BROOKLYN'S PASSAGE OF ACHERON

There is a secret tunnel they say, the tomb of a dead railroad car flipped over on its side like an iron whale and buried beneath Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue since 1861. Since then it has been the source of a flurry of folklore stories, hauntings, legends, and lurid secrets.

Some say Civil War spies buried the mysteriously missing pages of John Wilkes Booth's diary down there in a brass box. Others claim the tunnel holds weaponry from the notorious Smoky Hollow gang, bootlegging treasures, clues of 19th century espionage, and plenty more.

In 1861, Walt Whitman wrote a column in the Brooklyn Standard where he describes "the old tunnel, that used to lie there underground, a passage of Acheron like solemnity and darkness, now all closed up and filled up, and soon to be utterly forgotten, with all its reminiscences..."

The tunnel was rediscovered in 1981 by engineering student-turned-Brooklyn's own Indiana Jones, Bob Diamond. Diamond spent years in search of the tunnel and its supposed secrets. After scouring ancient engineering documents, obtaining city permissions, and crawling on his belly through 100ft of Brooklyn soot he was finally rewarded when he was poked through a hastily constructed brick and cobble wall and felt a blast of cold air rushing out from the 120 year old cave.

Currently there is a documentary is in the works exploring his great find and this amazing story. This trailer is pretty good insight to the story...


The tunnel was originally commissioned by Cornelius Vanderbilt's LIRR in 1844 when the nuisance of train-related pedestrian bloodshed was gumming up his all important train schedules. A small army of Irish workers did the digging, known later as sandhogs, using the cut and cover method and in truth, it became New York's very first subway.

By the 1850's the tunnels usefulness was waning so a contractor named Electus Lichtfield was hired to fill in the tunnel once and for all, but these being the glory days of New York construction corruption, graft and all around corner-cutting, Lichtfield does not such thing. Instead, in the interest of making a grand ole' profit, he walls in the tunnel on both ends, covers up the other entrances with cartloads of brick and dirt, and get some his "friends" at City Hall to confirm that the tunnel was gone forever...

Bob Diamond's incredible story of rediscovering the tunnel eventually uncovers Lichtfield's scam but his great con turned out to leave something of a legacy for New Yorkers in search of a little intrigue. Still, there are two areas of the tunnel that have not been opened up and Bob Diamond believes that Booth's diary and other lurid artifacts may still be entombed there. Diamond is now the official curator of this great piece of NYC archeology and occasionally runs tours of the defunct tunnel that Whitman called "dark as the grave, cold, damp, and silent."

There is a great collection of in-depth tunnel-related articles here: http://www.brooklynrail.net/proj_aatunnel.html

You can also read the story at Curious Expeditions: http://curiousexpeditions.org/?cat=35

~MB

CHASE- MANHATTAN - BURR?

Have you ever found yourself half-drunk and impatiently waiting for your cash to spew out of an ATM and wondered about this wacky little symbol here?? It's okay... Mulberry Bend has.


This story begins in 1799 amidst the bitter rivalry of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Following a cholera outbreak in the then fledgling New York City, Burr won a crucial contract to drain fresh water ponds on Manhattan Island in order to supply fresh water to its inhabitants. This led him to found the Manhattan Company.


Hamilton had established the first corporate bank in New York, Bank of New York, in 1784 and enjoyed many years of fat profits without any competition. This irked Burr so much that he insisted that his newly established Manhattan Company obtain a clause in its charter that would allow it to become a bank, adding another layer to their fierce rivalry ... and we all know how that ended.

A. Burr - one hell of a model American !

Burr laid pipe all over Manhattan... literally. Always the cost-cutter, he hollowed out pine logs to carry the water to where it needed to go. Ultimately, Burr did a terrible job draining the water from Manhattan which led to awful public health and structural problems down the line but that's a different story. Have a look at his handy work:

See where this is headed?? Over the centuries the Manhattan Bank went thru several mergers and in 1930 John D. Rockefeller Jr. threw his hat in the ring and the bank became the largest in the nation. In the 1960's the bank decided that they needed a graphic logo - pretty revolutionary at the time - so they hired Chermayeff & Geismar Associates to whip something up.

They wanted something that would suggest security, organization, protection, equality, etc. but the designers also thought that they could make their clients happy by taking note of the venerated history of the bank which dated back to 1799. So they used Burr's old pine logs as the inspiration for the abstract image that would go on to become one of the most genre-defining corporate logos of the age.

To this day workers will occasionally unearth hollow pine logs during excavations like this one at Coenties Slip. It seems as though the ubiquity of the Burr's pine logs translates nicely to the evil corporate omnipresence of Chase logos in our fair city today.

Oh Burr, you always get the last laugh!

Weird...

~MB

THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND

In the closing weeks of this year's historic Presidential election we've all been hearing a lot about Barack Obama's ties to Weather Underground co-founder, Bill Ayers. For those who don't know, the Weather Underground was a radical student activist group that carried out (among other things) a string of terrorist bombings on Government buildings from 1969-1975. Typically the bombs were detonated at night so as to focus on the buildings themselves and not any their personnel.

Without fueling any more hype around the overblown controversy that continues to haunt Mr. Obama, the Mulberry Bend wishes to take notice of an inconspicuously quiet, leafy block in Greenwich Village and the footnote in history that transpired there.

It was March 7th, 1970 - A thunderous explosion from within No. 18 West 11th Street suddenly rattled the entire block. Fire immediately broke out amidst the the thick smoke and building wreckage. Two soot-covered young women emerged, one completely naked after narrowly escaping her shower. Confused neighbor, Dustin Hoffman stumbled out on the street...


A concerned neighbor saw the nude woman and took her in to get her something to wear. The stunned neighbor then returned to the street briefly, when she looked back the two women had disappeared. Three bodies were discovered in the ruins, all members of the Weather Underground.

No. 18 West 11th was discovered to be a Weather Underground safe-house and bomb factory. Someone had been tinkering with a pipe-bomb when it accidentally exploded. Police later found blasting caps, pipe-bombs, and anti-tank shell, and 60 sticks of dynamite in the house, enough explosives to "level both sides of the street."

Nowadays, if you find yourself walking along West 11th, look out for the somewhat angular building jutting out from the flat-facades of the 19th century row houses. It is a chilling reminder of this haunted house of American terror.

One cannot help but think that Bill Ayers was a pretty despicable person for advocating this kind of thing, but the idea that Mr. Obama would for some reason secretly hold some allegiances to this group or its dead ideas requires something of an overactive imagination.

Nevertheless, I don't think Mr. Ayers will do anymore damage than he has already done, and Barack Obama can remember like the song does,

You dont need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows...