Detroit's abandoned tunnel systems open door to another world | Hacker News Reader

Detroit's abandoned tunnel systems open door to another world

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243 pointsrmason140 comments

Here in Seattle the underground part of the city is open for tours (parts of it anyways). They built the current downtown on top of the old one, so it's pretty surreal down there.

Not even tunnels in this case, just like a whole-ass other set of streets and storefronts, all abandoned, partially buried, and covered on top.

The history of Seattle is fairly interesting for those who are not aware of it. A lot of cities have rebuilt from fires, done terraforming etc, Seattle kind of took it to a whole new level.

This prompted me to watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsqRP0ualoI

"fairly interesting" is quite the understatement! Absolutely fascinating and hilarious at the same time! Thanks for your post TIL

Video could really use more photos and visuals, but it's just some dude talking really fast without pauses. Could've been a blog post.

Chicago also lifted up its street level, I don’t think Seattle was unprecedented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

It’s the only article linked with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regrading_in_Seattle, however.

Sacramento: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-original-street-leve...

Atlanta: https://www.atlantafamilies.org/underground-atlanta-history/

There's also a certain amount of "and then you're done" here.

Maybe one day we'll decide to raise Miami or New Orleans, but once all of your cities have raised themselves out of the swamps they were built on, you don't need to keep raising them for tradition's sake. You're done. And new cities, such as they are, we no longer allow to build below grade in swamps.

If you want to see something trippy, take a look at the land just west of Magnolia and Discovery Park on the King County Parcel Viewer. They were planning to fill that in back in the day and on the map you can still see all of the streets they planned and even some parcels that are still owned by people who tried to buy in early. All underwater of course.

This is so cool. I didn’t believe you so I had to look it up and watch some youtube videos, fascinating.

Like New New York in Futurama?!

It's wild that we used to do radical changes to cities like this and now changing zoning or making cities walkable are frequently seen as unfathomable.

Really? It seems like once a group of people have lived somewhere for a generation or two and have a $Trillion invested in a place they probably are going to make it hard for new comers to make radical changes.

Kinda like a giant codebase that's been maintained for 50 years and has a million regular users is going to make updates difficult.

Find a place people don't already want to live and make that better with great new housing designs? Why do does someone deserve to move somewhere new and live there cheaper than the people who already live there?

Now, that said there are huge distortions to the market driven by taxes and leverage. Many expensive places have 10% unoccupied housing. Think about how much that is. Imagine the time, cost, and disruption to build even 10,000 units of housing, when there are 40-50k units unoccupied.

People want to live near evisting jobs so your someplace new will be a suburb and generally has constraints because of that. You have to get people into the city for example which forces car dependance for example.

In his example you also need to attract employers, other people. Being first advantages.

But you won't as employeers go where the employees are.

Sure but if your preferred design is as great and appealing as you say then after a few generations, your new city might be getting the jobs.

Would you like to be the first and start a new city? Would you move to the middle of, say, South Dakota and start New New York City? If it’s as simple as you say, in a few generations your new city, lotsoweiners, will be getting the jobs.

We can look at mining towns to see projected growth. Mining towns have to start where the ore is, and they generally can pay a lot more than average to attract people. However such towns tend to die when the mine closes unless there is some other reason for the town to exist. That other reason is not how nice the town is, but geography. Note that I said town above not city.

Cities exist for geographical reasons, if you don't have the great port (either ocean or river) to attract people 300 years ago to settle there you won't get people today.

Keep in mind that ten percent figure is not ten percent totally unoccupied for the entire year.

The process of leasing is not immediate. In a similar way to how 0% unemployment is not actually desirable or remotely achievable, you want some slack in housing markets so that people actually have price competition and choice.

Because existing cities are where the jobs are located. That’s why people move there: to have a job and a shot at a better life. Some of us feel strongly that ‘current’ residents should not have the right to effectively exclude others from the pursuit of happiness and opportunity.

