The Brooklyn Daily Eagle from Brooklyn, New York • Page 27

Futoira SfL IPomross 1940 BROOKLYN, FRIDAY, MAY 31, 1940 fib I I -v -rrf tv -4' I Sketched bj Laurenoe LuiU, Pratt InitUut '40 DRcAM Artist's conception of how Fulton St. will oppeor, looking west toward Borough Hall, with the elevated structure removed. Ornamental poles and modern trolley tracks and cars, suggested by the Downtown Brooklyn Association, will preserve for shoppers, with the subway, all present transit facilities. With this broad thoroughfare. Downtown and Central Brooklyn are expected to undergo a rejuvenation.

BROOKLYN TAKES ANOTHER GREAT STEP FORWARD maps and specifications for the com-' plicated razing and the condemnation order has been signed by Supreme Court Justice Charles C. Lock wood. But in the years this monster on stilts has held nine miles of Brooklyn's principal business street in its tentacles, trolley, light, telephone, power and fire alarm system wires have been strung on it. Now they must be relocated. Poles must be erected to hold the trolley wires; most of the others will be buried, a complex task because of telephone wires already underground and the subway.

There will be a transition period, it is true, in which patience will be necessary. But after this metamorphosis, Fulton St will emerge from its aged chrysalis a newer, brighter and better thoroughfare. Tonight, at long last, exactly 52 years, one month and six days after the first chugging, screeching steam locomotive pulled its string of bright yellow-cars along the new Fulton St. Elevated Line, another epic event in the creation of the Brooklyn of Tomorrow will take place. On the stroke of midnight, the final, dingy green electric train will grind its way into the Rockaway Ave.

station. Immediately, it will be possible to start work on demolition of six miles of the structure, the ugly Black Spider which for half a century has cast its shadow over the heart of Brooklyn and its evil spell over the slums it helped create. As part of the unification of the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit system with the city lines and at an estimated cost of $2,000,000, the facades of Fulton St. stores and office buildings, hidden for years in gloom, will be revealed in the light of day and a broad, unobstructed main thoroughfare opened to traffic. Culminating a civic campaign of many years, in which the Brooklyn Eagle was the crystallizing force, removal of this blight on the borough is, without doubt, one of the greatest single forward steps taken here since the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge on May 24, 1883.

Authorized by the Board of Estimate, with Mayor LaGuardia firmly behind it, demolition of the ancient elevated structure will be no simple task. Borough President John Cashmore's engineering staff, under Consulting Engineer Philip P. Farley, has drafted.