A Brooklyn legend passes
Brooklyn tunnel impresario, transit advocate Bob Diamond dies at 62
COURIER LIFE, AUG. 27-SEPT. 2, 2021 41
BY BEN BRACHFELD
Bob Diamond, a passionate
transit advocate who rediscovered
a long-abandoned
rail tunnel under Brooklyn,
died on Saturday, Aug. 21 at
his home in Flatbush. He was
62 years old.
His death was confi rmed
by his longtime girlfriend,
Sharon Rozsay, who said he
had died at home after suffering
a stroke while dealing
with a bad virus (though not
COVID-19).
Diamond was a lifelong
Brooklynite who spent the
bulk of his life in Flatbush,
where he was born, grew up,
lived, and passed away.
“He really loved Brooklyn,”
Rozsay told Brooklyn
Paper. “And he did a lot for
Brooklyn, and he always was
trying to do something better
for Brooklyn.”
Diamond, who headed the
Brooklyn Historic Railway
Association, was most well
known for rediscovering the
world’s oldest subway tunnel
underneath Atlantic Avenue
in Downtown Brooklyn, and
leading tours of the subterranean
passage for 30 years until
the city put a kibosh on his
enterprise.
The Atlantic Avenue tunnel
had been built by the Long
Island Rail Road in 1844 as
part of its New York-to-Boston
service but was sealed in
1861, after just 17 years in service,
when the state banned
the use of steam locomotives
in Brooklyn’s city limits. Over
time, the tunnel was mostly
forgotten, and its location was
unclear for over a century,
with the only indications of its
existence being legends of, for
example, John Wilkes Booth’s
diary being stored in a tunnel
under the Brooklyn Academy
of Music, and its rumored use
as a clandestine bootlegging
route by Prohibition-era gangsters.
Diamond was an electrical
engineering student at the
Pratt Institute when he fi rst
heard about the lost tunnel in
1980. Interested in rail, trains,
and their history since childhood,
then-20-year-old Diamond
set out to fi nd the tunnel.
His research eventually
led him to Brooklyn Borough
Hall, where then-Borough
President Howard Golden led
him on a tour through the
building’s archives.
“He found certain information
that led directly to the
spot where the Atlantic Avenue
tunnel was,” Rozsay said.
“At that archive at Borough
Hall, he found maps and all
kinds of information, very old
information, of the beginning
of Brooklyn.”
Diamond used his fi ndings
to pinpoint what he believed to
be the tunnel’s location, then
in 1981 convinced Con Edison
to allow him to go down a
manhole on Atlantic Avenue
at Court Street.
“He got down there and he
had to go on his hands and
knees in dirt to get to this spot
where there were bricks,” Rozsay
said. “He undid the bricks,
and he went and got one of
those chain ladders and he
went down into the tunnel,
and then it was discovered.”
Diamond began offering
guided tours of the tunnel soon
after its rediscovery, which
were a hit despite the tunnel’s
only access point being the
very manhole in the middle of
Atlantic Avenue that he had
fi rst descended in 1981. He was
supported in his efforts by the
city, which renewed his lease
to operate the tunnel on several
occasions between 1986
and 2008, and provided him
grants for his projects.
But Diamond’s fi xation
remained on something he
never got the chance to unearth:
an 1830s steam locomotive
rumored to be buried
behind a thick layer of granite
in the tunnel when it was
sealed. Diamond spent years
trying to uncover the locomotive,
and was on the verge
of a breakthrough in the late
2000s, when fi lm and TV producers
started taking interest.
The Brooklynite signed a deal
with National Geographic in
2010 making a documentary
about the tunnel and the lost
locomotive; crucially, Nat Geo
would pay for the excavation.
But as the stars seemed to
be lining up for Diamond to
make his cherished fi nd, the
train began to derail. The city
yanked Diamond’s permission
to use the tunnel in December
2010, and in fact barred any
entry into the passageway, citing
safety issues raised by the
Fire Department regarding
the tunnel’s single entrance at
the Atlantic Ave manhole and
air quality issues.
Later that month, Diamond
fi led a lawsuit against the city,
seeking millions in damages
and to have the tunnel reopened.
After a protracted legal
battle, he lost the suit, with
a judge declaring that the city
was within its rights to unilaterally
revoke the contract.
To make matters worse,
in 2011 an engineering fi rm
all but confi rmed that the rumored
locomotive was indeed
buried under Atlantic Avenue,
when electromagnetic imaging
revealed an enormous
metal “anomaly” buried beneath
the thoroughfare. But
Diamond never got the chance
to excavate it.
Finding the locomotive
wasn’t the only dream of Diamond’s
scuttled by the city: for
years, he yearned to build a
trolley from Red Hook to Downtown
Brooklyn, and on numerous
occasions was nearly in
the position to actually do so.
In the 90s, he received both
city permission and funding
to pursue the streetcar project,
going so far as to purchase
vintage trolleys and start to
lay down track in Red Hook.
But the city eventually cut off
funding and, in 2003, revoked
Diamond’s contract to construct
and run the trolley. The
city later ripped up the tracks
that Diamond had laid down,
and the trolleys were trucked
away to Connecticut.
The dream came alive again
when in 2009 the Bloomberg
administration expressed interest
in restarting the project,
but then came crashing
down when the city decided
the project would be too costly
and not serve enough riders.
Most recently, Diamond
worked as a consultant on the
Brooklyn-Queens Connector
(BQX) project, a favorite
of Mayor Bill de Blasio which
nonetheless faced similar criticisms
as Diamond’s earlier
streetcar dreams. His work
included drawing maps, devising
potential routes, and determining
what roads might
be able to support a streetcar.
The BQX was about to enter
the city’s public review process,
and Diamond was attending
most public meetings
on the project, when COVID-19
hit the city and scuttled the
project. Last year, the mayor
said that the future of the BQX
would be up to his successor.
Legal bills and the loss of
income from the tunnel tours
left Diamond depressed and
nearly broke at the end of his
life, but he still found time to
do consulting work on various
projects, and he was a
well-regarded transit expert
sought by engineers all over
the world, Rozsay said.
“They were emailing him
from Australia, from Europe,
from Canada, from all over,”
Rozsay said. “He was known
all over the world.”
Transit advocate Bob Diamond, seen here pointing to a spot at the end of
the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel where he believed a long-abandoned locomotive
remained, died on Saturday, Aug. 21.
Brooklyn Paper fi le photo by Tom Callan