It’s a common trope in comic books to have action take place in an “abandoned subway station.” I always figured this to be a purely fictional concept, but I recently discovered that there actually is one such abandoned station underneath New York. So now I’m curious: Are there others, around the world?
Given the astronomical cost of digging subways in the modern era, my guess would be that this would only happen in the oldest systems, or perhaps in formerly-Communist cities. I’m aware that North Korea reputedly has secret subway lines underneath Pyongyang (in addition to the publicly-acknowledged system).
And what else is down there, abandoned or hidden away? I’ve seen pictures of an abandoned downtown under Seattle, left behind when the city rebuilt itself on a higher grade. Obviously, some old cities have catacombs. Some modern cities have pedestrian undergrounds, like Houston and Montreal (and Minneapolis-St. Paul?) – are there walled-off, decrepit areas of those systems, with twisty little passages, all different?
There aren’t really any mole people, are there? I’m aware of homeless people sleeping in subway stations and tunnels, but no one lives their whole lives down there, eating mushrooms and worshiping a giant albino alligator, do they?
Please limit any references to the Batcave, Neverwhere, Daredevil, etc. I’m asking solely about the real world, and I don’t want to get booted to CS.
Indeed, the NYC Transit museum is housed in a disused subway station.
And yes, there are mole people, or were. There’s a documentary called “Dark Days” about a group of people living in a tunnel. But they weren’t born there or anything.
There is a disused tunnel near here supposedly left over from a world war, it is supposed to run to the sea but may be collapsed in part? If it indeed still goes to the sea it must run under not only a lot of residential housing but Port Of Spain which is the capital of Trinidad.
EDIT: Here is a picture TriniView.com - straker71.jpg I have been there and wanted to explore it but my wife was with me, she also doesn’t think it would be wise to investigate lol. That tunnel is on top of a hill BTW with the city in between it and the ocean.
Minneapolis-St. Paul doesn’t have much in the way of underground pedestrian traffic in the modern day. Instead they have skyways, enclosed walkways over the streets. There are a few underground tunnels for specific buildings, but they’re uncommon. The Mayo Clinic in Rochester has underground tunnels connecting many of its buildings; they call this the Subway, which confuses many of their out-of-town patients.
I had read about an underground St. Paul tour sometime in the past, and searching for that brought up this very interesting link. I’ve been in some of the caves under St. Paul, but this site shows that there’s a lot more there than I knew. I know there is also some hidden infrastructure under the city related to its notorious criminal past in the Dillinger days.
There was Underground Atlanta — a whole buried level of the city that they unearthed and turned into a commercial zone.
Miru Kim is a photographer who has made a career of exploring, discovering, and photographing long-abandoned, forgotten, and decaying urban sites. Her work will open your eyes to all kinds of stuff you never knew was there.
Toronto has two unused subway stations: Lower Queen and Lower Bay (see more on them here). In short, Lower Queen is really only roughed in, and never finished, much less used; but Lower Bay was in use for a while, before the logistics of running trains from one line to another via Lower Bay became problematic. While now closed to the public, Lower Bay station is still functional, and trains can pass through it, which means that it has been seen in many movies and commercials involving subway scenes.
There are narrow and low tunnels under Old San Juan, Puerto Rico left over from the old Spanish defense system. The Park Service doesn’t want you going in there without an escort or a tour group.
There are loads of disused stations under London. Usually if you see an Underground station in a movie it’s Strand (Aldwych) which is on a disused branch line as well, allowing them to run trains through it without interfering with regular service. There are also the old sewers, underground rivers, old post office and other service tunnels…the city is riddled with them. I have a book somewhere called London Under London which goes into great and interesting detail about it.
Which is not to say that they’re all interconnected and a race of CHUDs could move around the city under our feet. But there’s a lot going on down there.
Paris is famous for it’s catacombs and tunnels. besisdes the legendary Phanom sewer system, apparently it has quary tunnels.
In the good old days, before heay equipment, it was cheaper to mine the blocks of limestone for all the major buildings in tunnels, rather than by clearing dozens of feet of overburden to create a giant open pit mine. SO all the blocks for big buildings like the Louvre came from tunnels dug under the city.
