Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Scarah Dowdy and I'm to bling a Chalk Reporting
And today's topic is a very popular listener suggestion because
who doesn't love underground cities. I mean, they're so mysterious.
(00:25):
It's kind of the world that we want to hide
from ourselves, if if we want to get really philosophical
about it, sewerds, bones, all kind of scary, Yeah, kind
of scary, kind of scary. I means, certainly if you're
going to go into like comic book territories where the
penguin lives the bad guy. Um, I don't want to
(00:45):
go down there by yourself. But intriguing too, and I
think that's why so many people have suggested this topic
to us. And um, not too long ago, I actually
edited an article on urban exploring by my freelancer, Julia Layton,
and it was, you know, it covered the whole range
of urban exploring options, what like exploring abandoned buildings, factories,
(01:09):
that sort of thing, but it was the underground spots
that she mentioned, like these abandoned coal mines in France
or the Denver International Airport, which has this crazy underground
baggage handling labyrinth and all these New World Order conspiracy theories.
It was that kind of thing that really captivated my
(01:29):
attention with that article. Yeah, so that's kind of where
this idea came from, and we wanted to do a
mix of cities. But interestingly, some of the listeners suggestions
that we've gotten over the years have been kind of
out of the ordinary, just as out of the ordinary
as the as the Denver International Airport, the unexpected underground location, right,
(01:50):
not the typical London Rome Paris lineup that you might
expect if you hear about underground cities, though we will
be talking about some of those two so fittingly, many
of the suggestions seem to be inspired by personal experience,
people who had seen these subterranean worlds on guided tours
and wanted other people to know about them, and that
(02:11):
seems like a good place for us to insert a
little caveat here. While a lot of places will mention
are open to the public and are safe to tour,
unsurprisingly most underground areas are not. They can be dangerous,
deadly and illegal. So just a disclaimer there, our little
disclaimer before we start, we're actually even going to be
(02:32):
mentioning a special police unit that tries to discourage exploration
or trespassing, depending on which side of the law you're on.
There um in one particularly famous underground city. But the
first selection on our list is a truly ancient underground city.
And if you've ever seen Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade,
(02:54):
you're gonna be visually familiar already with Petra. In the movie,
it's the one of the buildings of Petra is the
setting for the temple that holds the Holy Grail, and
in the movie, the real life stone facade of that building,
it's called the Treasury in real life, leads to this
elaborate underground world. So it's probably not gonna be too
(03:15):
hard for folks who've always seen the movie to imagine
that there's an underground city connected to Petra. But um,
that's not entirely the case. It's rather misleading, at least
not when it comes to that Treasury. Yeah, when the
when you when it comes to the Treasury building that
really is mostly a facade with just a very small
room carved out into the cliffs behind it that was
(03:36):
once used as a tomb, but Petra as a whole
definitely counts as an amazing underground city. It does the Nabatations,
formerly a nomadic tribe, built in as their capital and
what is today Jordan's, and though they were annexed into
the Roman Empire in a d one o six, Petra
thrived as a trading capital for hundreds of years after that.
(03:58):
So the mountains made to the city defendable from attacks,
and the soft rocks made it easy to carve and
excavate underground areas in addition to creating an amazing water
system pipes, reservoirs, etcetera that allowed for refruit to be
grown in this arid region, plus uh gardens, baths, drinking
(04:19):
water and allowed for the inclusion of those things as well.
So all these pipes just carved right through rock. I
think it might be um well, maybe not the most
visually impressive part of Petra. Of certainly an accomplishment, but
it was an unknown city to Westerners from the twelveth
century Crusades until eighteen twelve when a guy named Johann
(04:40):
Ludwig Burkhart came across it. It was, I don't know,
like a story you would um read in a in
a real Victorian sort of travel account almost you know,
he was disguised as the Persian pilgrim came across these ruins,
and well, obviously, like I just said, very visually impressive.
You know, imagine soaring buildings carved into rock and all
(05:03):
these diverse architectural styles peppered with enticing caves and underground chambers.
For a long time, archaeologists just saw what was on
the surface, you know, they just saw it as this
very strange, very elaborate tomb town. I mean, the treasury
that that we mentioned earlier is the prime example of that.
