Urban Exploration - Steve Duncan

Support Andrew Wonder's new project & help these kids make a movie!

2011-04-26T10:40:00.000-07:00

Got this email from my videographer partner, the genius filmmaker behind the Undercity clip on Vimeo (linked from this site). Short version: please go to http://kck.st/egEArY and drop a few bucks (or $10,000) to BEFORE THURSDAY to help fund his project of teaching highschoolers to make movies!

Hey Steve,

Here is the kickstarter link for my class. Anything you could do to pass it around would be greatly appreciated. As you know this has been a huge passion project that I've done with all my own money but I'm finally running out. If we don't hit our 10,000 goal by Thursday, I get NONE of the funding and won't be able to complete the film by our June premiere.

The class is made up of 9 students that I hand selected from 30 applicants. The students have been working with me all semester to learn leadership and teamwork through filmmaking. We went through a lot of adversity while making the film (we lost our lead actress 3 weeks in a had to reshoot half the film in two days, the feds seize our trailer park, etc) but with the skills I've been teaching them they all moved forward and never gave up. I'm very excited to finish the film and show the community.

Here is the link:

http://kck.st/egEArY

Also, ABC down here did a piece on the class and made me their "person of the week." I put the link below.

http://www.wlos.com/shared/newsroom/features/potw/videos/wlos_vid_97.shtml

Thanks for your help. Nothing but victory!
Andrew Wonder
andrewwonder.com

Cool photo gallery of my shots up at Matador Network (and interview)

2011-02-06T19:02:00.000-08:00

http://matadornetwork.com/trips/photo-essay-exploring-sewers-utility-tunnels-and-catacombs-around-the-world

http://matadornetwork.com/trips/interview-with-steve-duncan-urban-explorer

Radio in Montreal with Nel Plamondon - the Ric Peterson Show

2011-02-06T18:52:00.001-08:00

http://www.cjad.com/Shows/RicPetersonShow.aspx

Interview on "All That We've Met" with Pauline Pechine

2011-01-25T11:32:00.000-08:00

Steve Duncan is after buried treasure and underground labyrinths

Articles on sewer workers

2011-01-23T21:30:00.000-08:00

Flushers in London sewers:
http://www.ediblegeography.com/fatbergs/

And sewer divers in Mexico City:
http://www.ediblegeography.com/julio-the-sewer-diver
http://pruned.blogspot.com/2007/01/sewer-divers.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45322-2004Aug29.html

Email of the Day

2011-01-23T20:48:00.000-08:00

A wonderful email from Kürt in Belgium. The reason I'm posting this? The way he writes about New York City - with almost a magical, romantic belief - is exactly the way I feel about it myself. He's never been to the city; I lived there twelve years and will live there again; but I couldn't have said it better myself.

[Kürt Demeyer to steve@undercity.org]

Dear Steve

I was very impressed about your video from NYC . Like most Belgium people (and also other people over the world) , i have a dream , to visit once in a lifetime NYC . It is just something a human has to do . Sometimes , i want to escape my usual life here in Belgium , leave the rest of my family behind , my property and go on living in the USA . It was always my dream .

Now i'm married sins 2005 (a was single about 35 years) , i think it won't happen anymore (to visit or to live in NYC) . Maybe for the best , ... i don't know .
I am very in love (think obsessed) with your town , and it would be a problem for me after a visit to NYC , to return to my hometown Orroir (a little village in the french part of Belgium) . I hope you are happy there and pride of what you do and got . If i ever meat you in this life , i'll will pay you a 'Duvel' (Belgium special beer) , that's for sure . Again , thank you for the beautifull video and sorry for my writing-errors ...

Kürt

NPR - "Into The Tunnels: Exploring The Underside Of NYC" by Jacki Lyden

2011-01-02T00:00:00.001-08:00

After a wonderful time with the fearless Jacki Lyden when she accompanied Erling Kagge and me on our December expedition under New York City, her story on the trip is airing today on "All Things Considered" on NPR.

Online link for story: http://www.npr.org/2011/01/02/132482428/into-the-tunnels-exploring-the-underside-of-nyc

NY Times - "The Wilderness Below Your Feet"

2011-01-02T00:00:00.000-08:00

Excellent article by Alan Feuer in the New York Times Metropolitan Section (or N.Y/Region section online) on the December 2010 expedition by me and Erling Kagge. Photos in the article by Steve Duncan, Andrew Wonder, and Times Photographer Michael Appleton.

Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/nyregion/02underground.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
Slideshow: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/01/02/nyregion/02underground-ss.html

NYC Urban Exploration with videographer Andrew Wonder

2010-12-31T12:00:00.000-08:00

Check out this very cool cut of some footage shot by videographer Andrew Wonder from our explorations in NYC. View it on his Vimeo page:
http://www.vimeo.com/18280328

UNDERCITY from Andrew Wonder on Vimeo.

Underground Expedition through New York City with Erling Kagge

2010-12-31T00:00:00.000-08:00

In December of 2010, I spent a week with Norwegian polar explorer Erling Kagge (email: erling@kagge.no) making our way through the underground of New York City. Starting in the Bronx and ending at the Atlantic Ocean in Jamaica Bay, Queens, our idea was to make our way from one end of New York City to the other through its myriad tunnel networks. In the process, I knew we'd also be exploring New York City's past -- making our way through more than two centuries of urban development, including streams that were once aboveground waterways in the pre-urban topography (17th & 18th centuries), to the city's first enclosed sewer along Canal Street (early 19th century), to the completely 20th-century labyrinth of the subway system. We wouldn't sleep in hotels during the week-long trip, but would camp in the tunnels or wherever we could find a spot.

It was freezing cold, often wet and miserable, far more difficult than I expected in many ways, and we only made it through a portion of the tunnels we planned/hoped to. It was also an absolutely wonderful trip. Overall it was five days and four nights, monday-friday. We slept three nights underground, and the fourth night didn't sleep at all.

The trip was originally Erling's idea and I can't thank him enough for the leadership, inspiration, and-- above all-- his complete willingness and excitement to do crazy, stupid, foolish, wonderful things like this. I also want to give me deepest thanks for the other people involved, both friends who helped to make the trip possible and journalists who were willing to accompany us on some or all of the trip to help make public the amazing world of the urban underground.

My co-explorer:
Erling Kagge (Click here for one of many online pages about him. Also, many thanks to his wonderful family for sparing him for ten days prior to Christmas!)

Also:
Moses Gates (www.allcitynewyork.com)
Shane Perez (www.shaneperez.com)
Will Hunt (http://willunderground.wordpress.com)
Andrew Wonder (http://andrewwonder.com)
Elizabeth Rush (http://www.elizabethrush.net)
Brooklyn
Russell
Jacki Lyden (NPR)
Brent Baughman (NPR)
Alan Feuer (NY Times)
Michael Appleton (NY Times)

Researching New York: Perspectives on Empire State History

2010-11-19T12:00:00.000-08:00

My first presentation at an academic conference:

Researching New York: Perspectives on Empire State History "Modeling Minetta," a project created with Liz Barry

Nov 19, 2010
University at Albany - SUNY, Albany, NY

"On Top of the World with the Recreational Trespassers" - London's Guardian

2010-11-15T12:00:00.000-08:00

My photos appeared in a short article:
"On Top of the World with the Recreational Trespassers"
Guardian (London)
Nov 15, 2010

Press on Conflux 2010

2010-10-12T02:00:00.000-07:00

Had an absolutely wonderful time at Conflux 2010! An amazing set of people showed up for the festival. Really glad to be involved with it.

My Keynote Address from Friday Oct 8 (sound is not very good for the first few minutes, but better after): http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/10078519

Panel discussion/Long table talk, with me, Moses Gates, Miru Kim, and Julia Solis from Sunday Oct 10: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/10121777

The Conflux channel on ustream.com: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/conflux-festival-2010

Press:
http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/own-this-city/80781/things-to-do-in-nyc-this-weekend

Keynote Speaker - Conflux 2010

2010-10-08T09:10:00.000-07:00

Steve Duncan is Conflux 2010’s keynote speaker

Steve Duncan is Conflux 2010’s keynote speaker

Artist, historian and urban spelunker Steve Duncan will be giving a keynote talk October 8 in the auditorium at Conflux HQ.

Steve’s photography explores the hidden side of quotidian urban life, taking his audience to the forgotten spaces of New York, Paris, Rome and beyond. As of late you may have caught him talking about the Paris catacombs over at Flux Factory.

Beyond making pretty images, (more of which can be appreciated at undercity.org) Steve’s explorations are also the springboard for historical research. In his words, he tries “to peel back the layers of a city to see what’s underneath.” While delving into the physical urban layers he also digs into the temporal layers by researching the history of urban terrain all over the world.
Be sure to catch him in NYU’s Barney Building auditorium the Friday evening of Conflux!

"What Lies Beneath" - Metro New York, Thurs Oct 7

2010-10-07T12:00:00.000-07:00

"What Lies Beneath: Uncovering NYC's Lost Underground"
Metro New York
Thurs Oct 7, 2010

Article on Underground London

2010-10-04T00:25:00.000-07:00

Online article about underground London and its lost rivers
http://www.qmsu.org/news/article/7681/240/

"Exploring Sewers" - Arcade 29.1

2010-09-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

"Exploring Sewers"
Article and photos by me published in Arcade 29.1, Fall 2010

Link to the article text, without the pictures, is here

"City of Light, City of Darkness" - Slideshow Thursday July 15 at Flux Factory, Queens

2010-07-13T19:25:00.000-07:00

XXXXX THURSDAY, JULY 15 XXXXX

City of Light, City of Darkness: Panel on the Paris Underground

As part of Flux Factory's Going Places (Doing Stuff) III, urban explorers Moses Gates and Steve Duncan will present adventures from far-off Paris. Though it's known as the City of Light, there are 170 miles of absolute darkness that exist under the city -- a network of limestone quarries dotted with WWII bunkers, ossuaries, unofficial art galleries, and other assorted surprises colloquially known as the Catacombs. It is home to a subculture of people of all ages, interests, and nationalities who make a hobby of exploring and utilizing these and other hidden spaces throughout Paris -- the Cataphiles.

Moses Gates and Steve Duncan will be covering the history, culture, and structures of this underground world in a slideshow presentation, as well as explaining how you, too, can become a Cataphile.

Flux Factory
39-31 29th Street, Long Island City, Queens
8p; $free

Email of the day - Sewer hazards

2010-06-18T00:50:00.000-07:00

Tomasz Kupiecki to steve
Jun 2

Hi Steve!
Your site is very interesting, it`s a good job. I`m Tom, sewer worker from Warsaw, Poland. Photos of London sewers were so familiar- we`ve got sewer net projected by Wiliam Lindley about 1880`s.

I wanna warn you- sewer can be a deadly trap, because of poisonus gases, poor oxygene atmosphere, explosive gases, fast rising level of water, so please, be very, very carefull.

For example I was a victim of explosive gases, in Poland work is still „in oldschool style”- rubber waders, coats, gas masks, tripods from communism era, etc. So- I put my black rubber chest waders and went to manhole. I wade about 30 meters from there in knee deep sludge, to check condition of sewer line (high about 1,9m, wide aobut 3m)... So I was wading, and suddenly I heard somethig like thunderclap, and a mighty force thrown me back, to the manhole. I feel very high temperature, I was knocked down and all covered by sewer sludge... Waders were filled by this... I was trying to keep head above it... My co-workers on the surface were yeling: Tom what is it? I babbled: for God`s sake, pull me out from here, and I fainted. The cause of explosion was someones fag putted to the manhole... Before I was taken to hospital, rescuers had to clean me and remove from me waders filled sludge... In hospital I was all in gypsum costume about half year.

So, please- be very, very carefull.
Best wishes, and sorry for my English, Tom from Warsaw.

I emailed him back and mentioned that I usually carry a gas meter that checks for explosive/flammable gases as well as for hydrogen sulfide and carbon monoxide, but that I don't currently have a working oxygen meter. He sent this diagram and explanation for helping avoid low-oxygen atmospheres:

Greg Brotherton's sculpture

2010-06-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

Aawesome sculpture from Greg Brotherton - "Sewer Man," inspired in part by one of my pictures from the underground Park River in Hartfard, CT....

http://www.brotron.com/

Cow tunnels in gotham

2010-05-28T00:54:00.001-07:00

http://gothamist.com/2010/04/14/flashback_cow_tunnels.phphttp://gothamist.com/2010/04/14/flashback_cow_tunnels.php

NYC Drain Exploration on YouTube

2010-05-04T10:26:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMb_GFU6Rco

Columbia Magazine - "The Night Hunter"

2010-04-17T00:04:00.000-07:00

Columbia Magazine, Spring 2010
Cover Story:
The Night Hunter
By Paul Hond
"Urban explorer and photographer Steve Duncan approaches history from a different perspective."
http://magazine.columbia.edu/features/spring-2010/night-hunter

Underground London Rivers - in Croatian!

2010-04-13T08:58:00.000-07:00

From VelikaBritanija.net: All Things British, in Croation

"Zaboravljene rijeke"
Piše: Vjeran Stojanac , 01. 04. 2010.
http://www.velikabritanija.net/2010/04/01/zaboravljene-rijeke-london/

"Urban Explorations" on Build Blog

2010-04-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

http://blog.buildllc.com/2010/04/urban-explorations/

2010-03-12T03:44:00.000-08:00

I think T.S. Eliot had an urban explorer's sense of history and the past. A couple lines from "Little Gidding" (Number 4 of "Four Quartets"):

...History may be servitude,

History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern....

...What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make and end is to make a beginning...

...We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Sven Johne

2010-01-25T16:01:00.000-08:00

A while back I was contacted by a Sven Johne, a German conceptual photographer, who wanted to integrate my work into a project. I didn't know what a "conceptual photographer" was but the more I found out about his work, the more I liked it. The end result is here: http://www.svenjohne.de/svenjohne_work_nytunnel.html

Slideshow Jan 15, 2010, in Riverside, CA (Near UC Riverside)

2010-01-06T12:00:00.000-08:00

Slideshow Jan 15, 2010 at Shutterstories in Riverside; Photos on Exhibit through April 2010

On Friday January 15th I'll be doing my first slideshow/presentation in Riverside, CA. Many thanks to Terry and Melissa Tippie for the chance to do it at their gallery.

This is also my first chance to show pictures from my trip to Eastern Europe this past summer! Amazing tunnels and excellent adventures in Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. You can see some samples on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/organize/?start_tab=one_set72157622892006485

Details:
January 15, 2010
At Shutterstories (gallery/studio space), 981 Iowa Ave., Riverside CA 92507
Doors open at 7pm, come and have a drink or a snack
I start showing pictures at 8pm.
Generally these run about 45 minutes of me presenting, plus time afterwards for questions.

One Case silent auction by Resource Magazine

2010-01-05T12:00:00.000-08:00

Four of my prints are being offered as part of the One Case silent auction in New York, organized by Resource Magazine, which will take place January 7th 2009 night at Milk Gallery (450 W.15th St. NYC)
Catalog: http://issuu.com/resourcemagonline/docs/onecase.
Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=228369978620&index=1

Photo on cover of novel "My Dead Body"

2009-10-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

The recently-published horror/mystery novel My Dead Body features one of my photos from underneath London as part of the cover art:

Resource Magazine - Underground Locations

2009-09-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

Resource Magazine

Fall 2009

Creative Time Video

2009-08-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

A short video about me, shot and produced by Howard Silver for Creative Time, is here:http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2009/cttv/?p=138

urbanautica.com - "Memories from the Underground"

2009-07-09T10:23:00.000-07:00

Some of my photos are being shown on the excellent photography site Urbanautica.com.
On the website: http://www.urbanautica.com/blog/steve-duncan/ (In Italian by default, but you can change to English)
Via Facebook feed: http://www.facebook.com/pages/urbanautica/84597496009

"An Urban Spelunker Pursues His Vision"

2009-07-01T14:45:00.000-07:00

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/livewire/archived/an_urban_spelun/
by Ryann Liebenthal

An Urban Spelunker Pursues His Vision

An underground break-in for the sake of a math assignment led Steve Duncan to the Discovery Channel and a gallery show -- and maybe a new career

By Ryann Liebenthal (~931 Words)

ryann.liebenthal@gmail.com

It’s 2 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and Steve Duncan is scrambling. The 30-year-old mapmaker, freelance photographer and self-described urban historian has had a particularly busy week, which has taken him from the train tunnels of Manhattan to an underground river in Yonkers, then back to his alma mater, Columbia University, to shoot photos for a university event.

So he’s running late framing pictures for a show his work is in at a New York gallery. His contributions to the series, “Night Moves,” consist of after-hours shots from some of the most remote parts of New York City—stunning views from the top of the Manhattan Bridge, eerie glimpses into sewer tunnels beneath the city streets.

Duncan is supposed to be at the gallery by 4 to drop off his prints. But as the minutes tick by, it becomes increasingly clear he’s not going to make it.

“I’m not usually this bad at this,” he said, looking up from his work. He paused. “Well, that’s sort of a lie.”

Lately, Duncan has lost interest in his map business — and not just because the mapmaking industry, like other tourist-based markets, has suffered in this dire economic climate. Instead, he is more interested in his tunnel explorations, a mostly unprofitable hobby he’s been cultivating since he started at Columbia—where he majored in urban studies—in 1996.

“I had heard that there were these tunnels under the university, and I was fascinated,” he said. But it was an academic emergency that finally led him underground.

“I was procrastinating as usual in this math class I had,” he recalled, “and it turned out there was a big set of stuff that could only be done using programs on computers in the math building.”

It was 11 p.m. The math building had closed at 9.

He convinced another student to take him into a subterranean passageway leading to the math building. “So then he led me into the tunnels,” he said, “and kind of pointed me in the right direction. And then I found myself alone in the tunnels, which was terrifying—exhilarating also, but really scary.”

Then he just kept going.

Duncan’s friend Jacob Press remembers the time Duncan spent eight hours getting into a tunnel by digging through a concrete wall, with a shovel he’d found on the street.

“I’m a little squeamish about tunnels and stuff,” Press admitted. “I never caught on when you started going down those Amtrak tunnels.”

Surprisingly, Duncan said it was his lifelong fear of the dark—“not just the dark per se, but a fear of things jumping out at me”— that drove his desire to go underground.

“Actually I kind of lost the whole fear of the dark thing after a while of going around tunnels, and I was sad,” he lamented. “I lost that sense of going into something…that sense of discovery that I had at first, and that I really loved.”

His expertise was recognized when he worked as an on-air urban historian for a truncated Discovery Channel series called “Urban Explorers.” Five episodes – about Buffalo, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Denver and Milwaukee – ran in 2004 and 2005.

Duncan relies on freelance assignments and income from Opus Publishing, which he runs with partner Arthur Gorelik. The two founded the company in 2002, after noticing a significant gap in the map market.

“A lot of big map publishers had taken a long time to adapt digital files for cartography,” he said. Working with digital data, Opus could update maps much more quickly.

This kind of frenetic, can-do spirit seems to characterize Duncan’s approach to work and life. After dropping his prints off just before 5 p.m., he climbed into his Mazda Accent, and began what at first seemed like a meandering ride back to the office. But then he abruptly stopped the car, and ambled over to a sewer grate in the middle of the street.

He’d been down this tunnel before, he said, looking down.

As he waited for a car to pass, he turned and began describing the histories of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, both visible in the waning glow of late afternoon light.

“It’s not so much that I’m a good historian,” he said, “it’s just that it doesn’t really matter how good a historian you are if you’re not communicating it.”

He knelt down and shoved his flashlight through one of the round holes of the sewer grate. He put his eye right up to the grate and peered down into the tunnel, pointing out the flowing river down below.

“And you can smell it too,” he said, hopping back up, his eyes alighting on a sewage construction project down the street.

"An Urban Spelunker Pursues His Vision," The Westsider, June 18 2009, Front Page

2009-06-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

"An Urban Spelunker Pursues His Vision"

The Westsider

June 18 2009, Front Page

Article by Ryann Liebenthal, front page photo by Steve Duncan

Website of the Week at the Evening Leader Newspaper, North Wales

2009-06-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

So I was in Russia, running through tunnels under Moscow and being terrified of the militisia (sort of the federal police), when I got this email:

to: steve@undercity.org
date: Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 6:10 PM
subject: Website of the week

Hi Steve,
Your site has made it onto our website of the week column at the Evening Leader newspaper in North Wales...Keep up the good work. My editor particularly loves your New York photography.
http://www.eveningleader.co.uk/breaktime/Best-of-the-web-.5335134.jp

Cheers,
Mark

I gotta admit, I was definitely a bit excited about this. North Wales is one of those areas that seemed more legend than reality when I was reading about it as a child. It contained the kingdom of Gwynedd, the Llŷn Peninsula, and has a mountain range called Snowdonia. Rivers have names like the River Dyfrdwy, the River Conwy, and the River Dyfi. Anyone who ever read Lloyd Alexander as a child and fell in love with Princess Eilonwy will doubtless understand my excitement over this part of the world.

Anyway, regardless of my love of Welsh names, I know I'm in good company because Mark's "Best of the Web" column, in follwing weeks, also included things like Alias' excellent photography (mostly of sites in the UK) at http://www.guerillaphotography.fotopic.net/, and Tom Kirsch's - AKA Motts - beautiful photos (primarily from sites in the NYC region) at http://www.opacity.us.

NYC: The World's Fair Observation Towers

2009-06-01T22:09:00.000-07:00

Relics of the World of Tomorrow: Climbing the Astro-View Observation Towers in Queens

It was near midnight in late October, and I was in the Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, staring up at three concrete towers. They look something like three closely-spaced castle spires, with a flying saucer landed atop each one. The flying saucers are in fact huge round observation platforms, 64 feet in diameter; they were built for the 1964 World's Fair as the Astro-View Observation Towers of the New York State Pavilion's attractions.

Visitors to the Fair packed into the streamlined Sky-Streak elevators that ascended on the outside of the towers, getting off at one of the three saucer-like platforms. From there, they looked out over an historic and unique display of mankind's greatest achievements, ranging from Michelangelo's Pieta to the world’s first public display of controlled nuclear fusion. Though the exhibits are now long gone, I desperately wanted to experience the view as well. At least I would be able to clearly see the centerpiece of the Fair, which had also been left standing: the striking 140-foot-tall stainless-steel globe called the Unisphere.

Since the fair's end in 1965, however, the Astro-View Towers have been closed. The fair's governing body, the World's Fair Corporation, collapsed into bankruptcy, leaving the many plans for re-use of the pavilion structures unrealized. Now, decades later, weeds, bushes, and even trees grow around the Astro-View towers, and the rims and railings of the observation decks are thick with rust that is visible even from the ground. One of the Sky-Streak elevators remains, but it is stuck two-thirds of the way up the tower, with all the color faded out of its paint and pieces of its once-sleek shell slowly falling off.

A tall fence with a locked gate surrounds the base of the towers, but I had discovered a slit cut low in the chain-link in an area hidden by thick bushes. I crawled through, trying to stay hidden as people came and went from the nearby Queens Theater in the Park. The theater too was part of the Fair's New York State Pavilion, and it is one of the few structures from the fair that is still used. Adjacent to the towers is the third structure of the Pavilion, the Tent of Tomorrow, a huge round arena that originally had a suspended roof of colorful panels supported by 98-foot-high concrete columns. Like the observation towers, it is long-abandoned, though the huge concrete columns remain, along with the giant terrazzo map of New York State embedded in its floor.

