Inside New York City's Most Secret Basement | World's Strangest

we are going down underneath various basements basements that are marble shops upholstery shops an entire service plant a power plant and we're going under that in the past if you'd stepped into this elevator by mistake you face being shot at the other end in case you told anyone what you saw but we seem to be alright so far after tunneling down through ten storeys of solid rock the engineers blasted and carved out a chamber almost as large as the huge station concourse above it's a mind-blowing twenty-two thousand square feet and what was it that was such a critical life-and-death secret what was it that couldn't be spoken about this it is a rotary converter nine rotary converters each weighing 15 tons transformed 11,000 volts of alternating current into the direct current needed to power the trains above they were the beating hearts of the entire metro-north rail network converting power to run trains over 2,000 miles of rail track these huge machines standing 20 feet tall were put down here in 1913 because developers wanted to build more profitable skyscrapers on the land above 30 years later their secret location turned out to be a clever move when in 1941 America joined the Allies and declared war against Germany the north eastern railway was crucial to troop and weapons movements to the ports and if the Transformers were sabotage it could have crippled the war effort no surprise then that this place was guarded like Fort Knox armed troops were stationed down here in this sub basement with trigger fingers just waiting for an authorized person to show up but a German spy who had worked down here told the Nazis about it and Adolf Hitler recognizing its strategic importance was determined to destroy it in order to slow America's entry into the war Adolf Hitler decided to send two submarines with two saboteurs aboard each one to the east coast of America and the Nazis weapon of choice for the secret operation was not explosives but something much simpler back in 1942 this sub-basement could have been easily destroyed a made ineffective simply by throwing sand into the rotary converters it would have killed them and it would have also effectively killed 80 percent of the troop and war materiel movements in the Northeast fortunately the Nazi agents were spotted coming ashore by a seaman second class Coast Guard walking the beach the FBI were contacted and they tracked the would-be saboteurs about to make their way down into that sub-basement they were all arrested two of them were executed an effort that nearly crippled America's entry into the war was foiled at the last moment

Channel: Science Channel

Views: 1,324,178

Rating: 4.4801965 out of 5

Keywords: science documentary, world's strangest, us history, new york history, grand central station, nazi saboteurs, northeast railroad, rotary generators, secret elevator, New York City (City/Town/Village), Manhattan (Political District), world's strangest tv show, world's strangest full episodes, science channel

Id: qLPOmtI4W9I

Length: 3min 49sec (229 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 15 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/lethal_primate]

this went from clickbait to an actually pretty cool story

[u/axonxorz]

Pocket sand!

[u/Fourier_Transform]

I wonder how many untold stories like this are out there.

A recent one I heard on NPR was about the Ballon Bombs Japan used to try and incite terror in the US.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/fu-go/

[u/Busti]

So you tellin me that the fate of ww2 rested on some rectifiers?
I call bullshit!

[u/Blazah]

Very cool - guess it's not used anymore ? They didn't say..

[u/Octavian_The_Ent]

Is this slowed down a little bit or something?

[u/[deleted]]

So much fisheye

[u/PutinBot4576]

If they weren't arrested they would've been shot, so it wa gonna be foiled anyway.

Also, funny that they had tried so hard to keep it secret but a spy found it anyway. Lol.

[u/HikerKayaker]

Hmm, a pretty neat piece of history. Thanks for sharing!