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Detroit's abandoned tunnel systems open door to another world
- dmoy 3y agoHere in Seattle the underground part of the city is open for tours (parts of it anyways). They built the current downtown on top of the old one, so it's pretty surreal down there. Not even tunnels in this case, just like a whole-ass other set of streets and storefronts, all abandoned, partially buried, and covered on top.
- voidfunc 3y agoThe history of Seattle is fairly interesting for those who are not aware of it. A lot of cities have rebuilt from fires, done terraforming etc, Seattle kind of took it to a whole new level.
- cycomanic 3y agoThis prompted me to watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsqRP0ualoI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsqRP0ualoI "fairly interesting" is quite the understatement! Absolutely fascinating and hilarious at the same time! Thanks for your post TIL
- eps 3y agoVideo could really use more photos and visuals, but it's just some dude talking really fast without pauses. Could've been a blog post.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoChicago also lifted up its street level, I don’t think Seattle was unprecedented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago It’s the only article linked with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regrading_in_Seattle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regrading_in_Seattle, however.
- js2 3y agoSacramento: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-original-street-level-of-sacramento-sacramento-california https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-original-street-leve... Atlanta: https://www.atlantafamilies.org/underground-atlanta-history/ https://www.atlantafamilies.org/underground-atlanta-history/
- saalweachter 3y agoThere's also a certain amount of "and then you're done" here. Maybe one day we'll decide to raise Miami or New Orleans, but once all of your cities have raised themselves out of the swamps they were built on, you don't need to keep raising them for tradition's sake. You're done. And new cities, such as they are, we no longer allow to build below grade in swamps.
- 13of40 3y agoIf you want to see something trippy, take a look at the land just west of Magnolia and Discovery Park on the King County Parcel Viewer. They were planning to fill that in back in the day and on the map you can still see all of the streets they planned and even some parcels that are still owned by people who tried to buy in early. All underwater of course.
- thehoff 3y agoThis is so cool. I didn’t believe you so I had to look it up and watch some youtube videos, fascinating.
- actionfromafar 3y agoLike New New York in Futurama?!
- ajmurmann 3y agoIt's wild that we used to do radical changes to cities like this and now changing zoning or making cities walkable are frequently seen as unfathomable.
- kurthr 3y agoReally? It seems like once a group of people have lived somewhere for a generation or two and have a $Trillion invested in a place they probably are going to make it hard for new comers to make radical changes. Kinda like a giant codebase that's been maintained for 50 years and has a million regular users is going to make updates difficult. Find a place people don't already want to live and make that better with great new housing designs? Why do does someone deserve to move somewhere new and live there cheaper than the people who already live there? Now, that said there are huge distortions to the market driven by taxes and leverage. Many expensive places have 10% unoccupied housing. Think about how much that is. Imagine the time, cost, and disruption to build even 10,000 units of housing, when there are 40-50k units unoccupied.
- bluGill 3y agoPeople want to live near evisting jobs so your someplace new will be a suburb and generally has constraints because of that. You have to get people into the city for example which forces car dependance for example.
- lotsoweiners 3y agoSure but if your preferred design is as great and appealing as you say then after a few generations, your new city might be getting the jobs.
- bluGill 3y agoWe can look at mining towns to see projected growth. Mining towns have to start where the ore is, and they generally can pay a lot more than average to attract people. However such towns tend to die when the mine closes unless there is some other reason for the town to exist. That other reason is not how nice the town is, but geography. Note that I said town above not city. Cities exist for geographical reasons, if you don't have the great port (either ocean or river) to attract people 300 years ago to settle there you won't get people today.
- mcronce 3y agoI did a few of those tours when I lived out there. They were very cool
- mordechai9000 3y agoI grew up in Seattle, and my parents would sometimes mention the underground tour, but I never actually saw it until I was in my late 20s and I took my girlfriend home to visit. When I did the tour, the guide really played up the brothel/prohibition angle and made a few off-color jokes about that part of the history (more burlesque humor than outright offensive). So maybe that's why parents never took me.