During the revolution, the government decided Paris had outgrown its old parish churches, and the cemetaries were unhealthy. For a few years after the revolution, all the bones in the old church graveyards of Paris were dug up, transported through the streets (at night!) and dumped in the empty tunnels of one of the limestone mines. At the time it was on the edge of town. The femurs were used to build walls, all the bones were tossed into piles behind those. The only identifiers are the signs indicating which parish this wall of bones came from. Hearts, crosses, and other cute designs were made with the skulls.
Today, the entrance is in the middle of southern Paris; you can descend into the “catacombs” and walk about a kilometer through the tunnels to see this.
As for all the other tunnels - aparently they form a maze under the city; the resistance famously used them during WWII, and urban explorers today have a much richer (forbidden) territory to explore than the mundane steam tunnels and old subways of newer cities.
There were never any mole people, as described in the (completely fictional) book by that name. There are some homeless people who have made shelters in train tunnels, though. Dark Days depicts some in the Amtrak tunnels at Penn Station.
Just about any city will have a substantial amount of underground infrastructure that is either abandoned (like disused or unfinished subway stations or lines) or not regularly inhabited (steam and utility tunnels, drainage infrastructure). Even “abandoned” subway infrastructure is often maintained somewhat on the chance that it will be useful in the future. Google any city and “storm tunnel” and you’ll find youtube videos of people exploring drainage tunnels.
Yes, the book Mole People has been pretty much debunked. The author of that book greatly exaggerated, or fabricated many of her experiences, and accepted hearsay uncritically, reporting it as fact. So you don’t have thousands of people spending their lives in underground dystopias, who never come to the surface, are deformed, etc. But homeless people do live underground in many cities, they just don’t resemble the mole people portrayed in the book. Here’s a photo essay of some (relatively comfortable-looking) habitations found under Las Vegas.
I’ve explored storm drains in a small city/town that will remain nameless. Just a 1m diameter pipe, basically, but the drain systems ran all around the city. A friend of mine got hold of a map of the system once, and used it to crash a party
There are also rumours that Moscow has a Metro-2, a secret subway system for government. Probably just a legend, but I suppose it’s possible. Very likely there will be numerous abandoned bomb shelters and other secret/forgotten security infrastructure under the city.
a narrow gauge underground freight railway was constructed in Chicago, it stopped being used a long time ago. in recent times it was flooded when bridge work punctured one of its tunnels.
Downtown Chicago has a network of freight tunnels, through which used to run a narrow-gauge railway, which were once used to deliver coal and other items to downtown buildings.
The tunnels were largely unknown to city residents in recent decades, until one of the tunnels running under the Chicago River sprung a leak in 1992 (due to misplacement of new bridge pilings), and the tunnel system flooded, leading to flooding of the sub-basements of many downtown office buildings.
Chicago has an old freight tunnel network under the Loop. It was built around the turn of the century (19th-to-20th)to make deliveries of parcels and coal to, and take away coal ash from, downtown buildings. The system was very extensive, with a tunnel under pretty much every Loop street and extending across the Chicago river to the north and west.
It was originally intended to compete with the horse-drawn drays that jammed pre-traffic-signal Loop streets, but motor-trucks took away an increasing amount of its traffic, as did buildings converting from coal furnaces. Construction of the State and Dearborn Street passenger subways at the same level as the freight tunnels didn’t help, and they went out of business in the '50s.
It was these tunnels that flooded rather spectacularly in the 1990s when a pile-driver struck one of the under-river tunnels. As the tunnels were connected to the passenger subways and to the sub-sub-basements of most pre-1960 buildings in the Loop, the flooding was extensive. The tunnels have since been sealed with water-tight doors to prevent the spread of flooding.
I don’t refer to the tunnels as abandoned because they are still used as utility conduits. Ironically, the original builders obtained a franchise from the City to build a telephone system, not a freight railway. They were just as surprised as anyone that their “telephone conduits” were so big you could run little electric trains, like mine trains, in them.:rolleyes:
St. Louis had an abandoned train tunnel running under the Downtown area which is now being used for its light rail system. A few blocks north there was an abandoned tunnel which for years held a homeless “village” (not to mention a whole bunch of late-night raves) until the city moved everyone out and filled the tunnel.
