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THE NEW YORK TERMINAL OF THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE
Harper's Weekly—October 12, 1895

THE erection of a new terminal at the New York end of the Brooklyn Bridge is a task of far greater difficulty than the erection of the one on the Brooklyn side. In Brooklyn a new station was built directly across the street from the old station. In New York the new station is being built on the site of the old one. The extraordinary care necessary in tearing down the old building, the use of a great deal of the iron-work of the old station in the new, the building of a complete false-work structure for the trains to run on, have delayed the progress of the work, and will so delay it that it is probable that the station will not be completed fully until some time next summer.

The first change of importance in the New York terminal has been to raise the tracks one story in the station. This was necessary to provide new stairways for the people. It obviated cutting into the masonry of the bridge structure and the consequent weakening of that. The next important change was to move the platforms further toward Brooklyn. This was done to give room for the switching of the trains entirely beyond the platforms, thus destroying any probability of serious accident to the passengers in shifting the cars. The new station will have two "island platforms." One will be the incoming platform and the other will be the outgoing Trains coming from Brooklyn will go to alternate sides of the incoming platform as they arrive, and trains going to Brooklyn will leave the outgoing platform in the same manner. There will be double tracks, called "sandwiched" tracks, across the bridge, and any given train will remain on one continuous track in making the round trip.

The new station will be 521 feet long and 87 feet 6 inches wide. The platforms will be 230 feet long and 20 feet wide. The old platforms were only 100 feet long, and 8 feet wide. Trains will be run under a headway of forty-five seconds instead of ninety as now, and the train capacity will be fully 500,000 passengers a day in time of a crush.

Those passengers who climb to the trains from Park Row will have one more staircase to mount than in the old station. Those who walk up the slope under the structure will find that the distance by the stairs to the platforms, will be about the same as in the old station. Those who go still further up the slope, until they come out under the forward end of the outgoing platform, will find that the staircase climb will be much less than in the old station. For those who come from Rose Street there will be two elevators, each capable of carrying twenty persons. They will lift the passengers a distance of thirty-six feet, leaving a climb for them of fifteen feet. The entire ground-floor of the station will be a waiting-room, through which the bridge promenade will run. The ticket-boxes will be placed at the entrances to the staircases. The cost of the new terminal will be $240,000.


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