From my spot in the bushes, I examined the three towers just as I had on previous visits, looking for a way up. There is a vertical slot in the side of each tower, like a tall narrow window, but the bottom of this window only starts at about third-floor level. Below that slot, there is nothing but blank and featureless concrete. Through the slot in one of the towers, I could see the framework of a stairway.

There was a door in this tower, but it was firmly shut with not one, but two massive locks. Other than the door, the only possible way into the structure was through the slot-like window, but there was no way to climb up to it. A ladder would have solved the problem-but even if I had a ladder long enough, and managed to transport it via cab or subway, there was no way I could have set it up without attracting attention from people at the theater or from one of the police patrols that made frequent rounds in the park. There was only one solution I could think of: a grappling hook.

I knew that it would be harder to use a grappling hook in real life than the movies make it seem. In the Hollywood conception of a grappling hook, the hero throws the hook, pulls at it until it catches firmly on something, and then climbs up the slender rope attached to the hook. But it's very difficult to climb straight up a slender rope; it needs to be as thick as a ship's hawser to give a good grip, and then it's too heavy to throw. I compromised by picking out a mid-size rope—5/16", about as thick as a standard rock-climber's safety rope—and then knotting it every two feet. It wasn't actual climbing gear, just a nylon rope I bought from the hardware store; it was not intended to support a person, but knew it would hold me for the short time I needed it to.

The hook was harder. When I looked up "grappling hooks" on the web, I found everything from cheap ninja-styled toy hooks to antique grappling hooks collected by military enthusiasts. The most exciting thing I found was a $4,000 grappling-hook launcher, looking something like a bazooka, that could send a hook and trailing line nearly 500 feet. The ad copy didn't say, however, how the person who launched it from 500 feet away could see whether or not the hook had caught on anything solid before trusting his life to it. I needed something cheaper anyway. I decided it was time to call on some real talent, and I headed downstairs from my apartment to talk to Dan, the welder who lived on the bottom floor of our converted Brooklyn warehouse. He had once been a bridge-welder, and he had showed me a souvenir of his certification test: a chunk of a weld three inches thick between two steel beams, cut open to make sure there were no air pockets or defects through the entire thickness of the weld. After seeing that, I knew I could trust his skill.

He told me it would be easy enough, but that I needed to find the steel. A few days later I was back with some rusty steel bars—nearly 3/4" thick—that I had scavenged from a construction site.

The most challenging part of the project turned out to be making the eyelet for the rope. In order to make the whole thing as strong as possible, Dan wanted to make this out of the same bar that made the main hook, instead of attaching separate pieces of metal. He heated half the bar until with an oxy-acetylene torch until it was glowing cherry-red, and the air around it shimmered. Then, wearing huge leather gloves and welder's aprons, the two of us heaved at it together like medieval blacksmiths, trying to curl it around the vice that held one end. We even broke the vice loose, but Dan repaired it and we kept on, alternating between heaving at it and re-heating it. The hook end went more quickly. The finished product was not pretty, and heavy as a cannonball, but I was thrilled. I picked it up to admire it but it was still incredibly hot and it burned me even through my welder's glove. We dropped it into a bucket of water to cool, and the water steamed and bubbled.

Three nights later, I was back at the old World's Fair site, and once again I was hiding in the bushes. The parking lot was full of cars. A friend, Jeremy, was with me. I'd lured him out with the promise of the most spectacular view of the night skyline he'd ever seen, and he had come with me even though it was November and the temperature was well below freezing, with one of those driving winds that can make New York in winter seem like the coldest place on earth. Now he looked both cold and worried.

"I thought you said there was no one at the theater this week," he whispered to me.

I had checked the theater's schedule, and had picked a night when there was no show scheduled. I hadn't thought about rehearsals, however, or any of the hundred other things that goes into a preparing a theater for future shows. We waited until past midnight, but the activity showed no signs of abating. It was far too cold to keep on waiting any longer, and we decided to go for it anyway. We would just have to stay inconspicuous and quiet. After crawling from our hiding place, I coiled the rope carefully, and then swung the hook and released it in a perfect underhand throw towards the window slot.

It got less than halfway to the window before the weight of the rope caught at it, and the hook crashed back to the ground in an aborted arc that sent loud clangs of metal-on-stone echoing out into the night. We dove back into the bushes, and waited to make sure no one had heard. A police car came by, and for moment we both thought it was coming for us; but as it went on past us we realized it was just the normal park patrol. Jeremy tried throwing it next, with an equally useless result, and then we took turns: one person throwing it, and the other trying to catch it on the way down before it clattered on the concrete. We mostly failed—it's not easy to catch a falling chunk of heavy metal bars, especially one that falls unpredictably because of the rope drag—and we spent a lot of time diving back into the bushes and waiting to make sure no one had heard us.

Finally, with Jeremy throwing the hook and me throwing the coil of rope behind it, it found the slot. I pulled on the rope and could feel the hook sliding in the interior of the pillar, and then it caught on something solid; the framework of the stairs, I thought. I tugged at it, and then started up hand-over-hand along the knots I'd tied.

I think the hardest part about climbing a rope up a wall is near the top, where my own bodyweight tensions the rope and pulls it so close to the wall that it's hard to get a hand around it. (Lower on the rope, the angle is shallower, and so it's much easier to keep the rope away from the wall.) This climb was doubly difficult because I was worried about pulling the hook free if I changed the angle on the rope or moved it too much. I was able to make it almost to the top, though, without moving the rope, and I reached out for the smooth concrete sill at the bottom of the slot. I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when my foot slipped on a knot. My reaching hand slid uselessly off the smooth concrete, and the full weight of my body came down with a jerk onto my rope hand, mashing it painfully between the knot and the wall. In the first moment I was terrified I was going to fall from the rope. As I caught myself, I was even more frightened that the jerk of my arrest would pull the hook loose from its anchor. I glanced down; I was already much higher than I was accustomed to climbing without a harness and safety gear, and suddenly felt very, very nervous.

I took a deep breath and carefully hooked my fingertips over the edge of the concrete again, before pulling myself up until I got one forearm, and then the other, onto it. There was still nothing to hold on to and I had to keep squirming forward, relying on friction, with my legs and most of my torso still hanging over nothing, before I could get a grip on an inner corner and pull myself all the way in. As I slid through the narrow gap and onto the stairs, I saw for the first time what had been serving as an anchor for my grappling hook and my life: a tiny, rusted electrical box, that looked like it might give way at any moment.

Close up, the staircase inside the tower was a frightening wreck, with some of the metal treads rusted completely off. The framework at least was still mostly intact, although shaky and bent in places. I tied off the rope, leaned out the window, and whistled for Jeremy to tie my camera bag to the rope so I could haul it up. Then I dropped the rope back down again for him to climb. Slowly, and with great effort, he climbed about two-thirds of the way up, and then I could see him pause, trying to gather strength for the rest, before deciding on retreat instead. He made it most of the way back down before his grip weakened and he started to slip, sliding down the rest in a sort of controlled fall that left him sprawled on the concrete. He tried again, using his feet to better advantage, but with his arms already tired from the first attempt it was a hopeless task.

"Go on," he called up to me. "I'll wait."

My disappointment that he wasn't with me was quickly forgotten as I took stock of my situation and realized that I was actually in this thing. Above me was the first of the three platforms, and I started up.

Because the treads were so weakened with rust, I straddled the stairs, with one foot on each side of the frame. In a few minutes I stepped out onto the first platform, which had originally been a cafeteria; I imaged hundreds of people, laughing, eating, and admiring the brilliant spectacle of the fair.

I crossed to where the platform intersected the next tower, and continued up its equally deteriorated stairway. There was more and more damage as I went further up, and I was glad for the gloves that protected my hands from the rusted railings that I gripped tightly, in case something under my feet gave way. As awkward as my straddle-legged climbing was, I fell into a rhythm and was surprised when I quickly came out onto the second platform. This was much higher than the first; I stayed well away from the edge, wondering just how sturdy this old concrete was, and crossed over to the tallest tower.

For most of its height, this tallest tower holds only the elevator and electrical wiring, but from the second to the third platform it's the only way up and so the access stairs are built into it. A short climb brought me directly beneath the top platform. Under each of the platforms, I noticed, the stairs were in slightly better shape; the deck itself must have protected the metal stairs from the rain that caused the rust.

The top platform is double-decked, with the upper deck about 15 feet above the lower. The stairs between the two levels were deteriorated almost to the point of non-existence, and I had jump to avoid falling as two of the treads broke loose under my feet and crashed to the deck below. But then I was at the very top, and all around me was New York City, seen in rare and magnificent form.

To the north, I could see the Unisphere, with Shea stadium and the National Tennis Center stadium behind it, and further away the green necklaces of the Bronx-Whitestone and Throgs Neck bridges. As I watched I could see the lights of circling planes, too, waiting to land at LaGuardia. To the south, there was the alien-looking bulk of the Tent of Tomorrow and past that the Long Island Expressway, a great glowing stream of cars, and beyond that Meadow Lake and then Willow Lake, each one reflecting all the lights around it. Just to the east, I saw the Queens Theater building. Far to the west the skyline of Manhattan was nothing but tiny shapes of light in the distance, the buildings recognizable only by their relative heights, and all around me the vast city rippled and twinkled under the moon. I was mesmerized. I don't know how long I was up there, but eventually I realized that I was so cold that I couldn't stop shivering, and I started back down.

SOME HISTORY

The towers I climbed, along with the Unisphere, the Queens Theater, and the Tent of Tomorrow, are some of the most obvious relics of the Fair. In fact, though, much of the landscape that I'd seen from the towers-Meadow Lake, Willow Lake, the entire 1,255 acres of Flushing Meadows Corona Park, and most of the highways-was also a legacy of the '64 World's Fair and of its predecessor on the site, the 1939 World's Fair.

Thematically, both of the fairs expressed a belief in mankind's ability to change the world for the better through technology, and the history of the site itself gives strong support to this belief. Originally, Flushing Meadows and its environs were dotted with marshes, supplied by streams that flowed into the Flushing River and Flushing Bay. It was impossible to build in the marshy ground, and so as the surrounding area urbanized, the meadows became a landfill. By the 1920s, it was a giant ash dump, run by the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company under a man called "Fishhooks" McCarthy. With the entire city running on coal heating, the area was described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in the novel The Great Gatsby as a vast desolate, hellish "valley of ashes" that stretched as far as the eye could see.

When the 1939 World's Fair was being planned, the Commissioner of the Parks Department was Robert Moses, a visionary whose single-minded focus on rebuilding the city to fit his visions was both horrifying and wonderful: horrifying sometimes for what he destroyed to make room for his visions, but wonderful for what he created. In the desolate landscape of the ash dump, where generations' worth of garbage had created hills over a hundred feet high, he saw the possibility of a green and fertile landscape for the Fair—a vast tract of land that, once landscaped, would continue to serve as a city park for generations to come.

Unlike many visionaries, Robert Moses was very good at getting things done. In just three years, between 1936 and 1939, his workers filled in the marshes; re-channeled the Flushing River and built huge sewer tunnels to contain its tributary streams; created the 84-acre Meadow Lake, the largest in the city, as well as the smaller Willow Lake; and landscaped the entire 1,200 acres of newly-habitable land. Moses wrote that his teams "leveled the ash mountains, and rats big enough to wear saddles, with white whiskers a foot long, gazed wistfully at the bulldozers and [those] who disturbed their ancient solitary reign." By 1939, it had become the perfect setting for the fair, the theme of which was, appropriately, "Creating the World of Tomorrow with the Tools of Today."

The 1939 Fair was a tremendous success, and in a multitude of exhibits it expressed the same potent, supremely self-confident spirit that had led to the transformation of the site. At the center of the fair, visitors could enter the huge globe of the Perisphere and see, from a god's-eye view, an intricate model for a futuristic urban utopia called "Democracity." Even more fantastic, for many visitors, were the real scientific and engineering accomplishments introduced at the fair: technologies like television, air conditioning, nylon, color photography, and an early electric calculator.

Twenty-five years later, the 1964 World's Fair was held in the same place. Robert Moses was the driving force behind this fair, even more so than he had been in 1939, and he became the chairman of the World's Fair Corporation. Like its predecessor, the 1964 Fair was a dazzling display that celebrated mankind's progress; there were artistic and historical treasures and technological wonders, including a display of early computers. Many exhibits—like the Apollo rockets that would soon take mankind to the moon—promised more wonders to come.

It was not, however, an unqualified success. Attempting to increase revenue, Moses and the World's Fair Corporation charged fees to exhibitors and also opened it for two successive years, both of which violated standards set by the governing body for World's Fairs, the Bureau International des Expositions. Due to this, very few other nations participated, and so the major pavilions in 1964 were those of American companies, which of course had commercial rather than cultural goals.

In the end, it was a financial disaster. The 50 million visitors were only about two-thirds of what had been anticipated, and at the end of the Fair the bankrupt corporation defaulted on a $24 million loan from the city and paid its other creditors only pennies on the dollar. The majority of the fair's pavilions were demolished as planned, but there was little money available to convert the remainder to permanent uses, and some—like the New York State Pavilion structures—were left to rot.

When I think about the fair, though, these faults seem almost inconsequential. What is most important about both of the World's Fairs is the powerful and hopeful belief they expressed in the ability of mankind to create positive change in the world. The towering relics of the fair are reminders of this, but it is perhaps best shown in the fairground site itself: in what was first an uninhabitable swamp and then a desolate dump, the city created a shining vision of utopia; a place where nearly 100 million visitors came to see the future.

Solo Show at the BoConcept Store in Cambridge, MA, May 21-June 21, 2009

2009-05-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

A selection of nineteen of my photographs are being shown at the BoConcept Store in Cambridge, MA from May 21-June 30, 2009

Location:

BoConcept Cambridge

999 Mass Ave

Cambridge, MA 02138

Tel. 617 588 7777

NYC: First Time Into the Tunnel

2009-05-01T01:18:00.000-07:00

The hole I was digging was about three feet deep and halfway under the wall when I ran into a tarpaulin imbedded in the dirt. It caught at my shovel strangely, and I couldn’t tell what I’d run into in the nighttime darkness until I took out my flashlight. I knelt down next to the hole to see.

The beam of my flashlight showed the dirty blue plastic and then, as I prodded it with the shovel, I saw a half-rotten shoe sticking out of the worm-infested folds. A dead body. The idea filled my mind with a sudden wave of revulsion and horror. For a moment I couldn’t move. Then I reached out and slowly pulled on a corner of the tarp. The shoe tumbled out, attached to nothing, and behind it there was only dirt.

I let out a breath that I hadn’t known I was holding and sagged against the handle of the shovel. My moment of panic was over but my heart was still racing. I didn’t want to keep digging by myself, and so I walked over to the stairs leading into the next terrace of the park and waited for my friend Elinor to get back from her cigarette run. When she returned, she sat down with me and we both smoked a Camel before starting to dig again.

We were in Riverside Park, and the only light came from a crescent moon and from the occasional passing car on the West Side Highway. In the darkness there was nothing visible but the stunted grass of the field, and beyond that the leafless trees were outlined against the clouds that moved raggedly across the October sky. As we returned to our surreptitious nocturnal digging, I felt like a grave-robber in a horror story.

Next to us, the 15-foot stone wall leading to the next terrace of the park was a dark mass, the light barely enough to make out its texture. We kept our flashlights off as we dug so as not to be seen—though it was unlikely anyone else would be in this desolate area in the middle of the night.

We were trying to get into the West Side Line tunnel, a two-and-a-half-mile long tunnel that runs underneath Riverside Park from 72nd Street to 123rd Street. The tunnel was created in the 1930s when an existing line—the New York Central Railroad’s West Side Line, that dated back to 1849—was lowered beneath ground level and covered over. The line was abandoned in 1982 and the massive subterranean space was taken over by a community of homeless New Yorkers who were quickly dubbed the “Mole People.” The squatters built plywood shacks and wired in electricity from streetlights on the surface; water for drinking and washing came from Riverside Park’s public bathrooms or occasionally from tapping into pipes that ran close to the tunnel’s walls. Then Amtrak acquired rights to the tunnel; they kicked everyone out, bulldozed the shacks, and began running trains again in 1991.

From what I had read—researching in old newspaper articles, and the few books that mentioned the tunnel in recent decades—it seemed like the last of the mole people were gone by 1995. I hadn’t been able to find any information about the tunnel since then, though. I was intrigued; I wanted to see it. I wanted to see what traces of the one-time community remained, and I wanted to know—is anyone still down there?

One of the newspaper articles had mentioned that, during the heyday of the underground community, the residents who lived close to the center of the tunnel had created new entrances by digging underneath a retaining wall in the park. When the Parks Department found these holes, they would fill them in, but the mole people just dug new ones the next day, according to the article. It sounded easy and quick, as if it was just necessary to clear some dirt from under the wall to make a space big enough to slip through. We’d even found a place where the ground looked like it had been dug up and replaced, assuming that it would be easier to dig through the site of an old, filled-in tunnel than through undisturbed ground. But we had already been digging for more than two hours, hacking through the rocky earth, and when we finally reached the bottom of the wall, we found it was solid concrete at least two feet thick. We would have to actually tunnel underneath it. Even without the tarp slowing down our progress, it was clear we’d be digging for a while longer before we could get all the way under the wall.

Later, I would find out how foolish our labor was—there are far easier ways in at the ends of the tunnel, although there is no entrance within a mile of where we dug that night. Now that I’m more experienced, I’ll usually look at current and old city maps, review satellite images, and walk at least some of the route on the surface when I’m trying to get into a new tunnel. But this was the first city tunnel I had tried to get into, and at the time it seemed reasonable that I would have to dig my way into something underground.

Eventually, I had dug out enough that I could reach through and feel empty space. We cleared out a little more dirt so we could squeeze our bodies through. I put my flashlight in my mouth, and then pushed myself headfirst down and into the hole. It was a tremendously awkward entrance. I pushed with my elbows, scraped my ribs, got dirt and trash down my shirt collar, and even thought I was stuck for a moment, but eventually I was through.

I stood up with the eerie sensation that I get when I go from a warm sunny day into the dim, hushed coolness of a cathedral. At first it seemed that the space just stretched on forever around me. Even when I realized it wasn’t infinite, I could still see that it was very, very big. My flashlight beam barely showed the far wall, a little over 60 feet away. The tunnel is about 30 feet high, and I was standing in a sort of concrete compartment built about two-thirds of the way up one wall. It was about five feet deep and twelve feet long, bordered at each end by massive rusty I-beams that support the roof. The top of the tunnel is wider than the bottom, like the cap of a mushroom, and we had dug underneath the edge of that outer cap; the compartment I was in is basically the dead space where the top section fits over the main structure of the tunnel. If I were to sit or lie down, I realized, I’d be invisible from the track level, making it a perfect little bedroom niche. I’d already felt that there was debris under my feet, and now I looked and saw that I was standing on the rotting remnants of a long-ago squatter’s life: mouldering shoes, clothes, damp and blackened books, bottles and cans, more shoes, and something that was once a blanket, everything mixed together into the disgusting strata of a landfill and so damaged by water and time that all the items were now the same shade of a fetid dark gray. The tarp and shoe that had so frightened me earlier had been part of this mass of garbage.

Elinor kicked her way through our little hole. She brushed ineffectually at the dirt smeared into her shirt. After crawling through the trash and dirt, I felt like I was covered with crushed worms and spiders too, but no matter; we were in.

Elinor got out the cigarettes as she stared around and I reached for one. As I smoked I looked down at the floor of the tunnel below; we might be able to drop down without hurting ourselves, but I couldn’t see how we could climb back up. It was fifteen feet or more, and the smooth concrete wall offered no holds.

“How the hell can we get down?” I said, wishing we’d thought to bring a rope. Elinor suggested we use the tarp. “We can tie one end to that thing. Hopefully those cables aren’t still being used.” She pointed her light at her feet, where rusty bolts held up two old electric cables that were strung along the wall.

The tarp was a little rotten and a little torn, but still strong enough to support us. I worried more about the sixty-year-old bolts. We slid down one at a time, arms and legs wrapped around the makeshift rope, getting even dirtier in the process.

The air was dusty enough that I could see the particles glittering faintly in the beams of our flashlights as we walked along the wide expanse of dirt on one side of the tunnel. In the center there are two parallel tracks, for trains running north and south. Amtrak’s Empire Service line is the one that passes through the tunnel, and the trains continue north across the Spuyten Duyvil Bridge to the Bronx and then on up the Hudson Valley. We stepped hesitantly and slowly, not talking, afraid to disturb the ominous quiet and unsure what to do now that we were in.

We passed a huge mound of old trash bulldozed against a wall, evidence of the people who had once lived here and the subsequent clean-up by the Amtrak workers. Dozens or hundreds of niches like the one we’d entered through lined the upper portion of the tunnel’s west wall, and I wondered how many had housed people.

Graffiti was scattered throughout the tunnel, both simple tags and huge colorful pieces, all layered on top of each other and mixed together with aphorisms and messages—“This city will chew you up and spit you out,” and “R.I.P. SANE,” and “’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the tunnel, not a creature was stirring, not even a rat…” On later visits I came to understand that the most desirable spots for murals are the places where ventilation gratings let sunlight in, and this is part of why so many pieces are drawn over each other in clustered layers of paint.

Some of the only murals left undisturbed were the giant black, white, and silver paintings done in the 1980s by a painter named “Freedom.” The murals range from about ten to twenty feet tall, and were pained with the help of a ladder. They range from a Dali-style melting clock, dripping its way down the wall, to a replica of a Ted Williams baseball card, to huge portraits of tunnel residents that are now long-gone. Freedom first found his way into the tunnel when he was 14, and visited constantly for years, making friends with the residents and creating the murals specifically for them, his only audience. These murals have a tremendous impact when they suddenly appear in the beam of a flashlight, the faces gleaming like an old albumen photographic print. Most were already more than a decade old by the time I first saw them, and the fact that so many remained unscathed demonstrated the respect Freedom had earned from his fellow writers. A portrait of the Mona Lisa’s face was one of the few Freedom works that had been tampered with; a new piece of graffiti covered the bottom half of with ten-foot-high mural. But the newer tag had itself been painted over with the words "Where's your respect, toy?"

We walked on the tracks, stopping to see the things that leapt out of the blackness into the beams of our flashlights, with no idea of how far we’d come or how long we’d been underground. Eventually, we realized it was almost five in the morning and decided to head back.

On our way back to the hole, we heard a train coming. It was just a low rumble at first, coming from all around us, and for a few moments I thought I was just imagining it. Then Elinor heard it too and we both stopped and looked down the tunnel behind us. Far away, the darkness of the tunnel was inexplicably brightening like an underground dawn in the moments just before the orb of the sun is visible. Then the headlights of the train itself appeared around the curve, moving dangerously fast, and the full roar of the engine hit us.

We sprinted for a wall, turning off the flashlights as the light and noise of the train filled the space around us. After so long in darkness and the silence, it was deafening and blinding; the air hummed with the brightness of the light, and the concrete wall shook with the sound. Then the engine flashed past and the beams of the headlights swept on down the tunnel. I caught a quick-flash filmstrip view of heads silhouetted through the windows, the smell of dust and steel, and the clashing of the steel wheels on the rails.

For the short moment that the train was actually passing the tunnel had been bright as day and we felt exposed—we must have been seen, there seemed no chance that all these people could pass 15 feet from us and not know we were there. But the bright-lit faces in the windows had all been staring straight ahead; and then it was gone, heading uptown, across the river, and out of the city, and we were left with the darkness and silence again.