Current zoning is especially odious in who it affects. The people it excludes from high opportunity areas are the poor and disadvantaged. Supply restrictions in the face of high demand lead to high home prices, effectively shutting out the poor and young from a better life for themselves.

Allow remote work for everyone who does not need to be physically present onsite to do their job.

And in your Zoom utopia, how does remote work help health care workers, police officers, construction workers, elderly care workers, massage therapists, mechanics and so on and so on? How does this help younger people wanting to date, start a family, or just have a reasonable social life?

I have a more simple proposition: instead of allowing remote work, how about we allow new homes to be built so the wealthy stop bidding up the price of all the old homes and remodeling them?

how does remote work help health care workers, police officers, construction workers, elderly care workers, massage therapists, mechanics and so on

I literally excluded all these people in my statement. Was it that hard to parse?

No it wasn’t hard to parse. What it was was hard to fathom that someone really thinks remote work is a general solution to high housing costs. Therefore I explicitly pointed out common occupations to remind us all about the larger picture.

Well paying IT or white collar jobs that can be done anywhere are in the minority, and further the people that do hold those high paying jobs are frequently the very same people bidding up the price of existing homes in high opportunity cities, and pushing poorer people out in the process.

You do realize that well paid people who spread out because they can work remotely create jobs for poor people outside of big cities? And in big cities demand for housing falls because there are fewer people? How is it not a win-win scenario?

I don’t think the person you’re arguing with is against remote work or wouldn’t agree it’s a win-win. I think (and I agree) they are saying that it just doesn’t come close (on its own) to fixing housing on its own for the majority of workers, for whom remote work cannot ever make sense.

Also I might add that it seems like* most people who work remotely do not even choose to fully “maximize” the benefit by moving to truly super low cost of living locales, I’m assuming it’s for social, family, and perhaps status reasons. So, yes, economic activity outside fancy areas is being stimulated, but not to a huge degree.

*source: thinking of everyone I know at my fully remote company. Only a few live in places like West Virginia. Many live in the Bay Area, L.A., NYC, and like Connecticut.

Yes, some people won’t move. But that should be an option. An office job should not be the main reason people live in big cities.

Exactly. Remote work is (or at least will be) a net win. But it doesn’t address the fundamental problem behind high housing costs: too few homes in areas people are willing to live.

A huge issue for these small towns are in fact these high income remote workers or vacationers. They quickly drive up costs of things like housing but also entertainment and food in the towns they migrate to, where the workers often end up rent burdened living on top of each other, not able to save much money.

Your premise is wrong and the pandemic has proven otherwise (except maybe for NYC). People will choose to move out of the city if given the choice.

Once it transitioned to an epidemic people came back. Not necessarily the same people who left, but housing prices are back up to pre pandemic levels if not higher is my impression.

This is mostly because money lost a lot of its value (eaten by inflation, and overly generous policies during corona to fix the restrictions they themselves created)

These people already exists somewhere else (ie: any town, mid-west). Remote work will move health care and police workers to these places again (or keep them there) because the remote workers will create demands for these professions.

Many of the jobs done in hubs can be done anywhere else; they are the "remotest" jobs out there. Tech, Finance, Media, Research, etc... Many of these jobs can be done remotely and that will benefit everybody.

Of course, except for the big hubs landowners who are essentially exerting a tax on the high-income individuals.

Why can't these remotest jobs just be done anywhere in the world? Why restrict it to people who are citizens/residents of the US?

They can and already are suggesting this is not a real threat. And annoyingly, the jobs that could be outsourced, were already.

And that is with corporations playing with the existing visa system AND illegal immigration.

In short, remote addresses a lot of issues for an average worker. It does mess with existing system for corps.

> how does remote work help health care workers

Are you really asking this question? Cost of living, especially housing, is based on supply and demand. As remote workers move out from expensive areas the cost of living goes down.

And real estate investment funds and landlords don't like this...

