The Secret Life Underground

Rus­sos at Live­Journal pos­ted an abso­lutely exquis­ite set of pho­to­graphs (many HDR) of the deep under­ground in Moscow. Many relate to sub­way con­struc­tion, repair and aban­don­ment. Oth­ers seem to have deep sub­ter­ranean nat­ural cav­erns. Abso­lutely amaz­ing views of things we never see. Thanks for Eng­lishRus­sia for catch­ing these and doing some trans­la­tion so Eng­lish read­ers can appre­ci­ate what it is we are see­ing. By the way, unless you read Rus­sian (I will admit to not) use the Eng­lish Rus­sia link as it gives the full set as well. I am sure that they are avail­able on the Rus­sos site, but I can­not nav­ig­ate the Cyril­lic. There’s another set of pho­tos at Rus­sos which I don’t have trans­la­tion for and sense it might even be an aban­doned sta­tion. Inter­est­ing con­trast to the aban­doned TTC one that is expec­ted to draw crowds.

On this sub­ject, there is a con­tinu­ing curi­os­ity. There was the announce­ment this week that an aban­doned TTC sub­way sta­tion in Toronto (Bay/Bloor I think) was going to be fea­tured dur­ing the Doors Open week­end in the spring. Media out­lets picked up the story and were eager to add other stor­ies about what’s hid­den under­ground that we don’t get to see. They advised to show up early for the doors open at the sub­way sta­tion as it was expec­ted to be so very pop­u­lar. Why the allure? Is it just the oppor­tun­ity to be one of a chosen num­ber that get to share a secret? Is there an innate interest in engin­eer­ing achieve­ment? Or is it just the deep human desire to know?

The cata­combs in Paris or Rome con­tinue to attract the curi­ous. I found the cata­combs pretty creepy myself and by the end was mov­ing rel­at­ively fast to get out. The tour of the sewer sys­tem (almost as grand as the Moscow sub­way) also con­tin­ues to be a prime tour­ist attrac­tion in Paris. While I think there is a desire to belong to a select fra­tern­ity and there’s always a simple curi­os­ity, there is some­thing to the sense of grandeur of engin­eer­ing that goes bey­ond human scale and per­haps sub­ways man­age this one — cer­tainly they do as part of the big­ger net­work. There is an enorm­ous col­lec­tion of web sites or pages realt­ing to the unseen aspects of the urban exper­i­ence. People recount their adven­tures get­ting into places that people are not per­mit­ted. On a side note I went off to find the webring relat­ing to this and note that webrings may be fad­ing in favour to auto­mated ping­backs on blogs.