[HN Gopher] Detroit's abandoned tunnel systems open door to anot...
___________________________________________________________________
Detroit's abandoned tunnel systems open door to another world
Author : rmason
Score : 34 points
Date : 2024-02-10 20:30 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.freep.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.freep.com)
| dmoy wrote:
| Here in Seattle the underground part of the city is open for
| tours (parts of it anyways). They built the current downtown on
| top of the old one, so it's pretty surreal down there.
|
| Not even tunnels in this case, just like a whole-ass other set of
| streets and storefronts, all abandoned, partially buried, and
| covered on top.
| voidfunc wrote:
| The history of Seattle is fairly interesting for those who are
| not aware of it. A lot of cities have rebuilt from fires, done
| terraforming etc, Seattle kind of took it to a whole new level.
| thehoff wrote:
| This is so cool. I didn't believe you so I had to look it up
| and watch some youtube videos, fascinating.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| One interesting rabbit hole to go down is finding YouTube videos
| of urban explorers finding their way into such tunnels and
| exploring.
|
| There's some really cool videos of people in London in all sorts
| of tunnels and places they shouldn't be in.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| One of my favorite activities in college was exploring the
| campus - there were parts that weren't closed off to students,
| but I felt like we were probably not supposed to be in. It was
| fascinating walking around, looking at the weird architecture -
| in some places, the ceilings were barely six feet tall, and at
| one point to move between two adjacent buildings you had to use
| a door that was half the height of a regular one. Just a
| bizarre space that, nowadays, would be likened to "the
| backrooms".
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| A few years ago I had the pleasure of spending 10 weeks in
| hospital, which as well as having bits dating back to 1860
| and being extended every couple of decades, is also attached
| to the local uni. The only way I stayed sane was spending my
| nights exploring as much as I could, made all the more
| exciting by having to crawl up stairs and drag my wheelchair
| behind me. I decided very quickly that "no public access"
| signs didn't apply as I wasn't a member of the public, I was
| an inpatient.
|
| Elevators are particularly interesting. You might need a key-
| card to get onto the 4th floor, but it turns out that for
| efficiency half the elevators waited on that top floor. Get
| into elevator, read book for 5 minutes, wait for it to reset,
| go home and let you out in the restricted section. Or this
| entire floor is locked off from the stairway, but the floor
| above is open and the elevator lets me go down a floor and
| get out.
|
| It's honestly amazing where you can end up, especially if you
| combine boredom, time and a bit of a can-do attitude. One of
| my favourite games was using the stick from an ice-lolly
| (sold from a machine in reception) to jimmy the lock on badly
| fitted doors. I also found an ebay pair of scrubs to be
| really useful once I'd worked out how to get into places -
| you'd go down a corridor, have people stick their heads out
| of doors and start with "Hey! You can't be down her---oh
| sorry doctor". I ended up reporting most of it to security
| just after I got released. They refused to engage, but had
| swapped out all the locks when I had a check-up a year later.
| pests wrote:
| I treated my college campus like this. I had tons of secret
| nooks and crannies, rarely used single-occupant bathrooms,
| good reading chairs or study areas, even found a working
| shower in an old CS building that used to be dorms. In
| winter I would know the route through the complex of
| buildings and rarely used passages and connections to
| reduce my time spent outdoors.
| milesward wrote:
| Oh dude I found my sousaphone, plus a like-new Rhodes
| piano, and a whole-ass pipe organ my college had
| forgotten.
|
| Plus the ID card laminator, that was clutch ;)
| yawgmoth wrote:
| There used to be tours of the Detroit Salt Mines, and indeed the
| Detroit Salt Company is still alive today.
|
| Near the "Uniroyal Giant Tire" [1] off of I-94 is a small tunnel
| that goes under the freeway. Not the same as these, but, well, as
| interesting as the freeway tunnel I suppose.
|
| [1]
| https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Uniroyal+Tire/@42.2714...
| pests wrote:
| Wow, I live five minutes from that tire. Since I was young I've
| passed it a million times on the freeway and also checked out
| the service enterence for it but it was all gated off.
|
| Any more details on the tunnel?
| kmbfjr wrote:
| How did they miss the tunnel from the Detroit News building to
| the former studios of WWJ? They are essentially the same paper
| these days.
|
| The tunnel is under LaFayette Blvd. The Detroit News remains but
| the TV station is next door. The beautiful Alfred Kahn designed
| studios are now an AFL-CIO union hall.
|
| The main theater used for live TV at the old studios is still
| magnificent.
| richk449 wrote:
| Interesting article, but surprisingly poor writing for a flagship
| big city newspaper. It's full of typos and incomplete sentences.
| Is it AI generated text, or just a frantic writer with a dozen
| more articles to crank out today?
| ssl-3 wrote:
| > The mines remained operational until 1984 and reopened after
| a brief hiatus in 1983 to provide the road salt used by the
| city today.
|
| They... they did what?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I think they're referring to the nuclear waste accident in
| 2019 that bifurcated the timeline in 1984 allowing 1983's
| events to continue uninterrupted
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Well, since you put it that way...
|
| This is the kind of cromulent journalistic excellence that
| everyone should strive to attain.
| blihp wrote:
| Yep, but what do you expect from an industry near its end. They
| tend to do better with the front page stories, but a lot of the
| local/filler stuff now looks like this. You're not going to
| have meticulously crafted articles with editors to ensure its
| up to the papers standards when you don't have the ad (or
| subscription) dollars coming in to support that level of
| output. So now it often looks more like a blog than a
| newspaper... plenty of more prestigious news organizations are
| looking just as bad these days.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-02-10 23:00 UTC)