Remote doesn't necessarily mean "living in the middle of nowhere".

Case in point: I've moved to a city 40% the size of the one I grew up in so as to be able to afford housing at all and it's been great. A friend who stayed there recently purchased a 25% smaller apartment for 40% more in comparison to mine. It's not even funny at this point.

You have generally more time for all the things you mentioned when you don't commute 2h a day.

As for new homes: even now investment demand will gobble up any new housing that's built, as the former grows much faster than the latter. Induced demand for housing if you will.

Remote work isn't really a solution.

Cities exists because they do something economically and socially valuable for humans. It becomes possible to support some infrastructures and services, such as theater, grocery stores, etc.

All remote work does is distribute some functions to less populated areas without solving the core problems that plague modern cities everywhere with gridlock and vetocracy. Otherwise, remote works would still be roughly be distributed to the same cities instead of going elsewhere.

If we want to unlock the most value, then yes we do want to solve commute 2 hours a day, especially for people who still need to commute. Yes, we do want cheaper housing in the most desirable cities. Yes, we want those remote workers living there anyway.

<< Cities exists because they do something economically and socially valuable for humans.

And they will continue to exist. Because of remote, they will maybe shrink in size, which is not a bad thing.

<< If we want to unlock the most value, then yes we do want to solve commute 2 hours a day, especially for people who still need to commute.

And that part is definitely solved by remote.

This is what anti city people don't get. My mom grew up in a small religious village and left for the big city because she wanted a life.

My sentiment is that we've been getting diminishing returns from cities for quite a few years now and it's time to put some pressure on those who benefit the most from the current situation.

It so happens that the same people insist that we all, especially specialists with considerable disposable income, return to offices.

To reiterate a point I already stated: you won't get cheaper housing when it's seen as an opportunity for passive income. Only making these properties valued less can help here and remote work is the tool for that.

If a group of people is working remotely,for example at a smaller village, then health care workers, massage therapists ..etc can also move, cause there's more money at that small village ?

In vail and other places its already like this. It turns out, wages for workers don’t go up to match the multimilliondollar home valuations. Now Vail has to effectively build dorms for their workers in a sort of company town situation since they can’t find housing in summit county they can afford to rent on the wages they make. And those dorm projects are met by pushback from homeowners.

I am not sure I understand why we can't walk and chew gum at the same time. Like with everything else, life is complicate and housing is not that different. Remote could absolutely lower some of the pressure in the cities.

Unless, naturally, there is another objection to addressing something as quickly adoptable as remote for a good chunk of workforce -- no reasonable person would dispute that not all jobs can be effectively done that way.

> Because existing cities are where the jobs are located. That’s why people move there: to have a job and a shot at a better life.

I don't know, I live in a big city but I mostly work from home despite the office being 20 minutes away by metro. Because today's hotdesk flexi hipster office is a nightmare for actually doing work.

I moved here because I love living in a big city. Always having stuff to do. All the things to discover. Amazing public transport so I don't need a car (I absolutely hate driving). 20 bucks for a monthly pass and my shoes cover my entire travel needs for a month. Literally all the shops I need right around the corner. I can roll out of the disco at 6am and into my bed. It's amazing. I love being in the middle of life.

A lot of my friends love having a huge house in a quiet village but I don't understand that at all. I come from a quiet suburb but I've always hated that kind of environment. Even though I was happy there when I grew up.

Also I have pretty niche interests. It's just really hard finding a makerspace or a BDSM club in a small town. Here I have many to choose from in both categories :)

Also, small towns tend to be very big on the 'family values' mindset which isn't something I fit into, if that wasn't already clear from the above. In a city people know where to keep their opinions on how other people live their lives. In small towns they'll constantly gossip behind your back. I've lived in one for 10 years and hated that.

Anyway my point is, there's many reasons people want to live in cities that have nothing to do with their personal chance at jobs or money. It's really a very different type of society and environment that's really desirable for some people despite the crazy house prices.

> It seems like once a group of people have lived somewhere for a generation or two and have a $Trillion invested in a place they probably are going to make it hard for new comers to make radical changes.

Few if any of them actually invested that money. Rather they bought when it was cheap and then sat on it (either individually or as a family passing it down through inheritance) as the price went up - worse still they vote to grandfather in cheap property tax rates for people who bought early, so they're not even paying their fair share at the most basic/direct level.

> Find a place people don't already want to live and make that better with great new housing designs?

In today's vetocracy that's pretty much impossible - you'd have to find somewhere where not a single person already lived. Even then, as soon as you started doing it someone would move in and then block you. (Set a rule that requires development to continue? There's already a statewide rule that cities just flaunt)

> Why do does someone deserve to move somewhere new and live there cheaper than the people who already live there?

Being able to move in at the same price would be plenty. Up until the '50s people moved where they liked and build what they liked where they liked, without any permitting or anything. Now it's illegal to build practically anything - the vast majority of housing stock is only legal because it's grandfathered in, and would be illegal to build anew.

> Now, that said there are huge distortions to the market driven by taxes and leverage. Many expensive places have 10% unoccupied housing. Think about how much that is. Imagine the time, cost, and disruption to build even 10,000 units of housing, when there are 40-50k units unoccupied.

Unoccupied housing is a scapegoat. A healthy market needs some liquidity. If you legalise building new houses then unoccupied houses cease to be a problem.

You should look at before and after pictures of cities in China over the last 30 years.

Those cities have been around much longer than Seattle.

Median homeownership rate in the US is 13 years. In many big cities there are more renters than homeowners. Owning for a generation or two is the exception, not the norm.

Percent unoccupied is a bit misleading because it’s point in time. If the average tenant stays for 2 years and it takes 2 months on average to replace the tenant (given repairs, maintenance and marketing) that’s 8.3% unoccupied at any given time (2/24)

As a counterpoint — Paris’s bike infrastructure changes.

Despite all the talk of less regulation in the US it seems our cities and suburbs are much more protected and lethargic to change many European counterparts

But the restrictions are on this very same group. They can’t sell or develop their property as they choose.

In practice it is governance by those with the most time on their hands. Why does this small group get to restrict property rights for the rest of the group?

I did a few of those tours when I lived out there. They were very cool

I grew up in Seattle, and my parents would sometimes mention the underground tour, but I never actually saw it until I was in my late 20s and I took my girlfriend home to visit.

When I did the tour, the guide really played up the brothel/prohibition angle and made a few off-color jokes about that part of the history (more burlesque humor than outright offensive). So maybe that's why parents never took me.

I’m not sure what the mechanism for burying a town or city section is. It seems to have happened since antiquity, so it’s obviously the rational choice over millennia, but my intuition doesn’t connect. (Aside from soil deposits and erosion.)

For ancient archeological sites, burial happens when places get abandoned (typically due to war, or economic reasons, or famine). A lot of land isn't flat, so to build structures you have to level off a piece of land which involves moving dirt from one place to another. After a couple centuries of abandonment natural flooding and erosion will move that dirt around and bury the structures. New settlements come in and build on top of the new surface layer.

For cities like Seattle, the original town was all wood and burned. Prior to that it was prone to flooding. During the reconstruction they decided to haul in dirt to raise the level of the city for better water management, but that would take a while. So businesses were rebuilt in place (but out of brick and stone), while dirt was being hauled in and new street levels were raised. New buildings were then built on top of the existing (essentially turning the existing ones into basements / foundations for the new ones). Similar thing in Chicago -- the city was raised up, and the second floors of buildings became the ground floor, first floor became basements, etc.

Thank you

Butte MT has a pretty cool little system like this. Basically a semi underground street system. A neat relic from a different time

How can one imagine this? A big underground hall with a concrete ceiling in which there are buildings?

Or are the underground building like a -1 floor to the ones above?

The did it in 2 stages. Before that, you need to know some history. A fire burnt down the majority of downtown. So, they had to rebuild everything anyway. The downtown was also low enough that the sewer would flow into the bay at high tide. After the fire, they made certain parts of the downtown streets up to 2 stories higher to accommodate a functional sewer system.

First, they made the streets higher without touching the storefronts. "Crossing the road" would have required climbing ladders. Once the streets were in place, they made the sidewalk and the new storefronts on the old first or second story. So, when you walk around that part of Seattle, there is sometimes just two stories of air beneath the sidewalk. You can identify these sidewalks through their use of amethyst blocks which actually serve/served as sunlight. As you can imagine, a block can consist of a single large structure and so sometimes the basement of these buildings are huge empty spaces. If I recall correctly, the Seattle underground is actually disappearing as development occurs and put these large basements into use. However, I do believe there is a movement to try to preserve at least part of the underground by simply buying enough adjoining buildings and funding their upkeep with tours (which is where I got this information). In terms of touristy things, I think definitely one of the more unique things in the USA and probably has similar vibes to the catacombs of Paris (without the bones).

> First, they made the streets higher without touching the storefronts. "Crossing the road" would have required climbing ladders.

And what was underneath those higher streets? A giant block of concrete? Scaffolding?

This is exactly underground Atlanta. They raised the ground level and built the new city on top of the old. The old storefronts and businesses are still there. About 1/8th of it is publicly open, but there's a ton more that's closed off and is just trains driving under the city.

Like....Futurama style? Where new York is still there in its entirety just buried under New New York?

Almost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground

Seems amazing!

I can see on the tours when you purchase the tickets online yourself: "There is a $2.50 convenience applied to each ticket at checkout."

What does that mean ?

You have to give tips to a computer ? Is that a thing in the US ? Like at the self-service checkout ?

It used to be “for the convenience of being able to buy a ticket from home” which is ridiculous by itself because online tickets makes things cheaper the venue. Now it is “for the convenience of the ability to buy tickets at all” because in some places that is the only way to buy tickets.

I had an electric company that charged a $2 fee for online payment. I seriously considered paying them by check every month. The choice seemed to be between they charging me $ for an online payment or I charging them $ (indirectly for all the labor it takes for processing a paper check, they even sent me a prepaid envelope). It is atrocious that a company charges us for making something cheaper for them. (I ended up using my banks bill pay feature because I didn’t want to risk a check being lost in the mail).

Thank you!

Tacoma has some underground, too. Worked in a building where they had us in a shitty office on the bottom floor, in back, butted up against the hillside.

We figured out there was some kind of storage back there, and because the place smelled so musty and the ventilation was so bad we were kinda curious. We rigged the door so that once it was opened it wouldn't latch shut again and waited; a few days later we were in luck.

Going through the door there was the whole brick facade of the building (burnt, ironically), and the bottom of the present day sidewalk, three stories up.

There used to be tours of the Detroit Salt Mines, and indeed the Detroit Salt Company is still alive today.

Near the "Uniroyal Giant Tire" [1] off of I-94 is a small tunnel that goes under the freeway. Not the same as these, but, well, as interesting as the freeway tunnel I suppose.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Uniroyal+Tire/@42.2714...

Wow, I live five minutes from that tire. Since I was young I've passed it a million times on the freeway and also checked out the service enterence for it but it was all gated off.

Any more details on the tunnel?

My dad had some big chunks of salt from touring that mine. And I still remember the tire.

There were also a lot of brine wells south of Detroit, where they mined salt by forcing hot water down into a hole and bringing up the brine.

And then evaporated the brine? Or what was it used for?

Making lye and chlorine by the chlor-alkalai process. So they didn't need dry salt.

Diamond Salt is still made this way north of Detroit. Almost all restaurant salt in the United States is sourced here.

One interesting rabbit hole to go down is finding YouTube videos of urban explorers finding their way into such tunnels and exploring.

