There are two microform rooms on the first floor of the 42nd Street New York Public Library. It gets confusing. After several moments spent jiggling the handle to Room 119, I rationalized I must have the wrong spot, and walked to the south side of the building, passing through a brass gate to reach the entrance to Room 100.
Shortly after picking up the microform of the Brooklyn Eagle from 1844 from the desk, I moved through the computer-lab-like room to a free microfilm reader in the third row of desks, and cracked open the box I’d been handed. Inside, the small reel looked more like it would attach to a 1970s tape recorder than contain anything legibly recognizable as writing.
I lost a few more minutes fiddling with the various knobs and figuring out how to load the reel into the machine. The instructions at this particular machine, surrounded on all sides by out of order signs, had been defaced past the point of parsing, and when I finally got the film to spool appropriately in the machine, as opposed to shooting out of the machine at high speed like a spring snake from a can of nuts, I was greeted by a blank screen. A little more knob twisting and button pushing ensued until I swallowed my pride and asked a librarian for help. It turns out the focusing lens required to read anything is not built into the machine and needed to be scavenged from a nearby reader.
The first thing that struck me about the Brooklyn Eagle as I scrolled through its pages was its lack of images – the layout consisting of a myriad of small boxes filling up 5 columns per page. Secondly, I noticed the paper was usually between 4-6 pages an issue.
As I twisted the large grey knob on the machine’s right side, I sped along to May, hoping to find some mention of the tunnel at its groundbreaking. While I had no luck as of yet, I started noticing other words: “Mesmerism,” “Mormon Trouble,” ads signed by the mayor of Brooklyn offering 50 cents for every stray dog killed, and a reward of $25 being offered for a missing six-week-old infant. This was a very different New York in a very different time, one where the last great invention was the telegraph.
My first luck on the tunnel hit on July 10, 1844 – a collapse near Henry St. had killed a horse and sent one workman to the hospital with severe injuries. There was no follow-up to confirm whether he had lived or died.
I had more luck, later, in December, with the whole week of papers leading up to the tunnel’s December 5 opening being littered with small, sarcastic quips, like this from December 3, 1844: “Long Island Rail Road representatives and their guests took a ride through the tunnel on Atlantic Street today and examined the work— on the champagne bottles.”
The large column commemorating the tunnel’s opening was full of hope, statistics and mayoral speeches, but held no indication of the fate coming for the tunnel only 17 years later.
With its creation in 1844 more adequately illuminated, its abandonment in 1861 would be the next step. I have a feeling I’ll be back in front of the microform machine soon.