7. Joralemon Street Tunnel

Location: From Bowling Green to beneath the East River
to Joralemon St. and Willow Place
Built: 1903-1907
Architect: William Barclay Parsons
National Register Number: 06000015
Listed: February 9, 2006
Visited: August 1, 2007



The list of Manhattan sites on the National Register of Historic Places includes a small scattering of hardcore irregulars that aren't buildings or concatenations thereof: twelve boats (including two aircraft carriers), five bridges, twenty-five subway stations, and two tunnels -- the Holland Tunnel, and the one under the microscope today, the Joralemon Street Tunnel. 1.5 miles of wormhole under the East River, its claim to greatness is that in 1908, it helped connect New York City's first underground subway line into Brooklyn. For all that, I'm not sure I've ever been through it before. The Joralemon carries the 4 and 5 trains; if I go to Brooklyn, I typically use either the 2 and 3 trains or the M and R trains, and they go through the Clark Street and Montague Street tunnels. More typically, though, I don't go to Brooklyn at all.

Down by the nearest train station, I let a few trains pass until there's one empty enough, not that people blocking my view is going to be my main problem. For all of the subway trains on this line, a small portion of the front car is dedicated entirely to the train conductor. Thus any good head-on view of the tunnel has to be seen through two windows, at least one of which features a kind of distorting glass that prevents a person from seeing much of anything around its perimeter. Plus my digital camera -- eight years old and two measly megapixels -- is absolute shit when it comes to darkness, even when supplemented by a flash. So I get on the train knowing and accepting that any photograph I take of the tunnel isn't going to be remotely illustrative, just a token effort at best.

You know, I'm OK with this. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been rather hard-assed lately about personal photography on the subways, having made overtures towards banning it entirely not once but twice in the last few years, and according to Wikipedia, they still don't allow flash photography. (Uh, oops.) God forbid anybody detains me I can always show them my blurry and indistinct pictures of not much. Still, I can tell the other people on the train are a little skittish seeing me take pictures: they too are thinking about bombs in tunnels. One guy sitting down is muttering something under his breath. It probably doesn't help that I have a mid-sized beard and thus look OMG possibly potentially "Al Qaeda" or maybe just "crazy-ass" to those not hip to the hipster trends in facial fashion.

OK, so what does the Joralemon look like? Well, it looks like any other subway tunnel ribbed with tracks and supports that prevent the East River from crashing down onto us. If it has any grace that marks it as being something other than a wondrous feat of engineering (the way that, for example, the Gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge make it stylish, maybe even witty), this is either lost on me or lost in the dark. It is not completely dark, mind, but outside of the odd shape of the tunnel walls (almost keyhole-shaped -- I must be remembering this wrong), what I can see best are the chromatic blue and green lights.