We made our way back to our starting point and climbed up the tarpaulin to the debris-filled ledge with our hole. We decided to walk north along the ledge before going back to the surface. We edged past concrete partitions and climbed around the huge, rusty steel I-beams that support the roof of the tunnel. After walking a few hundred feet, we found a bed—a sleeping bag laid over slabs of foam padding. It had obviously been used recently. Though we stepped over the bedroll and walked on, I felt nervous. It was clear we weren’t the only ones to come to the tunnel, and I wasn’t sure what kind of people the others would turn out to be. These residents already lived on the very margin of the city; would they be angry that, after they had been pushed out of our world, we had invaded theirs?

I could tell Elinor was feeling worried, too, though she seemed less affected than I was. She suddenly dropped down on her knees to look through a narrow space between girders. "Here kitty—come here, kitty…"

I peered over her shoulder and saw two cats, wary and fierce-looking, standing immobile and staring at her. I moved for a better view between girders and suddenly realized that I was looking into an entire room built into the side of the tunnel: clothes were hung on a line stretched from corner to corner, a dingy table was sitting next to a battered chair, and an antiquated radio kept company with a couple more cats perched on the table. The more I looked, the more cats I saw: half-hidden behind the clothesline, perched in the shadowed areas of the girders on the sides, and looking back at us from every corner of the room. All of them were staring at us warily, their eyes gleaming wickedly in the light from our flashlights.

We all stood still for a moment.

"Wow," said Elinor, "look at all those cats."

The cats seemed well-fed and at home; along one wall we could see a messy row of food bowls, disposable aluminum trays, and water dishes made from the bottom halves of plastic gallon jugs. The scene was bizarre; who would make a home here, buried in this nocturnal room with two dozen cats? I felt something in my stomach halfway between nervousness and fear.

In following years I would get to know Brooklyn, the woman who lived in that room and fed the cats. Homeless as a teenager, she had found her way into the tunnel the first time by following the half-wild cats that she’d begun to feed in Riverside Park.

“I came, I looked under the wall, I said ‘Oh! Look at all these cats!’ and then I felt sorry for them. I fell in love with the cats so I would come everyday and bring them cat food. And my cats love me. I’m all they have…” she told me, years after that first visit.

At the time, however, I knew none of this. Instead, I felt the weight of all the darkness behind me like a rising tide, and I wanted nothing more than to escape to the surface.

We headed back, passing the bed and then climbing back over the partitions and past the steel beams. When we got to the hole, Elinor went through first. I handed through the flashlights and then squeezed myself through, pushing with my feet against a half-buried cooking pot. I'd stopped noticing that the tunnel air was dusty or stale, but when I finally took a breath of New York City air, it was the purest, sweetest, cleanest thing I've ever tasted and I could smell the open space, the autumn breezes, and the light of the first fingers of dawn.

On the cable of the GW Bridge - With permission!

2009-04-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

New York Post
April 14, 2009
Article by Don Kaplan
My deepest thanks to Don for taking me along as the photographer on such a fun assignment! Don is an excellent writer and a deeply interested & thoughtful reporter. It's too bad that it didn't get more space to run-- I think that there should have been more of both his article and my photos.

Hudson River Railroad- Question for Readers:

2009-04-08T09:11:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

I'm trying to determine for sure when the Hudson River Railroad along Manhattan's West Side Line first opened, and specifically when the first railroad bridge opened that carried the line across the Spuyten Duyvil Creek. Can you help?

According to this 1988 article from the NY Times, the railroad:

"...crossed Spuyten Duyvil Creek, now the Harlem River, on a wooden drawbridge. The bridge was built no later than 1848, when service was extended to Fishkill. Later, service was extended to Albany, and points west and north."

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/06/realestate/streetscapes-spuyten-duyvil-swing-bridge-restoring-a-link-in-the-city-s-lifeline.html(This statement is already a bit suspect because the mouth of Spuyten Duyvil Creek is not technically the "Harlem River," but is rather part of the Harlem River Ship Canal that connects the Hudson and Harlem Rivers.)

A more comprehensive, but contradictory history of the bridge is here:
http://www.washington-heights.us/history/archives/spuyten_duyvil_swing_bridge_30.html
This article by James Renner says that "The New York & Hudson River Railroad was incorporated on May 6, 1847" and that:

The first tracks were opened on September 29, 1849, running from Manhattan (Chambers Street) to Peekskill along the eastern shore of the Hudson River. By December 31st of that year, the system was extended to Poughkeepsie and then finally to Albany. At the Spuyten Duyvil a wooden trestle was constructed to connect Manhattan with the Bronx.

So we have 1848 and 1849... and on top of that I've also seen 1851. Of course I'm more inclined to believe James Renner's account, as his detail is much more extensive. But does anyone have any authoritative references or primary sources on this? Please email me at steve@undercity.org

Rome: Looking for the Cloaca Maxima

2009-03-26T08:08:00.000-07:00

A story of searching for the oldest sewer in the world, Rome's Cloaca Maxima. This story of our adventures is by my friend & exploration partner Moses Gates. Visit him at http://www.allcitynewyork.com.

“You have made a very big mistake!” Here I was being chewed out, in English no less, by a homeless Gypsy fisherman with a neatly trimmed mustache on the east bank of the Tiber River. My crime? Trying to visit the Cloaca Maxima - the world’s oldest sewer.

Ancient Rome had a problem - a lot of people, even more animals, and no way to get rid of all their poop. To cope with this problem, a rudimentary sewage system was dug around 600 BC, flowing through town out to the Tiber River. True to Roman form, it even came complete with its own goddess, Cloacina, a statue of whom was placed above the part of the Cloaca that now runs underneath the ancient Roman forum. The Cloaca is so old, nobody really knows if it started as a tunnel, or a ditch, or even a natural river. It’s been in use in some form or another ever since, although in modern times its remaining passages were consolidated with the rest of the sewer system of Rome.

I wasn’t quite sure of the big mistake I had made. A little research had led us to the approximate location of the outflow of the Cloaca Maxima. I decided to head over there and see if we could get in. One possible entrance had a couple of guys camped out in front of it, obviously making it their home. One was digging in the mud in front of the entrance with a shovel, so I asked him (as best I could), if it was the Cloaca Maxima. He seemed friendly enough when he gestured to keep walking down the path by the river. But as I turned to walk away, I heard some very rapid, very angry Italian being hurled at me. After repeated “no parlo Italianos,” he said “OK you speak English? - you have made a very big mistake!”

Apparently I had in some way gravely offended some sensibility of his in our brief exchange. I had no idea what to do, or what he would do. Luckily, after a good deal of further berating, he took my apologies enough that I could walk away without fear of further offense. Still, I glanced over my shoulder more than once. He was so mad, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him running after me, shovel in hand.

Well, here was another obstacle I’d put in our way. Instead of manholes and fences, now we had angry Gypsies to contend with. The next morning Steve and I, armed with our peace offerings of cigarettes and beer, went down to try and talk our way in.

We had determined earlier that day that the tunnel by the Gypsy campsite was almost certainly the actual outflow of the Cloaca. The guy who had yelled at me wasn’t there, but his friend was. He only spoke Italian, Romany, and Russian fluently (got to love Europe, with a trilingual homeless population), but we somehow ended up managing a mangled conversation with him in French. 10 minutes and a couple beers late we were in. Imagine our disappointment when the tunnel ended in a brick wall after 10 feet.

Undaunted, we decided to explore a little further down the river to see if there were any other possible entrances. We were in luck: only a few dozen feet down the river was a sewer entrance, close enough that it might lead to the Cloaca. This time the obstacles were different. There was a heavy gate in front of the entrance, although luckily it wasn’t locked. And there was another obstacle one might associate with sewers: namely sewage. While the other entrance had been kept fairly clean by the Gypsies camped out there, this one had no such caretakers. Flies were swarming all over us as we were up to our ankles in the muck of whatever Romans flush down their toilets trying to pry open the gate. This time it took a little elbow grease and a heck of a strong stomach instead of two beers and decent French to make it in.

Once we were in it got a little better - most of the sewage had caught on the gate at the entrance, and there was only a trickle down the middle of the tunnel. The tunnel itself was big, and looked relatively new. It began to curve toward the direction of the entrance to the Cloaca, giving us hope that it would eventually connect with it, but stopped at a flood gate before very long.

With the Cloaca this close, we had to go on. Luckily for us, there was a ladder. Up the ladder, into the gatehouse, across a catwalk, and down another, much rustier, ladder and we found ourselves in the sewers beneath the Capolitine hill. On we went.

These sewers made the one we were just in look like the Sistine Chapel. We were on a narrow, somewhat slippery catwalk maybe a foot wide right next to the bodily waste of millions. One wrong step and we would literally be up shit’s creek without a paddle.

Still we pressed on to see what we could find. After 50 feet or so a smaller tunnel branched off to the side. This had no sewage in it, and was made out of brick - brick that looked incredibly similar to what ancient Roman ruins were made out of. Could this be the remnants of the Cloaca? We went as far as we could, stopping to take some pictures. The tunnel was only about 5 feet high or so, and ended in a strange chamber, complete with brick arches. We were under the oldest part of the city - even if it wasn’t the Cloaca, it was a fair bet this tunnel was at least a couple millennia old, and was host to the kind of history we had only read about.

We left this strange offshoot behind and carried on. Here was where Steve started to get worried. We had brought an air meter, which would tell us if the oxygen content got too low or if there was anything poisonous in the air. But Steve wasn’t worried about air - he was worried about water. We hadn’t checked the forecast that day. If it started to rain, or even just drizzle, there was a good chance the water level of the sewer would rise considerably. The catwalk was only a few inches higher than the effluence next to us. If it rose just even a little, we would be swimming back out. And if it rose a lot…well, let’s just say I could think of a lot better ways to go. We offered up a quick prayer to Cloacina and pressed on.

A little further and the sewer split in two. The big problem was that this was also where the catwalk ended. The tunnel to the right had no catwalk, and there was a 6 foot gap until the catwalk picked back up on the tunnel to the left. Jumping it was out of the question. We tested the water with the camera tripod to see how deep it was. The river of shit swallowed the 5 foot tripod with room to spare. We were out of options.

We had no idea if our quest was successful - we had been almost exactly in the path of the original Cloaca. Some remnants of it could have been the brick tunnel or the catwalk-less offshoot. The most likely possibility was that it was a bricked up archway that we had passed. But we had gone as far as we could without Hazmat suits. It was hard to head back out without knowing for sure if we’d accomplished our objective, but we couldn’t very well expect a big sign saying “welcome to the world’s oldest sewer!” We negotiated the other ladder and the gate, and made it back to the city before nightfall, passing our old Gypsy friends along the way. We gave a friendly wave and smile, and were honored when we got a slight nod of the head back.

NYC History: The Atlantic Avenue Tunnel

2009-03-26T07:44:00.000-07:00

Walt Whitman, writing just after the Atlantic Ave Tunnel was closed:

The old tunnel, that used to lie there under ground, a passage of Acheron-like solemnity and darkness, now all closed and filled up, and soon to be utterly forgotten, with all its reminiscences; of which, however, there will, for a few years yet be many dear ones, to not a few Brooklynites, New Yorkers, and promiscuous crowds besides. For it was here you started to go down the island, in summer….
…We were along there a few days since, and could not help stopping, and giving the reins for a few moments to an imagination of the period when the daily eastern train, with a long string of cars, filled with summer passengers, was about starting for Greenport, after touching at all the intermediate villages and depots. We are, (our fancy will have it so,) in that train of cars, ready to start. The bell rings, and winds off with that sort of a twirl or gulp, (if you can imagine a bell gulping), which expresses the last call, and no more afterwards; then off we go. Every person attached the road jumps on from the ground or some of the various platforms, after the train starts…. The orange women, the newsboys, and the limping young man with the long-lived cakes, looks in at the windows with an expression that says very plainly, “We’ll run along-side, and risk all the danger, while you find the change.” The smoke with a greasy smell comes drifting along, and you whisk into the tunnel.
The tunnel: dark as the grave, cold, damp, and silent. How beautiful look Earth and Heaven again, as we emerge from the gloom! it might not be unprofitable, now and then, to send us mortals—the dissatisfied ones, at least, and that’s a large proportion—into some tunnel of several days journey. We’d perhaps grumble less afterward at God’s handiwork.

-Walt Whitman, “Brooklynania” #36, 1861 (Approx.)

    Underneath Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, stretching west from the busy intersection with Court Street, is an old Long Island Rail Road tunnel. At 21 feet wide and 17 feet high, it was big enough for two locomotives side-by-side. Today it feels more like a natural cave than a man-made tunnel. It once carried passenger trains filled with summertime crowds heading to towns and resorts on Long Island. But after it was closed in 1861, it remained essentially forgotten for well over a century, until a young Brooklyn historian in the 1980s found references to it and eventually tunneled into it.
    The train tunnel was built for a passenger railroad line that connected Brooklyn’s ferry landing at the foot of Atlantic Street with the Long Island Railroad station in Jamaica (now part of Queens). Since it was built for passenger trains and ran underground through a city (the city of Brooklyn), it is the world’s first subway tunnel—predating by many years the famous but short-lived Pneumatic Subway that Alfred Ely Beach built in lower Manhattan in1870. It was also one of the longest train tunnels in the world at the time.
    At the time the tunnel was built in 1844, both steam trains and the city of Brooklyn itself were still quite new. Though Brooklyn had existed as a town for many years, it was only in 1834 that the bill to incorporate it as a city was passed in Albany (over the heavy opposition of New York City). Steam locomotives as well were essentially an invention of the 1830s. In 1830, Peter Cooper had demonstrated the first practical steam locomotive in the US, a small engine called Tom Thumb that managed to pull a passenger car at 18 miles per hour, showing that the new technology could be far superior to horse-drawn trains. Over the next two decades, rail lines would not only revolutionize shipping through New York state, but would also facilitate incredible development in the towns and suburbs around New York City. Seeing both the massive immigration-fueled population explosion in New York, and the desire of the wealthier to get away from the crowded, dirt city center, developers began to lay out residential tracts in Brooklyn. Commuters could travel between the two cities via the South Ferry, a ferry line that would lend its name both to the South Ferry station in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn’s South Ferry station at the foot of Atlantic St.
    Companies were chartered to lay individual rail lines, and one of the earliest in Brooklyn was the Brooklyn and Jamaica Railroad Company, chartered in 1832, to lay tracks between what were then two villages. Tracks were laid along what is now the route of Atlantic Avenue, although at the time it was Atlantic Street and extended only slightly east of Flatbush.
    In 1834, the Long Island Rail Road was chartered as well, with plans to run from Jamaica (now queens) westward through Long Island. The original goal of the Long Island Rail Road was to connect New York and Boston, using ferries to cross both Long Island Sound and the East River. (This plan would end up ultimately seeing little success, especially when an overland rail line was completed through Connecticut, but the company would handle passengers traveling to the new towns and summer resorts that sprang up on the island through the 1800s.) The Long Island Railroad would not finish laying the 94 miles of track that connected Brooklyn with Greenport, where a steam ferry took passengers to a connecting train to Boston, until 1844, the same year that the Atlantic street tunnel was built. But in the meantime, the new rail lines gave unprecedented access to towns along its route, laying the groundwork for Long Island’s railroad suburbs.
    The first Brooklyn and Jamaica Company trains ran along Atlantic Avenue in 1836. Within a year, however, the company had leased its tracks to the Long Island Rail Road, which was continuing to lay tracks further and further into Long Island.
    But steam technology was in its infancy, and the locomotives were both weak and dangerous. The engines sometimes exploded violently. From their inception, steam locomotives were not allowed in Manhattan south of 27th Street because of this; as the city expanded north so did the cut-off line, and Grand Central was built at 42nd street because that was the southern terminus for all steam-powered locomotives at the time. The city of Brooklyn likewise forbade any use of steam within city limits until 1839, and so trains were pulled by horses until out of the city limits. Regardless of the ordnance, horses would still have been during the first part of the journey, as the early steam locomotives were not powerful enough to handle the hill between the ferry landing and Court Street, and even after steam was permitted horses still were attached to the train to help it up the grade. (Which created its own problems, as the horses were easily spooked by the loud, clanking, frightening engines; the Long Island Rail Road eventually solved this problem by putting a passenger car in front of the engine, as a buffer between it and the horse teams.) Local business and residents were not happy with the operation, especially as the railroad expanded. A letter to the editor in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle recalled that, before the tunnel was built, the railroad would send “their locomotives to Smith street, and there stationing one or more on the open street, belching forth their thunder and steam, rendering the whole neighborhood inaccessible; add to this the blocking of up Atlantic street, from Henry street to Smith street with carloads of manure, and the sidewalks and lots with heavy and obstructing material, all permitted to remain as long as possible…”

    Starting on May 24, 1844, the Long Island Railroad began work on the tunnel as an open cut, after the Brooklyn Common Council had authorized the construction of a tunnel “constructed of good materials, with sides having good and substantial stone walls, to be arched with brick or stone,” The first trains ran through in December of 1844. In its annual report of 1844, the Common Council described the tunnel:
The whole length of this structure is little more than half a mile. The walls are of massive stone, of the thickness of six feet, and ten feet high. The arch is of brick, twenty-two inches thick, the whole laid in hydraulic cement.
    Light and air came in through three ventilation shafts that rose to the surface, about 17 feet above the roof of the tunnel at the center. (These ventilators—“not to exceed four feet in diameter, and to be constructed with suitable iron railings at least four feet in height,” according to the charter, we capped to a depth of three feet when the tunnel was closed.)
    Although already in daily use for trains, the report noted, the tunnel was not entirely finished; it was expected that another $15,000 worth of work was needed, bringing the total cost of the project to $66,352. “This great work,” the report declared, “will greatly facilitate the operations of the Company, obviate many dangers, and as a work of art will embellish the city of Brooklyn.” Implicit in this was the fact that lessening the visibility of noisy, smoke-emitting steam trains would help property values in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, and that routing the trains through the tunnel would allow for expansion of residential development south of Atlantic Ave.
    Despite the tunnel enclosure, the smoke and noise along Atlantic still aroused widespread opposition from local residents, especially as Prospect Heights developed into a wealthy and prestigious suburb of New York in the 1850s. New development south of Atlantic, which had been facilitated by the tunnel, now led to calls to close the steam rail line completely, as residents and business complained about the space the tunnel entrances took up in the middle of the street, and the barrier that the rail line created to north-south movement on the local streets. In 1858, Brooklyn banned steam locomotive operations within city limits, a measure aimed specifically at the Brooklyn and Jamaica Railroad line, and despite challenges the ban was upheld by courts the following year. A compromise with the railroad was reached when it was decided that the city would buy the tunnel for the sake of closing the steam line; local property owners adjoining Atlantic street would be assessed for a total of $125,000 to pay for closing the tunnel and repaving the street. “The consummation of this work,” the Times declared, “offers a great improvement in the street, for which the owners of property can well afford to pay the assessment levied therefor. ”
    Steam locomotives were completely eliminated by 1860, though horse-drawn train cars ran through tunnel for another year. But by December of 1861 the tunnel had been completely closed, and the street smoothed and restored to a full 120 feet wide. The two ends were filled in with dirt, but most of the tunnel—about 1,600 feet—was left empty. The railroad tracks and ties were removed, and today the only hint of the railroad that once ran through the tunnel is the corrugated dirt floor, with shallow and time-rounded depressions showing where the railroad ties used to sit.
    A horse-drawn rail line was installed on the surface of the newly smoothed and widened Atlantic Street to connect to the Jamaica station. The Long Island Railroad, giving up on Brooklyn, built a new track (the LIRR Main Line) between its Jamaica station and a ferry terminal at Hunter’s Point in Queens County.
    Considering the incredible growth of Brooklyn over the next decades, perhaps it’s not surprising that the tunnel was so quickly forgotten. Between 1860 (when the tunnel closed) and 1880, the population of the city leapt from 279,000 to 599,000—meaning that well over half the residents had not been alive in Brooklyn when the tunnel had been active just 20 years before. By 1900, when the Borough of Brooklyn had over one million people, the number was somewhere between 5% and 10% of the population. This is the downside of urban development and growth: the past is quickly forgotten. But it does linger on in the realm of urban myth and legend. By 1893, it was the subject of a “romance,” a short story in the New York Times that began:

    “The Atlantic Avenue Tunnel!” exclaimed Bilderhouse, looking up from his writing table.
    “That’s what I said,” replied Furbish. “Don’t you know there’s an old, unused tunnel there, under the middle of the street, extending from the ferry almost to Flatbush Avenue?”
    “Don’t believe it. Never heard of it before,” said Bilderhouse, leisurely resuming his work.

    Fruitlessly searching for an entrance to the tunnel after a dying man tells of treasure hidden there, the hero of the story dozes off at a bar and dreams of the Keats poem “Endymion.” (“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:/Its loveliness increases; it will never/Pass into nothingness; but still will keep.”)
    By 1911 the myth had expanded, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that the tunnel might be infested with giant rats and “desperate men,” and that “the popular impression prevails today that it would be a good deal safer to go down into its darkness armed.” In 1936 a squad of police did their best to get in, after the District Attorney received an anonymous letter that said “If you inspect the old tunnel you might find something interesting.” (It was thought that they might find the body of Bo Weinberg, a gangster who helped the infamous Dutch Schultz expand operations into Brooklyn during prohibition .) They tried cellars along Atlantic Avenue, rapping on basement walls with crowbars, but found no connection. “The place is supposed to be alive with rodents big as behemoths,” Captain John McGowan told the reporter, although Sahib Lineburgh, an inspector with the Transit Commission who had been in the tunnel 20 years before, called the stories “bosh.” When he went in during 1916, he said, he and his men drilled into it both at Court Street and Henry Street. “We put ladders down and went down, carefully, because we’d heard all those legends about poison gas, and pirates dens and rats big as cats.” But they found nothing, though they had to walk through an inch-deep, 56-year accumulation of mold—no rodents, no treasure, and no connection to any buildings on Atlantic Avenue. The police eventually called on workers to dig an entrance from street level through the ceiling arch of the tunnel. They found nothing, but the hole they made is still visible in the roof of the tunnel. Another exploration during World War II, due to reports of German saboteurs hiding in the tunnel, was equally fruitless. (The closest the old tunnel came to being opened up to the public was probably also during WWII, when the WPA suggested using it as an air raid shelter, but it was not pursued. )
    Just one of the legends about the tunnel turned out to be true: that it was filled with poison gas. In the late summer of 1980, a 20-year-old railroad buff named Bob Diamond became the first person since 1941 to enter the tunnel. But a few feet in, Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) tests found carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide is a well-known danger in tunnels; it’s slightly heavier than air, and over time the carbon monoxide released from cars can seep into underground spaces, creating an odorless, invisible, and absolutely deadly layer of gas.
    Bob Diamond would eventually work to open up the tunnel for tours to the public, which still enter through a nondescript manhole in the middle of Atlantic Avenue at Court Street. That summer, he was still just an engineering student and a railroad buff; he’d spent months researching the tunnel and eventually found plans for it at the Brooklyn Borough President’s office. But he approached city agencies and got them to agree to help him. What he found that day, before the trip was aborted because of the bad air, was the brick arch of the tunnel’s ceiling, creating an open space about three feet high over the dirt filling the tunnel. He couldn’t go any further that day, but he would eventually find that the majority of the tunnel was completely open and untouched.