This beautiful facade, but just a tiny room underneath, I mean,
(05:27):
certainly not built for a thriving city, right, And it
actually wasn't until the later twentieth century that the full
scale of Petra started to reveal itself. According to a
Smithsonian article by Andrew Lawler, some eight hundred caves have
been identified to this point, somewhere tombs, others gathering spots
or just places to escape from the heat, and a
(05:49):
thriving surface level city also existed, with a six hundred
seat theater. Roman style villas, including one that's been excavated,
which contains an olive press and Pompey style frescoes, and
these things obviously didn't survive intact, leading to that original
sort of eerie impression that Petro was underground only exactly
(06:09):
and in reality, as many as thirty thousand people probably
lived in Petra at its height. But finally, you know,
as a trading city, it really relied on lots of
people coming through, and as new caravan routes developed and
as the sea trade stole away some of the business,
eventually the city fell into decline. Earthquakes didn't help matters either. Today, though,
(06:32):
it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so an underground city
that you can actually explore to a certain extent. But
there's a lot left to explore, I mean a lot
left for the professionals to explore, ed say. According to
a Natural and Geographic article by Mahdi Miltstein, only fifteen
percent of the site has been excavated, so find all
(06:54):
sorts of new things. But Petra we started off because
it really seems like an engineering marvel, I mean not
just because of those beautiful thoughts, but all those caves
carved deep into the rock, something that was clearly carefully planned,
carefully executed over a long period of time. But the
next entry on our list is the epitome of an afterthought,
(07:16):
and it's a lot closer to home for us. It's
actually Seattle, which was founded in the mid eighteen hundreds
and not exactly the best location as far as tidal
flooding went. The city experienced major flooding problems right from
the start, but it wasn't really bad enough for them
to deal with the problem right away. But in the
summer of eighteen eighty nine, a major fire burned the town,
(07:39):
which was mostly would at that point, to the ground,
and new building codes reasoned out the fire risks and
ordered new construction to be done in brick or stone,
but nobody really considered the flood issue still until many
new buildings were already standing. It doesn't seem like the
best time to figure out about the problem with that,
(07:59):
especial when you're working in brick you're our stone. So
finally those city engineers decided that to handle the flooding,
they were just going to have to raise the streets.
I mean, easy peasy, right, Not so much, But they
started this massive undertaking in the nineties, and they did
it by building these retaining walls that were just a
(08:21):
few feet beyond the existing buildings, and then they would
backfill between the walls and then pave the new raised
surface as a road. This is the really crazy part.
I mean, as as if that doesn't sound range enough,
the city ran out of money before sidewalks could be completed,
so in a lot of areas you ended up with
(08:42):
this bizarre situation where you had a road with two
deep channels running on either side. So if you wanted
to cross the street, you might just imagine yourself walking
out of a building. You're immediately face to face with
a retaining wall, and then you turn walk in this
little channel between the building and the retaining all until
you got to a ladder. You would climb the ladder,
(09:03):
according to Ken van Vechten in the l a time,
somewhere as high as thirty five ft tall. I mean,
don't buy too many supplies while you're out shopping, and
then when you finally got to the top of the ladder,
you could cross the street do it all again. It
sounds like a chore, yeah, but I bet you stay
in pretty good shape. Some vertical exercise from time to time.
(09:27):
It took an entertainment tax on vice to raise enough
money for sidewalks, though these weren't just backfilled like the streets. Instead,
arches were built between the buildings and the retaining walls,
with sidewalk roofs built on top. So for years people
continued to use the underground storefronts and sidewalks until disease
finally made it unsafe. And I think that is even
(09:50):
stranger than the previous scenario I was describing that you
would just have a two level sidewalk, essentially in two
levels of storefronts. Yeah, it sounds more complicated to me. It, yes,
you'd be I can imagine getting directions for a store
and you're out on the street looking for it, and
then you're like, oh, man must be in the lower level.
Um okay. So Seattle, Washington certainly a strange entry on
(10:14):
our list, and obviously, um the city's underground was the
accidental result of handling a problem, certainly not anything the
engineers set out to do. But the next entry on
our list was an underground city that was very much intentional. Yeah. Actually,
out of all the entries on this list, it might
(10:35):
be the most legitimate underground city. So it's darren cooy
You and it's in Turkey's historical Cappadocia region. Cappadocia has
this really unusual terrain. Ancient volcanoes plus erosion has created
strange conical mountains sometimes called fairy chimneys. And because like Petra,
(10:55):
this region was once a trading hot spot, and because
the rock is soft, it also has a lot of
caves and underground areas which are perfect for avoiding looters
and raiders if you are looking to do that from
ancient merchant. So according to Travel Weekly, there are more
than forty underground cities in the region, with darren coo
You being the largest. It was discovered in nineteen sixty
(11:17):
three when a home renovation uncovered a hidden passage and
it led to a thirteen story deep city with a
room for up to twenty thousand people. Well with a
series of rooms I mean just endless chambers and chambers
and tunnels and passageways and and really not just living
areas either. There were stables for livestock, line presses, storerooms
(11:39):
I mean literally an underground city, numerous ventilation shafts to
keep the city safe and and keep the air healthy
and kind of ominously. Uh. These one thousand pound stone doors. Uh,
they look like they'd be out of a cartoon or something,
I mean, giant stone wheel. The apparently one person could
(12:02):
move by himself, although they could only be moved from
the inside only, so trying to keep somebody out of
the underground city. Um. Most historians believe that this Darren
cool you was built by Phrygians and about eight hundred BC.
