Secret Subway

>Geoff Carver >someone on a german-language list had a question about whether there had been any archaeological investigations of any remains of alfred ely beach's pneumatic subway in NYC anyone heard/seen anything about it? The story I heard that the pneumatic tube subway was constructed in "secret" and as far as I know, I have not heard of it turning up in any archaeology though I think there was some offhand report about it possibly turning up in a construction or utility excavation not too long ago. At the end of last year I was monitoring the new subway tunnel through Battery Park, once, where before Ellis Island, Castle Clinton (Castle Williams across the harbor on Governors Island, another multi-gunport circular structure) on the "Swing Shift" (3:300pm to 12:00am) and many pneumatic tubes kept turning up, where before they ran from the former immigration center (Castle Clinton) to the nearby U.S. Customs House, now also part of the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. Other pipes were not very well mapped, i.e., water to the various facilities, and had to be repaired and reconnected as the work went on down to bedrock between the I-beams and wooden platforms for heavy equipment used in the "cut and cover" tunnel construction used elsewhere too. The current subway connects to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal on a track of a short radii curvature from earlier railcar specs., so current passengers have to depart from the first four modern cars, where the platform for them exists, the rest of the train in the tunnel approach to the station. The new construction will alleviate that problem with a new station, at the former Whitehall wharf. A lot of modern excavation and techniques are/were being used creating combinations of concrete pilings and walls in bedrock. An eternal flame and the "Sphere" sculpture from the World Trade Center plaza is in the Battery Park, "adjoining" the new tunnel construction. The National Parks Service runs the ferries to the world's first electrically lit lighthouse, the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe's Island from the park, where my Scottish grandma once worked as a nanny for the caretaker. The new National Lighthouse Museum is supposed to open at St. George on Staten Island. The pneumatic tubes in the park were used for paperwork between the facility I think and the pre-Ellis Island immigrant processing. We lost one dirt profile in the loose consolidated fill to a water pipe fracture. The current Battery Park was built by prison labor according to the fiscal report in the 1850's of the NYC Parks Dept. to the city I read in Special Collections at Stony Brook University many years ago. Once Castle Clinton was an island, like Ellis Island, with a causeway out to it (and Rikers Island, the prison, though household coal trash filled-out by 1903 (NY Times), the causeway came with the automobile, boats from the Bronx serviced it before, connected to Queens today, cases from it are still heard by juries in the Bronx). There were also cable car systems like San Francisco around the area and perhaps, and steam locomotive elevated trains (and surface), whose constructions may have impacted the experimental pneumatic subway. Sure would be fun to find.

"Secret Subway" and "The Beach Pneumatic Transit Co." study by Joseph Brennon. Alfred Ely Beach was one of the founders of "Scientific American" magazine and his father owned the newspaper "The Sun" my father worked at as a young boy, his father a real estate reporter for the "New York Record" I think it was. New York's "The Sun" has recently been "reborn", beginning first on the Internet! Only $0.25 (once a penny). "The Sun" building was recently added to New York City's Landmarks.