Sources:

Whitman, Walt. From "Brooklyniana," a series of twenty-five pieces in the Brooklyn Standard between June 1861 and November 1862. Found in The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, edited by Holloway, Emory. Doubleday, Page, & Company, Garden City, N.Y., 1921

Wallace & Burrows. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Oxford University Press, USA, 2000

Horton, Gail. “A Brief History of the Greenport Terminal of the Long Island Railroad” 1992. ONLINE AT http://www.rmli.org/Page/Grennport_History_detail.htm

"Long Island Railroad.” The Times And Commercial Intelligence, June 14, 1838 SCAN ONLINE AT http://arrts-arrchives.com/atlaverr1.html

"Steam on Atlantic Street (Letter to the Editor)." Brooklyn Eagle, December 29 1858, p 2

Brooklyn Common Council, March 29 1844, Ordnance granting permission to the Long Island Railroad Company to construct a tunnel through Atlantic street. SCAN ONLINE AT http://arrts-arrchives.com/tunnel.html

Rogoff, Dave. “Atlantic Avenue (Cobble Hill) Tunnel” May 1962 Bulletin of the ERA's New York Division, online at http://rapidtransit.net/net/faq/nyc/AtlanticTunnel.html

Brooklyn Common Council Annual Report, 1844, p 177-178, SCAN ONLINE AT http://arrts-arrchives.com/tunnel.html

"The Atlantic Street Controversy with the L. I. Railroad Company." Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 1, 1858, p. 2

"Brooklyn News." New York Times, December 23, 1861.

"The Atlantic Avenue Tunnel: A Romance." New York Times, January 23 1893, p. 10

"Old Tunnel Eludes Police Explorers." New York Times, July 19 1936.

Gordon, David. "A Transit Legend Lives In Brooklyn." New York Times, February 7 1973

“Eerie Brooklyn Cave May Be Air Raid Shelter.” 1940 article scanned at http://arrts-arrchives.com/tunnel.html

"A Tunnel That Can Keep A Secret." New York Times, August 6 1980.

NYC: Knickerbocker Avenue Extension Sewer

2009-03-25T08:19:00.000-07:00

   In the 1880s, Bushwick was one of the most dynamic and thriving neighborhoods in the city of Brooklyn, NY. It was known especially for its many beer breweries. At the time, Brooklyn was still a separate city from New York City, and it was the third largest city in the United States. (New York City, composed at the time of just the island of Manhattan, was the largest city in the country; the five boroughs of today’s New York City would not be joined until 1898.)
   Both Brooklyn and New York City were growing incredibly rapidly. In the single decade between 1880 and 1890, New York City’s population would grow by 24% from 1.2 to 1.5 million, and Brooklyn’s population would grow an incredibly 42%, from 567,000 to 806,000. Stimulated by explosive growth in the region and fueled with cheap labor, the 1880s saw the opening of some of the most incredible engineering works of the century, including the Statue of Liberty (installed in 1886), and the Brooklyn Bridge (opened in 1883). On a smaller scale, Brooklyn’s first elevated railway opened in 1885, with its eastern terminus at the very edge of Bushwick.
   The same year, the magazine Scientific American featured a completely different kind of engineering project on the cover of its December 12th issue: a massive 12-foot diameter sewer that was being built to carry the combined sewage and stormwater from Bushwick to a new outlet on the East River.

From the point of view of an average Bushwick resident, this tunnel was not particularly interesting. Bushwick already had an extensive combined sewer system, with the largest sewer main, which ran along Knickerbocker Street, a full 11 feet in diameter . But the outfall for the Bushwick sewer system was into Newtown Creek, a slow-moving stream that had been turned into a canal. The new sewer featured in Scientific American, called the Knickerbocker Avenue Extension, was built to carry the flow away from its current outfall in Newtown Creek to the East River, about two miles away. For the population of Bushwick, nothing would change; their sewers would function as normal. But the new tunnel would keep sewage away from Newtown Creek’s many fright docks, even as the flow of sewage from Bushwick increased with the population. As the Scientific American article explained:

The necessity for the work is apparent from the fact that the present outlet sewer for this section of the city, which drains an area of about 2,800 acres, some of which is very low and flooded by every rain, is discharged upon the low lands at the head of Newton Creek, making a nuisance greatly detrimental to public health and damaging to valuable property in the vicinity. Frequent complaints from people living near this outlet and by the Department of Health rendered the construction of a new outlet absolutely necessary.

But, the article explains, “although there is nothing new either in the sewer itself or the duty it is designed to perform, the method of building one section of about three-quarters of a mile in length is certainly unique and interesting.”
This “unique and interesting” method was the technique used in digging the sewer as a deep tunnel (instead of as an open cut) in the section closest to the East River, where higher land meant that the tunnel was about 65 to 75 feet beneath the surface. To bore a sewer as a deep tunnel instead of as open cut was extremely unusual, and to do it the engineers used a new system of modular iron plates that were inserted at the head of the tunnel to support the roof and sides as the digging was done. Well behind the head of the tunnel, the plates were removed (to be re-used at the front) and bricklayers installed the bricks, set in cement, which would form the 12-inch thick walls of the circular tunnel. An iron-framed five and one-half foot diameter “pilot hole” preceded the main tunnel slightly. As the Scientific American article explains:

This method of tunneling not only gives an exact idea of the nature of the material in advance of the main work, but also served to firmly hold the sides of the excavation, preventing caving in; and where the route extends through a street lined upon each side with houses, and, as in this case, at an unusual depth below the surface, it has many advantages…

   At the time, this was all fairly unusual and impressive from an engineering point of view. The engineer Brunei had been the first to use cast-iron plates as lining for his landmark tunnel under the Thames as far back as 1843, and a train tunnel under the Hudson had even been started in 1874 using some of the same techniques (though that tunnel would not be finished until 1903), but the vast majority of urban tunnels were still built with a cut-and-cover method. The Knickerbocker Avenue Extension marked perhaps the first time that this sort tunneling technology had been used for a sewer or drain.
   This technique is actually very similar to how tunnel boring machines function today, with the cutting head and shield at the very front, and reinforcing plates installed directly behind the shield, providing not only support to the walls of the tunnel, but also bracing for the TBM to push forward. Of course today the digging is done mechanically rather than by manual labor, concrete is poured behind the plates to reinforce the tunnel instead of hand-laid bricks, and the debris or muck is taken out on a conveyor instead of pushed by hand along tracks in small carts as it was in the Knickerbocker extension, but the essential concept is the same and is quite different from the earlier methods of digging-and-blasting ahead of any reinforcement, with bracing only after the tunnel had progressed forward.
   I’d read about this sewer and its construction some years back, and had spent some time walking its route above-ground, or at least as close as I could figure it out. I never found the outfall but spent only a little time looking for it, knowing that the original outfall might be gone-- during the 20th century new development has sometimes changed or covered up original river outfalls. But recently a friend stumbled on the outlet completely by accident. This is how the outfall was described at the time it was built:

The outer end of the outfall is 18 feet in width and 6 1/2 feet in height, measured from the center of the invert, the curve of which has a radius of 41 feet; the sides are vertical, and on them rest iron I-beams, 12 inches deep, and varying in length from 20 feet at the outer end to 13 feet where the outfall sewer joins the circular one.

Today the outermost iron I-beams have rusted to threads, and the breakdown of bricks and concrete at the top of the outfall makes it look like little more than a pile of debris by the water’s edge. The East River is actually a tidal estuary, and at high tide the water comes within six inches of the top of the outfall tunnel—or higher if there are waves or bad weather.

   I’d had a healthy fear of rising tidewaters ever since the time a few years ago when I was briefly trapped in a storm drain by the incoming tide, so we planned our trip carefully around low tide. It was clear from scouting it that this was still primarily sanitary sewage flowing the pipe, and so we loaded up with protection: we bought hip waders, rubber gloves that went up to the elbow, and wore respirators to keep out any loose particles in the air (though the respirators were unwieldy enough that I soon took mine off). We met up at a bar on the corner of the street above the route of the sewer, just a couple hundred feet from the outfall. When we finally walked into the outfall, it was an hour before low tide, and the water was ankle-deep. We ducked under the rusted I-beams and fallen brickwork, but we only made it about 50 feet in before coming to the floodgates.
   These one-way gates are common now on large CSOs (Combined Sewer Overflows/Outfalls); during normal dry-weather flow, the new interceptor will take the entire flow (of mostly sanitary sewage) to a treatment plant, and gates prevent the incoming tide from flowing back into the system. But during storm events the system maxes out, and the pipes to the treatment plant can take only a small portion of the water, which eventually pushes the gates open and jets out into the bay. Normally, to open the gates for inspection, a truck will hoist the gates up using a chain that goes to the surface. We had no truck, but I had a pair of ratcheting truck tie-downs (good for up to 10,000 pounds), and we were able to pull the gate open slightly by alternating the two— we’d attach one to the chain, tighten it up to open the gate 2-3 inches, then attach the second and tighten it to take the pressure off the first and move the gate another couple inches.
   When we finally had the gates far enough open to slip through I was delighted. Ahead of us stretched the 12-foot high, perfectly circular tunnel lined with hard, dark red bricks. Just in front of us, a catchbasin about six feet long and as wide as the entire tunnel was set into the floor. The fast-moving flow of sewage coming toward it down the tunnel was a little over a foot deep, and it flowed into the catchbasin in a small, powerful waterfall. From the catchbasin, as I knew from sewer maps, it flowed into a 3-foot, 6-inch brick interceptor which led in turn to a 7-foot main interceptor that took it, along with the flow from other old Brooklyn sewers, to nearby treatment plant.
   We carefully climbed around the catchbasin, which was filled with roiling gray water that seemed to be waiting for us to slip even a little on the moist, slick, slimy bricks.

And, finally, we were in the main tunnel. A 12-foot-high tunnel of hand-laid brick running east-west, 64 feet underneath Williamsburg. A pioneering engineering project from the days when the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty were built. But unlike those monuments, the tunnel we were in had probably averaged less than one visitor a year in the intervening 125 years. Another few steps and we were almost directly underneath the bar where we’d been drinking just before. We walked about three-quarters of a mile, then turned around and came back. The tide was rising, and we came out through knee-high water around our waders, seeing the lights of Manhattan reflected in the opaque water.

And really that’s the end of my story. Seems anticlimactic, doesn’t it? But in exploring the urban environment, the fact of us being in the place isn’t the story. Even the process of getting into it isn’t really the story, although it often is close to one. The real story is the hidden thing itself, how it came to be and what it meant to the world. We were just there to see it.

NYC: The Brooklyn Bridge

2009-03-24T21:48:00.000-07:00

Hart Crane
From “To Brooklyn Bridge”

“O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,--

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path--condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms."

On my 29^th birthday I finally climbed the Brooklyn Bridge.

I had just broken up with a girl I’d been with for years, my longest relationship ever and the only one that seemed to be on track for marriage. We’d even talked about marriage sometimes, but whenever we talked about it I felt my skin start to crawl. For her, it was all she wanted. But I was terrified—terrified that the commitment would doom me to a life of boredom and monotony. After all, how can one single girl, no matter how fun or loving, be complex enough to continue giving me a sense of newness or discovery after decades lived together?

A birthday brings on self-reflection, and I had been thinking about all these things, although they depressed me and made me worry I was incapable of real love.

Late that night I found myself at the Patriot, a dive bar in lower Manhattan, slurping up a special birthday shot from a cocktail waitress’s belly button as she lay across the pool table. The whisky and the feel of the soft girl-flesh rushed into my head and suddenly I felt a wave of optimism and happiness. For months I had been feeling trapped, old, tired, bored and boring, caught up in a fast-flowing river where it took all my strength just to stay in the same place.

But suddenly I knew differently. Today, my birthday, was the first day of the rest of my life, and the entire world of possibilities was open. So when Sunny, between drinks, asked me when we were going to climb another bridge, I had an answer immediately. “Tonight,” I said. “The Brooklyn Bridge.”

I had wanted to climb the Brooklyn Bridge for years. Over time, though, i had stopped thinking about it as a real possibility. It’s illegal, of course. But it’s also illegal to climb the other bridges around Manhattan, and yet I’d been to the top of all of them. The difference is that with every other bridge around Manhattan it’s possible to go up the towers, either on service ladders or by climbing inside the latticework of girders. Going up the tower in these ways kept me more or less hidden from view. But the Brooklyn Bridge has solid stone towers rising straight up, and there are no ladders. The only way up is along one of the cables, which means the climber would be silhouetted against the sky and highly visible.

This route also means walking up a sloping steel cable little more than a foot in diameter, using the auxiliary cables at each as handrails. We would do without any of the safety gear that bridge-workers use; though it would be reassuring to be clipped in, I knew it would make us impossibly slow. We had to move fast, which only made the tightrope-walk up the cable more worrisome.

There’s something particularly spectacular about the Brooklyn Bridge, and it isn’t just because it was an engineering triumph that rivaled the Erie Canal or the Egyptian pyramids. It is absolutely beautiful, with nearly perfect curves and massing. And it connects what were at the time the largest and the third-largest cities in the country– New York City and Brooklyn.

The towers, 276 feet high, are each made of three pillars supporting huge gothic arches and together form one of the most familiar sights in the world. At the time they were designed, in 1869, they were taller than almost anything else in the country– almost as tall as the spire of Trinity Church, taller than the dome of the Capitol in Washington DC– and far more massive than any other tall structure. The bridge needed to be tall so that high-masted sailing ships could still pass underneath it, going to and from what was then one of the largest and most active ports in the world.

It was the first major bridge in the world to use steel suspension cables, which were developed by the bridge’s designer, John Augustus Roebling. Steel at the time, however, was still a fairly new development, and was considered too dubious a material for the massive weight-bearing towers. The original design for the bridge had been made in about 1869, and it would not be until two decades later that steel frames were first used to support massive structures: Holabird & Roche’s Tacoma Building in 1889 (the first building with an all-steel skeleton); the Forth Bridge in Scotland in 1890 (the first major all-steel cantilever bridge); and the early skyscrapers of Burnham & Root and Louis Sullivan in the 1890s. So it came naturally to Roebling to design these towers in stone, in the same monumental gothic style he had seen growing up in Mühlhausen, Germany, where he first passed the exam to become a Baumeister, a Master Builder.

The towers are more massive than they need to be, as are the gothic arches they form over the roadway, and in fact they are partially hollow below the level of the road deck. In this, Roebling was using the language of expressive architecture. “In a work of such magnitude, and located as it is between two great cities, good architectural proportions should be observed,” he wrote. “The impression of the whole will be that of massiveness and strength.”

Sunny and I left the bar when it closed. She’s a rock-climber and I’d climbed another bridge with her once before, and even after our drinking I knew I could trust her to handle herself. In the glow of the city after-hours, we walked to City Hall Park and then up onto the long wooden footpath that crosses over the bridge.

I had walked this path for the first time almost exactly ten years before. I had just come to New York for school; I met a girl and I was in love from the first moment I saw her. On our first date, both of us still new to the city, we had walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. She wore soft black-leather gloves and I loved the feel of her hand in mine. I was completely and absolutely in love, but within a year I had successfully driven us apart because I believed I’d never be satisfied with her if we stayed together too long. She’s happily married now, and just had her first child.

Marriage— or any relationship of true and mature love— must be a complete partnership, my last girlfriend told me. Two people decide to build a life together, hoping that as a team they can create something far more fulfilling than each could alone. This is how the Brooklyn Bridge was built, too. John A. Roebling designed the bridge, but died (of tetanus, from a crushed foot) early in the surveying process. His son, Augustus Roebling, took over as the main engineer, but was crippled by the bends while working on the underwater tower foundations. After that he watched the work through a telescope from his bedroom window, while his wife carried his orders to the workers and stood in for him at the site. The beautiful bridge that came out of these efforts is a monument to the ingenuity and glory of New York— but it’s also a monument to the commitment of one family, shared between father and son and between husband and wife.

Sunny, walking along the path next to me, had a husband, but he wasn’t with us that night. Her marriage was on the rocks and would soon completely unravel. Like me, she’d been feeling trapped. Which, on the face of it, seemed like a silly thing for her to worry about. She’s a brilliant university professor, with three postgraduate degrees. She speaks four languages fluently and she’s an excellent rock-climber. And she’s gorgeous, and she can mesmerize a crowd by dancing to country music on a bar– which she’d been doing at the Patriot just an hour before. Her life seemed wonderful. What was she was trying to escape from? What more freedom could she possibly want or even use?

On other hand, I had just broken up with the girl I loved and now I found myself approaching something I’d passionately wanted to do for years. And it was probably only because her marriage was in trouble that Sunny was willing to come along with me on this foolish quest. There was a connection between our romantic troubles and our willingness to go on an adventure. Why? Because adventure requires some risk— even if it’s just the risk of wasting time— and to risk yourself is to celebrate your independence. If you’re in a partnership, you can’t be so spendthrift with yourself, any more than you can gamble with funds from a company account. But when the life or the money is entirely your own, you can let go of the caution that ordinarily limits you to sensible investments.

We walked to the middle of the bridge, where the suspension cables reach their lowest point, dipping down close to the wooden walkway. I climbed up first.

At each end of the bridge, a police car idled at the edge of traffic. Police have been continuously stationed on the bridge since September 11^th, 2001, watching for trucks that might be laden with explosives. The entire bridge, with approaches, is a little over a mile long. (The central span, between the two towers, is only 1,595.5 feet.) We were in the middle, which meant that each police car was, at most, about 3,000 feet away– a little over a half-mile. A half-mile is a long way to see at night. But with the bright lights that illuminated the entire bridge, would we be instantly visible as small dark shapes silhouetted against the towers?

The police seeing us wasn’t even my main worry; I was more concerned with the people passing by. About 150,000 cars cross the bridge every day; that’s about 6,000 an hour, or 100 cars per minute, not including bikers and pedestrians. It was the middle of the night, but traffic still flowed unceasingly. We’d be on the cable for several minutes. How many of the drivers would look up? And how many of them, seeing us, would understand our need for freedom and independence, instead of calling the police?

Of course, not everyone who risks themselves on the Brooklyn Bridge does it purely for the reward of the accomplishment. Police regularly respond to reports of suicide jumpers. And why would someone want to kill himself? Love, of course. As one of the Emergency Services Unit responders (officer Gary Gorman, in a 2000 interview) explained that, in addition to money troubles, “marriage or failed relationships seem to be the cause of most suicide attempts.”

A jump from the deck of the bridge, 135 feet above the water, is

sometimes survivable, so people who want a sure death occasionally jump from the top of the tower we were about to scale. That fall is invariably fatal. “It is hardly necessary to point out to thoughtful men the splendor of a suicide committed from this virgin height,” declared the Brooklyn Eagle in 1877, six years before the bridge was even opened.

Suicide jumpers led to suicide guards, which are ten-foot-tall sections of fence installed along the cable. Climbing over a fence is no problem on the ground, but 150 feet above the water and fifty feet above the roadway it becomes far scarier. I’ve heard one report of a would-be suicide jumper who became so terrified while climbing over the guards that he changed his mind and decided he wanted to live. I wanted to live too, and I was very careful as I eased my body over the fence and dropped down onto the narrow cable again.

The cable I stood on, one of the four main cables that supports the bridge, is fifteen and three-quarters inches in diameter with 5,434 individual wires inside. I take the strength of a steel cable for granted, but the bridge builders had had a hard time convincing the citizenry that it would hold the bridge up. Public confidence was shaken even more when it was revealed during the construction that a corrupt contractor had supplied defective steel, some of which was woven into the strands before it was caught. Additional strands of good steel were added to reinforce the cables, and the engineers assured the public that the bridge was not only strong enough, but far stronger than it would even need to be for the load it would carry. Nonetheless, fears of collapse led to a massive panic on the bridge a week after it opened, while sight-seers still crowded the roadways. Pedestrians fled the bridge in a mad scramble and twelve people were trampled to death.

But more than a century later, the cable below my feet felt steady as a rock. I could feel the smaller cables thrum under my hands with the vibration of the light traffic, but I felt none of the structural vibration that I’ve felt on many all-steel bridges, in which the steel girders are always flexing slightly from the weight and motion of traffic.

The cable slopes up more sharply as it rises to the towers, and soon I was walking up a steep slope. Roebling designed the bridge so that the weighted suspension cables would still follow a catenary curve, the natural curve that an unweighted rope will take when hung loosely between two points. I feared the slope would become so steep that my feet would slip before I reached the top, but before I had a chance to do more than think of it, I had finished the climb. The cable vanished into the stone wall; inside the tower top, it’s held in an iron cable-saddle on huge rollers. I went up a short ladder, past the overhanging cornice of the tower, and I was at the top of the Brooklyn Bridge.

From the ladder I rolled onto my stomach and lay for a moment stretched out on the granite. I felt wonderful. The solidity of the stone this high in the air felt miraculous.

I looked out over the skyline, brilliant in the cold air, with every spark of light on every building seeming both close enough to touch and impossibly distant and high. I felt awe and ecstasy for the beauty of it, and a deep sadness that I would never see more than the tiniest fraction of the stories behind each one of those lights.

I rolled over onto my back and watched the stars until Sunny came over the ladder’s edge. We sat first on one side of the tower, looking north along the East River, and then we moved to the south side and looked out toward the Statue of Liberty and the still waters of the bay that once teemed with sailing ships. We both shivered from the cold, but we didn’t want to leave. Eventually I noticed the first faint lightening of the sky to the east, above Queens, hinting at the coming dawn.

A helicopter passed over the bridge, and with a start we saw the beam of a spotlight stabbing down as the helicopter slowed. We ducked against the edge of the cornice and tried to look like shadows. Even huddled and with my face hidden, I still felt the brightness as the light washed over us. I didn’t think they saw us; the light passed and we breathed again. The helicopter circled lazily, but as it headed back toward the bridge it was joined by another. When the pair had passed over us again in a wide circle, we crawled to the ladder and hurried down the cable. It was far more frightening than going up; now we were forced to look down, and face-to-face with the drop. Another terrifying fence-climb over the suicide guard, and we were back to the walkway. Three helicopters circled now. They were probably looking for suicide jumpers, but I’ve never been so far from suicidal; I felt immortal.

When the Brooklyn Bridge was built, New York was the busiest port in the world. It was the financial capital of the world and the industrial center of the nation. It controlled the majority of the wealth in a country that was quickly becoming a world superpower. It would soon be the most populous city in the entire world.

Today the port traffic, always New York’s raison d’etre, is essentially gone. Still a financial center because it always has been, the city has rested on its laurels for nearly a half-century, attracting relatively little in the way of new commerce. Like Paris or Madrid, this city that was once was the center of a world empire will perhaps become just a showcase, an aged grande dame that is essentially a static— though still beautiful— shell of its past power and glory.

But despite all this, I never worry that I’ll become bored with the city. It will never lose its power to awe and fascinate me, and it is so multi-faceted that I know I could live out my life within it and still never come to the end of newness and possibility. Maybe I’ll find that with a girl someday. Maybe I’ll even tire of New York, aging and changing as it is. But every time I see it laid out before, I fall in love all over again.

London Underground: The Walbrooke Stream/London Bridge Sewer

2009-03-23T08:51:00.000-07:00

One of the oldest sewers in London is the London Bridge Sewer. It was built in the 1840s and then integrated into the comprehensive sewerage system that was built under Bazelgette in the 1860s and 1870s. On my final night in London, DS and I went into the sewer via a manhole on a fairly crowded street. It was late at night, but we still had to walk past it the first time because too many cars and people were passing by. Eventually we changed into our waders in a nearby alley, and then opened up the manhole and dove in, praying no cops would happen to be passing at the wrong moment.

