The Secret Infrastructure Beneath NYC - Cheddar Explains

New York's legendary skyline gets its fair share of attention but what happens if you go 600 feet underground let's start digging in your first scoop you'll cut through three inches of asphalt then you'd hit 10 inches of course concrete out of foot you'll see a thin layer of absorbent soil that catches all the stuff that runs off the street at 15 inches are all the wires telephone electric cable TV etc all covered in casing and buried underneath or close to street curbs at 2 feet gas lines funnel fuel across the city they're all kept track of by Con Ed with very detailed maps at 4 feet deep water mains bring in water from the Catskill and Delaware watersheds and the Croton reservoir in upstate New York sharing terrain with the water mains are the first of the oddities under New York there are a series of mnemonic mail tubes criss crossing the city from Bowling Green to Harlem first built in 1897 each tube could transport letters 35 miles an hour and they shot letters into post offices and office buildings for some reason it's inventor decided to test it by shooting a black cat in a carrier through its tubes for reasons unknown at its height the mnemonic tubes covered a 27 mile route connecting 23 post offices it was at least semi operational until 1953 a quick note New York City consists of five boroughs totaling around 300 square miles with varying population densities so what's underneath them varies a lot so in this scenario what we're going to be talking about what's underneath the island of Manhattan six feet deep are the steam pipes used to heat and cool buildings kana didn't stop covering them and asbestos until 1975 it was the most effective insolent of the day and all that asbestos is still there on the outside of the pipes officials think that removing it would cause a huge release of asbestos into the air so it's only removed if that part of the steam pipe needs to be replaced it's not leaching into the steam soak on eggs in no rush also at 6 feet deep at the intersection of Bowery and Canal Street engineers stumbled across a small boarded up room with its walls and ceiling covered in mirrors no explanation has ever been found at 7 feet deep you'll start to find the sewage pipes they're generally installed around the vaults of subway tunnels both the sewage pipes and the subway vaults very in-depth around the city but 7 feet is an average depth the depth of subway tunnels varies around the city from a few feet deep around the Lexington Avenue stops to 180 feet below ground at the 191st Street Station there are 840 miles of track in the whole system and 472 subway stations that's not even including all the abandoned and forgotten subway platforms which you can take a tour of with the MTA at 15 feet deep archeologists found a shipwrecked boat in the mud under Broad Street which used to be shallow water it's been dated to the late 1600s and is 92 feet long and 25 feet wide you can imagine the archaeologists surprised when they uncovered the massive relatively hole boat at 20 feet deep you can find a warren of tunnels under chinatown these tunnels were the site of Chinese gang wars in the late 1800s Herbert Ashbury a journalist and true crime writer who wrote gangs of New York says that Al Capone used these tunnels to transport bootleg liquor and do other more unsavory things at 50 feet deep on the Lower East Side you'll find a few hundred feet of highway built in the 1960s the tunnel is six lanes wide and was the start of the abandoned Lower East Side Express project or Lomax Lomax was vastly unpopular and slated to be wildly expensive to the tune of 72 million dollars it would have fully destroyed a big part of Soho which at the time was not the luxury area it is now Bob Dylan wrote a song protesting it now it's boarded up and mainly forgotten at 600 feet deep going down to 800 feet you'll find New York's water Tuttle's these are the main conduits for clean water to the city coming from upstate New York water tunnels one and two which were both completed by 1935 are 24 feet across water tunnel number three is being built right now and is the largest capital construction project in New York City history it's being built so that water tunnels 1 and 2 can be closed for repairs something that has essentially never happened construction on water tunnel number 3 began in 1970 and is still going on today workers who call themselves sandhogs have been hundreds of feet underground digging this tunnel for the past 50 years this is just a general outline and all these things very in-depth depending on where they are in Manhattan it's somewhat of a mystery as to where things actually are underground and that's a big issue when construction below ground occurs city officials have to call in someone from each of the major agencies for electricity sewage and water to tell them where each different kind of pipe is there's no consolidated method it's been called a spaghetti bowl of utilities that leaves a lot of room for error and there's so many stories of workers sending a shovel straight through a gas line or jackhammering through a water main because they have no idea it's there these mistakes cost the city 300 million dollars a year people like Alan Lightner a homeland security consultant and Wendy Dorf a government worker have tried to create a map of the New York City underground with all of its pipes and oddities but their plan hasn't come to fruition during the 9/11 attacks a Con Ed worker looking at the underground maps noticed there was a 20,000 gallon tank of freon under the towers not only does freon explode it also releases highly toxic gas called phosgene thankfully the fires didn't reach the tank and it didn't explode while Leyden Aaron Dorf thought that this would secure Con Ed support Konig actually pulled funding citing security concerns in 2012 when Hurricane sandy hit the electrical substation at East 13th Street containing the Transformers for everything below 34th Street was in flood zone the aftermath a three-day blackout including two hospitals whose backup generators failed because you guessed it they were in basements that were also in flood zone so maybe don't just start digging willy-nilly on a random sidewalk you could hit something dangerous we should leave it to the professionals maybe start funding that map did you know about all of the stuff under New York let us know in the comments make sure you like this video click Subscribe ring the bell for post notifications we'll see you next time

Channel: Cheddar

Views: 1,867,740

Rating: 4.8035498 out of 5

Keywords: Cheddar, nyc, manhattan, city infrastructure, underground new york, underground, exploring, urban exploration, subway, pipes, below nyc, urban planning, city design, new york, new york city, explainer video, town planning, virtual walking tour, explainer, city planning, urbex, nyc subway, mta, cities, explore, urban design, cheddar explains, nycta, city, public transportation design, water pipes, big apple, sanitation, infrastructure, engineering, tunnels, construction

Id: SX1xmaKPb9o

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/silvapain]

Much of Manhattan is on landfill. It’s not surprising.

[u/asdwdff]

the chinese wars underground in tunnels is fucking crazy

[u/Funkyard87]

15ft isn't that deep. They probably were construction workers.