Old Chicago Freight Tunnel
Chicago, IL

Underneath downtown Chicago, 60 miles of abandoned tunnels exist about 40 feet beneath the surface of the city. These tunnels were dug in the first years of the 20th century, and from 1906 until 1959 the Chicago Tunnel Company ran miniature trains in these tunnels to delivery coal, mail, and freight to buildings in the loop, and to remove ash and waste from from the same buildings.

The tunnels, which follow the grid of the streets above, were essentially forgotten for many years. In 1992, workers driving piles into the river near the Kinzie Street Bridge unwittingly pierced of the abandoned tunnels. Water flooded the tunnels and then in turn flooded the basements of buildings in the loop. The disaster was magnified because of ignorance about the tunnels; many people had forgotten their existence, and there was no reliable map of all the tunnels.

Eventually, the water was cleaned up and the connections between the tunnels and most buildings were shut off with concrete plugs. In some cases, water-tight doors were installed. Today, some of the tunnels are used to house telephone cables and fiber-optic lines, as in the photo above.