The Forgotten, Invisible and, Abandoned

[Ashot]

Steve Duncan,

Photographer and Urban Historian

Brooklyn, NY

 

 

Old Chicago Freight Tunnel

Chicago, IL

http://www.undercity.org/photos/1Gallery/chic_tunnels5.jpg

 

Underneath downtown Chicago, 60 miles of abandoned tunnels exist about 40 feet beneath the surface of the city. These tunnels were dug in the first years of the 20th century, and from 1906 until 1959 the Chicago Tunnel Company ran miniature trains in these tunnels to delivery coal, mail, and freight to buildings in the loop, and to remove ash and waste from from the same buildings.

 

The tunnels, which follow the grid of the streets above, were essentially forgotten for many years. In 1992, workers driving piles into the river near the Kinzie Street Bridge unwittingly pierced of the abandoned tunnels. Water flooded the tunnels and then in turn flooded the basements of buildings in the loop. The disaster was magnified because of ignorance about the tunnels; many people had forgotten their existence, and there was no reliable map of all the tunnels.

 

Eventually, the water was cleaned up and the connections between the tunnels and most buildings were shut off with concrete plugs. In some cases, water-tight doors were installed. Today, some of the tunnels are used to house telephone cables and fiber-optic lines, as in the photo above.

Edited June 23, 2008 by Ashot

[Ashot]

NYC Subway, Deep Underground Tunnel
http://www.undercity.org/photos/1Gallery/SubwayA002.jpg

Most of New York City's Subways were built in the early 20th century using the "cut-and-cover" method, which involved digging trenches, laying track and supports, and then cover over the exposed trench to make a tunnel. In a few places in the system, however, the subway was far enough underground that it had to be bored as a round tunnel.

In these deepest parts of the system, the tunnels are essentially round in cross-section, as opposed to the rectangular shape seen through most of the subway lines. Such round tunnels can be seen, for example, in all the tunnels where the subway crosses under rivers. The round shape not only facilitated the boring process, but it also allowed the tunnelers to create the tunnel as a series of reinforced ribs which help support the weight of the rock, water, and mud above.

The picture above shows a section of the subway where a line crosses underneath a river. The shape of the tunnel is essentially circular, with a flattened bottom on which the rails are laid. The doorway visible to the upper right in the picture leads to a parallel tunnel for trains going in the opposite direction.

Round tunnels such as this are the most dangerous type of subway or train tunnels because there is no clearance between the train and the walls of the tunnel. In such a narrow tunnel, the movement of the train-- which often travels very fast in the long stretches of river crossings-- also creates an incredibly forceful wind, functioning like the piston in a pump to drive air in front of it.

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Tent of Tomorrow and Meadow Lake
1964 World's Fair Site, Flushing Meadow/Corona Park, Queens, NY
http://www.undercity.org/photos/1Gallery/WorldsFair_topview.jpg

The 1964 World’s Fair was held in Flushing Meadow/Corona Park in Queens, New York City. The site is dominated by three connected concrete towers that support three 64-foot-diameter platforms at different heights, with the highest one at 216 feet. These towers were part of the New York State pavilion at the fair, and housed observation decks serviced by high-speed elevators. The towers have been unused since the fair, and decades of rain and wind have taken their toll; almost all of the metal elements (including the inside stairs) are rusted to the point of uselessness, and only the strength of the massive concrete columns keeps them standing at all.

At the foot of the towers is another magnificent relic of the fair-- the giant “Tent of Tomorrow,” an open structure of tensioned steel supported on 16 concrete columns, each 98 feet high. The Tent of Tomorrow was also part of the New York State pavilion at the fair. It was designed by modernist architect Philip Johnson, and the floor of the structure has a huge terrazzo map of New York State, now cracked and nearly invisible beneath weeds.

The most famous remnant of the fair is the Unisphere, a 120-foot diameter steel globe (the largest globe in the world) which is still a polished and pristine Queens landmark. But although a number of other structures from the ’64 World’s Fair have found new lives—such as the Queens Museum of Art and the Queens Theatre in the Park—the structures from the New York State Pavilion, though magnificent, have essentially been left to rot.

Most of the country knows this part of New York City only from television broadcasts of the US Open, which is held in the USTA National Tennis Center at the northern end of Flushing Meadows/Corona Park. Shea Stadium is just to the north of the Tennis Center, and most of the park is just wide open spaces and large lakes, a landscape shaped by the city-beautiful aesthetic of Robert Moses when he was the administrator of the 1964 World’s Fair.

But the threads of this region can be traced much further back. Before Robert Moses came along, the park had already been home to the 1939 World’s Fair, a stupendous and dazzling event with hundreds of pavilions which introduced the American public to technologies we now take for granted: television from the Radio Corporation of America, air-conditioning from the Carrier Corporation, diesel engines, even nylon stockings.

