If you spent any time working at the Court Street Trader Joe’s, or just hung around Cobble Hill on weekends, you may have noticed groups of people standing in the middle of Atlantic Avenue going down into the sewer. They were actually heading down to take a tour of the Atlantic Avenue tunnel, the world’s oldest subway tunnel. At least they were doing that until 2010, when the Department of Transportation shut the tour down. Now tour organizer Robert Diamond is back with a big study arguing in favor of reopening the tours, but he’s asking for your help on Kickstarter to raise the money to actually print the thing. Oh also, the study argues for establishing electric rail cars between Downtown and Red Hook.
Of all the Kickstarters in the world that you could run into, this is probably one of the most straightforward. Diamond has already done the study, weighing in at a whopping 346 pages, which he says has both a detailed plan to restart the tour of the tunnel and bring in electric streetcars to connect Red Hook and Downtown Brooklyn. The problem is, Diamond has to print 100 copies of the thing that he can then hand out to elected officials.
To do that, he needs $5,000 to cover the printing and distribution costs, since he presumably won’t just be driving around hurling these out the window of his car. Now, we can take or leave the subway tunnel tour. If we want to wander around underground we’ll just open a sewer manhole and do it our damn selves. But the idea of electric streetcars running between Red Hook and Downtown is such a wonderfully crazy idea that it just has to at least be studied, if not necessarily implemented.
[h/t DNA Info]
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I went on Bob Diamond’s Atlantic Ave tunnel tour, and respect the guy for his tenacity in locating the tunnel and obvious devotion to it, but this is a pretty stupid kickstarter. First, he’s been presenting this idea for years to the City government and it’s been studied and rejected. Second, anyone who wants to read the report can read it electronically. There’s no need to print these at $500 a copy (?) just to harangue elected officials with the print version.
$50 a copy, still too much.