THE NEW YORK TERMINAL OF THE BROOKLYN
BRIDGE
Harper's WeeklyOctober 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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