History
Grand Army Plaza opened on August 23, 1920 as part of the opening of the IRT Eastern Parkway Line, an extension of the Brooklyn IRT from Atlantic Avenue to Crown Heights – Utica Avenue. This extension was part of an expansion of the subway system known as the Dual Contracts which built not only IRT lines in Brooklyn but also those for the BMT. The BMT Brighton Line was already in use at the time but used trackage that is now part of the Franklin Avenue Shuttle; the opening of the subway line beneath Flatbush Avenue provided a more direct route to Downtown Brooklyn and, eventually, Manhattan.
The construction of the station and tunnels resulted in the removal of Frederic W. Darlington's 1897 Electric Fountain from the center of Grand Army Plaza, which was dug up for the cut-and-cover construction and replaced with a grass oval. Construction began on a new fountain, known as the Bailey Fountain, in 1928, and it was completed in 1932.
Read more about this topic: Grand Army Plaza (IRT Eastern Parkway Line)
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“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)