Hiking Beneath the Streets of NYC!

[Tom Rankin]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/nyregion/02underground.html

"We will descend with backpacks, headlamps, waders and a QRae II confined-space gas detector."

To each his own!

 

[MichaelJ]

Love Urban Exploration. You have to be careful, of course ... don't do it in Washington, DC, where there are myriads of "secrets" underground that will bring unmarked black SUVs. And don't try to find M34 underneath Grand Central Station, either.

I especially like those urban explorers who make art out of their journeys.

My overall favorite is the old power station and tailraces at Niagara Falls.

 

[lx93]

Eh, I could find the part of exploring old subway passages, closed down factories & hospitals, etc., interesting. Maybe even a temporary substitute for those times when I can't work on a peakbagging list.

But sewers? I'll leave that to the escaped pet alligators.

 

[DSettahr]

When I was in Paris a few years ago, we took a tour of the catacombs beneath the city. It was pretty interesting... back before the Renaissance (or about that time period), they ran out of places to bury people in the cemeteries above ground, so they started digging up the bodies and moving them into tunnels beneath the city to make room. What we went through was at least a mile (probably several miles) of tunnels, all with bones stacked against the walls. They were stacked quite neatly, too, and were organized by what part of the body they were... torsos at the base, covered by arm and leg bones, and with a well-organized row of skulls across the top.

The best part was when we made it back to the surface, the exit was pretty far away from where we'd gone down, and as it was a self-guided tour, we had no clue where we were in the city, and were quite disoriented!

 

[mirabela]

In college (Chicago) we used to wander around the steam tunnels around our neighborhood. Yuck ...

 

[Ed'n Lauky]

The most fascinating experience I ever had like that was back in the 90s on the French--Italian border. One of the Alpine guides told me how I could get into a closed up and obviously abandoned Maginot line underground bunker. My son and I spent about three hours exploring the place. The beds and tables were still there. There was still diesel fuel for the power plant. There were charcoal drawings on the walls of the bunk rooms that were quite cleaver. We were totally underground until we got to the very top where there was a reinforced concrete machine gun turret. The gun was gone of course but I have a picture of my son aiming an apparatus that would have held the gun.

Old newspapers dating back to the beginning of the war were in piles on the floor.

There were a few signs such as a Kodak wrapper that a few others, but very few, had been there before us. Basically is was as if we had entered the twilight zone and stepped back in time to the 1940s.

An old phone line led up the mountain to the bunker and there was a phone attached to the outside of the building. To my great surprise when I picked up the phone I got a dial tone. By using a phone card I had I was able to call my brother in the US. "You won't believe this bro, but I'm calling you from an old French bunker located some 2000 meters up on the side of a mountain."