The Cove, the provocative film that documented the hidden dolphin slaughters in Taiji, Japan, made its Japan debut at the Tokyo International Film Festival this week, and director Louie Psihoyos was there to bear witness to its unveiling. I talked to him just two hours after he got off the airplane ... More.
Let's start this off with a quick clarification. When I say "LED light", I'm not talking about the nifty, little blinky things that are frequently part of the ingredients list in Make projects. I'm talking about the Big Show: An LED light that can replace the incandescent bulbs and/or CFLs you have ... More.
The cellphone business is patented up to its eyeballs. Dumped at ground zero in the wasteland of owned ideas, newcomers typically have to pay as much as ten percent of sales to the old guard. Apple declined Nokia's invitations to give it money, and as a result is now the target of a lawsuit filed ... More.
I am digging these photographs of very large turbans -- perhaps for ceremonial occasions? -- worn by holy men of the Sikh faith in India. If someone is more familiar with their traditions than I, do pop in the comments and tell us more about what we're seeing.
"Check Out These Enormous Sikh Turbans... More.
Boing Boing guestblogger Connie Choe is a health and culture writer by day and a professional kimchimonger by night.
This video about a young woman who suffers from dystonia
and can only walk backwards is really interesting, but I offer it up with a
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see? It really IS a system of tubes.
I'm sure they aren't doing a perfect job, but I'd bet being a an engineer for New York and being in charge of trying to keep straight the underground infrastructure is a huge, thankless job.
Are there some ghost in that pic at top or some kind weird effect from the camera?
Is it construction or a collapse? The headline is confusing, and the chaos in the pictures doesn't help much to clear it up.
Why do you think it's a collapse? It's very clearly themess of infrastructure laid bare by digging. Maybe a bit worse than you would see nowadays, but not by much. Why try to sensationalize these very neat pictures?
I grew up in NYC. I saw plenty of street digs, but I remember the first time I saw a really big one, in which mounds of dirt had to be excavated. I had the stunning realization that the world I knew was actually built on dirt! I was probably 5.
This picture reminds me of Underground, by David Macaulay (author of The Way Things Work, among other things). The whole book was a series of illustrations showing the man-made complexity beneath a single city intersection.
I can stand and stare at the screensaver all day too.
According to the March 17, 1919 edition of "Greater New York" a newspaper put out the the Commerce and Industry Association of New York, Beekman Street was due for repaving after having been "torn up for subway construction" along with a number of other streets in the area.
I'm confused, was the street hollow or something? was is covered in tarmac or paving slabs or what?
I can't get over that lumber. Throwaway construction lumber - 10"x10" LOGS - you'd pay a pretty penny for wood like that today. You just can't find lumber like that anymore - well, you can, but it's very, very expensive. There's not a knot in any of that wood in any of those pictures. Fine lumber was so abundant back then that they just used the lower third of the tree (the part without the knots) and left the rest to rot. You can't find a piece of wood at lowes/home depot these days without at least two knots in it.
Cory - these are pictures of excavated streets with all the utilities running through them. This yet another one of the MTA's abandoned lines. The subway runs on Fulton St now.
I'm an engineer on the new WTC at Ground Zero. If you think this is chaotic, you should see the streets now (they didn't even have telecomm then!).
Every under-street in downtown NYC prob looks just like this.
I'm confused, was the street hollow or something? was is covered in tarmac or paving slabs or what?
No, they aren't hollow. They dig around the pipes. (As several have mentioned, this isn't a collapse, it's excavation for work.)
I find it fascinating to see the "city beneath the city". The years have slowly built up the infrastructure, and the archaeological treasures undeneath NYC streets must make some anthropologists giddy!
Thank you for sharing these pictures.
#10 - The streets are indeed hollow where the subway runs. The preferred method of establishing subway lines is to dig a trench where the street is, lay the subway track, then build a framework of steel beams to support the new street as it is replaced. If you've ever been to New York City, you can literally feel the vibrations at street level when the train runs underneath.
Steam
Sewage
Water
Maybe even some pneumatic tubes!
Be sure to click the jump link as there are several high-res images to gaze at!
@steaming pile:
Yes, I live in New York. If you say you know for sure I believe you, but I find it hard to believe they don't infill, considering the roof of the tunnel is so much lower than street level in most cases.
The Steam Punk Internet revealed!
Long ago I explored the underground parts of center city Philadelphia.
There were six levels that I found. People live in all of them, including the railways - I saw cardboard houses less than two feet from passing trains.
Nice sinister Lovecraftian atmosphere in the picture. No wonder he hated the "Cyclopean" metropolis and even used the underground tunnels as inspiration for the Shoggoth-infested labyrinth below Antarctica ;-)
Edison was the first to run electrical mains under the streets in NYC. The telephone poles were already grossly overloaded. He had to invent the entire electrical distribution ifrastructure to go with his generating plant. He sold electricity and light bulbs.
"Are there some ghost in that pic at top or some kind weird effect from the camera?"
Long exposure - a few seconds long. Some people walked away during the exposure.
...electrical mains under the streets in NYC...
Yes, this area of NYC is the site of some of the first serious electrical infrastructure. However, the amazing thing for me about these photos is that this is _not_ 100, 50, or 25 years of electrical wiring over electrical wiring. From what I can tell, the wiring in that area was, max, fifteen years or so old in 1917. Nearby Pearl Street Station was one of the first of the Edison Illuminating Company's generators/substations but the Pearl St. Station didn't quite cover the Beekman St. and Wall St. area, that area was wired a few years later. So, the earliest possible date for most of the electrical wires in these photos is, by my counting, maybe 1900.
In some of the photos, there's a elevated train track running above the street--unbelievably supported by a makeshift scaffolding since the street that it was sitting on is gone--and I suppose some of the wiring in the street might be related to the trains which, IIRC, had their own substation/generators by, oh, 1910 or so. Some of the pipes are clearly gas, some sewer, but I suspect some of them are pneumatic tubes. The USPS had an extensive pneumatic tube system in NYC by 1910, including, presumably, the Wall St. PO. Also, some of the buildings on Beekman St. were zippy enough to have their own pneumatic tube system.
God knows what it would look like to do a similar excavation now. (Sometimes Coned provides a glimpe but the Beekman St. dig removed all the dirt for about 40 feet below the street. I can't think of any open recent digs on that scale. Maybe Columbus Circle? but that wasn't open at the street level.)
There were dozens more of these photos from the same body I posted - many by the engineers, though a few are labelled as being taken by a photographer at 5 Dekalb Avenue, Brooklyn (just down the street from where I'm typing). In some of them you can see wooden structures supporting temporary elevated gas pipeline 'bypasses' running above the sidewalk.
The New York Times archives for this period has a story about a large fire on Nassau Street that threatened this project - a water tower collapsed and flooded the tunnels.
I love the contrast between the evident care taken in digging round the existing pipes and the somewhat cruder arrangement of those pipes in the first place.
Question for MICHAELJOHNPRINCE, back at 12:
Does the Beekman line tunnel still exist? Was it filled when it was abandoned? Are there any traces of it?
Beeckman has a 'c' in it. Common error. Will go read the post and comments now.
Ack! When I saw my comment it looked so wrong. I was thinking of Bleecker Street. Beekman sans 'c' is correct. I did read all of the interesting comments, though. And some of the non-interesting ones too.
NYC's substructure is frequently exciting.
Ah, TNH, that's my favorite front page of the NYT headline:
What Next, Locusts?