What's Under Your Feet in New York City?
practical.engineering125 points by sohkamyung 4 days ago
125 points by sohkamyung 4 days ago
Meanwhile in place of power, cable, and phone lines there is a related 18 mile translucent line hung in order to turn the entire city into one big happy home called a *eruv* -- following the law of the highest of high courts to the letter. [0]
AFAIK the eruvim are not dictated by “high courts” (there is no “high court” at all), but are instead constructed and maintained by various Orthodox groups. Not all Orthodox groups agree about their propriety either, so the presence of an eruv doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s recognized.
(Also pedantic, but it’s not the entire city: there’s a Manhattan eruv that covers a large part of Manhattan, while Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx have separate smaller eruvim.)
There's a lot one could say about
> following the law of the highest of high courts to the letter.
but I don't think that "there is no 'high court' at all" is one, for believers.
I live in nyc, when I first heard of the eruv couldn’t believe they would come up with such elaborate hacks just to ‘technically’ still be following their religious laws! Now if I remember I try and spot it when out.
It also has a status page! https://eruv.nyc/
This is a very weird story.
Religious infighting with 2 fundamentalist sects that somehow boiled down to some people digging a tunnel connecting 2 buildings because of... reasons? Like it seems like they thought that if they built the tunnel that'd magically lead to everyone deciding "You know what, this expansion project is a good thing!"
Very bizarre.
Regardless, I'm glad it got shut down before a collapse killed someone.
> Religious infighting with 2 fundamentalist sects that somehow boiled down to some people digging a tunnel connecting 2 buildings because of... reasons?
The very short version is that both groups claim ownership of that building, and one of them wants to expand it significantly. Neither group is allowed to modify the building because of a court order, so the one that wants to modify it did it surreptitiously in an attempt to create facts on the ground that would modify the status quo.
(Obviously none of this is sensible, but the actual reasons are pretty quotidian.)
It's quite frustrating. The story ends with:
> four defendants refused to accept a plea deal and were set to be tried in April 2025
I can find loads of stories reporting those facts, but I can't find an account of what happened next. Did they change their pleas? Were they tried?
An illegal tunnel in a densely populated city like that is a bold move.
This was unexpected though:
> stills taken from videos of the synagogue's interior as well as the room leading to the tunnel, which showed a stained mattress and high chair, respectively, fueled antisemitic conspiracy theories
> A USA Today fact-check stated that the stained mattress seen in viral videos had been removed from behind wood paneling of the synagogue rather than from the tunnel itself, undermining online speculation that the mattresses were in the tunnel
Here's a video in which a Rabbi who is a member of the sect clarifies the story:
https://xcancel.com/Truthtellerftm/status/197901264211193488...
That's where the mutants live. Also, there's a thousand year old, old New York City buried underneath that had bathroom booths with phones in them.
And those weird booths that look like suicide booths, are no suicide booths. I love you, meatbags! Hello, it’s me, Bender Rodriguez!
This is quite informative and useful as I live in NYC. I think in the video he mentioned that the city is collecting all that data on what’s underground to collect all in a database and make repairs easier - anyone know if such data is or will be public, like on data.ny.gov ? And what I’m getting at, is it would be really cool to have this kind of 3d visualization like in the video, but based on actual real data so I could view what’s actually underneath the streets I walk every day.
I can’t read something like this without thinking of the late great Richard Scarry
Luckily ChatGPt does a pretty good impression https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6a6662e9af6c81918523fb06d1384e74
This is fantastic, but I so hoped it would come with an infographic of NY's underworld, slice of cake style. I recall seeing one somewhere, but my attempts at finding it again all failed.
The video does have something like that, it's not labeled though, rather he goes through each part and highlights the part he's talking about
One of the most informative videos from Practical Engineering channel. I thought I knew NYC infra fairly well, but I learned so much from that video still (like how NYC's electric grid is actually a grid and more fault tolerant).
Pieces of Belgian cities?
If you're referring to the Belgian blocks[1], I don't think they're actually from Belgium specifically, just Europe in general. Although some might be from Belgium!
[1]: https://sohobroadway.org/soho-broadway-block-by-belgian-bloc...
Fascinating. Anything that grows up above ground has a proportionate growth below ground as well.
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