There's some really cool videos of people in London in all sorts of tunnels and places they shouldn't be in.

One of my favorite activities in college was exploring the campus - there were parts that weren't closed off to students, but I felt like we were probably not supposed to be in. It was fascinating walking around, looking at the weird architecture - in some places, the ceilings were barely six feet tall, and at one point to move between two adjacent buildings you had to use a door that was half the height of a regular one. Just a bizarre space that, nowadays, would be likened to "the backrooms".

A few years ago I had the pleasure of spending 10 weeks in hospital, which as well as having bits dating back to 1860 and being extended every couple of decades, is also attached to the local uni. The only way I stayed sane was spending my nights exploring as much as I could, made all the more exciting by having to crawl up stairs and drag my wheelchair behind me. I decided very quickly that "no public access" signs didn't apply as I wasn't a member of the public, I was an inpatient.

Elevators are particularly interesting. You might need a key-card to get onto the 4th floor, but it turns out that for efficiency half the elevators waited on that top floor. Get into elevator, read book for 5 minutes, wait for it to reset, go home and let you out in the restricted section. Or this entire floor is locked off from the stairway, but the floor above is open and the elevator lets me go down a floor and get out.

It's honestly amazing where you can end up, especially if you combine boredom, time and a bit of a can-do attitude. One of my favourite games was using the stick from an ice-lolly (sold from a machine in reception) to jimmy the lock on badly fitted doors. I also found an ebay pair of scrubs to be really useful once I'd worked out how to get into places - you'd go down a corridor, have people stick their heads out of doors and start with "Hey! You can't be down her---oh sorry doctor". I ended up reporting most of it to security just after I got released. They refused to engage, but had swapped out all the locks when I had a check-up a year later.

I treated my college campus like this. I had tons of secret nooks and crannies, rarely used single-occupant bathrooms, good reading chairs or study areas, even found a working shower in an old CS building that used to be dorms. In winter I would know the route through the complex of buildings and rarely used passages and connections to reduce my time spent outdoors.

Oh dude I found my sousaphone, plus a like-new Rhodes piano, and a whole-ass pipe organ my college had forgotten.

Plus the ID card laminator, that was clutch ;)

I grew up near Wesleyan U in connecticut; they have an extensive underground tunnel system partly for steam delivery and partly just to get around in weather. We used to do medieval recreation and other stuff down there, and I still occasionally dream I'm wandering the tunnels, 35 years later.

Are you the inspiration for Stephenson's "The Big U"?

Lol, no! That's based on BU, and was published right around the time I started LARPing. I can't remember if there were tunnels or LARPing in that book, but steam tunnels/walking tunnels are common in the northeast, as is LARPing.

There was definitely both! Man, I should re-read that book. I read it in college, and definitely felt like I was missing out on what I felt should have been a quintessential college experience, like losing a radiation source, fighting off mutant rats, and building my own tank.

Same, we had steam tunnels that you could get into if you were careful -- both not to get caught and not to get burned. Mechanical rooms that were often unlocked. Weird spots between buildings where additions were made.

UCSD has an amazing labyrinth of tunnels, some easily accessible, some locked away and purposefully obscured, but discoverable.

University of Michigan famously has a bunch of that sort of thing, though they were closed off to students by the time I got there. [0]

[0] https://localwiki.org/ann-arbor/Steam_Tunnels

I recently got to see the backrooms of an MIT building in sub basement 2. You had to go through some tight spaces (think ~20") and there was some rotating machinery to stay away from. I was surprised at how big it was. When I first went in I thought it was just the narrow corridor with the large air handler units, but it snaked around a corner to reveal itself to be 4-5 times that size.

The entire MIT campus is connected through underground hallways, most in use as labs. It's not all in ship shape, but tunnels and underground labs and industrial machinery do entertain my inner child.

I've heard UWisc's steam pipe service tunnels are cool to see, but I never got a chance to explore them while I was there.

