New York Underground

The Anatomy of a City

Julia Solis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000143614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Did alligators ever really live in New York's sewers? What's it like to explore the old aqueducts beneath the city? How many levels are beneath Grand Central Station? And how exactly did the pneumatic tube system that New York's post offices used to employ work?

In this richly illustrated historical tour of New York's vast underground systems, Julia Solis answers all these questions and much, much more. New York Underground takes readers through ingenious criminal escape routes, abandoned subway stations, and dark crypts beneath lower Manhattan to expose the city's basic anatomy. While the city is justly famous for what lies above ground, its underground passages are equally legendary and tell us just as much about how the city works.

CHAPTER ONE Introduction

Figure 1.1 Inside the Croton Aqueduct

New Yorkers have long been fascinated by the underground. Even a century ago, New York was described as a city of cave dwellers, whose cellars had many levels and whose communal Main Street had been superseded by the subway, with stations serving as new market squares. From labyrinthine diagrams, urban legends, and reports from the trenches, it would seem that if New York’s underground were uncovered, a maze of canyons and chasms, riddled with a dense network of conduits and tunnels, would meet our eyes. The city’s history is filled with attempts to harness the world below its streets. Possessing the world’s most formidable collection of skyscrapers nicely shows how well New York stands up to engineering challenges. But at least a few New Yorkers know that the real adventure is far below, down the elevator shaft with the sandhogs, where you can feel and smell what New York is really made of and where the very fabric of the city vibrates with life.

Exploring New York’s underground brings many surprises. One is that the hidden areas beneath the streets can be strangely peaceful and welcoming. It is specifically in its subterranean realms that this often chaotic metropolis becomes approachable; the secret spaces of the underground, desolate and beautiful, are the intimate surfaces of this gargantuan city. Above ground, New York treats its abandoned structures like seeds stuck between its teeth; well-meaning forces jab at them, hoping to reintegrate them into usefulness, yet eventually they are crushed or absorbed. In losing its ruins, the city is giving up a part of its soul. Only beneath its streets do the dark places linger; here are remnants from past centuries that haven’t been renovated or modernized, structures that have been left to age alone in the dark.

My first forays into the New York underground were not to document tunnels, seek out the homeless, or write graffiti, but simply to venture into a world that would throw me for a loop. The subterranean environment was wild, unpredictable, not subject to the societal rules that reigned topside. It seemed incredibly desolate

Figure 1.2 A disused control tower beneath the City Hall area

Figure 1.3 Obsolete freight tracks below mid-Manhattan

and yet alive. Obviously people were passing through, but rarely would they show themselves as I wandered around.

But they left traces, including peculiar objects that remained, collecting dust, and coming across these was like entering a kind of fantasy realm, where the unexpected lay behind every turn. Walking a brightly lit but abandoned subway track beneath Brooklyn, finding a plastic toy train that someone had balanced perfectly on one of the rails left me puzzled. Not far from there I saw laundry hanging on a clothesline above a train spur, the clothes swaying like ghosts in the blue tunnel light. Who had left these things behind?

What was the story behind the carton of doll furniture, still sealed in cellophane, that had been placed like a present at the foot of an emergency exit’s decrepit stairs? Why was there a room next to an abandoned tunnel containing nothing but a large hook near the ceiling, a ladder, and a rope? Clearly, there were interesting things going on down here, and in the solitude and expanse of these underground spaces, every detail was magnified; there was space and time for them to make an impression.

Some of the mysteries developed into narratives. It was striking to discover, in the late 1990s, a page by the graffiti writer Revs — a large section of a tunnel wall painted pale yellow and covered with what looked like a journal entry describing a childhood episode in Brooklyn. Out of context, this bright narrative seemed completely insane so deep underground. Only later did I find out that he had written more than 200 of these autobiographical pages all across the city’s subway tunnels. Obviously there was a lot more going on here than met the eye.

There were also architectural oddities, and again, the deeper I delved, the more questions surfaced. Places such as the track areas of Grand Central Terminal, with their seemingly inexplicable stairways and crawlspaces, became just as intriguing as the derelict remnants of the city’s first aqueduct. How astonishing to discover the sheer scope and intricacies of these man-made burrows.

Getting to the bottom of these mysteries, however, has become virtually impossible in recent years, as the shadow of the terror attacks on 9/11 has spread into all manner of subterranean spaces. The creative anarchy of earlier times has largely dissipated as security has tightened. The attacks have had a profound effect on New York’s underworld, an area that now seems rife with threats. Here, in an uninhabited realm, dark and unfamiliar to most New Yorkers, the city appears particularly vulnerable.

