In Berlin, Germany, there’s a small arm of a subway line that goes into (soon to be retired) Tegel airport. They built the stations and everything, people would have walked maybe 50m from the station to any gate (since the terminal is a hexagon and the station would have been in the middle).
Before the opening of the airport, Berlin taxi drivers raised a stink and said they would not be servicing the airport if the subway was to be used. They also went on strike, and after much back and forth, the line was not used. It is, however, pretty much functional and if Tegel is transformed into some sort of lecture center (there are plans), it could be revived without much hassle. You can even see the platform where the arm would have started, since it’s on the platform of an existing station.
There are some other abandoned/unused stations and lines that you can take a walking tour of. I’d really like to go one day.
Do a Google search for “Dulce Base.” It’s an old saw of the conspiracy theorists; an underground government research facility joined to various places around the globe via secret underground tunnels. Supposedly one of those places is Caltech. I have a friend that works there and grill him about the secret tunnels all the time. Apparently that eventually made him curious so he started asking the senior staff about it… and they all told him to shut up and never talk about it.
Ok, sorry, I forgot that there was the whole specific mythology of mole people. No, they never existed.
I was treating “mole people” as synonymous with “people who live in the subway tunnels as their actual residence, with homes they built and stolen electricity and shit, as opposed to sacked out on a station bench.” Though this latter category of folks really did exist, it wasn’t correct of me to call them “mole people.”
My undergrad school - the University of Calgary - has several tunnels connecting various buildings. However, they were shut down for safety reasons (apparently exposed wires and a few assaults when they were opened)
My grad school - Careleton University in Ottawa - also has a bunch of tunnels, but they are used extensively.
Living a cold climate, it’s useful to have tunnels to hide from the weather.
There are also loads of tunnels that were dug to grow mushrooms in - apparently Paris is built on a kind of loam that is perfect for them.
If you’re looking for Batcave type stuff, the catacombs really are where it’s at - miles and miles of tunnels only a portion of which is thoroughly mapped and open to tourists. All kinds of shit happens down there. A couple years ago, policemen who were down there for a training exercise stumbled upon a fully equipped movie theater complete with well-stocked bar. Whoever built and staffed it were stealing power from the “surface world” somehow, although when the cops came back later to investigate further the place had been cleaned out. Only a teasing little note was left by the “owners”, a fascinating “criminal” arts collective known as UX.
Less dramatically, the raver scene routinely holds parties down there, furbishing one large cave for a WE, then packing it up and moving to another one for the next. I guess it’s more sexy than rusting warehouses :p. At one time it was also where neo-nazi skinheads liked to congregate, though I don’t know whether that’s still the case today.
If only it did, Arch Oboler could have written a creepy radio play about it. (No link because, obviously, it depends on Chicago having an underground freight train system.)
The History Channel had a series from 2007-2009 called ***Cities of the Underworld***that explored the subterranean worlds beneath the some of the world’s largest cities, and a number of cities in the US. It gets replayed now and again.
When I was living in St. Louis, I asked the natives a question: “Which side was St. Louis on in the Civil War?” They said it was complicated. Missouri had its own little intramural civil war—sort of the Civil War semifinals, and the winner would then get to join the main Civil War—anyway, St. Louis changed hands between both sides; it was fought over between Missourian Rebs and Missourian Feds (and IIRC that was how Ulysses S. Grant got started in the war).
So my St. Louis friends related rumors of hidden tunnels leading from many of the old houses to provide a route of secret escape in case the city be taken over by whichever side you’re against. Or a network of secret connections between houses, if any of them linked up. I bet Chicago doesn’t have anything like that either. What they did have is a secret murder hotel run by major serial killer H. H. Holmes. Any number of horror/suspense movies & shows with secret murder hotels (Angel, Supernatural, maybe Barton Fink come to mind) actually trace their plots back to the real-life horror in Chicago.
:rolleyes: There are, of course, steam tunnels under the Caltech campus (as there are under any large campus of buildings supported by a central utilities facility). These tunnels (as well as the “hyperspace” areas in the interior dual walls of the older hovses) are routinely explored by undergraduates with tacit approval of the administration as part of the particular traditions of that institution. None of the Caltech grads I’ve spoken with have ever mentioned any kind of “Dulce Base” or “underground government research facilities”.
On the newer end of things as far as cities go, Las Vegas has a very large storm drain system under the Strip that actually does have a fairly large population of homeless people living in it, especially since the recession and the collapse of Vegas’s construction boom. It seems to be a fairly popular subject for European news agencies for some reason.
Scenic Moose Jaw is riddled with tunnels. They were used for making liquor destined to be smuggled into the US during prohibition, and before that they were home to immigrants avoiding paying a Being Chinese tax. They’re now open to the public, the city has turned them into a tourist attraction.
The evidence quoted on Wiki for the existence of Metro-2 seems pretty strong to me, and during the cold war it made perfect sense. Communist countries have always been big on this kind of thing and it’s a lot easier to keep it a secret than it would be in a democracy.
Washington DC has the Dyar tunnels, a network of tunnels built by Harrison Dyar, a scientist at the Smithsonian. He buitl the tunnels in his spare time to relax. The were lined with bricks, had electricity and apparently served no purpose. He dug two such networks and parts of them are still in existence, although sealed off.
