The Fake Townhouses hiding Mystery Underground Portals (15 Pics)

Every city has its secrets, it’s just a matter of finding them…

On a street in Brooklyn that takes you towards the river, where the cobblestones begin paving the road, there is a townhouse that deserves a second look. Despite its impeccable brickwork, number 58 Joralemon Street is not like the other houses. Behind its blacked out windows, no one is at home; no one has been at home for more than 100 years. In fact, number 58 is not a home at all, but a secret subway exit and ventilation point disguised as a Greek Revival brownstone.
The house stands directly nine stories above the New York City subway tracks for lines 4 and 5, which carries passengers from the nearby station Borough Hall in Brooklyn under the East River over to Manhattan Island. If you approach the front door and peak through the crack, you’ll eyeball a bleakly lit windowless room with concrete flooring and a metal bunker-style door that could easily lead to a bat cave. Every so often, neighbours have reported¹ seeing men dressed in special work suits in the middle of the night hanging around the stoop at number 58.

The property was once a private residence dating back to 1847, according to the Willowtown Association, but in 1908, as the first underwater subway tunnel connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn was being constructed, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York acquired the house. The windows were fitted with unsightly  industrial steel shutters as the site was converted into a subway ventilator as part of a vast network for the tunnels below. For decades, vented air simply poured out from the windows according to neighbours¹, who knew it only as the “Shaft House”.