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's 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 wall 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 trash filled-out
by 1903 (NY Times), the causeway came with the automobile, boats from
the Bronx serviced it before connected to Queens today, and cases from
it 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.

On 5/12/06, geoff carver <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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?
>


-- 
-----
Fight back spam! Download the Blue Frog.
http://www.bluesecurity.com/register/s?user=Z2Vvcmdlam15ZXJzanI5MDQx