Others think it's older than that, in fact, much older,
(12:22):
and was built by Zoroastians in this sort of Noah
esque type undertaking to protect the chosen during a great disaster.
And I checked out a History Channel segment on it
and was even treated to some pretty fun theories. I mean,
you've got to have amazing theory like this if you're
gonna be talking about underground cities, right, Uh, involving extraterrestrials,
(12:44):
both as engineers planning the place and invaders who necessitated
it being built in the first place. This reminds me
of that South Park episode where they watched the History
Channel to find out about the First Thanksgiving and it's
all about extra terrestrials, but just an aside, it's regardless
of who built it, it's a pretty impressive thing, and
(13:06):
I definitely encourage you guys to look up a map
of it. That sort of helps provide the scale we're
talking about. I mean, if twenty people doesn't already do
the trick. So the next city on our list is
kind of the quintessential underground city, not only for its
expansiveness but for its still unrevealed mysteries. It's Paris, which
(13:27):
is filled with subway sewers, quarries, reservoirs, crips, and wine cellars.
And once you look at a map of underground Paris,
it's actually kind of amazing that the city doesn't just collapse,
something that is actually sometimes kind of a problem. Has
this disturbed me, Sorr, I learned about that. But Paris buildings,
(13:47):
many of which are of course built of limestone, give
a little bit of a clue about what's actually underneath Paris,
or what used to be underneath Paris. More limestone of course,
plus jeps them and a long time of the quarries
were built far outside of the city, so it wasn't
like there was a danger of massive stone buildings falling
(14:08):
into empty quarries um. But eventually development caught up and
new buildings would be placed over minds and quarries that
had just been abandoned or filled with rubble, and nobody
had a really good sense of where all this stuff
was under the city and what was being built over it,
and how stable everything was. And after the city's first
(14:30):
major collapse in seventeen seventy four was followed quickly by
a few other collapses, and Louis the sixteenth brought in
an architect named Charles axel Mo to map the quarries,
trying to figure out where everything was underground and come
up with a plan to stabilize the city. Conveniently, though,
this was around the same time Louie was ordering that
(14:52):
paris Is overflowing cemeteries be emptied. And I went off
on a research tangent on these gross cemeteries too. I mean, yikes,
really really bad charnel houses, just rotten ball grounds of cemetery. Um.
So they had a problem, all these all these bodies
(15:13):
to deal with, what to do with with all the bones?
You know, people couldn't live in these areas anymore near
the cemetery. So the solution was to put them in
some of the old tunnels. So that's how the Paris
Catacombs came. About six million dead are interred within the
Paris Catacombs. Um, I mean probably most folks know this already,
(15:34):
but there of course not named in any way. They're
not um grouped even as entire skeletons, just bone piles.
Some of them are around one thousand, two hundred years old.
Pretty amazing fact. Um. I do think it's noted what
cemetery they came from though, so that's one little nod
(15:56):
to their original burial spot. So that was the most
famous result probably of GMO's work. But they also made
a lot of progress as far as engineering and mapping
the tunnels goes, and the departments set up to examine
the tunnels still exists today. And just a side note
here which might be a scary thought for a lot
of people, there are still cavens, though there hasn't really
(16:18):
been a big one since nineteen sixty one. The maps
drawn by GIMMO also serve as the basis for underground
exploration today by people who are known as catophiles. According
to Neil Shay in National Geographic some of these cataphiles
are casual explorers who enter stewers or old utility tunnels
to paint or even just to hang out. Others who
(16:39):
are actually trained explorers, who go as far as underground
diving to examine unknown parts of the map, which sounds
so terrifying. I mean, you're already underground, it's dark, their wrath,
their roaches, and then you dive into a pit of
black water. No thanks, yeah, I'll skip it. So to
combat the catophile, Paris has a special police unit which
(17:02):
we mentioned in intro. We did mention that, and and
it's interesting too. The I think it's the habitation of
these tunnels which make underground Paris so fascinating. You know
that they're not just completely abandoned. Um. One of the
most interesting points to me was that during the war,
of course, some of these old quarries were used by
(17:23):
resistance fighters, some were used as Nazi bunkers, um. But
just for normal sort of pursuits too, I mean, not
hunkering down. For example, farmers would grow mushrooms and them
because you know, perfect dark, chili wet environment, good for
growing your market mushrooms, you know, not too close to
(17:45):
the catacombs. I hope. I hope not always watch your vegetables.