As usual, the guys at Sub-Urban had done the original research on this sewer, including researching the chronology of its construction. Reading Nicholas Barton’s The Lost Rivers of London, however, I decided that this sewer was also what remained of London’s Walbrooke (or Walbrook) stream, which was so named because it was the only watercourse that crossed London’s walls at the time when a wall fully encircled the city. (The sewer still passes underneath London Wall Street.) As the only running water to flow under the walls, it must have been important to early London for two reasons: first, as a supply of fresh drinking water, and second, as a sewer which could carry refuse out of the city.

As a freshwater supply, I assumed that there must have been springs that once fed the brook, because how else could enough water be generated to create a consistent stream in the small area of the city? And, in fact, when we got into the sewer, we found that underground springs apparently still flowed in the area, and still fed into the Walbrooke despite the tunnel that now surrounded it. In dozens of places, streams of water came through the brick walls. Some trickled down the sides; others had enough force to spew out between bricks like fountains. All of these streams had apparently forced their way into the tunnel over the century and a half that the sewer had been in use. There was no way to stay dry as we passed through these areas; water dripped from the ceiling, spurted from the walls, and splashed up from the sewage.

As an open sewer for the walled city of London, the Walbrooke must have carried its share of filth even before it was put underground. However, no matter how bad it was back then, we soon found out that today it’s beyond merely disgusting. It was in fact the most noxious, filthy sewer I’ve ever been in. Most of the time sewers don’t actually smell that bad, as flowing water combined with the process of decomposition leaves even human waste smelling more like a barnyard than like a toilet. But the London Bridge Sewer has a very shallow drop compared with more modern combined sewers, and this probably allows a build-up of un-decomposed waste over years. The smell nearly knocked us over when we got into the main channel, where filth and slime came up almost to the crotch of my chest-waders. I was reminded of the name that the explorers from Sub-Urban.com had given it: Stoop’s Limit, so named because even the normally-intrepid explorer nicknamed Stoop, who never balks at anything, finally called a halt in their trip because of the smell.

It was in this sewer, unfortunately, that I found out that my chest-waders had developed a hole near the left knee. When I first felt the wetness along my leg, I though that one of the streams of water from the sides was running down into my waders. When I realized what it actually was, I hit my own limit and called to DS to retreat with me to shallower and drier areas.

In retreating, we found some smaller side-passages. Along the sides of these, a crystalline deposit had built up on some of the old brickwork. I don’t know what mineral it was, but it was gorgeous, especially as it suddenly glittered out of the complete darkness in the light of our headlamps. As I was taking pictures of it, I noticed a tiny, nearly transparent spider that crouched on the crystals.

One other interesting thing about this sewer is that it passes directly underneath the Bank of England. Presumably it is fairly deep where it does so, but it brought to mind the various bank-robbery movies I’ve seen where the thieves manage to find an old sewer tunnel that they use as a base to dig into bank vaults. I’d always thought it was unrealistic, but maybe it’s more of a real possibility than I knew.

London Underground: the River Fleet

2009-03-23T08:42:00.000-07:00

THE RIVER FLEET

Day 1 in London, November 14, ----, 3:30pm local time.

Ah! London! Sewers!

I’m sitting right now in a Starbucks in central London, where I popped in to use the bathroom and hang out for a few hours while I wait for my friend to finish work. As I flushed the toilet, it occurred to me that I might see those same turds again in a few hours. Tonight we’re going to visit part of London’s sewer system: the River Fleet, a tributary of the Thames that flowed through central London until it was put underground—and connected to the sewer system— in the 19^th century.

I just arrived in London a few hours ago, flying in from New York. My friend and exploring partner goes by the cryptic name of DS. I met him at his office and dropped off my bags of gear– chest-high rubber waders, gloves, camera, tripod, flashlights, headlamps, spotlights (for light-painting photos), an air meter, even an inflatable inner tube for a possible rafting trip along an underground river in Northern England.

Day 2 in London, November 15, ----, 7am local time.

Was in the River Fleet last night and into this morning. Just got back to DS’s place. I want to tell the story of our night, but I think I have to start with the river itself:

THE RIVER FLEET flows from two underground springs in northern London, in Hampstead Heath (a large park on the North-western part of the city) on each side of Parliament hill. The western source starts at the Hampstead Ponds, and the old course of the river just to the south is marked by Fleet Road. The second source is in the northern edge of the park, on the grounds of Kenwood House. A longer series of ponds, the Highgate ponds, show where this spring flows along the eastern side of the park.

The two springs unite just north of Camden Town. In 1826, it was recorded that the river at this point was 65 feet wide. The Fleet had always one of London’s bigger rivers—the name itself is thought to have been derived from a word meaning, basically, “big enough to float a large boat”—but by the 19^th century it was deeply polluted, serving as a drain and sewer for the entire area.

This was going to be my first time into the London underground. DS and I met with another urban explorer, who goes by the nickname Loops. The manhole that was our goal was a square hatch in the middle of the sidewalk, next to a stoplight on a busy street. It was well after dark on a weeknight, but people walked by constantly. Some were headed toward the hotel just down the street; others were simply walking. At one point when the coast seemed clear, a couple came meandering along the sidewalk. They were obviously and enthusiastically on a date. They held hands and lingered, leaning into each other and stealing a quick kiss. They were moving at a snail’s pace. A dozen feet from the hatch, they stopped completely and admired the ornate stone building next to us. We had already put our rubber waders on, and we sat on a low wall across the street and tried to look inconspicuous in the rubber suits. Finally the sidewalk was empty. We walked over, as quickly as possible in the rubber waders. As DS and I stood casually, Loops knelt down to try to undo the latch that normally prevents anyone from opening these hatches from the top.

We were here at this relatively early hour because of the tide. The Thames is an estuary in which high tide rises more than twenty feet above low tide. I don’t know how that’s possible; I think it’s because water flowing down the river hits the incoming tide, and the conflux creates tides much higher than I’ve seen on the east coast of the US. But because of this, the final portion of the Fleet is completely flooded from mid-tide onward.

The hatch was what DS called an “easy-lift.” The hinged square cover was far easier to raise than a heavy manhole—at least, once it was unlatched. Loops was still struggling with it, his headlamp on now. DS bent down to help him. Eventually he threw down the tool he’d been using, and with one finger jammed through the tiny hole he was able to jimmy the latch. We raised the hatch, and then the heavy grill just beneath it.

I went down the ladder into a small, dry brick tunnel. DS was just behind me. From the bottom of the ladder I looked up: a small square view of the night sky, and then it disappeared as Loops lowered the grate and the hatch cover. In the sudden darkness, the scrape and clang of the metal grating echoed ominously off the Victorian-era brickwork around us. But we were in! I was elated.

It’s the incredible brickwork that makes the London underground so amazing. The sewer system was constructed under the engineer Bazalgette, who researched and planned in the 1850s and started construction of the hundreds of kilometers of brick tunnels in the 1850s. Thousands of workers dug tunnels and laid brick and stone to make the sewers for the rich and burgeoning metropolis.

Although few ever saw it, Bazalgett’s sewer system was one of the engineering marvels of its day. Round brick tunnels ranging from six to twelve feet in diameter hold mainline sewers, as well as rivers like the Fleet that had become so polluted that they were best put underground. Round tunnels flow into even vaster tunnels shaped like an upside-down horseshoe, with gently concave floors. Smaller channels were often oval or egg-shaped. (With the smaller end of the egg’s profile pointed downward, this shape keeps sewage flowing faster even when it’s low flow, and that helps reduce silt build-up.)

These were built not only for sewage and wastewater, but also to drain the city of rain or snowmelt. Because of this, the tunnels often seem needlessly huge. In most of the Fleet, the tunnels range from eight feet up to twenty feet high. The flow of sewage and water we encountered, however, was rarely more than one or two feet high. But in heavy rains these tunnels could fill up almost completely. In manhole shafts, markers ran up the sides with markings every meter, showing that the water could potentially rise much higher even than the top of the tunnel.

When Bazalgette designed the sewer system, one of the most important things he did was create a system of five “interceptor” sewers, which ran parallel to the Thames at various distances and intercepted the water from the north- and south-flowing sewers to carry the sewage to a treatment plant. Previously, the sewage had flowed directly into the Thames, near where drinking water for the city was withdrawn. Bazalgette’s new system probably saved an incalculable number of lives from disease.

But when it rains, the flow vastly increases. The rainwater mixes with the human sewage. The treatment plants and interceptor sewers are unable to handle the load. As the flood of water and sewage comes through the tunnel, it rises over the small diversion dams that normally direct it into the interceptors, and a flood of untreated sewage is released directly into the Thames.

This is a problem common to almost every older city, and is one of the most serious public health issues for urban waterways. Cities try to deal with it in a variety of ways; London is beginning to work on a gigantic deep-underground tunnel which will serve as a reservoir or holding tank for excess sewage when it rains, which can then be slowly released and treated in dryer weather. It should be ready in about 2020. In the meantime, every time it rains, raw sewage is released with the rainwater into the Thames.

Of course this is an imperfect system, but cities are organic growths that re-use and build on their past. Therefore almost nothing in an older city is going to be perfect, because the systems and infrastructure in use are so often leftover from an earlier period of growth. It’s imperfect, but nonetheless I love seeing the sort of cut-away view of both the history and the physical structure of a city that you get from seeing old underground systems in a modern city.

Cities that are planned and built in the modern era—like many Australian cities-- always have separate storm drains systems (for rain) and sanitary sewage systems, so they can avoid this problem. But in a large city like London or New York, it’s basically impossible to add in a new separate system for stormwater. The cost is prohibitive and urban populations would never accept the city-wide shutdown that the construction would cause. But this highlights even more what an incredible thing Bazalgette did in constructing the system in the first place—perhaps the largest infrastructure project London has ever undertaken, a masterpiece of Victorian-era brick and stonework that is still fully in use today.

The bricks inside the Fleet looked as if they had been laid just yesterday. Hard-fired dark bricks formed the floor, sometimes changing to large flagstones. As the tunnel changed shape and size, we could see that the arches were made with four, five, even six layers of bricks. I couldn’t believe the amount of work that had gone into this.

When we first came in, the water was about two feet deep. Our manhole opened into a small network of access tunnels that led in one direction to the equipment that could raise or lower huge floodgates. Now the gears everything else was almost unrecognizable underneath a swollen, flaking layer of rust and a coating of black, oleaginous mud.

In the other direction, the tunnel led us into a set of ladders and catwalks that led down into the main tunnel itself. It was incredible: near the outfall here, it was a giant chamber easily twenty feet high and equally wide. The exquisite brickwork vied for my attention with the sheer architectural wonder of it.

Though most of the standing water near this of the Fleet’s tunnel seemed relatively clean, we quickly encountered sewage when we passed the interceptor tunnel a few hundred feet upstream. A steady stream of obvious sewage flowed into the interceptor, making a waterfall that roared and pounded in the confined space. A four-foot high dam stretched across the main tunnel of the Fleet to prevent it from flowing through the outfall and into the Thames. But it was clear that with even a little bit of rain the water level would rise enough to go over the dam, flowing into the Fleet tunnel and then into the Thames.

I had on chest-high waders, and was glad of it. Loops and DS both just had hip waders, essentially crotch-high boots. They were easier to move in than my rubber suit, but it occurred to me that if I fell I’d probably be able to stay dry– but if they fell, the high boots would immediately fill with water. The slime that coated everything made it impossible to walk on the sides of the concave floor without slipping, so we trudged along the center. The water would only have been shin-high if it had been standing still, but with the heavy current it splashed past our knees.

Wading through sewage is a nasty business. In purely sanitary sewers, the water is often a bilious green-brown. (“Sanitary sewers” is the official term for pipes that carry raw sewage, to distinguish them from the cleaner storm drain tunnels designed only to carry rainwater runoff.) In combined sewers, as were built in the Victorian era, street runoff often dilutes the sewage so that the smell is not so bad, and you can sometimes go many steps at a time without being reminded that you’re in a sewer. But the worst part of venturing into sewers is seeing something recognizable: tampons, condoms, maxi-pads, streamers of half-disintegrated toilet paper, or the occasional turd bobbing in the water. We saw all of these as we trudged upstream. The smell was bad, but not awful; only a little worse than I’ve smelled around pigsties or slaughterhouses.

But neither the smell nor the sight of floating turds could detract from the excitement I felt. This was the great Fleet River; it had been flowing along into the Thames since before the Romans first established Londinium. The intersection of the Fleet and the Thames was one of the reasons that London had become London, a great city built on a foundation of water-borne trade.

After the great fire of London, Christopher Wren (the great architect behind St. Paul’s Cathedral) had designed at least one bridge over the Fleet, and I eagerly looked at the walls when the tunnel changed shape or size to see if I could tell where it had been integrated into the tunnel when the Fleet was put underground. I don’t know if I saw it, but what I did see was a palimpsest of London history from Victorian times to the present: old stone arches, Bazalgette’s amazing brickwork, flagstone floors in some tunnels, new sewer line connections of metal pipe, ancient sewer connections of brick tunnel that had been sealed up, because the building or possibly even the entire street that they had served no longer existed. Ancient, rusted ladders led to 19^th-century manhole shafts capped by heavy iron covers. Newer ladders, visible in access rooms ten feet to the side of the main tunnel, led to stainless-steel hatches like the one we came in.

Beyond all this I could see the ancient history of London. With a deepwater port on the estuary of the Thames, all that was needed for the growth of a great city was freshwater rivers. Some would be used for drinking water, others as canals to transport goods. The rivers could also be used for waterwheels to run mills—something the tidal Thames could not do. The Fleet and its companion rivers provided all of these things. And the city grew until it was the center of a world empire, and then it became so large that the small rivers that had fed it were now nothing more than impediments, loose threads in the urban fabric that blocked traffic and occupied valuable real estate. So the rivers were put underground, and as always happens in cities, history and the past were eaten up as the city built for the present and the future. Except that the past is still there– it’s just hidden away, and you have to work a little harder to see it.

We were done by about 3:30am. We had almost let ourselves get trapped by the rising tide, and in the final section before our exit, the water was so high that it came over the tops of Loops’ waist-high boots. The rising tide made it impossible for us to visit the southernmost section of the river tunnel, even though our exit manhole was so close to it. We would come back the next week at low tide to see the impressive outfall space, a gigantic brick-arched chamber with massive iron doors hanging at one end to serve as one-way valves for the water.

We stayed in the access tunnels a little longer, wiping down our muddy, sewage-covered gear and packing up for a quick exit out the manhole. Even in that short time, we could see the tide visibly rise in the tunnel near the outfall.

When we got out DS walked to his office, where he would wash in the bathroom and sleep a few hours on the couch before he had to wake up for his day job. I walked to the nearest Tube station, and had to wait two hours outside the station for the mornings first train. It was absolutely freezing as I waited, especially in my wet clothes, and I sort of wished I was back underground where it’s always warm.

London Underground: the Tyburn River

2009-03-23T08:18:00.000-07:00

The Tyburn River

The Tyburn was one of London’s smaller rivers, nothing like the size of the Fleet or the Westbourne rivers I visited in the city. But I had long looked forward to seeing it, more than any other part of London’s underground. Integrated into this river’s history are two of London’s most important landmarks: Westminster Abbey, which was a nucleus of London a thousand years ago, and Buckingham Palace, a cultural center of London in the modern era.

Until early in the second millennium A.D., the Tyburn split into two wide, marshy streams just before flowing into the Thames, and the area between them was called Thorney Island. Westminster Abbey was founded in 1065 A.D. on this island. And today, with its course drastically changed and channeled underground by the developing city, the Tyburn River flows deep underneath the grounds Buckingham Palace.

I was fascinated by the idea of being in a forgotten tunnel underneath such a well-known landmark as Buckingham Palace. I’d be under the noses of the celebrated guards, and they’d never know it. The thousands of tourists that flock every day to see the home of Britain’s royal family would never see what I was going to see, even though it’s only a few dozen meters from the home of the Queen. And this unique experience, shared by so few others, is no small or meager thing. In fact, considered in purely structural and engineering terms, I’m sure that it could rival the Palace itself– the Tyburn’s tunnel stretches for kilometers, with parts as large as ten meters across, and is composed of something like two million hand-laid bricks.[1] But it’s hidden in two ways: physically invisible from the surface, and also unnoticed in the same way that our heartbeats or breathing often go unnoticed. We see the surface layers, whether looking at bodies or at cities, and we often forget the structure behind the surface, just as we often forget the history that underlies the present. But in the Tyburn, as happens with so many historical sites in cities, physically venturing underground and the imaginative process of looking back into history became inextricably linked for me. In both ways, this river would help me in my quest to see new layers of London.

In London’s early days, the Tyburn River flowed from two small sources in Hampstead (north London). The first was the “Shepherd’s Well” along what is now Fitzjohn’s Avenue, and the second was on the grounds of Belsize Manor. Belsize Manor is gone, but its old location is hinted at by a half-dozen streets in South Hampstead with Belsize in the name (Belsize Road, Belsize Court, etc).

From these sources, the Tyburn flowed in a generally south-easterly direction; first along the eastern side of Hyde Park, then through the area where Buckingham Palace now stands, and then onward to the site of Westminster Abbey. There it split into two marshy channels, which formed a soggy moat around the slightly higher land of Thorney Island on which the Abbey would grow.

Because it was so close, the Tyburn was one of the first streams to be diverted to provide drinking water for London. By 1236, the clean water of the upstream Tyburn was already being carried in a conduit to the city. A half-dozen different schemes for bringing its water to the city would be tried in the next few centuries, including one in which three and a half miles of leather pipes were used to transport the water.

The diversion of the water for other uses, combined with the Tyburn’s small size and the closeness of its sources to the growing city, quickly turned it fetid. With diversions upstream, the flow decreased and the now-small stream became a default sewer for those who lived along it. By 1611 London had made itself independent of local water sources by building an aqueduct to Hertfordshire, but the Tyburn– at least its southern half– had probably ended its usefulness as drinking water centuries before that.

The river’s course was also drastically changed by the city. Instead of running toward the site of Westminster Abbey, it was channeled further south and ran into the Thames near the site of the Vauxhall Bridge. What’s fascinating to me is that, in fact, it’s impossible to say for sure when the change took place. The amount of London’s growth that predates any complete plan or written record of the city shows clearly how organic a city’s growth is over time. The historian Nicholas Barton places the change in the Tyburn’s course sometime between 951 and 1663. But exactly when, or why, it was changed, or if it was a natural process that happened over the centuries, remains murky.

Today, the Tyburn is a sewer flowing through a brick tunnel. Officially titled the King’s Scholar’s Pond Sewer, it’s about three meters in diameter when it passes underneath Buckingham Palace. Walking through it we saw many side channels– some go only a short distance to manhole shafts, some connect to side-street sewer lines. There are also consistent tap-ins (individual sewer pipe outlets) from buildings built above the tunnel. Which one of these outlets or side channels ran from Buckingham Palace, I can’t say. But it is likely that at some point we were wading through the Queen’s shit—a more personal side of royalty than most tourists get to see.

South of Buckingham Palace, we took a look at the surface to orient ourselves. It was now about 3am, and we felt safe in carefully raising a sidewalk manhole to peer out. But a moment after DS stuck his head out, he pulled it back and closed the cover; we were just outside Victoria Station, another of London’s landmarks and probably a bad place to be seen coming out of a manhole.

In its final section south of Victoria Station, the river follows the winding course of Tachbrook Street. The street is named for a brook that was, essentially, the drastically diverted remnants of the original Tyburn River in the area closest to the Thames; when the tunnel was built it followed this same general path. The original outlet for the tunnel was near Vauxhall Bridge, but a series of floodgates cut off this final connection to the river except in extreme floods. (Wastewater in the tunnel is diverted into a series of interceptor sewers, which carry it east to treatment plants.)

The many centuries of human involvement in the course of the Tyburn had shrunk it to no more than a small stream long before it was covered, and I expected to see nothing more than the continued small round tunnel. But instead, the passage opened up into a series of much larger galleries. Intricate brickwork curved up into magnificent arches, and lines of heavy stones high in the walls showed where part of it had been originally constructed as an open canal. Ancient, slime-encrusted interceptors carried away the small channel of sewage that ran down the center of these huge spaces. This had clearly not been just a work of pure functionality, as so much urban infrastructure is today; it was in its way a monument to the city and an expression of its glory.

The floodgates that shut off the southern end of the river—each widely separated from the other– were modern and made of bright steel, incongruous against the dark brick. The first we had passed was mechanized, and we went through it only after Z scouted the tunnel beyond it for the rest of us. (Not knowing if it might close behind us and trap us, I had been too timid to go further until he determined there was a manhole further ahead we could use as an emergency exit.) The second was a closed steel flap weighing tons, and we made it through with brute force and careful squeezing—though crawling through the narrow gap we made brought us face-to-face with the sewage.

But the third, closest to the river, was firmly and perhaps permanently shut. We couldn’t follow the river to its end. But we had already followed it through a good thousand years of London’s past, and I was quite happy as we made our way back to the silent pre-dawn streets above ground.

**********

Please Note: The Credit for the research and archeological work in uncovering these rivers and their history belongs entirely to others, not me, in particular the extremely dedicated folks at www.sub-urban.com.

The people represented through these websites have my deepest thanks for exploring these rivers and their history and for guiding me around: www.sleepycity.net; www.sub-urban.com; www.silentuk.com; and Loops.

For further reading: The Lost Rivers of London, by Nicholas Barton.

[1] This is a very, very rough guess, based on the size of the tunnel and the number of layers of brick. I didn’t actually count them all.

