A house is not a home

[58 Joralemon Street, Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The windows appear to be shuttered. But the door appears to be shuttered as well. Was a Collyer cousin living here? No. No one was. And still, today, no one is.

An April Fool’s piece by a newspaper columnist suggests that this address was known to at least some Brooklynites:

[“5 Minutes from Bob Side.” Brooklyn Heights Press April 01, 1971.]

Another Brooklyn paper gives a hint as to what the building is about:

[“Statistics of East River Tunnel.” The Brooklyn Eagle, Jaunary 9, 1908.]

On July 10, 1903, ground was broken to create this shaft in what was once a private residence. But what was the East River tunnel?

Here’s an answer (urbanistarierl, via Instagram). And a lengthier one (PIX11 News, via YouTube).

Additional strangeness: a comment on the Pix11 story mentions a subway substation at the corner of West 13th Street and Greenwich Avenue in Manhattan. (It’s not masquerading as a residence.) On a visit to the city in 2016, I took a photograph of one of the substation’s Art Deco doors.

[Click for a larger view.]

The door remains, sometimes covered in graffiti, sometimes not. Google Maps shows that the bit of graffiti in my photograph (“Uncle Sloppy”) was gone by November 2016.

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More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)