I guess, I guess. So that's the lesson to this story. Yes,
that's the one. So like Paris, New York City is
another city that's really famous for its under round, its sewers,
its subway and so on. But for this we're going
to keep it really specific and talk about something called
(18:07):
Track sixty one, which once symbolized the height of luxury
in the city. It didn't start that way, though, No,
it really didn't. The original Grand Central Depot was a
as you would imagine, a large train station built all
above ground, the station, the tracks, the train yard, the
whole deal. But between nineteen o three and nineteen thirteen,
(18:27):
according to Joseph Brennan and Columbia University, the railway and
the terminal moved largely underground. You know, this massive construction project,
which of course opened up all this valuable real estate
at street level. So the Waldorf His Historia Hotel and
one of the most famous luxury hotels out there for
anybody who's not in the know already, was built on
(18:50):
one of these auctioned off lots between nineteen nine and
nineteen thirty one, and it was built right above railway
sidings underneath and and shortly for the hotel's construction, and
this is an important note for for what's actually under
the hotel. Some electrical buildings had stood on the site,
and one of them had necessitated an underground loading platform
(19:12):
that was located by the sighting. So it wasn't a
train station, so to speak, but there was a platform
that existed underneath underneath the Walldor Historia. So eventually the
hotel repurposed this old platform for its guests who were
lucky enough to have their own private railway cars. You
could basically exit your car and be whisked up by
(19:33):
elevator to the hotel. FDR notably used the secret entrance
for campaign stop, and the station is now in disrepair,
but it did have one last hurrah when Andy Warhol
held his underground party. There not too many people with
private rail cars these days, I guess. Nope, So a
special train terminal sounds kind of nice, or a train
(19:55):
station a private train station you're in private car, um
it really sound is pretty lovely. But the next entry
on our list is more on the disturbing dark side
of underground life, and it's in Portland, Oregon. Of all places.
Underneath Old Town and Chinatown you'll find shafts and tiny
rooms and tunnels that all hint at a very dark
(20:19):
maritime past that happened in the city in the nineteenth century.
Ship captains would have trouble finding enough crewmen for these
multi year, very difficult voyages, and so unscrupulous Portlanders or
if that's what you call people who live in Portlands,
they would fill the demand for for these crewmen by
(20:40):
opening up pubs, drugging able bodied patrons and then dropping
them through trapdoors in the floor that were called dead falls.
After that, you know, after the these unsuspecting patrons would
awake in some creepy underground chamber. Uh, they would be
eventually taken down onto the docks sold to captains for
(21:02):
as much as fifty dollars ahead, which was a tidy
profit for the bar owners um At the time, it
was called being shanghaied or or crimping, and that's why
still today the tunnels are called Shanghai tunnels. This was
one that was a listener suggestion. Actually, I think the
the lady had gone on one of these Portland Shanghai
(21:22):
tunnel tours was quite impressed by it. Do you have
to go through the trapdoors? Tunnels have a little drop,
Maybe it'll be like Seattle and you climbed down a latter.
So for the last spot on this list, we gave
it to an underground city that extends layer by layer,
deeper and deeper into the past, and that's of course Rome.
(21:46):
A visitor to rome In described that if a man
happened to dig on his property, he might easily uncover
a column upright and extending from deep below ground, and
even as far back as the classical period in Roman
architects would raise the surface level by just taking the
roofs off of old buildings, back filling them and starting
new on top. The Great Fire of a D. Sixty
(22:09):
four s entire neighborhoods buried, and natural erosion buried low
lyne areas in the Middle Ages. So this is a
little different from some of the other underground cities we've discussed,
and that it wasn't necessarily intentional. I mean it was intentional,
but it's just building on top of trash the year
after year, and um churches especially are prime spots to
(22:32):
find these layers of history underground. According to Tom Mueller
in the Atlantic and that's partly because the ancient churches
were built on pagan temples, you know, to try to
completely erase them, but keep people coming back to their
familiar worship location. Um. He used the example of San Clemente,
which is near the coliseum, where there is a twelveth
(22:54):
century church that sits on top of a fourth century
church that sits on top of first century apartments, and
a temple which sits on top of a building that
was destroyed in the fire. And then crazy, there's still
something else below that because they can tell the walls
keep on extending. It just hasn't been excavated yet. Um.