INTRODUCTION: RIVERS & THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

2009-03-23T06:39:00.000-07:00

    The British Empire at its peak was the largest in the history of the world, and the cornerstone of the Empire was foreign trade. Empire and trade fed off each other, as new colonies made available new resources and markets for British factories, and by the late 19th century Britain had an estimated quarter of all world trade. The prodigious production levels needed to fuel this trade were made possible by the new systems and technologies of the Industrial Revolution, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. As the first major nation to industrialize and use these new production systems, Britain gained a tremendous advantage in advancing both its Imperial and its commercial interests. In the process, many of its cities were changed irrevocably and sometimes unrecognizably, with vast demographic shifts and even topographical changes as canals were dug, rivers were shifted, or hills were mined.
    Some of the cities most affected by the Industrial Revolution were those that became the industrial giants of Northern England in the 19th century, such as Sheffield, Manchester, Bradford, or Nottingham. However, despite its apparently disruptive effects on these urban centers, the Industrial Revolution was not wholly an external phenomenon that happened to them, nor a fundamental disruption of their existing order. Rather, it was a period of highly accelerated development, and its seeds had been sown centuries earlier as individual cities like these had began to specialize in certain industries and to export manufactured goods to mainland Europe or to other parts of Britain. Though seemingly sudden and even cataclysmic because of the allometric processes of industrial and urban growth, the Industrial Revolution actually flowed naturally out of the evolving systems of production that these cities had been developing over the course of centuries.
    Cities like Sheffield, for example, which had long been famous for its knives and tableware, had developed a craft-oriented economy that passed knowledge and techniques from one generation to the next, slowly developing technologies and mass-production capabilities while maintaining links to resources like coal, iron ore, and distribution networks. Bradford, which in the 18th and 19th centuries became a phenomenon of urban and industrial expansion in the wool trades, had already been processing wool and textiles almost from the time of William the Conqueror. Through its long history this city had likewise honed its production methods, established channels for supplying itself with raw materials, and worked to develop markets for its products. It was the pre-existing industrial economies in cities like these that brought forth the inventors, technologies, transportation networks, and entrepreneurs that made the Industrial Revolution possible and even inevitable.
    And what had sustained the early industrial economies of Northern England’s cities in prior centuries? In almost every case, it was rivers that had played the most vital roles—powering mills, transporting goods, and providing the water needed for industry. Centuries before steam power, it was their locations on waterways that allowed towns like Bradford (on the Bradford Beck), Sheffield (on the River Sheaf and Porter Brook), Manchester (on the River Medlock, River Irk, River Irwell, and the Gore Brook), or Birmingham (on the River Rea and the River Tame) to thrive and in some cases to even develop economies based on production of specific goods using water-powered, mechanized processes. These and many other river-rich towns in Northern England were ideal incubators of industrialism, and the success of that incubation was demonstrated by their explosive growth and economic success in the 18th and 19th centuries.
    Successful cities build over their history, and these cities, which changed so radically in size and character during the course of the Industrial Revolution, did so in particularly obvious ways. In each of the cities mentioned above, all but the largest of the rivers are now underground. The Bradford Beck, the Sheaf, Porter Brook, the Medlock, Gore Brook, and the Irk—all of these waterways were at one time vital to the development of the cities through which they flow, and each is now partially or completely culverted within their respective cities. In cities throughout England, and particularly Northern England, similar sites exist. London, for example, has over a dozen named watercourses that were once significant to the developing city but that now are integrated into the sewer system and completely invisible from the surface.
    Though underground, and usually unseen, the changed role of these watercourses does not mean that they no longer offer insight into the cities they run through. On the contrary, they can offer a connection to the early days of a city, because often the small, polluted urban waterways that are likely to be culverted in a large city are the same small and centrally-located streams that would have been most useful to the early settlement that was the predecessor of the city. Moreover, the process by which a river was culverted or integrated into a sewer system not only tells about that particular period in the city’s history, but it also strongly reflects changes and developments the city underwent between the time that the watercourse was a useful resource above-ground, and when it was relegated to the underground. The growth of Sheffield from a small village of artisanal knife-makers to a water-powered metalworking town, for example, was reflected in the Porter Brook’s complete diversion into a series of millraces and millponds by the 18th century, and Sheffield’s shift away from water-power and its continued growth in the 19th century is reflected in the culvert, which functions as a city storm drain, that encloses the Porter Brook today.
    On a recent trip to England, I set out to find some of these disappeared watercourses and to see what they could tell me about the history of the cities under which they now ran. In cold November weather, I took off from London with two companions: Chris, an Australian computer programmer and photographer, and John, a Londoner who divides his time between his work as an arborist and his hobby of researching London’s sewers. We had three goals: Nottingham, to find the remnants of a small stream once known as the Beck Burn; Sheffield, to find the River Sheaf; and Bradford, for the Bradford Beck. John woke us up at five o’clock a.m., and Chris and I piled into his little two-door sports car amidst piles of rubber boots, helmets, winter jackets, tripods, cameras, and headlamps.

NOTTINGHAM #1: NOTTINGHAM BACKGROUND AND THE BECK BURN

2009-03-23T06:37:00.001-07:00

    The first stop was Nottingham, where our goal was to walk underground through the 19th-century Beck Valley Storm Water Culvert, a drainage tunnel that follows the old course of a stream called the Beck or the Beck Burn. It was the smallest of the watercourses we would visit, but I was still excited to see a stream from which Robin Hood himself might have drunk. If the locals knew we were walking through their city’s drains, I wondered, stealing from Nottingham’s rich past to share with the present, would they consider us heroes or thieves?

    In Robin Hood’s time—around the 13th century AD—and for centuries after, the Beck had been a clear and sparkling brook that ran through Sneinton, an area of pastures and fields just east of Nottingham’s gates. Unlike the eponymous watercourses we would later visit in Sheffield and Bradford (the River Sheaf and the Bradford Beck), the Beck Burn was never central to Nottingham and probably was not used to drive waterwheels for power. Up until about the 17th century, it was literally peripheral, running just outside of Nottingham’s eastern edge and flowing south into the River Leen, which was effectively the town’s southern border.
    Rather, its importance as an incubator of urban development lay in its value as one of several watercourses that richly supplied the region with irrigation, washing water, and drinking water for people and livestock. The springs that supplied it were on the north side of town, and with the Leen on the south this gave the town freshwater sources on three sides. Charles Deering, an historian of the town who lived and wrote in the 18th century, pointed out that the Beck Burn was invaluable as a source of water for the luxuriant corn and hay fields to the north, as well as the cattle pastured both north and east of the town. After enumerating the other advantages of the site—the navigable Trent River less than a mile to the south, and the closeness of the famous Sherwood forest—Deering asks rhetorically: “Thus were a Naturalist in Quest of an exquisite Spot to built a Town or City upon, could he meet with one that would better Answer his Wishes?”

    The Beck’s primary source was St. Ann’s Well, a spring that was located north of town at the end of what is now St. Ann’s Well Road. Another unnamed spring fed into the stream between St. Ann’s Well and the town. The stream originally flowed into the Leen River, which in turn flowed into the larger Trent River. The Trent River, as well as the Nottingham Canal of the late 18th century, provided transport routes that helped Nottingham develop into the central market town of the region. The Trent is not much changed from its old course, but the Leen disappeared when its water was redirected into the canal. The Beck Valley Culvert now flows directly into the Trent, well south of the town’s boundaries in the middle ages.

NOTTINGHAM: INTO THE BECK

2009-03-23T06:37:00.000-07:00

    Comparing 19th-century maps with contemporary ones, we found the outfall of the culvert along the northern shore of the Trent River. We let ourselves down the bank and into the river, and stepped into the twelve-foot-wide, eight-foot high brick tunnel.
    The sunlight disappeared almost instantly as we waded in. The water was waist deep; it was cold and dirty, and I was very glad to be wearing chest-high waders. Chris and John were only wearing hip waders and they tried to keep to the curving, shallower sides of the channel. I stayed in the center where the water was higher, but the flat bottom gave a better footing. I jumped and almost fell when I felt something moving touch my leg. Chris saw me. “Fish,” he said. “They’ve been bumping into my legs. Is that what you felt?”
    A stone plaque above the intricate brickwork of the outfall had told us it had been built in 1884, and gave us Nottingham’s Latin motto—“Vivit Post Funera Virtus,” or “Virtue Outlives Death.” The tunnel had been built with care and pride, and a measure of that is the fact that the grade is still even, with no sinkage or buckling of the floor. As the tunnel slowly sloped upward, the water became shallower, until it was just an ankle-high fast-moving stream coursing down the center of the tunnel. Occasionally, we passed openings to smaller brick tunnels. From its inception, the culvert had been intended to carry storm water—but as with almost all older storm water drains, it would also carry any overflow from the sewage system. The lower half of the tunnel openings we passed were blocked with a dam. As long as the sewage didn’t rise above the dam it stayed out of the culvert, but if it rose too high then the excess would flow over the barrier and into this tunnel.
    After about a half-mile of walking, the tunnel turned perfectly round, a brick tube maybe twelve feet in diameter, which would slowly shrink as we went further upstream. Dark, glassy bricks lined the bottom third of the tunnel to resist the punishing flow of water. Higher up, the bricks were lighter in color and looked much more like standard building bricks. All of the brickwork was still immaculate, despite being over a century old. The vitreous bricks underfoot were wet and incredibly slippery, and I fell once with a noise that echoed through the tunnel.

NOTTINGHAM: ST. ANN’S WELL AND SEWERAGE

2009-03-23T06:36:00.000-07:00

    St. Ann’s Well itself was a much-loved site. In the 17th and 18th centuries it was about a mile from the town limits, which helped the water stay clean. Writing in 1641, a local historian described it:
This Well is all Summer long much frequented, and there are but few fair Days between March and October, in which some Company or other of the Town….use not to fetch a walk to this Well, either to dine or sup, or both…. and when any of the Town have their Friends come to them, they have given them no welcome, unless they entertain them at this Well.
    By the 18th century, the spring was protected by a hut with stone walls and a tiled roof. Though it was officially named after a nearby chapel dedicated to St. Ann, the well was also known as Robin Hood’s Well. The Public House next to the well had its own attractions for fans of the famous outlaw: “Robin Hood’s Chair,” a battered wicker chair that visitors could sit in, along with a hat and a bow that the owners of the Public House “affirm[ed] to have been the famous Robber’s Property.”
    Though St. Ann’s Well was a well-loved attraction, the stream from it became more and more polluted with sewage as the city grew. Records show that the city had maintained the Beck’s channel as far back as the 15th century, hiring laborers at three pennies a day to clean out the refuse that collected in the ditch. After nearly four centuries of maintaining it this way, it was roofed over for the first time sometime between 1833 and 1872. But heavy rain could cause the small ditch to back up and flood the road next to it, and the undrained sewage exacerbated the repeated outbreaks of cholera in the 19th century.
    In 1872, a Sewerage Board was created to deal with the sanitation issues plaguing the city. “As various sewers in the area were at that time discharging their contents direct into these rivers and other water-courses,” explained one of Nottingham’s city engineers, “the necessity for the formation of the Board will be readily understood.” Among their tasks was to build a new, larger culvert for the Beck.
    It was this 19th century culvert through which we walked now. The engineers had done their job well. Though the final years of the 19th century were still plagued by terrible labor conditions and disease outbreaks throughout Northern England’s industrial towns, urban sewerage and water supply engineering like this tunnel were the foundation of a hugely important fifty-year decline in mortality rates, which had begun with the passage of England’s first Public Health Act in 1848. By effectively draining sewage from Nottingham, this tunnel we were in had, without any exaggeration, saved thousands of lives that would have otherwise been lost to water-borne diseases. Virtue outlives death, indeed.

    We didn’t get all the way to the original St. Ann’s Well. The tunnel shrank until we had to walk in a crouch, and then shrank more until we had to crawl. I think we were about a half-mile from the original source when we were forced to turn around.
    Looking at surface maps and tracing our route, we found that we had walked and waded for about two miles through the tunnel. Originally the entire stream hadn’t been over a mile and a half long, but re-routing the outfall to the Trent when the Leen was diverted had almost doubled the length of the Beck Burn.
    We came out of the tunnel in the middle of Nottingham, through a rusty hatchway in the sidewalk between a busy roadway and a church that had been (accidentally) constructed over the culvert tunnel in the late 1890s. Somehow the church architects had forgotten about the Beck Burn’s tunnel (even though the Beck Burn’s nearness was the reason, in 1833, that the church had purchased the site as an additional graveyard for Cholera victims). An emergency system of iron braces—essentially a cage around the tunnel—was laid into the ground to support the weight of the stone church over the stream’s culvert.
    I thought the Church’s construction stood as a good example of why it’s important for a city to remember what lies beneath the surface. But as we crawled out of the ground, wet and dirty as we emerged next to a busy road, the utterly baffled looks we got from the people who saw us suggested that few, if any, knew they were passing over one of the once-pellucid streams that had nurtured the town in its very earliest days.

SHEFFIELD: BACKGROUND

2009-03-23T06:35:00.001-07:00

    In Sheffield, we visited the River Sheaf, which runs underground beneath the city center in a series of 19th-century stone culverts. Sheffield was founded at the confluence of the Sheaf and the larger River Don, and it was a world center of metallurgy, steel production, cutlery, and armaments well into the 20th century.
    The city’s metalworking industry developed the two most important processes behind the modern steel industry: the “crucible steel” process in 1740, and the Bessemer Converter in 1856. Stainless steel was invented here in 1912. The city manufactured decorative metalwork and household wares as well, especially after a Sheffield cutler invented an early method of silver-plating (“Sheffield Plate”) in 1742.
    When visiting the town in 1762, the writer Daniel Defoe wrote:
This town of Sheffield is very populous and large, the streets narrow, and the houses dark and black, occasioned by the continued smoke of the forges, which are always at work: Here they make all sorts of cutlery-ware, but especially that of edged-tools, knives, razors, axes, & and nails….
    These knives had been the core of the city’s production since the Middle Ages, and had made Sheffield famous throughout England and the world. In the 14th-century Canterbury Tales, one of the characters in the Reeve’s Tale carries a “Sheffeld thwitel,” or knife. Sir Walter Scott lived four centuries later, but he set his novel Ivanhoe in the 12th century and the first character in the book carries “…one of those long, broad, sharp-pointed, and two-edged knives, with a buck’s-hoon handle, which were fabricated in the neighborhood, and bore even at this early period the name of a Sheffield whittle.” Sheffield knives came the U.S. as well. (As did the word “whittle,” now used as a verb.) The humble Barlow knife, oft considered an American classic, was invented in Sheffield by Obadiah Barlow in 1670. Bowie knives were invented by the American Colonel Jim Bowie—but within a few years of his invention, Sheffield was producing most of the Bowie knives sold in America.
    The River Sheaf and its smaller neighboring streams provided the power behind this long tradition of metalsmithing. Neither the Sheaf nor the Don were big enough to navigate with a cargo-carrying boat of any large size (although smaller boats on the Don provided vital transportation of raw materials for the knifemakers), but the Sheaf was fast-flowing, with steep grades that could drive waterwheels. Smaller tributaries of the Sheaf flowed equally swiftly, and small water-powered mills were built in the area as early as the 12th century. In the centuries leading to the Industrial Revolution (and for many years after), waterwheels moved bellows, powered forge hammers, and drove the machines that rolled and cut metal for these knives and tools.
    Most importantly for Sheffield’s development, water was able to power grinding mills, which was a necessity for any serious cutlery manufacturing. (Cutlery includes edged weapons and tools like hoes, shovels, and axes as well as knives and tableware.) Without waterpower from the Sheaf or Porter Brook, Sheffield could not have developed the early industries and technologies that allowed the city to become a leader in the industrial production of metal products into the modern age.

    To get into the tunnel of the Sheaf, we followed the old course of the Porter Brook, which had once been a long and winding stream that flowed from across the city to merge with the Sheaf. The little stream had been altered almost beyond recognition, however, by mills seeking to use its water for power in the 18th century. Millraces had re-channeled the water into a series of millponds that only vaguely followed the Brook’s original path. Now the remnants of the stream—an ankle-high trickle—flows through concrete troughs and into its own tunnel, and then merges with the Sheaf underground. John, Chris and I followed the water until we came to the concrete mouth of the Porter’s culvert. Turning on headlamps and tugging up our waders, we plunged into the darkness.

SHEFFIELD: THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

2009-03-23T06:35:00.000-07:00

    When we came to the confluence of Porter Brook and the Sheaf, we were also directly underneath the Midland train station. This had been one of the first sections of the river to be covered over, when the station was built in 1870. The station was widely hailed as an engineering masterpiece for utilizing the site over the river, as this meant supporting the culvert against the weight of heavy trains. Looking around, we found ourselves in wide, low tunnel, divided into three channels, with each channel about twelve feet wide and a little taller than my head. Between the channels a series of heavy rough-stone arches looked like they would hold for the next thousand years. But the water level seemed low. The stream mostly flowed in just one or two of the channels, and we were able to walk dry in the third.
    By the time Midland Station was built, the city had already turned its back on the Sheaf, though the river was not yet buried. A century before, in 1770, there had been 133 “wheels” (the general name for a factory/mill building with multiple workrooms), which used waterpower to run 896 “troughs,” or individual grinding-wheel workstations. The first steam-powered grinding wheel in Sheffield was installed in 1786, however, and by 1840 the power sources were evenly split. By 1865 there were 132 steam-powered factories and few, if any, that used waterpower.
    A copy of a map from the 1890s showed us the factories and mills that had existed close to where we now stood, still at the confluence of the Porter and the Sheaf. There had been over a dozen cutlery, gilding, and silver plate factories within a five-block radius, places like the Pond Hill Works, the Clarence Works, and the Queens Plate and Cutlery Works. There were massive steel and iron mills: the Scandanavian Steel Works, the Soho Rolling Mills, the Central Hammer Works, and others. Larger than anything else, and closest to where now stood, there had been the giant Albion Saw Mills and the Sheaf Saw Mills. Their timber yards abutted the railroad tracks of Midland Station, and like the station the yards had been built over the underground Sheaf. Though next to the Sheaf, these factories and sawmills had all been powered by steam.
    Almost all of these business had sprung up in that heady time between about 1819, when the Sheffield Canal was opened to provide a navigable waterway along the River Don, and 1890, when the city had become the undeniable center of the world’s steel and cutlery industries. The population growth during this period had been extremely rapid, from about 65,000 in 1819 when the Canal opened, to 161,475 in the 1851 census just thirty years later. By 1900, the city was close to a half-million, nearly the same as the population today.

    Just as in the other industrializing cities of Britain, the downside of this fantastic growth was absolutely terrible conditions for the workers. Grinders suffered from silicosis and tuberculosis, and at mid-century nearly sixty percent of fork, needle, razor, and file grinders would die before age thirty. Children worked ten or twelve hour days in many factories, and an 1862 “Children’s Employment Commission on the Metal Manufactures of the Sheffield District” records witnesses such as William Henry Widdicombe, age 8, grinder; Thomas Darwin, age 6, grinder; Maria Lansley, age 9, hand-fly operator; Henry Kay, age 10, riveter; Joseph Broadhead, age 10, saw-glazer; and Sarah Ann Tingle, age 9, fork-filer.
    Concomitant with the factory work were terrible, overcrowded living conditions for the workers. This translated into terrible pollution of the Sheaf, as it became both a trash dump and the primary sewer for the dense worker housing along its shores. A doctor speaking at an 1886 commission on contagious diseases complained that the river was “...filthy and disgusting,” and went on to describe what he’d found in the old millponds (or lakes) and in the river itself:
The bed of the River Sheaf, the bottom of the lakes, and the ground occupied by the mill reservoir, are extensively covered with black, decomposing mud, much of which still consists of putrefying organic matter; and, taking note of the dead dogs and cats which may be seen there….the whole appearance of the river and its tributaries, as they pass between and below the houses of Sheffield, is abominable. Offensive gases are constantly escaping in bubbles from the filthy deposit…
    Other doctors at the conference agreed that “[t]he state of the Porter and the Sheaf is a disgrace to the civilization of the nineteenth century.”   However, with no real possibility of cleaning up the river, their only serious proposal was to make a covered sewer around the last two miles of the Sheaf, between the neighborhood of Heeley and the confluence of the Don.    The full length of this proposed culvert was never built, but the doctors would doubtless be gratified to know that by the early twentieth century, a little more than a mile of the river had been almost completely covered over.

SHEFFIELD: SHEFFIELD BEFORE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

2009-03-23T06:34:00.001-07:00

    We walked along in a darkness alleviated only by our headlamps. The water was still shallow, never occupying more than two of the three channels. The arched stonework was beautifully laid, though still of rough stones, and it felt to me like we were in the foundations of a cathedral. The thick stonework completely insulated us from the sounds of the city, and in this silence the trickling and gurgling of the water sounded loud.
    “It is no great tax on the imagination to divest the Sheffield of to-day of its furnaces, its rumbling rolling-mills, and its brick and mortar, and to clothe its sharp crests and undulating hollows with their primaeval timber and pristine verdure,” a writer opined in The English Illustrated Magazine in 1884. As I walked along, I tried to imagine that I was walking alongside the full, unpolluted river that Sweyn, the Saxon lord of Sheffield Manor, had looked upon in the 11th Century AD.
    “….the Sheaf in those days was an unspoiled, very charming stream with plenty of fish in it, and the banks edged with flowers,” I had read in a book called The Making of Sheffield.   The fish had always been so plentiful, in fact, that even into the 19th century some apprentice indenture contracts specified that the master could not make the apprentice eat salmon more often than twice a week. The water that flowed next to me seemed clean enough, with no more refuse than is expected in an urban stream, but I was completely unable to imagine fish in it.
    I couldn’t imagine what the river would look like with “primaeval timber and pristine verdure,” either, and so after the trip I looked at old maps of Sheffield to try to see how the river and town had changed. A map from 1780 showed me the Sheaf in a nearly-natural state: far from being covered over, the river was crossed by only a single bridge. The Porter Brook fed two small ponds for watermills—the “Forge Pond,” the water from which went to power grindstones and tilt hammers, and the “Mill Pond,” which powered a mill for grinding grain.
    A map from 1832, fifty years later, showed surprisingly few differences. As on the 1780 map, the industrial district seemed to contain only a few mills clustered around the two central millponds. Most of the forges and grinding mills at the time would still have been located in small hamlets outside of town, with a large workshop/mill building employing a dozen people, and with various machinery all powered by a single waterwheel. In a grinding mill, for example, one waterwheel would power six to ten “troughs,” or individual grinding-stations; at each station, the grinder would side or lie in a wooden framework that suspended him over the six-foot-diameter stone grinding wheel.
    By 1855, maps began to show an inchoate version of the modern city layout Porter Brook was no longer visible, the water channeled instead through a series of millponds and underground millraces. Three bridges cross the Sheaf in the downtown area, and though the factories and millponds had proliferated since 1832, they remained consolidated in a small area, only about a half-mile square. Just to the south, an expanse of land labeled “The Farm” began around Granville Square, where today’s culvert around the Sheaf ends. In the contemporary city, this landmark is memorialized with a two-block-long street called Farm Road.

SHEFFIELD: TO THE RIVER DON

2009-03-23T06:34:00.000-07:00

    The tunnel changed shape and size several times, marking different eras of construction of the culvert. All were stone or brickwork. Above, Sheaf Street followed our exact route; most of the street had been laid directly over the culvert. Close to the Don, we were now in an older area of the city, where some of the first millponds had been. Appropriately, the neighborhood that was above us is named Pond Hill, and nearby is Pond Street.
    The tunnels under Pond Hill were the largest we’d yet seen, and they were made of finished stone instead of the rough blocks we’d seen earlier. I estimated that the arched channels are about twenty feet high. The Brobdingnagian proportions seemed ludicrous when compared with the twelve-inch-deep stream that flowed past our boots. Incredibly, the tunnel expanded again as we came into sight of the outlet to the River Don: a truly vast chamber, with an arched ceiling that made me think of being in a cathedral or a stadium. I later found out that the masonry arch that loomed over us had originally been the Canal Bridge, which had connected the city center (just to the west of the Sheaf) to the Sheffield Canal basin (just to the east of the Sheaf).
    The water has not always been so low. On the night of March 11th, 1864, heavy rains caused Sheffield’s new water-supply dam to break a few miles east of town. Nearly three million tons of water roared down the Loxley River valley, into the Don, and through the center of town. Between 240 and 290 people were killed. The London Times reported that sleeping residents were drowned “like rats in a hole.” The water was high enough near the mouth of the Sheaf (where it connects with the Don) that children were drowned in their second-story bedrooms, and the next day corpses were found stuck in a tree and lodged at the top of a haystack.
    Maybe this had been on the mind of the builders of the tunnel when they made it so grand. In fact, the Sheaf has continued to flood occasionally, and in sections where its channel is not quite as large, it has burst its banks and flooded nearby areas. Just a few months prior to our visit, on June 25, 2007, heavy rains had caused both the Sheaf and the Don to swell over their banks; a 13-year old boy was wept away and drowned by the Sheaf.
    The River Don was the end of our journey, and we climbed along the waterline and up the riverbank, streaming water. I was happy that we’d come out here; just about where we climbed up the riverbank, I knew, there had once been the clearing that gave Sheffield its name—a field along the Sheaf (or Shef) River, where a Saxon village developed. After the Norman conquest of 1066 AD, a castle had been built on the same spot, and just as the Sheaf is below the contemporary city, fragments of the old castle still exist beneath today’s Castle Market.
    In fact Sheffield history can be traced back much further even than that. The very oldest evidence of human-built dwellings in England—remnants of a hut from 10,000 years ago—was discovered in a region in northern Sheffield. The residents of these earliest built structures doubtless drank and fished in these same rivers and streams, and perhaps it would be possible find out enough to determine just how their community interacted with rivers and other still-extant parts of their environment. But I was satisfied already. The River Sheaf has flowed through all of Sheffield’s history, and with it as a connecting thread we had already explored nearly a thousand years of the city’s past. That’s plenty for one day. We packed up our gear and set off to walk back to the car—aboveground, and fully in the present.