> You had to go through some tight spaces (think ~20") and there was some rotating machinery to stay away from.

This description makes me want to play Half-Life again.

I’ve seen a few of those. It’s really surreal. It makes me feel like our history has been fudged and the singularity already happened. It’s surreal especially with all the graffiti mentioning similar scenarios, or the bullet casings. But even outside of that just the crazy amount of buildings that suddenly appear. It’s pretty wild.

> all the graffiti mentioning similar scenarios

> the bullet casings

> the crazy amount of buildings that suddenly appear

???

Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt0zuWUWcqA

This may not be the specific one I am thinking of; as I have seen quite a few across various channels. I do recall this one evoking a sense of "surreal uncanny valley."

I watch them at 2x speed sometimes just to get past some of the slow parts, but then you may miss interesting things written on the walls.

Is this a Control reference?

Ha, is it? I am not so sure. What's Control? Are you part of the Bureau?

All anti-reality aside, see my other reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39417588

A "rabbit hole to go down", indeed.

The most interesting are the places that look like a time capsule or museum --- where everything hasn't been touched for decades, and the urban explorers who come along also respect that.

There are tunnels under the Detroit River too, for rail and cars crossings to Canada. The two downtowns are directly across the river. So a cool thing would be a Gondola. Things went to shit after 911. Instead of opening the borders like in the European Union. The borders got more closed down, and things regressed.

Im not entirely sure how your drawing your conclusion.

I grew up in suburban Detroit. Access to Canada has always been easy. You need proper identification, but it’s not by any means “locked down”. Beyond personal experience, I had acquaintances with cottages in Canada. They never have any issues traveling.

Was a gradual shift after 9/11. US started requiring passports (on paper, but if you're a US citizen entering without one, I don't think they can do much more than give you a hard time). Lots more quizzing upon entry into US.

Good ole days (pre-2000) meant giving a verbal declaration of citizenship and being sure to have a decades old crumbly birth certificate if they asked.

Canada technically doesn't require passports at the land border, but they make it more of a hassle if you don't have one.

On the plus side, the Canadian side cares a lot less about whether returning Canadians owed taxes & duties. The booths used to be staffed by a division of the CRA (Canadian IRS) and unarmed.

This. Pre-9/11 my family used to pop over to Windsor for dinner, and that was absolutely unremarkable. Every 19-year-old would hit the bars over there, because that was the drinking age. And the outlet mall parking lots on the Michigan side were constantly packed with Ontario license plates.

I'm jealous of the Niagara crossing that has a pedestrian bridge called the Rainbow Bridge because you can see the rainbow in the falls' mist from the middle of the span. Areas on both sides are pedestrian-friendly and you can just walk across, for a $1 fee. It sucks that you can't get from Detroit to Windsor without either your own vehicle, or boarding a grubby bus.

And you can walk or bicycle across the Peace Bridge for free! Lots of places to park for free on the Canadian side.

I haven't done it yet myself. But I'll probably do it for a parcel pickup one day.

Will the new Detroit-Windsor bridge enable walking/biking over?

Yes, it will! I don’t live in the area anymore but would visit partly to experience walking across when the bridge opens.

https://www.gordiehoweinternationalbridge.com/en/bike-or-hik...

Yes. https://www.gordiehoweinternationalbridge.com/en/The-Gordie-...

> US started requiring passports

It’s worth mentioning that the enhanced driver’s licenses and state IDs are still valid, which tend to be easier to acquire and require far less paperwork if one is already getting a license/state ID, so residents of the more populated border states have a somewhat more seamless option.

> if you're a US citizen entering without one, I don't think they can do much more than give you a hard time

I’ve always wondered what they would do.

In the 90’s, I once showed up at the US border without documentation and basically was let through after a 30 second lecture. I wonder if it would still work like that?

How did they miss the tunnel from the Detroit News building to the former studios of WWJ? They are essentially the same paper these days.

