Robert Diamond

Mark Worden (Standard British accent):

Robert Diamond leads tours of the mysterious underground tunnel which lies beneath Atlantic Avenue in the New York Borough of Brooklyn. Diamond himself first discovered the tunnel 30 years ago.  This is a part of his tour:

 Robert Diamond (Standard American/New York accent):

Now, the first thing that happened when I came down here was I looked around and I saw there was a hole in the roof of the tunnel right over there. So I was like, “Huh, why is there a hole in the roof of the tunnel?” And then on that stone over there on that side –  yeah, right there – there’s some writing and it says: “3/11/16” – the date is March 11th, 1916  – and what the writing says is electrician T. Lynch put first electric light in this subway. So I knew the tunnel  was closed up in 1861, so I was kind of  like, “Huh, why is there writing on the wall from 1916? And who’s T. Lynch and why was he down here hanging up lights?” Now, if you look at the center of the arch you’ll see one of his old insulators still nailed into the roof of the tunnel – yeah, right there. Now, what I did was I went back to the library and began doing some more research to find out what was going on in 1916 that would cause these guys to come down here and look around. So I found out that what was doing in the world at that time was World War One was going on in Europe, but the United States wasn’t part of it yet. What we did was sell ammunition to both sides, while we sat back and took everyone’s money! Then President Wilson passed an arms embargo against Germany, so the Germans didn’t like this too much, so the first thing they did was they tried to set up a dummy corporation in Connecticut, to buy up all the explosives being made in the US, and when that didn’t work, then they started putting time bombs in the ships carrying ammunition from Red Hook, Brooklyn out to England. Now, these… these little devices were called pencil bombs and they were set to go off in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. So a lot of the ships didn’t have radios back in those days – or not very good radios  –  so the ships would just never get to their destination. Now, one of these bombs failed to detonate and they found it in England, on the ship. So they figured out where it was coming from and they put a stop to it. So the next master plan that the Germans came up with was to sabotage Black Tom Island. Now, all the ammunition made in the US was gathered up in one place, before its shipment to England, which is  really stupid, to put all your ammunition in one place! And where they put this stuff was in back of the Statue of Liberty, where Liberty State Park is today, it was called Black Tom Island back then and the Germans blew this place up and the explosion was so great that it nearly broke the arm off the Statue of Liberty and people were thrown out of their beds 20 and 30 miles away and a lot of people were killed in Lower Manhattan by shards of glass falling down from the tall buildings.  And there was a big spy scare going on in the city at this time. So what happened was the people who live in this area, who remembered that there used to be a railroad through here began circulating a rumour that there were German spies hiding in this tunnel and they’re brewing up mustard gas and they’re getting ready to release it any second now. So the predecessors of the FBI heard about this and they actually got  together with the city highway department, it took the story seriously, and they… dug holes in the street until they broke into the roof of the tunnel. Now, they didn’t know there was a manhole cover 100 feet that way, so they just had to dig holes in the street until they hit it! Watch the steps: they’re unevenly spaced. OK, now, once they came inside they didn’t find any of the Kaiser’s henchmen running around with spiked Pickelhauben helmets,  but they… but instead in their report they wrote that they found an unknown tunnel in really good condition. So they wanted to photograph it and measure it,  to document it, so to do this they had to put up some temporary electric lighting  and that’s why T. Lynch put up some electric lights down here, so they could could photograph it and measure it.  Now, being a city agency, within days of photographing this place and measuring it, all their folders got lost! So the tunnel was lost again, almost immediately!  Until I came along in 1980 and then… then it got rediscovered again, but more about that later.

For more on Diamond’s Atlantic Avenue Tunnel tours, visit:

http://www.brooklynrail.net/proj_aatunnel.html

(Robert Diamond was talking to Lorenza Cerbini)

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