BRADFORD: BACKGROUND & BRITAIN’S WOOL TRADE

2009-03-23T06:32:00.001-07:00

It’s in the very nature of this green and pleasant land
you’re bound to find a watercourse runs very close at hand—
our rivers and canals are full of good ol’ English rain,
but if you come to Bradford you will look for one in vain!
From somewhere up near Allerton, I tumble down to town
but the pleasure ends near Four Lane Ends as I’m shoved underground.
And what goes on as I flow on
nobody gives a damn
Instead of being a chuckling stream
a sewer’s what I am!
Lyrics from “Bradford Beck,” composed and sung by Eddie Lawler, 2002.

Bradford grew incredibly during the Industrial Revolution, exploding from a population of just 13,264 in the 1801 census to 104,000 by 1850. Historically a center for Yorkshire-region wool, it had started to become the national center for woolens and worsteds in the 18th century as new mechanical processing replaced the hand-spinning techniques that were still guild-protected in the older wool centers to the south. As steam power began to be used around 1800, Bradford and its neighbor Leeds also found themselves to be perfectly positioned “where the coal supply of south Yorkshire [met] the wool supply of north Yorkshire.” By 1819, Bradford was considered the “centre and principal seat of the stuff trade in the kingdom.”
The wool trade continued to centralize around Bradford and Leeds throughout the 19th century, each specializing in certain types of production—Bradford’s specialty was made clear by its nickname “Worstedopolis.” As the processing centers for most of Britain’s wool, it would be hard to overstate the importance of these two cities to the economy of the Empire. “Only light and frivolous persons,” one historian wrote sternly, “will consider wool as too slight a basis for the foundation stone of the empire on which the sun never sets.” Wool had long been the country’s chief export, and poetic descriptions from prior centuries had called it “the flower and strength and revenue and blood of England” and “eminently the foundation of English riches.” Wool from the British Isles had been valued on the Continent since Roman days, and since the 14th century the official seat of the Lord Chancellor of England has been the ‘Woolsack,’ quite literally a sack filled with wool as a symbol the nation’s trade and wealth. Through the rest of the 19th century and into the 20th, Bradford would have a key role in producing that wealth.

BRADFORD: PREPARING FOR THE BRADFORD BECK

2009-03-23T06:32:00.000-07:00

   To see what we could of Bradford’s underlying history, John, Chris, and I hoped to visit the Bradford Beck, a river that now runs underneath Bradford in a series of culverts and bypasses. The river flows toward Bradford in a nearly straight line from the west, curves in a U-shape beneath the very heart of the city, and then meanders north-east to join the River Aire, about four miles away. Along the way it passes nearly underneath the 19th-century City Hall building, and flows along the side of the 15th-century Bradford Cathedral.
   We met with Will, a Bradford native, who would guide us through the Beck. “It’s not as big as Sheffield’s tunnels,” he told us, “but it’s a lot longer. It goes about six or seven kilometers underground.”
   With Will, we had two cars, which was convenient in allowing us to leave one car at our exit, instead of having to walk back wet to one car through sub-freezing weather. (It would be much warmer than that underground, protected from the wind and warmed by the city above.) We deposited the car and drove back toward our entrance, where we suited up with hip- or chest-high waders, jackets, gloves, hats and headlamps, a carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulfide gas meter, and more.
   In the parking lot where were getting dressed, our preparations seemed a little ludicrous for what was, essentially, a walk through a city. We’d never be more than a few dozen linear feet distant from busy roads and sidewalks where people in normal clothes went about their lives without worrying about backup headlamps, spare batteries, or gas meters. Nonetheless, I was enjoying our preparations. They helped to accent the fact that we weren’t simply visiting the Bradford that everyone else sees. Venturing into this unfrequented and usually unseen layer of the urban fabric, we would indeed be cut off from the surface, and the fact that our destination was so removed from the contemporary, aboveground city made it all the easier for me to imagine that we were actually journeying into the city’s past.
   When we were finally ready, we climbed down an embankment and into shallow but fast-moving water in a wide open-cut channel. We followed it downstream, and soon came to the beginning of the main culvert under Ingleby Road. We were under the eastern neighborhood of Four Lane Ends; we would not come back aboveground until we had passed Canal Road near Frizinghall, having covered more than half of the distance between the Bradford city center and the Bradford Beck’s outfall into the River Aire.

BRADFORD: WOOL PRODUCTION AND BRADFORD’S EARLY HISTORY

2009-03-23T06:31:00.000-07:00

    Between 1066, when the De Laci (or De Lacy) patriarch had come to the country with William the Conqueror, and 1311, when the last heir of the family died, the entire region under which we walked had been the estate of the De Lacis. The region was conducive to sheep farming and many of their tenants and burgesses raised sheep. In the first recorded use of the Bradford Beck to power wool-processing machinery, the De Lacis built a water-powered fulling mill, of which their many sheep-herding tenants and burgesses were permitted free use.     Fulling was a difficult process of agitating and beating wool cloth to both lock the fibers together and to clean them; it was a vital finishing step for cloth woven or knitted from yarn, and was even more important in the process of making more primitive felted cloth.
    The labor-saving water mill was the first step in the centralization of the region’s wool productions. Along with a mill for grinding grain (also built by the De Lacis, and powered by a waterwheel on the Beck), it was the focal point for a slow agglomeration of sheep-farmers and others into a village that would eventually grow into the world’s largest center for processing wool. By the early 16th century, Bradford had already begun to grow on the basis of its wool and cloth production. “[It is] a pretty, quick, market town….It standeth much by clothing,” the writer John Leland wrote in his Itinerary after a visit in 1536.
    In many respects, Bradford was ideally located in terms of its natural resources. The Bradford Beck, though the largest, was not the only stream serving the town; there were more than a dozen tributaries that fed into it, ranging in size from the large Bowling Beck to small streams known as “sykes.”    As in Nottingham, this plethora of watercourses assisted in irrigation and in raising livestock, and because they were generally fast-flowing, with large vertical drops from the surrounding hills, these streams also easily served to power watermills. The many streams also helped in washing wool, a process that required constantly moving water to carry away the large deposits of grease, lanolin, and dirt that accumulated on sheep. More importantly, the water of the region was particularly soft, which was ideal for washing wool. Along with these natural advantages, “the persevering industry of the inhabitants, and the abundant supplies of water-power, of coal, and of building stone….maintained Bradford in its position as one of the great manufacturing towns of West Riding,” wrote the historian Thomas Baines about 17th- and early 18th-century Bradford.
    However, Bradford lacked a navigable watercourse. The Beck was rapid but shallow, despite its many tributaries. Leeds was less than ten miles away from Bradford, but it was connected to the coast by the large River Aire, and this was probably a factor in the huge success of its cloth market—described by Daniel Defoe in 1724 as “a Prodigy of its Kind, and perhaps not to be equaled in the World.”
    Doubtless inspired by the success of its neighbor, Bradford began two ambitious projects in the 1770s: the construction of Piece Hall, where weavers and merchants could buy and sell “pieces” of finished cloth, and the Bradford Canal, which would connect the city to the River Aire and to the Liverpool & Leeds Canal. Piece Hall, finished in 1773, was one of the first dedicated marketplace buildings of its kind in the country, though soon similar venues would be built in many other cities as well. Even more important was the Bradford Canal, completed in 1774. It ran four miles to the Aire, and was probably the most vital infrastructure investment that Bradford could have made for its future. Via the Aire, the canal connected to the Humber Estuary on the east coast, and in 1816, the completion of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal connected it with the Liverpool’s port on the west coast as well. The water of the Bradford Beck was diverted into the canal to fill it, and the cheap waterborne shipping the canal provided—on Bradford Beck water—was in a large part what paved the way for the explosion of population and industry over the next seventy-five years.

BRADFORD: STEAM AND SEWAGE

2009-03-23T06:30:00.001-07:00

    Where we had first entered the culvert, it had been constructed of large stone blocks, with a flat floor and a rounded stone arch at the top. The shape and composition of the tunnel varied widely as we waded along, however, ranging from rounded brick conduits that looked like Victorian-era sewers to stone-walled, flat-ceilinged sections that had clearly been open channels before being covered. In some areas the stream ran through foundations of old buildings, which may or may not have still existed on the surface. Shafts of sunlight found us once or twice; some of the older industrial buildings had been built over the Beck before it was completely covered, and when one of them was torn down and replaced with a smaller building, small gaps were left. Side channels connected to the main tunnel occasionally, either outlets for anonymous, culverted tributary streams, or overflow outfalls for the sewer system. Though I couldn’t identify it, I knew that one of the inflowing channels we saw was the Goit, a now-culverted bypass channel that served as a millrace for watermills from as early as the 14th century well into the 19th.
    Steam power had begun to replace waterpower in Bradford in 1798, when the first factory powered by a steam engine was set up on Edmund Street, just a few hundred feet south of where we walked through the tunnel.    (The first attempt to bring in steam power for a mill had been in 1793, but a conservative group of merchants had brought suit against the mill owner to block the installation of the engine, worrying that “the smoke from the engine furnace would be a nuisance.” ) At the time there was still only limited mechanization in the wool industry; fulling was done with water or steam-powered machinery, of course, but the 1801 the census of Bradford recorded only one spinning mill in operation—most was still done by hand.
    By 1841, however, there were thirty-eight worsted spinning mills in Bradford itself, seventy in the region, and an incredible two-thirds of all England’s wool was being processed in or near the city. By 1850 the city had 129 mills—now running on steam—employing thousands of workers, and drawing labor from throughout Europe. The result was an eight-fold increase over the 1801 population in a period of just fifty years, with over 100,000 people in the city by mid-century; this would double again to over 200,000 by the end of the century.
    As with other industrial boom-towns, the surge in population turned the town’s streets and rivers into open sewers. As early as 1837, a sanitary surveyor declared Bradford to be “the most filthy town I visited," full of “open cesspits, pig styes and slaughterhouses and effluent-laden watercourses.” The greasy wastes from the wool industry were a particular problem, and the nature of the Beck changed almost overnight. Residents of the town could still remember catching trout in a sparkling stream when they’d been boys, but by 1840 both the Beck and the Aire had been turned into “the receptacles of all kinds of filth, and tippings, and the trout, graylings, eels and tench, were exterminated.”
    By the 1850s, it was even worse. “This brook at present runs the colour of ink,” declared a reporter for London’s Morning Chronicle about the Beck. The same waters fed the Bradford Canal, and the industrial pollution actually made the waterway flammable. Local boys would light it on fire for fun, and according to testimony at an 1867 commission on river pollution, the flames would rise six feet and would run along the water “for many yards, like a will-o-the-wisp.” Canal boats nearby would be “so enveloped in flame as to frighten persons on board.”
    Even more dangerous than fire or industrial pollution was disease. “[L]ike a filthy open sewer, [the canal] runs along the border of the town, breathing pestilence and death,” testified another resident in 1866.   This was hardly an exaggeration. As happened with all cities of the era whose expanded population created irredeemably unsanitary conditions, cholera, typhoid, and other diseases were spread through tainted water. Significant cholera epidemics had already occurred in 1832, 1849, 1853, 1854 and 1856. Partly because of diseases, the life expectancy was the lowest in the region, with an average of only about eighteen years. Less than one-third of the children of textile workers would live past the age of fifteen.
    In 1867, the city prohibited the use of Bradford Beck water in the canal, which soon ran dry. The Beck’s only real utility to the town was now as a main sewer, and in that capacity the stream served as the depository for all of the town’s waste. Even when sewer pipes had first been installed in Bradford, in the mid-19th century, they merely dumped the (untreated) sewage directly into the Beck, to the deep unhappiness of downstream landowners on both the Beck and the Aire. In 1869 one of these landowners, a William Stansfield of Esholt Hall, obtained an injunction mandating that Bradford treat its sewage before releasing it into the river. The first treatment plant proved to be a failure as the grease from the wool mills made the sewage exceptionally difficult to treat, but continued injunctions forced the city to continue investing in treatment facilities. Ironically, in 1899, the city took over William Stansfield’s Esholt estate on the Aire for a new treatment plant, and the Esholt Sewage Works continues to be Bradford’s main treatment plant today. In the 1920s, the three-mile Esholt Sewage Disposal tunnel was dug to directly connect the city’s sewer system to the Esholt works, and the Bradford Beck was finally freed of its sewerage burden. By this time, however, the river had already been completely culverted through the center of town, and so few fully appreciated the change that had taken place.

BRADFORD: AT THE END AND THE BEGINNING

2009-03-23T06:30:00.000-07:00

    By now, the tunnel we had come through had varied from all the way from 20th-century concrete with rusted steel girders supporting brick-arch roofs to sections that seemed drawn from the Neolithic era, with rough blocks forming the side walls and huge rectangular slabs of quarried stone stretching ten feet across from wall to wall to form the top of the culvert. We knew we were under Centenary Square at the heart of Bradford, however, when we came out into a magnificent chamber of stone-work arches. It looked like the crypt of a remarkably beautiful cathedral, though in fact the Bradford Cathedral was still a short distance ahead. Instead, we were almost directly under Bradford’s ornate Victorian-era City Hall. In addition the beautiful construction of this underground room—one of the first sections to be covered in the late 19th century—another landmark that showed our location was the confluence of our tunnel with another that contained an almost equally powerful flow of water. This was the Bowling Beck, the Bradford Beck’s largest tributary.
    The combined flow of water, we quickly realized, was powerful enough that it could actually move us slowly along even when we stood still, with both boots planted; there was not enough traction on the slippery floor to resist the push of the current. This made our wading more difficult, and when we reached a wider section we decided to rest along the raised stone path at the side. Small, fibrous tree roots had infiltrated through the rotten mortar between stones, and stalactite formations showed the age of the tunnel. We were approximately next Bradford Cathedral, the oldest building in Bradford. This meant that we were also at Bradford’s origin, as the “broad ford” that gave both the city and the river their names is generally agreed to have been just at the spot where the Beck passes the Cathedral. Somewhere very close to where we sat was the ancient site of the crossing, the original center of Bradford.
    Parts of the Cathedral date back to the 15th century, when it was still the Parish Church of St. Peter, and the 15th century church replaced another from the 14th century or before. Fragments of Saxon crosses have been found on the same site, meaning that some sort of settlement had existed here since at least the 10th century, and probably much earlier than that.
    I looked at the water flowing over my boots. For more than a millennium, people had been right here with this same flow of water, dipping their feet in it, drinking from it, fouling it with waste, wading through it, fishing in it, washing in it.
    In the light of my headlamp, it still sparkled.

SOURCES: SHEFFIELD

2009-03-23T06:29:00.001-07:00

“Children’s Employment Commission on the Metal Manufactures of the Sheffield District.” 1862. Online at: http://youle.info/history/fh_material/childrens_employment_1862.txt

“What are the best means of preventing the spread of Contagious Disease?” Statements of Dr Stevenson Macadam, Edinburgh, and Dr J.C. Hall, Sheffield. Report of the proceedings of the "Conference on Temperance Legislation, London, 1886.” Edited by George Woodyatt Hastings, Andrew Edgar, Charles Wager Ryalls, Edwin Pears. Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science.

Baines, Edward. History, Directory & Gazeteer, of the County of York. Published 1822; sold by Hurst and Robinson.

Baines, Thomas. Yorkshire, Past and Present. 1877.

BBC News. Online at http://news.bbc.co.uk. Articles: “Three dead following flood chaos,” June 26 2007; “Two die in Sheffield flood chaos,” June 25, 2007

BarlowGeneology.com. “The Barlow Knife.” Online at http://www.barlowgenealogy.com/Edson/barlowknife.html

Chaucer, Geoffrey. Canterbury Tales: Reeve’s Tale. Excerpt:
Ay by his belt he baar a long panade,
And of a swerd ful trenchant was the blade.
A joly poppere baar he in his pouche;
Ther was no man, for peril, dorste hym touche.
A Sheffeld thwitel baar he in his hose.

Children’s Employment Commission on the Metal Manufactures of the Sheffield District, 1862, referenced at http://youle.info/history/fh_material/childrens_employment_1862.txt

Defoe, Daniel. A tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain, divided into circuits or journies (London, 1726), Letter 8, Part 3: South and West Yorkshire.

Department Town & Regional Planning research group of the Sheffield Centre for Geographic Information and Spatial Analysis (SCGISA), at the University of Sheffield. “The Changing Face of Sheffield.” Accessed online at http://www.shef.ac.uk/~scgisa/

Domesday Book, 1086. The full reference to Sheffield (translated): [At] Attercliffe and Sheffield, two manors, Sweyn had five carucates of land [approximately 120 acres]. There may have been about three ploughs [=about 24 oxen, or three teams of 8]. This land is said to have been the inland demesne [domain] of the manor of Hallam.

Great Britain Historical GIS Project.”Sheffield District: Total Population.” Part of A Vision of Britain Through Time. Online at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield#Population_change

Hunter, Joseph. Hallamshire. The History and Topography of the Parish of Sheffield in the County of York, Chapter III. Published by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones. London 1819. Online at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hallamshire._The_History_and_Topography_of_the_Parish_of_Sheffield_in_the_County_of_York

Illustrated London News. “BURSTING OF THE BRADFIELD RESERVOIR, NEAR SHEFFIELD. — TWO HUNDRED LIVES LOST.” Saturday, March 19, 1864, (No. 1250, Vol. XLIV), online at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~mossvalley/mv2/sheffield-flood.html

Illustrated London News. “THE SHEFFIELD CALAMITY.” Saturday, March 19, 1864, (No. 1250, Vol. XLIV), online at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~mossvalley/mv2/sheffield-flood.html

Lee, Chris. “The Porter Brook Home Page: Old Maps of the Porter Brook.” Online at: http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~leebase/Pages/Old%20Maps.htm

Map: 1890 OS Map, accessed through Sheffield Urban Contextual Databank (SUCoD), The University of Sheffield, School of Architecture, 2001-2003; http://sucod.shef.ac.uk/

Map: Gosling, “A Plan of Sheffield,” 1736

Orwell, George. Diary, dated March 5 1936. Online at http://www.chrishobbs.com/orwellsheffield1936.htm

Palmer, Henry J. “Cutlery and Cutlers at Sheffield.” The English Illustrated Magazine, August 1884

Pollard, S. The History of Labour in Sheffield. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1959. P. 53. Chapter 2 online at: http://youle.info/history/Pollard/Chapter_2.html

Scott, Walter. Ivanhoe: A Romance. Reprinted by Signet Classic, 2001.

Stainton, J.H. The Making of Sheffield, 1865-1914.

White, William. History, gazetteer, and directory, of the west-riding of Yorkshire. 1837.

Williamson, William R. “BOWIE KNIFE.” The Handbook of Texas Online. Online at: http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/BB/lnb1.html

SOURCES: NOTTINGHAM

2009-03-23T06:29:00.000-07:00

“Nottingham Chamberlain’s Account Book, listing the costs, repairs, and expenses made by John Coste and John Howett, chamberlains of the town of Nottingham, from 29 September 1485 to the same date in 1486.” Nottinghamshire Archives. Transcription in: Stevenson, W.H., ed. Records of the Borough of Nottingham. London and Nottingham, 1883, vol. 3. (Original language was Middle English; translation available at http://www.trytel.com/~tristan/towns/florilegium/community/cmfabr11.html)

Aldous, R.C., Assoc. M.Inst. C.E., Deputy City Engineer, Nottingham. “Nottingham Main Drainage Works.” In The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, 1936; 57; 100; DOI: 10.1177/146642403605700206; online at http://rsh.sagepub.com.

Deering, Charles. Nottinghamia Vetus Et Nova, or an Historical Account of the Ancient and Present State of the Town of Nottingham. Printed by and for G. Ayscough & T. Willington, Nottingham, 1751.

Diocesan Advisory Committee for the Care of Churches, Diocese of Southwell & Nottingham. “Church History Project Database: Nottingham St. Catherine.” Online at http://southwellchurches.nottingham.ac.uk/n10/hhistory.html

SOURCES: BRADFORD

2009-03-23T06:28:00.000-07:00

SOURCES: BRADFORD

"Address before the National association of wool manufacturers, at the first annual meeting in Philadelphia, Sept. 6, 1865,” by John L Hayes, Secretary. Published by John Wilson and Sons, Cambridge, MA, 1865. Online at http://www.archive.org/stream/addressbeforenat00hayeiala/addressbeforenat00hayeiala_djvu.txt

“Inquisition Post Mortem, on the death of Henry De Laci the last Earl of Lincoln, 1311, 5th Edward II” reproduced in: Baines, Thomas. Yorkshire, Past and Present. 1877, Vol 2. P. 251

“Sanitary Report by Mr. Smith of Deanston, 1837.” Referenced in Ginswick, Jules, Ed. Labor and the Poor in England and Wales: 1849-1851. Vol. 1. Routledge, 1983.

Baines, Thomas. Yorkshire, Past and Present. 1877.

City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council. “Bradford’s History.” Online at: http://www.bradford.gov.uk/leisure_and_culture/hobbies_and_interests/bradfords_history.htm

Clapp, B.W. An Environmental History of Britain. London, 1994.

Crosier, Pete. “The Victorian way of...death!” BBC. Online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/sense_of_place/hidden_death_3.shtml

Defoe, Daniel. A tour through the whole island of Great Britain: Divided into circuits or journeys. Printed for S. Birt, T. Osborne, 1748. P. 119.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911. “Wool, worsted and woollen manufactures.” Online at http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Wool,_worsted_and_woollen_manufactures

Garnett, Breedge. “Esholt: A suitable case for treatment!” BBC. Online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/sense_of_place/hidden_esholt_1.shtml

Ginswick, Jules, Ed. Labor and the Poor in England and Wales: 1849-1851. Vol. 1. Routledge, 1983.

James, John. Continuation and Additions to the History of Bradford, and Its Parish. 1866.

James, John. History of the Worsted Manufacture in England: From the Earliest Times; with Introductory Notices of the Manufacture Among the Ancient Nations, and During the Middle Ages. First published in 1857. Reprint: Routledge, 1968.

James, John. The History and Topography of Bradford, (in the County of York). 1841. Quoted in: Baines, Thomas. Yorkshire, Past and Present. 1877. Vol 2.

Lawler, Eddie. “Bradford Beck” (song.) Online at: http://www.eddie-lawler.co.uk/

Leland, John. Itinerary. First published approx. 1846. This modernized translation is quoted in: Yorkshire, Past and Present , by Thomas Baines, 1877, page 261.

Royal Commission (UK). The Pollution of Rivers. 1867.

