Cool section to read via The FYI section in The New York Times....exactly the same question that Jase and I asked when we visited Governors Island this month. :)
Breathing Room
Q. Just off the northeastern shore of Governors Island is a tall, massive white structure that looks out of place near the old military buildings. What is it?
A. It’s the ventilator shaft for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. The tunnel’s 9,117-foot length required construction of the shaft, which appears at the surface as an octagonal building with its own island near the Buttermilk Channel.
The tunnel was opened May 25, 1950. Besides the shaft, ventilation is also provided by two buildings in Lower Manhattan and one in Brooklyn, at the tunnel’s ends. The tunnel’s 53 fans change the 6.15 million cubic feet of air every 90 seconds.
In the Names of Queens
Q. Some time ago, your column mentioned the Queens Topographical Bureau, in an item about naming Queens streets. What was the Queens Topographical Bureau?
A. Appropriately for a borough known for confusing numbered streets, avenues, boulevards, lanes, crescents and drives, the bureau still exists, at Queens Borough Hall on Queens Boulevard. The bureau supplies maps and various certificates for developers, and issues house numbers. It also puts down benchmarks to permit accurate calculations of property lines; you may have seen its name in the sidewalk.
The bureau’s glory year was 1911, when Charles Underhill Powell, a chief engineer there, designed the numbering system to unify the street grid for the 60 or so villages in Queens. Some historians considered the numbered grid a model of urban planning. Many delivery people and outsiders venturing into the borough don’t.
Mr. Powell liked to help the uninitiated by distributing a verse by the humorist Ellis Parker Butler, who lived in Flushing:
In Queens, to find locations best
Avenues, roads and drives run west;
But ways to north or south ’tis plain
Are street or place or even lane.
MICHAEL POLLAK
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