THE BROOKLYN TERMINAL STATION OF THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE.
Harper's Weekly, June 15, 1895

FOR more than a year work has been actively going on in making extensive changes in the terminals of the Brooklyn Bridge. Much of the work thus far has been unseen, but the erection and the near completion of the terminal station on the Brooklyn side of the bridge have given travellers some idea of the extent of the undertaking aboveground. The Brooklyn terminal will be only about two-thirds the size of the New York terminal, and the difficulties in building it have been small compared to the problems confronting the engineers on, the New York side. In Brooklyn a new station has been erected on the block directly south of the present station. The new station in New York must be erected on the site of the present station, and with no interruption of traffic.

The problem on the Brooklyn side has been to take care of double the number of trains, and also to dispose of double the number of people, now cared for. The present station ends in a curve, which has always been a source of danger and annoyance to passengers and to the management. The new station will be 357 feet long and 90 feet wide, and entirely straight. The entire ground-floor will be used as a waiting-room. Double stairways in the centre of the room will lead to two platforms on the floor above, one the incoming platform and the other the outgoing platform. Two large hexagonal ticket-booths will be placed on the ground-floor, but not adjacent to the stairs, as is the case now. The floor will be asphalt, and glazed brick will be used on the side of the walls for several feet above the floor. There will be twenty-four entrances on the four sides of the building—the Plaza, Sands Street, Washington Street, and High Street.

The train platforms on the second floor will be 250 feet long and 20 feet wide. Tracks will be run on each side of them the trains arriving at or leaving the platforms on alternate sides. Double stairways from each platform, directly over the stairways from the floor below, will run to an enclosed gallery hanging from the roof over the middle line of tracks. This gallery leads to the ends of the station, where the tracks of the Brooklyn Elevated Railroad pass at right angles through the new station, making a large loop. The Kings County Elevated declined to use one end of the new station for a loop terminal, and a long passageway from the centre of the suspended gallery runs to their line on Fulton Street. Consequently the Brooklyn road has the use of both ends, but one of the requirements made of that road is that passengers shall be unloaded or received at each end of the terminal station, so as to distribute the traffic as much as possible.

The Brooklyn station will be open for traffic in about a month. It will have cost $270,000 when finished. The original plan for the Brooklyn terminal was to have a loop system with a, fine stone station fronting on a plaza near the Brooklyn City Hall. This would have cost $2,500,000, and the plan was abandoned. It was found that the interest on the money would build this structure, which would be sufficient for several years. The elaborate plan has not been given up entirely, and the engineers refer to the new structure, with its capacity four times as large as the old structure, as a mere temporary affair.

The WEEKLY, within a year, printed a picture of the external appearance of the new Brooklyn station. The accompanying picture shows what the interior will be like on the second story. Franklin Matthews