In response, the underground is being policed like never before. Hatches have been sealed, subaquatic tunnels are guarded, and cameras have been installed. Information is disappearing off Web sites, archives are closing to the public, and photographers of infrastructure are increasingly met with suspicion. I was lucky to have discovered nearly all of the spaces in this book before the terror attacks and to have found a few kindred

Figure 1.4 A subway tunnel beneath Chinatown

Figure 1.5 The abandoned water pipe inside the High Bridge

spirits among those who work below the streets, since it is now a bad idea to venture into the city’s tunnels. Yet, my desire to transform a few of these areas into playgrounds for the imagination has not left.

A friend and I first began organizing scavenger hunts and other games in underground and ruined locations under the name Dark Passage in 1999. Three years later, I founded the preservation society Ars Subterranea, with the goal of introducing the public to more unusual underground spaces. And when we curated an art exhibition on subterranean New York inside the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel in 2002, the overwhelming amount of visitors demonstrated the public interest in this subject. Many spaces that would have been accessible to us only a few years ago are now closed to cultural events, but we will continue trying.

This book is rooted in the same motives — a passion for tunnels and a love for New York’s underground. While it is intended as a fairly comprehensive overview of what lies below our streets, my attention has leaned toward the stories of people who have creatively broken new ground, such as the inventor Alfred Ely Beach, the sandhog Dick Creedon, the caver Chris Beauchamp, and the writer Revs. It is meant as an armchair guide to the city’s nether worlds, not as an invitation for exploration, and that is why no private entry locations will be revealed.

The abundance of myths and legends that have sprung up about New York’s underground is not surprising — about sewer inspectors who arm themselves with rifles and go on subterranean alligator hunts; about a forgotten subway station with chandeliers and fountains, where an old woman plays piano at night; about cathedrallike spaces hewn out of the granite far below ground. Most of these myths have their origins in historic events covered in this book.

As this world becomes increasingly shut to New York’s public, I expect the legends will only grow in scope and embellishment. In the underground, at least, New York will always retain its mysteries.

CHAPTER TWO A City Built on Treacherous Rock

Figure 2.1 Roots inside the long-abandoned Croton Aqueduct in the Bronx

“New York is a city that eats its history,” Gerard Koeppel, author of Water for Gotham, wrote in 2002. As the finance capital of the world, the city has a longstanding reputation for being driven primarily by its quest for profits. Archaeologists and historians whose research depends on access to specific sites have traditionally had a difficult time in New York. Until the terror attacks on the World Trade Center slowed down developments in lower Manhattan, property values, not historic merit, set the standard for the use of many particular locations. Any archaeological excavation in downtown Manhattan, which could stifle the cash flow or obstruct rent collection, would have to fall by the wayside. Each hole in the ground needed to be covered as quickly as possible, each construction site transformed into rentable property.

In their book Unearthing Gotham, the archaeologists Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall address the reluctance of New Yorkers to integrate New York’s historical background into the collective identity of the city. To many of its residents, New York is the emblem of progress; digging in the past is something best left to other, more sluggish towns. That the city’s history is nonetheless being rediscovered and preserved is a relatively new phenomenon. As recently as 1963, barely anyone turned out to protest the demolition of the original Pennsylvania Station, and only when the monumental concourse had disappeared, to be replaced by the infinitely less attractive Madison Square Garden, did New Yorkers wake up. In 1965 the New York City Landmarks Commission was created partially in response to the ensuing public furor, just in time to save Grand Central Terminal from a similar destruction. In recent decades, New York developed a greater awareness of its historic relics and is paying closer attention to discoveries that anchor the city in its past.

A large part of these discoveries are made in the underground. The city’s oldest colonial artifact, a coin from the year 1590, was found by an archaeologist at a construction site in 1983. In the course of those excavations on Broad Street, the foundation wall of a tavern and a cistern from the seventeenth century also appeared, and, as part of the Stadt Huys project, are now being displayed below glass next to the finished building. The restoration of City Hall Park in the late 1990s yielded a staggering amount of artifacts and human remains just below the lawn, which have helped shed light on life in the colonial era.

Yet the recently awakened historic interest still has to compete with New York’s self-image as the world’s economic capital. Even as the public increasingly respects the underground as a potential treasure chest of artifacts, the rent needs to be collected, and fast. But New York’s conflicted connection to its own underground goes even deeper. For centuries the city has carried on a well-documented love-hate relationship with its geological foundation, the rock bottom that allows a skyscraper’s verticality in both the upward and downward directions. The solidity of the rock has permitted structural engineers to achieve record-breaking heights, yet the engineering feats that had to be accomplished just in trying to reach that rock have been no less pioneering. The geology of New York can always be counted on for a surprise: solid granite borders on decayed rock and quicksand in ways that are unpredictable and often dangerous.

Figure 2.2 The varying depths of bedrock in lower Manhattan

The city primarily rests on a hard rock called Manhattan schist. Although its consistency is very tough, it is pron...