I'm always dubious when someone claims to have found anything "long lost" in New York. No piece of infrastructure has gone unrecorded here since Stuyvesant ceded his governorship to British. New York has lots of winding tunnels and underground chambers, but they're not lost to anyone who bothers to look them up in the city's archives.
My doubts increase tenfold when the subject involves Grand Central, of which the Park Avenue tunnel is a part. That complex has been the focus of endless silly rumors popularized in books like Jennifer Toth's
highly suspect The Mole People.
I have no doubt that something semi-forgotten was semi-rediscovered under 740 Park Avenue, but it's neither secret nor a tunnel. Some reasons why:
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...a series of brick chambers about ten feet tall, six feet wide, all with arched ceilings, branching off from 740’s basement.
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The railroad tunnel's wall is roughly flush with the curb above. Hardly 10 feet seperate the basement of any Park Avenue building from the railroad tunnel. If the chambers "branch off" from the basement, they're either as short as they are wide, or they don't go toward the tracks.
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Gross didn’t mention it in his book after the Rockefeller relatives denied it. But not everybody’s so sure.
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Would a family with such conspicuous wealth deny the existence of a minor piece of infrastructure if it were real?
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...out of 740 Park Avenue to the railroad tracks...
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Some of the busiest railroad tracks in the world, which run into the largest railroad station in the world. Why clog up the approach to Grand Central with a stopped train when a far less disruptive boarding area sits only 30 blocks south?
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(where his private train could pull up)
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British monarchs have private trains. The merely fabulously wealthy have private cars, which run on regular trains, which stop at regular stops.
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Was it an old wine cellar? Remnants of a building built before 740?
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Yeah, probably.
08 January 2007, 10:00 PM
Secret Park Avenue Crypt Unearthed!
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