So Many Questions

That’s a photo of the Brooklyn Bridge subway station under construction in 1904, shortly before the original IRT line opened. This was, temporarily, the southernmost regular station, with only the City Hall station loop beyond; the tracks were extended south to Fulton Street less than a year later, then down to Bowling Green and South Ferry, then to Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Bridge staton was also a transfer point for the elevated trains coming over the bridge and ending at a station literally directly above this subway station.

Even if the date didn’t tell us that the construction was far along, it’s clear that it is. The rails have been laid, which was something that didn’t happen until major structural work was nearly done. This makes the most prominent feature of the photo – the gaping hole in the wall that exposes the tunnel to bright sunlight – that much odder. 

By playing with the contrast a little, it’s clear that the row of vertical lines in the back of that hole is Ransome rebar (twisted square bars) as you’d expect to find in a concrete wall. But the wall itself has not yet been made, and the hole is held open by plank and timbers. There’s a clear demarkation between the nearly-complete tunnel structure (the row of steel columns with knee braces at their tops) and the hole beyond.

Maybe this is an access shaft for equipment and materials? But then why wouldn’t the concrete retaining wall have been completed? The photographer appears to have been standing on the station platform, so that would be an odd place for a stair from the street down to the subway. Also, the geometry of the hole seems to have little to do with the geometry of the station. Given the date – at most nine months before the system opened to the public, it seems very late for major work like this to still be in progress.

My pet theory is that the hole and wall were meant to protect one of the buildings in City Hall Park from the construction and operating subway. Looking at the 1905 Sanborn map of the area – the brown thing at the “22” on the right is the elevated station at the end of the Brooklyn Bridge, the four little brown boat-like objects to the west of Centre Street are the kiosk entrances to the subway station – makes me think it’s the old City Court building on the far side of the hole. That long-since-demolished building was very near the tunnel and not parallel to to it.

But who knows?