The 1964 World’s Fair was not so significant in terms of the technologies introduced, but it was nonetheless a massive project that stood out even in an era of New York’s history that was characterized by huge projects. It was also not actually a “real” world’s fair as previous ones had been-- it was never sanctioned by the Bureau of International Exhibitions-- and instead it was the product of an unprecedented level of cooperation between corporations and municipal authorities. Over its two- year run, the fair lost a huge amount of money, in part because people complained about the overly “commercial” atmosphere, and defaulted on a $24 million loan from the city. This debt, combined with the depression of New York in the 70s, is a large part of the reason that the structures from the fair were not better maintained.

But to me, the faults of the fair are almost inconsequential; what I love about the idea of the fair, and its towering monuments, is that they are the symbols and relics of the tremendous ability that New York has had to utterly change and reconstruct the environment. Prior to the ’39 World’s Fair, the entire site—now a green and landscaped expanse—was a giant ash dump, run by Brooklyn Ash Removal. In the novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald describes how the area looked in the 1920s: “This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air."

And in this desolate landscape, someone had the vision to build not just one, but two massive expositions that attracted millions of visitors from around the world.

After years of seeing the remnants of the World’s Fair in Queens, I finally climbed the towers with the help of a homemade grappling hook. I took this picture from the top of the tallest tower, looking south over the Tent of Tomorrow and Meadow Lake. Meadow Lake is outlined with lights at the top of the picture, and the Tent of Tomorrow is the structure that looks like a spoked wheel-- actually a very large building, and made small only by the height of the tower from which I took the photo.

[Ashot]

Sawmill River, Underneath Downtown Yonkers
Yonkers, NY
http://www.undercity.org/photos/1Gallery/Sawmill_GaryAtEnd.jpg

Around 1650, long before Yonkers was established as a city and even before New York became New York, a Dutch landowner named Adriaen van der Donck built a water-powered sawmill on Nepperhan Creek near the Hudson River. That sawmill became the center of a town that was later to become known as Yonkers (incorporated as a village in 1855, and officially recognized as a city in 1872.)

The sawmill that Van der Donck built also gave a new name to Nepperhan Creek, which has been known as the Sawmill River ever since. As Yonkers grew, though, it grew around and over the small river. As more industrial and residential buildings were built in the 19th century, some straddled the river. Sections of it were shunted through underground flumes, and road bridges were built across other parts of it, until eventually the city decided to simply cover over the last exposed sections of the river. By the early 1900s, the river was completely underground for the section that passes through downtown Yonkers.

Walking through the underground river gives a fascinating glimpse into Yonker's past. The structures that contain and pass over the river range widely, from 19th-century bridges of logs and stone arches to the foundations of more recent buildings.

In this photo, an explorer stands underneath a brick arch below the wooden timbers of a building. Some of the wooden beams are visible through the hole in the brick roof of the tunnel.

http://www.undercity.org/photos/1Gallery/Sawmill_Crossing.jpg

In this picture, two friends and fellow explorers make their way through a deep section of the river underneath the brick-and-steel foundation of an old industrial building, about 1/4 of a mile from where the Sawmill flows out into the Hudson River. Edited June 23, 2008 by Ashot

[Ashot]

Old Croton Aqueduct, Gate Chamber
Manhattan, NYC
http://www.undercity.org/photos/1Gallery/croton%205_17_DSCN7849.jpg

The Old Croton Aqueduct supplied New York City's fresh water from the 1840s until early in the 20th century. It was the largest engineering project that had ever been undertaken in the United States when it was built in the 1840s. It was taken completely out of service by 1950, and today much of the 40-mile tunnel stands empty, inaccessible, and forgotten underground.

[Ashot]

Titan 1 Missile Silo, Self-Portrait

Denver, CO

http://www.undercity.org/photos/1Gallery/Den_silo_tunnel4.jpg

 

The Titan 1 Missiles, armed with nuclear warheads, were the first true inter-continental missiles. The program began in the late 1950s; the first missiles were brought on active duty in 1962, and all the missiles were taken out of service in 1965. (By 1965, the Titan 1 missiles were obsolete, replaced by Titan II missile program.) The Titan 1 missile program actually precipitated the Cuban Missile crisis, bringing the world closer to nuclear holocaust than it has ever been before or since.

 

The Titan 1 Missile silos were the largest and most complex of all the silos that were built to house intercontinental missiles. All of the silo was at least 60 feet underground, with some sections much deeper. A few have found new usages, but most of the silos remain abandoned as this one is.