from New York City to Boston. The Cobble Hill Tunnel and the Long Island Railroad remained the primary means of access to most of central Long Island from Manhattan and New York City. The ends of the tunnel were sealed in the fall of 1861. The similar Murray Hill Tunnel on the New York and Harlem Railroad was built as an open cut around 1836, roofed over around the 1850s, and is now in use for automobile traffic. Closure controversy In 1861, the New York State Legislature voted to ban railroad locomotives from within the limits of the City of Brooklyn. A tax assessment was ordered on all property owners along Atlantic Street (today Atlantic Avenue), to defray the costs of the closure. It was undisclosed at the time that New York State Governor John A. King was a major shareholder in the Brooklyn and Jamaica Railroad (later the Long Island Rail Road) and therefore had a conflict of interest and stood to benefit by the compensation payments to the railroad from the tax assessment. Dormancy Walt Whitman wrote of the tunnel: The old tunnel, that used to lie there under ground, a passage of Acheron-like solemnity and darkness, now all closed and filled up, and soon to be utterly forgotten, with all its reminiscences; however, there will, for a few years yet be many dear ones, to not a few Brooklynites, New Yorkers, and promiscuous crowds besides. For it was here you started to go down the island, in summer. For years, it was confidently counted on that this spot, and the railroad of which it was the terminus, were going to prove the permanent seat of business and wealth that belong to such enterprises. But its glory, after enduring in great splendor for a season, has now vanished—at least its Long Island Railroad glory has. The tunnel: dark as the grave, cold, damp, and silent. How beautiful look earth and heaven again, as we emerge from the gloom! It might not be unprofitable, now and then, to send us mortals—the dissatisfied ones, at least, and that's a large proportion—into some tunnel of several days' journey. We'd perhaps grumble less, afterward, at God's handiwork. In March 1916, the Bureau of Investigation suspected German terrorists were making bombs in the tunnel, and broke through the roof of the tunnel with jackhammers. They found nothing, installed an electric light, and resealed