Titus Frost, Brittany/Nicole Pettibone, Reality Calls: What's Going On Underground?

Great work, great work!  So many thanks!  Your generation is doing itself proud!

Titus Frost asked what was going on underground in one of his videos. 

This video mentions digging down deeper than the basement of Comet Ping Pong, and a deserted subway nearby.

 

Imagining D.C.’s underground history

 

 

 

Tickets such as these were issued to passengers on the Washington Mole Way. (Courtesy the Gene Thorp Collection)

 April 1, 2013

“Not many people have seen this,” Joe Kerr said as he pushed open a rusty door, the squeak of its hinges echoing in the dark.

We were 60 feet underground, and Joe , president of a D.C. urban exploration group called Friends of Outrageously Obscure Locations, was about to show me the remnants of Washington’s first subway system. We weren’t supposed to be here — technically, we were trespassing — but I had heard so much about this subterranean wonderland that I had to see it for myself.

“Welcome to the Georgetown Mole Way station,” Joe said, clicking on a large flashlight.

The light illuminated a cathedral-like space. The walls were covered in light green tile and inset every 20 feet or so with wooden benches. A wrought-iron railing ran along the platform’s edge, interrupted at regular intervals with sliding gates. Above an ornate booth was an enameled metal sign reading “TICKETS.”

“Pretty cool, huh?” said Joe, who works for the District cleaning the lenses on speed cameras.

It was unbelievable: a crumbling, disused subway station hidden beneath busy city streets.

Construction started in 1865, just as the end of the Civil War unleashed a wave of cheap labor. Otto Witzmann, a German-born armaments manufacturer made wealthy by the recent conflict, gambled that Washington would continue to grow in size and that its residents would welcome what he called a “modern” way to travel, “free from the indignities of the common street: panhandlers, mad dogs, temperance bores, street preachers, newsboys, traffic clots, slop buckets, inclement weather and the pungent droppings of cart horses.”

An ad in the Washington Panopticon newspaper sought investors: “OFFERED — An opportunity for Men of vision to join an Endeavor sure to Revolutionize travel in the District of Columbia and the County of Washington.”

Witzmann called it the Mole Way.

“The mole wasn’t held in such low esteem then,” Joe said. “Far from being seen as destructive, the mole was considered a clever, resourceful animal that could enter the earth at one point and pop up at another.”

More ...

 

Urban History: Exploring the Disused Streetcar Tunnels Beneath Dupont Circle

It seems there are also streetcar tunnels run up Connecticut Avenue past Comet Ping Pong

 

 

Twenty-five feet beneath Dupont Circle, a bustling urban park in Washington, D.C., an abandoned streetcar station has remained eerily quiet and virtually forgotten since 1962. In the chilly, pitch-black space, disused tracks follow the crescent-shaped concrete tunnels of the former Dupont trolley station.

 

According to the Washington Post, the 75,000 square feet of white-tiled tunnels had “the earthy smell of a cave”.  The station was built in 1949 along with the Connecticut Avenue traffic tunnel as part of an effort to reduce congestion around Dupont Circle.

 

The tunnel mouths were blocked-off when the station closed in 1962. But several street-level clues remain in the form of sealed entrances around the circle. The only signs of human intervention since its closure are the fake-trolley facades of the Dupont Down Under food court, a short-lived project that ended in failure amid significant controversy in 1996.

 

 

There are very large art posters of the Underground that are exhibited at Heathrow Airport - in the section coming from the Underground going into Terminal 4 (or 3?).  They are hung very high so as people walk past to departures or arrivals, they aren't likely to notice how creepy they are.

 

Here are only a few examples.  Perhaps people in the UK could get photos of them all.

 

 

 

 

The child's writing on the left says:

"under

where?"

 

[underwear?]   [Good question - under where?]

 

The more easily legible part of the writing in the poster reads: 

".... the "ole mole"

revolution hollows
out chambers in a

decomposed soil
repugnant to the
delicate nose of the
utopians"

 

 

13 Abandoned Stations & Disused Platforms of the London Underground

 

 

For what they are doing to kids and

for massive threats to everyone:

Look underground!  

 

Yo! Good People Looking Into Pizzagate, Better Look Into The Subways and Water Systems, too