Sifting through the links, there are some really hidden gems, inlcuding a book link I’d not seen before for New York Underground: Anatomy of a City, and some great posts about England and Rome around March 2009. Like many websites of a certain vintage, there’s plenty of broken links (unfortunately the Explorations tab being one of them) but still lots of great info – also a gruesome shot of Duncan’s hand and after story when he slipped and sliced it open during one of his explorations. These posts offer a great array of topics, like how 9/11 impacted urban exploration, the lives of the Mole people, and even a blurb in the difficult to reproduce on black pages local NW Design mag Arcade. Undercity is the other side/site of Duncan with posts ranging from 1999 through a sporadic fits and an end in 2015 with a focus on the “Guerrilla History & Urban Exploration” side of things.
HIDDEN WATER NYC PLUS
Plus this great 1901 article from the NY Times on excavating the creek. In many cases, the city retains the imprint of these features in the shape of a road, for example, like Water Street in lower Manhattan, that used to follow the edge of a stream or river or sometimes just in the name of a neighborhood or street.”įor instance, one of the posts on Minetta Brook yields a snip from the Viele Water Map (more on this in an upcoming post) showing the course: “Almost all of the the streams, ponds, swamps, tidal inlets, flood plains, springs, etc that once dotted the fertile land seem, at first glance, to have disappeared underneath the tide of New York City’s urbanization. Organized into regions and sites, with a sidebar around “Named Streams, Ponds, & Springs” it’s a wealth of info to dig into and some great, NY specific info. The site Watercoursesprovides the more academic side of this inquiry, dating back to 2008-2010 with a goal of “Looking for the lost streams, kills, rivers, brooks, ponds, lakes, burns, brakes, and springs of New York City.” As much of it isn’t regularly maintained, it’s still great repository of info, maps, photos, and lots of good links. Kulick joked, perhaps at least half seriously, that a burst of water gurgled into the river because “someone flushed a toilet.” Park River, Hartford Connecticut (Photo by Duncan)
John Kulick of Huck Finn Adventures, who has guided float trips through the subterranean section, told the New York Times he has seen eels, carp, and stripers in the dark water. From the NatGeo article: “Today, a few intrepid urban explorers paddle canoes down the buried river. This one is of the Park River in Hartford Connecticut. My favorite below as the idea of canoeing this hidden streams is a bucket list dream for me.
A few of the shots: Sunswick Creek, New York City (Photo by Duncan) Tibbets Brook, New York City (Photo by Duncan) River Sheaf – Sheffield, England – Photo by Duncan)
His photos are featured as well in National Geographic “11 Rivers Forced Underground” which include New York as well as other cities around the world. His photography is pretty stunning, (links to the original photography site seem down, but you can buy a print here) and more than a few articles feature his explorations and work, including this New York/London feature in the Daily Mail, “A tale of two underground cities: Urban explorer’s stunning photographs of the subways and sewers of New York and London” Here’s Duncan at work: Duncan, here smiling after the third night camping underground, is a graduate of Columbia University and is working on his doctorate in urban history at the University of California.
Since the 2010s, he’s been featured often, the theme similar to these stories from NPR “Into The Tunnels: Exploring The Underside Of NYC” as well as the New York Times (here “The Wilderness Below Your Feet” with Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge). Next is a hybrid photography, infrastructure history and adventurous drainer in the form of Steve Duncan. As we’ve seen in the Welikia Project and the book Hidden Waters of NYC there’s multiple ways to approach the investigation and documentation of hidden hydrology in the same city.
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