Shaw, Dave. “Saltaire: A successful industrial township.” Part of “The Industrial Revolution and its social consequences.” BBC. Online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/legacies/work/england/bradford/article_1.shtml

Skempton, Sir Alec, Ed. The Biographical Dictionary of Civil Engineers in Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 1. Everyman Publishers plc in assoc. with English Heritage, London, 2001. ISBN 1-84159-047-9

Testimony of Angus Reach. Originally published in The Morning Chronicle (1849). Reprinted in Labour and the Poor in England and Wales, 1849-1851. J. Ginswick, Ed. Routledge, 1983. P. 175.

Tucker, Irwin St. John. A History of Imperialism. Published by Rand School of Social Science, New York, 1920.

Turner, J Horsfall. Ancient Bingley, or, Bingley, Its History and Scenery. Thomas Harrison and Sons, Bingley, Yorks, 1897.

Wood, Janet. “Hidden Water” (Song.) from Bradford: The Musical. Performed at the 2005 Bradford Festival.

Yorkshire History Pages, The. “West Yorkshire: Leeds and Bradford History.” Online at: http://www.northeastengland.talktalk.net/WestYorkshire.htm#BRADFORD

Article by Bill Wheeler & Josh Yaffa: "Urban Cowboys" on Good.is

2009-03-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

"Urban Cowboys"
by William Wheeler & Joshua Yaffa
GOOD Magazine online, 4/16/09
http://www.good.is/?p=14862

Into the Night: Night Photography Symposium at B&H

2009-03-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

I was recently invited to speak at a day-long symposium on night photography at B&H Photo in New York, organized by Jill Waterman (author of the recent book Night and Low Light Photography). Also on the panel were some very accomplished photographers, whose work I've admired in the past, including Tom Paiva, Mark Jeremko, Lance Keimig, Helen Garber, and Daryl-Ann Saunders. I felt very privileged to be included.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/find/eventDetails.jsp/id/342
Monday, March 9, 2009 | 10:30 AM - 4:30 PM

Photo courtesy of Tom Dowling/TomBrooklyn

NY Post: Notes from the Underground

2009-03-06T08:30:00.000-08:00

"Notes from the Underground," New York Post, 3/6/09
Story by Don Kaplan, photos by Steve Duncan
Had a great time working on this story with Don Kaplan, who writes a fascinating set of feature stories for the New York Post.

Article:
http://www.nypost.com/seven/03062009/entertainment/notes_from_the_underground_158320.htm

Photo Gallery:
http://www.nypost.com/photos/galleries/entertainment/pp_20090306_mole/photo01.htm

"Night Moves: Angles of View" @ Farmani Gallery, March 5-April 11 2009

2009-03-05T12:00:00.000-08:00

Four of my photos will be included in "Night Moves," a group show of night photography curated by Jill Waterman and Daryl-Ann Saunders. This is a two-part show taking place in two galleries at once: "Night Moves: Angles of View" in the Farmani Gallery and "Night Moves: Exploring the Horizon" at the Safe-T-Gallery in the same building.

Opening: Thursday March 5th, 6-8pm
At the Farmani Gallery in DUMBO, 111 Front Street, Suite 212, Brooklyn.
March 5 - April 11, 2009
Hours: Wed-Sat 12-6pm

Photos at Life Cafe, Bushwick, Brooklyn, through March 2009

2009-03-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

Some of my photos are on view at Life Cafe, an excellent bar/restaurant/cafe at 983 Flushing Avenue (at Central Avenue) in Bushwick, Brooklyn, near the Morgan Avenue L train stop. Good place for dinner or a weekend brunch, or just a quick beer. Come visit!

e-Oculus: Sewers Reveal Deep Topography Below

2009-02-24T12:00:00.000-08:00

Review of my slideshow at the Center for Architecture on 1/27/09, by Lisa Delgado in the 2/24/09 issue of e-Oculus (publication of the AIA New York).
http://www.aiany.org/eOCULUS/newsletter/?p=2405

The Architect's Newspaper Blog: Underground Man

2009-02-13T13:10:00.000-08:00

Review of slideshow at the Center For Architecture by Julia Galef:

http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/2009/02/12/nderground-man/

Welt Der Wunder, February 2009 (photo credits)

2009-02-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

Welt Der Wunder, February 2009 (German)
Article on underground NYC
Photo credits on five of the images used

Catasterist.com, review of AIA slideshow

2009-01-29T12:00:00.000-08:00

A nice review of my 1/27/09 slideshow for the AIA-NY at the Center for Architecture. Thanks Kirsten!
http://catasterist.com/2009/01/about-the-night-before-last/

Slideshow at the Center for Architecture, January 27 2009

2009-01-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

Thanks to all who came to my January 27th slideshow/lecture at the Center for Architecture, Building Over the Past: The Hidden Layers of the City.

The 100+ seats in the venue were completely filled, and I was flattered to see that some people were willing to stand through it as well. My deepest thanks to John Steigerwald for organizing the event; to Jesse Lazar and the Center for Architecture for hosting it; and to the AIA and all architects who came.

This was the first time I'd had the chance to present any of my photos from sewers and underground rivers in London, Rome, NYC, Newark, Buffalo, Hartford, and various cities in Northern England. I was very happy to have the chance to show these, although the slideshow went longer than I wanted, and I think that for future presentations this year I'll have to divide it into two talks: one focusing on urban waterways and the development of sewers and bridges, and the other on general urban underground layers.

I love sharing my work with an audience, and if you or your organization are interested in discussing the possibility of me doing a slideshow presentation in the upcoming year, please contact me.

New York Moon: Water of Manhattan

2009-01-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

The New York Moon's January 2009 edition involved the myth and reality of waterways in Manhattan's past. Their interactive map includes a couple of my photos to illustrate sites.

http://www.nymoon.com/pubs/water/systems/

Travel & Leisure: Coolest Underground Travel Spots

2008-12-12T12:00:00.000-08:00

"Coolest Underground Travel Spots"
By Jennifer Bain
Travel & Leisure online, December 12, 2008
None of my photos are in the article; I am only quoted.

http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/coolest-underground-travel-spots

Also carried on:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27929685/

Urban Unconscious: Photography Auction Gala

2008-11-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

Thank you to Miru Kim for including me in the November 1, 2008 auction/show, "Urban Unconscious."

http://nakedcityarts.com/urbanphoto.html

One Week in a Hospital - Hazards of exploring underground rivers & sewers

2008-10-22T12:55:00.000-07:00

Wading through an underground river last week, which still has the irregular, rocky bottom of a natural streambed, I slipped. As I went down I caught myself with my right hand. I wasn't wearing a glove, and as my hand plunged into the water in search of a hold I felt a shock. Yanking it out I felt something tear. Something-- metal, glass, or stone-- had pierced deep into my palm near the heel of my hand. The pain was incredible and I later learned it was because it had pierced the Carpel Tunnel, that bundle of nerves through the wrist, and had damaged the Ulnar nerve which controls the last two fingers.
The pain died down after a while but I still wanted to make sure it was OK. At the emergency room at the NYU Hospital Center, they took x-rays and said nothing was broken, but that even after cleaning there was some foreign material still embedded inside. "We'll suture it up loosely," said the resident, who I was pleased with at the time but who I now realize was a dangerous idiot. "Any dirt will be able to work its way out. It will be swollen and hurt tonight, but it should start getting better by tomorrow."

That was Monday. By Tuesday morning it was red and swollen and painful. By the time I got back to the hospital it was red and swollen to the elbow. By the time they officially checked me into the emergency room three hours later, it was red to the shoulder and I found that if I squeezed my grotesquely swollen wrist, pus would flow out of the wound on my palm.
"Stop that!" the ER nurse told me, but I felt like it was better out than in.
The pain was truly incredible, and it kept getting rapidly worse. By the time they got the hand surgeon down there, nasty streaks of infection were beginning to become visible on my chest as well.

They rushed me to surgery and cut open my hand and wrist to clean out the infection from its source. I was in-patient at the hospital for a week, on intense IV antibiotics. The surgeons removed the "foreign material" that had been in there, and upon culturing it found that the infection was three things:
Staph bacteria (occurs all over the place)
Enterobacter (bacteria often found in human feces)
Aeromonas Hydrophila (a hardy waterborne bacteria often found in leeches)

"It's exactly what we would have expected to find, knowing you were where you were when you got it," said one of the Infecious Diseases doctors, with a tone that I think showed both disapproval and a little awe. They don't often get walking laboratories of pathogens like this, I imagine.

Sadly I have no pictures of the early stages; I was too busy moaning from the pain, screaming for morphine, and praying for my arm to fall off and release me from the agony. But the picture at the top of this post shows it just after I got out of the hospital, after seven days of antibiotics and healing.

Conflux 2008 Project & Tour: Underground Streams

2008-10-13T00:00:00.000-07:00

I led a couple walking tours at Conflux 2008 as part of my project "Looking for...", a quest to find out about New York City's lost waterways. See my website on the project here: http://watercourses.typepad.com/

Information on the Conflux event: http://confluxfestival.org/conflux2008/looking-for/

Before New York was developed, there were literally hundreds of streams running through the area now in the five boroughs, dozens large enough to be named and to function as important sources of freshwater. There were also springs that welled up from the ground, feeding streams or marshy areas. As the city grew, wells were dug to tap the water as well.

Most of these were covered over and forgotten; some of them still remain, merely hidden. Many more are referenced now by street names and symbols like street layouts and neighborhood names; most of the time these symbols, however, remain uninterpreted. I’d like to interpret them.

I will lead one or more walking tours (i’m thinking two, on two different days) and will point out some of these symbolic references to the pre-urban topography. I will also have packets of materials for different regions of NYC (things like copies from “Streams and Wells of Manhattan and the Bronx” and sections of the Viele Water map). These I will give to interested participants… and anyone who finds any clue, however recondite or obvious, to some ancient watercourse, will then email it in to a blog where it will post immediately. I hope by the end of the four days that we’ll both amass an informational archive, and be able to read oft-unread urban symbols of the past.

Gallery Show - Stage of Exploration: The World of Steve Duncan

2008-10-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

Stage of Exploration: The World of Steve Duncan
Reception October 3rd, 2008
Curated by Pierrette Kulpa
Wine provided by Kalin Cellars
Gallery space provided by Dan Regard and the Dupont Circle Art Galleries First Friday program

Click here to see images from this show

Italo-Americano Homeless Edition, New York City with Fabio Volo

2008-07-24T00:00:00.000-07:00

Italo-Americano Homeless Edition, New York City
Italian MTV
Original airdate July 24 2008 (In english, subtitled)
On-Camera & Location guide

In the spring I had a great time working with Fabio Volo and an Italian MTV crew. They wanted to meet some underground residents, so we spent the day walking through an old train tunnel. I'm in the first five minutes or so of the segment.

As of late 2008, the episode is available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDYzqVX92vE

Monsterquest: Super Rats (History Channel)

2008-07-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

Had a fun time working with the Monsterquest crew a few months back, and the episode aired on the History Channel for the first time on July 3, 2008, followed by July 5 and I think a few other dates. (Monsterquest is a series on the History Channel.)

From the TV Guide listing:

MonsterQuest : Super Rats Airs on Saturday July 05 09:00 PM

Recent archaeological evidence suggests that common rats once grew to massive sizes. Are these huge rodents making a comeback? Claims of huge rat sightings are being reported in startling numbers. Animal experts believe that these mutant rodents are getting bigger and bolder. Journey into the sewers with rat experts and meet witnesses who tell of cat-sized rats that have appetites for just about anything--including human flesh!

SUPER RATS is the most skin-crawling MONSTERQUEST yet!

I was originally hired to be a locations guide for them but I ended up being filmed and they used a bit of it-- their original plan of attaching cameras to rats to get the rodent-eye view (seriously!) didn't work out so well, and so I got a bigger part.

You can actually order this episode from them: http://store.aetv.com/html/product/index.jhtml?id=138750&name=Super+Rats+DVD

Tide & Current Taxi, with Marie Lorenz

2008-06-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

The wonderful artist, boatmaker, and adventurer Marie Lorenz took me on a boat trip to check out some things on the Harlem River. My favorite moment? When she said, with a calm indifference as if she was commenting on the blueness of the sky, "Let's be careful with these waves. These are the same kind of waves that sank my boat last time."

http://www.marielorenz.com/inprogress/?p=1393

Seattle: Searching for the Underground

2008-04-14T22:35:00.000-07:00

A story of Seattle's underground, around the old downtown of Pioneer Square. Written in 2000.

Seattle's history is a story of conflagratory destruction and socioeconomic rebirth; a story of a city rising above ashes and tideflats, and leaving behind forgotten subterranean interstitices.

The great Seattle Fire of 1889 destroyed 25 square blocks of the old wooden downtown around pioneer square, a downtown built on mud that had continually suffered near-flooding from high tides and rainfall. (The story goes that flush toilets were being installed in the 1880s, and every time there was a particularly high tide, the water level would rise so much that the toilets would back up and overflow).

After the fire, the city fathers mandated that new construction must be in brick, not wood. But more importantly, they decided to solve the problem of sewerage for downtown. In order to make sure that the new construction was above the level of the tideflats, they raised all the streets one story above the old ground level, with eight-foot retaining walls on each side of the roads and landfill between. It was an impressive project and it must have looked quite crazy. (Although they weren’t the only city to do it—Chicago actually did something very similar, raising its streets and buildings slightly to accommodate a new sewer system in the late 19th century.) The new higher streets meant that sewers could slope down to the level of the ocean water, which meant no more fountaining toilets. But it also meant that all the old ground-level entrances of the buildings were now one story below street level.

Another gold rush-- towards the Yukon, in 1897-- brought money and excitement to the rebuilt frontier town. The city and companies downtown built sidewalks from the new street level to what had been second-floor windows. Old ground floors became basements, and the old sidewalks became tunnels.

Throughout the Pioneer Square area, you can see grids of little glass squares inset into the sidewalks. These were the skylights into the lower-level sidewalks, which become a physical avatar of the sub-pression of skid-row pestilence in Victorian-era gold-rush urbanization: rats and opium dealers, cheap whiskey and cheaper hookers, golddiggers gone broke in darksome vaults, diseases and empty bottles of booze. Somewhere along the road between prospecting and pestilence, in 1907, there was an outbreak of Bubonic Plague, which is of course carried by the fleas on the lithe and lean Rattus Rattus. The underground was officially closed by the city and only the desperate and downtrodden remained.

Bill Spiedal, a historian and salesman of Seattle fact and fiction, led the first public tour of the underground in 1965. This was connected with the effort to declare the Pioneer Square area an Historic District, which was a good thing to do, if you will grant that banal and tawdry tourism is a better than banal and destructive modernism. I think it is.

For the past years, the underground has been a forgotten sub-basement and a rubbish-heap for earthquake debris. The tour is awfully insipid, but it’s easier than sneaking in.

Bill Spiedel's Underground Tour, (206) 682-4646
http://www.undergroundtour.com/

MY TOUR

I took the Bill Spiedel’s tour of the underground and vowed to come back to the underground later. There’s more to it than what they show you, of course. And what they show you, just because they show it to you, is boring.

I’d heard a rumor that the transient and homeless population of Seattle had taken to the underground, which makes a lot of sense in a cold and rainy climate. I decided to find some transient denizen of the underground and beg or bribe them to show me some way in.

They had a free keg of beer at the Green Tortoise hostel that evening, so I didn’t leave to roam the streets until late at night. I had a pint of whisky in my pocket but I left my camera behind. It’s a little more friable than I am. And breaking and entering while drunk, or climbing through intoxicated ratholes, is no time to be carrying something friable.

On Post Avenue I stopped in at a basement bar. It was carved halfway under the sidewalk, near a blanked-out skylight grid. I had a beer and asked the bartender about the underground. “Are a lot of places built out under the sidewalk, into the old spaces, like this bar is?”

He told me he didn’t know, and looked at me with that look that urban people give to strangers who seem overly friendly and conversational-like. The woman next to me overheard us, though. “You want to know about the underground tour?” She said. “They give a tour of it. It’s up there somewhere.” She pointed vaguely toward Pioneer Square. “I know,” I said, “but they don’t show very much of it. I was curious about the rest. Is most of it already built up, like it is here? Or can you still run around down there?”

“Whoah,” she said, with kind of a glazed look in her eyes. Actually the glazed look was probably already there, she was pretty drunk. “wow…that’d be pretty cool... all those tunnels underground... Can you get into them?”

“That’s what I'm trying to find out.”

“Whoah,” she said again. She told me some long story, about how she’d explored some abandoned bunker out on Vashon Island, and how cool it was. I finished my beer and left.

I found Dave on some street corner a bit south of Pioneer Square, a nondescript bum with his backpack and his dog, asking for spare change. I gave him a dollar and made my bid. “Hey man, what’s you’re name? I’m Steve.”

“Dave.”

“Hey, I heard that there’s some places here where there are tunnels under the sidewalk. You know of any way to get into ‘em without going down with the tour?”

He looked at me blankly. “There’s a tour that’ll take you down there.”

“I know, I took the tour. But it doesn’t show much of it. I’m a photographer, I want to find a way to go down and take some pictures outside of the tour.”

He looked at me blankly, like he wasn’t sure if i was crazy or not.

“Look, guy,” I said, “someone told me that a lot of people went down there to, you know, get out of the rain and all that. You know anything about that? You know, a dry place to sleep or whatever? I just want to take some pictures.”

He shook his head slowly, suspiciously. “I dunno about that,” he said.

Shit. I’m sounding like a crazy person, I thought. “You wanna drink?” I asked him, proffering the bottle. He took it and took a swig. “I don’t want to bug you or anything. I’m from New York, though, not around here. Where do people sleep around here when they don’t have any money?”

He brightened up and took another swig. “Oh, I'm not from around here either. I’m from Michigan. But you know, there’re a few places. There’s Freeway park, right? But the cops hassle you there. We did a big thing, once, with this tent city sort of thing in Volunteer park, to publicize....”

He told me about the adventures of homeless activism in Seattle, of SHARE-- Seattle Housing And Resource Effort-- and the tent city they’d been running on Beacon Hill. I listened raptly, distracted from my quest despite myself. “Did you know there are about seven thousand homeless people in Seattle?” he said.

“Man, that’s a lot” I told him. “gimme the whisky.” He passed it over and I had took a burning gulp. “Look,” I said, “with so many people looking for a place out of the rain and cold, I'm sure some of ‘em have gotten underground, right? Look, I'd be willing to give someone five or ten bucks just to show me an entrance, you know? I'm not a cop or anything.”

“Look, man, there’s nothing around here,” he told me. “I got some friends though who have this place down south a bit, by the water, there’s this old warehouse that you can get in through the wall, it’d be some good pictures, right?”

“Yeah? how far away is it?”

“like, a couple miles. it’s a long ways.”

Shit. No way did I want to walk a couple miles, drunk and tired in this sullen gray night. I’d just gotten into town that morning after a twenty-two hour bus ride, and I was leaving the next day.

“Look, Dave, I'm gonna try to find this shit that I think is around here,” I told him. “If I don’t, maybe I'll find you again and you can introduce me to your friends.”

We had another couple drinks and I gave him a couple bucks and went on, staggering. I climbed into a construction site and looked at where they were digging out the sidewalk for the foundation: nothing. I pulled at the grates of storm drains and kicked manhole covers. Nothing. Not even a hint that there might ever have been another level to this city.

I listened to another bum with his guitar, singing the blues impressively well. I gave him a cigarette and asked him my questions. He didn’t know nuthin’. I found another guy and we talked it over. “No,” he said definitively. “There’s no places around here underground.” I pointed him to the evidence of the skylights inset in the sidewalk, but he was unconvinced. “If there was someplace down there, I'd know about it,” he told me angrily. I didn’t mention the tour that I'd taken, that had proved there was at least something down there. Such certitude should not be undermined.

“But, man, I got some weed to sell,” he told me.

“That’s ok, I don’t want to buy any.”

“It’s good weed.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Man, it’s really fantastic stuff...”

“Don’t want it.”

“I’ll give it to you real cheap.”

“I don’t want to carry any with me, see?”

He paused, but only temporarily. With the look of a man who knows that he holds a king and all four aces up his sleeve, looked around slyly and pulled a baggie from his pocket. “Here, smell this.”

It was so green and good-smelling, my resolution dissolved. “I really don’t want much,” I said, “but I'll give you a couple bucks for a joint.”

He rolled one and I gave him a few bucks and we sat there somewhere on 1st Avenue and smoked it. We were in a niche underneath a construction awning with the century-old buildings looming around. Across the street, balding baby boomers and their fattening wives came out of a bar as it closed for the night.

Shit. I had failed. I hadn’t found any way in. Maybe there wasn’t any more to this section of the city than what was above ground. No subterranean secrets lurking beyond the ken of normal men. I said goodbye to my new friend-- his name was Ronny or Donny or something-- and headed back.

And there, underneath my feet as I headed back, was a grating, locked down into the sidewalk next to Columbia Street. A flash of color caught my eye. I bent down to look-- there, on the concrete wall of this vault, ten feet down, was a huge spray-painted tag. I rattled the grating against lock that held it down, and then, like some drunken mouse scurrying for its hole, I searched the whole block for some other way down, but no luck. The painter must have come through a storm-drain mainline from somewhere else. Someone was underground, often enough to paint, and they’d come through the pipe from a few blocks away...

I staggered back to the hostel, happy. There IS something down there.

The New York Moon: Living Deeply in New York

2008-02-01T00:00:00.001-08:00

The New York Moon
"Living Deeply in New York"
February 2008
online at:
http://www.nymoon.com/pubs/undertone/deeply/

Resource Magazine: Undercity

2008-02-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

Resource Magazine
"Undercity"
February 2008
Text by Jonathan Melamed, Photos by Steve Duncan

The New York Times: Columbia's Historic Atom Smasher (Photo Credit)

2007-12-20T00:00:00.000-08:00

The New York Times
"Columbia's Historic Atom Smasher Is Now Destined for the Junk Heap"
December 20, 2007
N.Y./Region
By William Broad; Photo by Steve Duncan

Men's Journal: Urban Underground

2007-11-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

Men's Journal

"Urban Underground"

November 2007, Page 58

Text by Will Hunt, Photos by Steve Duncan, LB Deyo

La Stampa (Italy): Urban Explorers, La tribu della notte

2007-08-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

La Stampa (Newspaper-Italy)
"Urban Explorers, La tribu della notte"
August 1, 2007
Text by Maurizio Molinari, Photos by Steve Duncan

New York Times: Children of Darkness

2007-07-29T00:00:00.000-07:00

The New York Times
"Children of Darkness"
Text by Ben Gibberd, photos by Steve Duncan and Miru Kim
July 29, 2007
NY Region/Metro Section
Online at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/nyregion/thecity/29shad.html?pagewanted=all

Where Have You Been?

2007-02-26T12:00:00.000-08:00

Part of Jeff Stark's wonderful "Where Have You Been?" series at the Bluestocking bookstore on the Lower East Side.

http://wherehaveyoubeen.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/steve-duncan/

Extreme Photography: Urban Exploration

2007-01-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

On Yahoo! Education, Digital Arts & Graphic Design Articles
Written by Jonathan Haeber

http://education.yahoo.net/degrees/articles/digital_extreme_photography.html

Playboy Deutschland: Der Untergrundkampfer

2007-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

Playboy Deutschland
Der Untergrundkampfer
January 2007

MSA Newsletter

2006-12-31T00:00:00.002-08:00

My photo from inside an abandoned Titan 1 missile silo outside of Denver, appearing in the MSA corporate newsletter.