- richardw 3y agoI’m not sure what the mechanism for burying a town or city section is. It seems to have happened since antiquity, so it’s obviously the rational choice over millennia, but my intuition doesn’t connect. (Aside from soil deposits and erosion.)
- derekp7 3y agoFor ancient archeological sites, burial happens when places get abandoned (typically due to war, or economic reasons, or famine). A lot of land isn't flat, so to build structures you have to level off a piece of land which involves moving dirt from one place to another. After a couple centuries of abandonment natural flooding and erosion will move that dirt around and bury the structures. New settlements come in and build on top of the new surface layer. For cities like Seattle, the original town was all wood and burned. Prior to that it was prone to flooding. During the reconstruction they decided to haul in dirt to raise the level of the city for better water management, but that would take a while. So businesses were rebuilt in place (but out of brick and stone), while dirt was being hauled in and new street levels were raised. New buildings were then built on top of the existing (essentially turning the existing ones into basements / foundations for the new ones). Similar thing in Chicago -- the city was raised up, and the second floors of buildings became the ground floor, first floor became basements, etc.
- richardw 3y agoThank you
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoButte MT has a pretty cool little system like this. Basically a semi underground street system. A neat relic from a different time
- fzeindl 3y agoHow can one imagine this? A big underground hall with a concrete ceiling in which there are buildings? Or are the underground building like a -1 floor to the ones above?
- hervature 3y agoThe did it in 2 stages. Before that, you need to know some history. A fire burnt down the majority of downtown. So, they had to rebuild everything anyway. The downtown was also low enough that the sewer would flow into the bay at high tide. After the fire, they made certain parts of the downtown streets up to 2 stories higher to accommodate a functional sewer system. First, they made the streets higher without touching the storefronts. "Crossing the road" would have required climbing ladders. Once the streets were in place, they made the sidewalk and the new storefronts on the old first or second story. So, when you walk around that part of Seattle, there is sometimes just two stories of air beneath the sidewalk. You can identify these sidewalks through their use of amethyst blocks which actually serve/served as sunlight. As you can imagine, a block can consist of a single large structure and so sometimes the basement of these buildings are huge empty spaces. If I recall correctly, the Seattle underground is actually disappearing as development occurs and put these large basements into use. However, I do believe there is a movement to try to preserve at least part of the underground by simply buying enough adjoining buildings and funding their upkeep with tours (which is where I got this information). In terms of touristy things, I think definitely one of the more unique things in the USA and probably has similar vibes to the catacombs of Paris (without the bones).
- fzeindl 3y ago> First, they made the streets higher without touching the storefronts. "Crossing the road" would have required climbing ladders. And what was underneath those higher streets? A giant block of concrete? Scaffolding?
- hattmall 3y agoThis is exactly underground Atlanta. They raised the ground level and built the new city on top of the old. The old storefronts and businesses are still there. About 1/8th of it is publicly open, but there's a ton more that's closed off and is just trains driving under the city.
- gambiting 3y agoLike....Futurama style? Where new York is still there in its entirety just buried under New New York?
- justsomehnguy 3y agoAlmost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground
- rvnx 3y agoSeems amazing! I can see on the tours when you purchase the tickets online yourself: "There is a $2.50 convenience applied to each ticket at checkout." What does that mean ? You have to give tips to a computer ? Is that a thing in the US ? Like at the self-service checkout ?
- odux 3y agoIt used to be “for the convenience of being able to buy a ticket from home” which is ridiculous by itself because online tickets makes things cheaper the venue. Now it is “for the convenience of the ability to buy tickets at all” because in some places that is the only way to buy tickets. I had an electric company that charged a $2 fee for online payment. I seriously considered paying them by check every month. The choice seemed to be between they charging me $ for an online payment or I charging them $ (indirectly for all the labor it takes for processing a paper check, they even sent me a prepaid envelope). It is atrocious that a company charges us for making something cheaper for them. (I ended up using my banks bill pay feature because I didn’t want to risk a check being lost in the mail).
- rvnx 3y agoThank you!