(23:15):
According to Mueller, though, there is a lot that's just
under regular buildings too. And I've always read that building
projects in Rome are kind of a nightmare because you
just dig down a little bit and you've got to
call the archaeologists, and because you've uncovered some priceless find.
But apparently many apartment dwellers are aware, you know, especially
(23:37):
if they've lived in the place for a long time,
their families have lived there, they know of some trap
door and the apartment basement or something like that will
that will lead to old grapes or old villas or whatnot.
Pretty interesting stuff. Sounds like we could do an entire
episode on Haunted Rome or something. I think we could
definitely do that, And that's one of the reasons why
(23:57):
I didn't put London on the Short Lived too, because
another city with great underground culture, um Rome. I've got
to experience a little bit of underground realm. When I
visited after college. I went to the Captain Monastery, which
has all of the I've probably mentioned this on the
podcast before. It has the bones arranged into these terrifying
(24:22):
I guess baroque sort of designs. I mean, it's very
beautiful on the one hand, but a little bit disturbing
to a little bit scary. But I think that just
I mean, you mentioned London, and it just shows how
much potential I guess there is to talk about some
more of these underground cities and areas of cities. Certainly
plus for London, we could talk about the Great Stink,
(24:45):
which is another favorite listener suggestion. And interestingly, there are
some possibilities for underground cities or areas of cities in
the future. Yeah, and not just hiding away all of
our ugly staff like like sewers and all that um.
One example I read about in Smithsonian was something called
(25:05):
the Earth Scraper, which is a sixty five story underground
pyramid planned for Mexico City, and it sounds pretty elaborate.
According to the architect este Ben Suarez, the plaza above
would be glassed over, and so you would have this
natural light flooding into what I presume would be in
reverse atrium almost inside uh. And then every ten floors
(25:28):
you would have what he called an earth lobby, so
green space, so you wouldn't feel too horrible working in
the depth of the earth all day. And then other
cities already have real underground situations already in action. Yeah.
Helsinki is an example of a city that already has
(25:49):
an underground hockey rank, a church, a mall, a water
treatment plant, but they also have an underground data center,
which is kind of interesting. Usually these are really hot
and require a lot of energy to keep them cool,
but this center is kept cool by using sea water,
which in turn is then used to warm homes that
are above ground. And this model is being explored by
(26:12):
several large Asian cities who are hoping to push some
of I guess they're less attractive or kind of things
you don't want about things don't really want to look
at fage treatment plants that sort of thing, or or
even data centers like this. So pretty interesting underground cities
of the future. I mean, who knows, maybe we'll lots
(26:34):
of possibilities. We'll have some yeah, some interesting underground things
to talk about in a few years. M h. So
we have some listener mail here today. It's an email
from listener Jason, and he says, I am a huge
fan of your show and have recently listened to the
podcast about William Randolph Hurst. I'm a history major at
(26:56):
Townsend University, and about a year ago I wrote a
research paper or on the history of marijuana legislation for
a political science class. While researching the beginnings of the
marijuana prohibition, I discovered that Hearst was instrumental in the
passage of anti hemp legislation. I became curious about the subject,
but did not go into depth with my Hearst research
(27:17):
due to the nature of the assignment. I was wondering
if you could dedicate a podcast to Hearst and marijuana.
And I get this quest a lot, don't we, Sarah,
But we do because people listen to the Herst episode
in the Nating. I actually wrote a blog post on
it for the Science blog a few years ago now
trying to do multipurpose stuff there with history and ciant um.
(27:39):
But it is a really fascinating story and it could
make a great podcast too. It was to spend for
me at the time to be able to find a
picture of hers, you know, doing a podcast on him,
and then writing a blog. But um, a very interesting story.
So thank you for the suggestion, and you can still
check out that blog post on our site. Perhaps, yeah,
you might be able to find that if you type
(28:00):
in some combination of person figure big around in the blogs,
just like it's an underground city. Um. If you want
to send us any other suggestions, you can email us
at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on
Twitter at Misston History and we're on Facebook. And if
you want to learn a little bit more about urban exploration,
(28:22):
which we talked about in the intro to this podcast,
it's a really kind of fascinating topic. You can read
a little bit more about that by looking up our
story ten Cities for Urban Exploration, and you can look
that at by visiting on our homepage at www dot
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
(28:42):
thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot
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