of the drawings in the exhibit shows the circa-1844 Atlantic Avenue rail tunnel under Brooklyn Heights — the same tunnel where Brooklyn railfan Bob Diamond now leads tours. The tunnel was closed in 1864 when steam trains were banned in Brooklyn, supposedly because of pressure from real estate interests.
After it closed, Walt Whitman wrote that the tunnel was “dark as the grave, cold, damp and silent.” It was shut off from the world until the 1980s, when Diamond, with the help of old maps from the Borough President’s Office, discovered its location.
The Current Terminal
The anti-steam train law was rescinded in 1870. Soon, the current Brooklyn terminal, at Flatbush and Atlantic avenues, was established. Some might remember the former terminal building, which was constructed in 1903 and torn down in 1988. It, too, is shown in the exhibit.
Today, the station is still active, and one enters through the Atlantic Terminal mall. Susan McGowan of the LIRR told the Eagle that it serves between 14,000 and 15,000 commuters on a typical weekday, while Penn Station serves around 85,000 commuters. By contrast, the Hunterspoint terminal in Queens serves a mere 4,000.
Another illustration shows LIRR trains at Brighton Beach toward the end of the 19th century. The current Bay Ridge freight line, which traverses mid-Brooklyn, was then a passenger line, and a spur went south toward Brighton and Manhattan beaches. The growth of subways, trolleys and buses in the early 20th century made this spur obsolete.
Later material in the exhibit deals with the takeover of the railroad by the MTA in the 1960s, and by the current construction of the “East Side Access” that will take LIRR commuters directly to Grand Central. Also part of the exhibit is a retired LIRR caboose, on the museum’s lower level. How did it get to the museum from Riverhead, eastern Suffolk? Raymond Kelly, senior vice president of operations for the LIRR, explained: It was pulled by locomotives over the railroad’s tracks, at a leisurely 15 mph, to Jamaica.
From there, it was pulled to the Fresh Pond yard, where it was transferred to the aforementioned Bay Ridge freight line, now operated by the New York and Atlantic. At the Linden Yard, it finally was transferred on the tracks of the subway system, and from there to Court Street!