- m3047 3y agoTacoma has some underground, too. Worked in a building where they had us in a shitty office on the bottom floor, in back, butted up against the hillside. We figured out there was some kind of storage back there, and because the place smelled so musty and the ventilation was so bad we were kinda curious. We rigged the door so that once it was opened it wouldn't latch shut again and waited; a few days later we were in luck. Going through the door there was the whole brick facade of the building (burnt, ironically), and the bottom of the present day sidewalk, three stories up.
- kilroy123 3y agoOne interesting rabbit hole to go down is finding YouTube videos of urban explorers finding their way into such tunnels and exploring. There's some really cool videos of people in London in all sorts of tunnels and places they shouldn't be in.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoOne of my favorite activities in college was exploring the campus - there were parts that weren't closed off to students, but I felt like we were probably not supposed to be in. It was fascinating walking around, looking at the weird architecture - in some places, the ceilings were barely six feet tall, and at one point to move between two adjacent buildings you had to use a door that was half the height of a regular one. Just a bizarre space that, nowadays, would be likened to "the backrooms".
- BuildTheRobots 3y agoA few years ago I had the pleasure of spending 10 weeks in hospital, which as well as having bits dating back to 1860 and being extended every couple of decades, is also attached to the local uni. The only way I stayed sane was spending my nights exploring as much as I could, made all the more exciting by having to crawl up stairs and drag my wheelchair behind me. I decided very quickly that "no public access" signs didn't apply as I wasn't a member of the public, I was an inpatient. Elevators are particularly interesting. You might need a key-card to get onto the 4th floor, but it turns out that for efficiency half the elevators waited on that top floor. Get into elevator, read book for 5 minutes, wait for it to reset, go home and let you out in the restricted section. Or this entire floor is locked off from the stairway, but the floor above is open and the elevator lets me go down a floor and get out. It's honestly amazing where you can end up, especially if you combine boredom, time and a bit of a can-do attitude. One of my favourite games was using the stick from an ice-lolly (sold from a machine in reception) to jimmy the lock on badly fitted doors. I also found an ebay pair of scrubs to be really useful once I'd worked out how to get into places - you'd go down a corridor, have people stick their heads out of doors and start with "Hey! You can't be down her---oh sorry doctor". I ended up reporting most of it to security just after I got released. They refused to engage, but had swapped out all the locks when I had a check-up a year later.
- yawgmoth 3y agoThere used to be tours of the Detroit Salt Mines, and indeed the Detroit Salt Company is still alive today. Near the "Uniroyal Giant Tire" [1] off of I-94 is a small tunnel that goes under the freeway. Not the same as these, but, well, as interesting as the freeway tunnel I suppose. [1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Uniroyal+Tire/@42.2714063,-83.2103305,946m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x883b367fc0171cad:0x7326ca6f26318d71!8m2!3d42.2705206!4d-83.2090241!16s%2Fm%2F0g9y9c4?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Uniroyal+Tire/@42.2714...
- pests 3y agoWow, I live five minutes from that tire. Since I was young I've passed it a million times on the freeway and also checked out the service enterence for it but it was all gated off. Any more details on the tunnel?
- analog31 3y agoMy dad had some big chunks of salt from touring that mine. And I still remember the tire. There were also a lot of brine wells south of Detroit, where they mined salt by forcing hot water down into a hole and bringing up the brine.
- dr_dshiv 3y agoAnd then evaporated the brine? Or what was it used for?
- analog31 3y agoMaking lye and chlorine by the chlor-alkalai process. So they didn't need dry salt.
- cabalos 3y agoDiamond Salt is still made this way north of Detroit. Almost all restaurant salt in the United States is sourced here.
- kmbfjr 3y agoHow did they miss the tunnel from the Detroit News building to the former studios of WWJ? They are essentially the same paper these days. The tunnel is under LaFayette Blvd. The Detroit News remains but the TV station is next door. The beautiful Alfred Kahn designed studios are now an AFL-CIO union hall. The main theater used for live TV at the old studios is still magnificent.
- richk449 3y agoInteresting article, but surprisingly poor writing for a flagship big city newspaper. It’s full of typos and incomplete sentences. Is it AI generated text, or just a frantic writer with a dozen more articles to crank out today?
- ssl-3 3y ago> The mines remained operational until 1984 and reopened after a brief hiatus in 1983 to provide the road salt used by the city today. They... they did what?
