Journal #3

Today’s class we adventured to Brooklyn one of the biggest boroughs in New York. We Started off going to Coney Island which isn’t an Island anymore, more like a peninsula. It was a 45 min train ride from Penn to Coney Island so our class got to know each other pretty well. When we got there we walked around on the boardwalk and went to eat at the original Nathans Hot Dog. Looking at the building on the right side by the boardwalk there was a sign counting down to the next hot dog eating contest. After we ate our hot dogs we went to the flee market right next to Nathans and looked at all the cool things they were selling. I was kind of disappointed that Coney Island Amusement Park was closed. But I feel Coney Island was a nice stop on this trip.

Our next stop in Brooklyn was to Brooklyn Heights where we stopped at the transit Museum to see the public transportation. We learned that this was a station at one point in its life but only went to one stop and people realized it was faster and cheaper to just walk. So by 1976 the train station turned in to the transit museum. During the period this train station wasn’t a museum Hollywood filmed some movies using the back drop of this subway. In this museum we say the old bus compared to the new ones and learned about how the subway was made and planned out. Most of the workers were Irish and Italians because those two groups needed money to send back to there countries. “Lined up on the tracks of the former Court St. station are examples of most of the subway cars that have traveled the tracks since the first line opened in 1904” (BG p.468). We found old advertisements on the old trains in the station. We found out that New York was against the Subway until one bad snow storm that hit the Northeast that stopped all the ground transportation. This lead to the subway to be built so that never happens again. I realized that building the subway was like mining. They used TNT to blow throw the ground and had to break the pieces that fell into mining carts. They brought all the pieces that fell to land fills around the area. They used a technique called cut and cover which was digging 15 to 20 feet or so down under ground and building the subway. They realized that they had enough room to have the trains go through and not digging so far. They used steel to hold up the tunnels so they wouldn’t fall on the people that used the subway. The way they made the tunnels so strong was to build it like a sky scraper that’s on its side.

After we were done with the museum we walked around Brooklyn Heights and learned about the different kind of styles of buildings they had. They were Greek Revival style, Gothic Revival style and Italianate style. Since Brooklyn was a city at one point they had a city hall that’s still there today. Since Brooklyn was isolated from Manhattan there was a ferry to get people from place to place. But soon Brooklyn got heavily populated and the ferry couldn’t handle the people. The largest suspension bridge was built by Roebling and his son called the Brooklyn Bridge that connected Manhattan and Brooklyn. This bridge was the tallest building in Brooklyn but before this bridge it was the Pilgrims church. I learned that the pilgrim church had a long point on its roof that made it the largest building in Brooklyn but it was taken down because when they were building the subway they were worried the rumbling would knock the point down so they took it down. They never put it up again because there really isn’t a point there are big sky scrapers. Once the tour was over we got ice cream and walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to see the new freedom towers, Empire state building and the statue of Liberty. I always wanted to walk it and I finally did. It was awesome even thought my feet hurt from the long day.