STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- We posted this photograph on our Instagram and Facebook pages last month and it sparked a lot of curiosity among our followers

The two men were digging tunnels in the 1920s for a proposed subway connecting St. George to Bay Ridge.

You wondered what happened to the project.

So, here's the story, according to our archives.

Actually, you have to go back to 1898 when Staten Island was incorporated into New York City. The reason for consolidation was to give the borough access to city services, particularly to improve transportation options -- fast forward to 2018 and you can see how that worked out.

(Footnote: In 1993, 65 percent of Staten Islanders voted to secede from NYC. That was stymied by the state. But, let's not get ahead of ourselves -- that's a story for another day).

Turns out the earliest known plans for a Brooklyn-Staten Island passenger and freight rail connection were studied 10 years before consolidation by railroad businesses, but the first serious proposal for a trans-Narrows tunnel was pitched in 1912 by George Cromwell, Staten Island's first borough president, according to Advance archives.

The plans and designs changed in the intervening years, but then, there it was: On a sunny day in July 1923, crowds of Staten Islanders lined the St. George waterfront for a lavish groundbreaking ceremony.

The Police Department marching band escorted Mayor John F. Hylan, the city's borough presidents and a cadre of high-ranking city officials off the ferryboat to meet John Lynch, Staten Island's fifth borough president.

At the time, the Advance wrote that they spoke before "one of the largest crowds which ever assembled" on Staten Island.

Onlookers clustered around the platform at the ferry, crammed into windows and doorways at Borough Hall and the courthouse and stood along vantage points on Richmond Terrace, Advance archives show.

City officials took "about a dozen healthy swings" with a silver pickaxe to break ground on the Brooklyn-Richmond Freight and Passenger Tunnel, the New York Times reported at the time.

A similar groundbreaking was held at Shore Road in Bay Ridge a few months earlier.

The tube would have cost about $27 million to build and would have been the longest underwater tunnel at the time when it was complete in 1929.

But much like they do today, grand transportation projects are left to die: Work halted only a year after it began. The idea continued to be kicked around for a while before ultimately being abandoned in the 1930s.

By 1932, the only sign of the project were four huge holes cordoned off by rickety wooden barriers, Advance archives show.

The holes -- two in each borough that contained the headings for the tunnel -- plus the land bought on Staten Island for the railway cost the city at least $6 million.

Why the sudden stoppage?

The reasons remain murky, according to Advance archives.

When bids were being advertised for further construction to be done in early 1925, those with railroad interests opposed the freight line and convinced Albany to block the project. Soon after, the bid advertisements ceased and the city engineers for the project were reassigned.

Another speculation, according to Advance archives, is that Mayor Hylan sabotaged the project because of his quarrels with the owners of Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit, who probably would have benefitted from the tunnel.

One more theory: New York Gov. Alfred Smith stopped the tube because he had investments in the Pennsylvania Railroad, which had monopoly control of rails entering the city from the south.

The real story is probably buried underneath those subway tunnels for good.

But this is what we do know: Another heralded project for Staten Island commuters was stopped in its tracks.

Sound familiar?