- yieldcrv 3y agoI think they’re referring to the nuclear waste accident in 2019 that bifurcated the timeline in 1984 allowing 1983’s events to continue uninterrupted
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Vecr 3y agoDark and/or 1983 reference?
- Schattenbaer 3y agoOr even Counterpart?
- Vecr 3y agoInteresting, never heard of that. Or maybe I did, but as it's presumably worse than 1983 and Dark I skipped it. Edit: It's actually mentioned in my files, so I had heard of it.
- yieldcrv 3y agoIt’s Dark! The question is not where, or who, or how, but rather when
- ijhuygft776 3y agoAre those easily accessible for the random person?
- INTPenis 3y agoThat article was almost comical. Come see our amazing tunnels; gestures at blocked pedestrian crossing.
- cozzyd 3y agoI've long wanted to know if my condo building's basement was once hooked up to the Chicago Tunnel Company tunnels. It was built as an office building in the loop in 1913, and there were certainly tunnels down both streets that my building abuts, so it seems fairly likely, but who knows...
- SoftTalker 3y agoDid it flood in 1992?
- cozzyd 3y agoIt's hard to find out! It wasn't a condo building then....
- Loughla 3y agoGet a clipboard and a flashlight and go look.
- mdgrech23 3y agowe suck ass at preserving history/things in this country. We all have this attitude of tear it down and build something better. No one is talking about improving/maintaining/repairing what we already got.
- bluGill 3y agoWe preserve too much garbage. Many buildings are marked hastoric despite there being nothing historic about them. Them you can't insulate them, and other such things.
- opportune 3y agoIf you want to preserve it, you should buy it. From my perspective, too many people in this country are exerting preferences on historicity/neighborhood character/style to the severe material detriment of others.
- Simulacra 3y agoJust curious, if you go to that link, and then press the back button, does it give you another spam page? The back button takes you to a page full of spam on mobile. Can anyone confirm ?
- lopis 3y agoCannot reproduce
- hansonpeter 3y ago[dead]
- dukeofdoom 3y agoThere are tunnels under the Detroit River too, for rail and cars crossings to Canada. The two downtowns are directly across the river. So a cool thing would be a Gondola. Things went to shit after 911. Instead of opening the borders like in the European Union. The borders got more closed down, and things regressed.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoIm not entirely sure how your drawing your conclusion. I grew up in suburban Detroit. Access to Canada has always been easy. You need proper identification, but it’s not by any means “locked down”. Beyond personal experience, I had acquaintances with cottages in Canada. They never have any issues traveling.
- Scoundreller 3y agoWas a gradual shift after 9/11. US started requiring passports (on paper, but if you're a US citizen entering without one, I don't think they can do much more than give you a hard time). Lots more quizzing upon entry into US. Good ole days (pre-2000) meant giving a verbal declaration of citizenship and being sure to have a decades old crumbly birth certificate if they asked. Canada technically doesn't require passports at the land border, but they make it more of a hassle if you don't have one. On the plus side, the Canadian side cares a lot less about whether returning Canadians owed taxes & duties. The booths used to be staffed by a division of the CRA (Canadian IRS) and unarmed.
- myself248 3y agoThis. Pre-9/11 my family used to pop over to Windsor for dinner, and that was absolutely unremarkable. Every 19-year-old would hit the bars over there, because that was the drinking age. And the outlet mall parking lots on the Michigan side were constantly packed with Ontario license plates. I'm jealous of the Niagara crossing that has a pedestrian bridge called the Rainbow Bridge because you can see the rainbow in the falls' mist from the middle of the span. Areas on both sides are pedestrian-friendly and you can just walk across, for a $1 fee. It sucks that you can't get from Detroit to Windsor without either your own vehicle, or boarding a grubby bus.
- gonzo41 3y agoI think underground systems and places are really cool. BUT, confined spaces are crazy dangerous. Be careful out there!
- jacknews 3y agoObviously the cars should go in tunnels, not pedestrians.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoDetroit, Tunnels. My first thought was this might be what the movie 'Barbarian' was based on.