The tunnel is under LaFayette Blvd. The Detroit News remains but the TV station is next door. The beautiful Alfred Kahn designed studios are now an AFL-CIO union hall.

The main theater used for live TV at the old studios is still magnificent.

I think underground systems and places are really cool. BUT, confined spaces are crazy dangerous. Be careful out there!

Obviously the cars should go in tunnels, not pedestrians.

I've long wanted to know if my condo building's basement was once hooked up to the Chicago Tunnel Company tunnels. It was built as an office building in the loop in 1913, and there were certainly tunnels down both streets that my building abuts, so it seems fairly likely, but who knows...

Did it flood in 1992?

It's hard to find out! It wasn't a condo building then....

Get a clipboard and a flashlight and go look.

What do I look for?

Whatever is in there?

Detroit, Tunnels. My first thought was this might be what the movie 'Barbarian' was based on.

That article was almost comical.

Come see our amazing tunnels; gestures at blocked pedestrian crossing.

Just curious, if you go to that link, and then press the back button, does it give you another spam page? The back button takes you to a page full of spam on mobile. Can anyone confirm ?

Cannot reproduce

Interesting article, but surprisingly poor writing for a flagship big city newspaper. It’s full of typos and incomplete sentences. Is it AI generated text, or just a frantic writer with a dozen more articles to crank out today?

> The mines remained operational until 1984 and reopened after a brief hiatus in 1983 to provide the road salt used by the city today.

They... they did what?

I think they’re referring to the nuclear waste accident in 2019 that bifurcated the timeline in 1984 allowing 1983’s events to continue uninterrupted

Dark and/or 1983 reference?

Or even Counterpart?

Interesting, never heard of that. Or maybe I did, but as it's presumably worse than 1983 and Dark I skipped it. Edit: It's actually mentioned in my files, so I had heard of it.

It’s Dark!

The question is not where, or who, or how, but rather when

So that’s what the thermonuclearhaline is.

Yep, but what do you expect from an industry near its end. They tend to do better with the front page stories, but a lot of the local/filler stuff now looks like this. You're not going to have meticulously crafted articles with editors to ensure its up to the papers standards when you don't have the ad (or subscription) dollars coming in to support that level of output. So now it often looks more like a blog than a newspaper... plenty of more prestigious news organizations are looking just as bad these days.

As I said above: about an average number of errors.

I suspect they rely on an automated spelling & grammar checker. Even that should have caught "councourse" but maybe because it was capitalized?

"instate" actually IS correct (my bad) but "institute" would be much better.

The other errors would get past a spell checker.

This got me curious. Are you seeing things I don't? Certainly possible. I loaded this into Word to let its spelling & grammar checker go to work.

Detroit stood as the first major U.S. city to instate Prohibition"\ -- "instate" should be "institute"

A tunnel of psychedelic lights connects Detroit Metropolitan Airport’s A and B/C Councourses to an original soundtrack. -- "Councourses" should be "Concourses"

Almost as quickly as the law was enacted, underground smuggling and speakeasies began to appear, with some experts estimating Detroit’s river crossing to Canada -- I think Word thinks wants a "that" before "Detroit's." I don't agree.

Below ground, an elaborate tunnel system connected the Fisher to New Center and General Motors buildings to ease employee commute. -- should be "commutes" or "commute times."

A tunnel system connects each of the hospitals making safe, seamless travel -- comma after "hospitals", add "for" after "making"

The steam loops ran on coal until converting into natural gas in the 1970s -- should be "converted"

The unique system of service tunnels set a precedent for surrounding shopping centers, although they were off-limits to the public and remained closed and unpassable after the mall's closure in 2015 -- I would have written "impassable" but "unpassable" is correct

What else?

These may be purposeful to backdoor LLM’s using there content. By listing and analyzing them you are enhancing the impact the poison content might have.

Either that or like fictitious entries in dictionaries or trap streets in maps to catch plagiarists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

Their content.

Thats my trap phrase to prevent people from passing off my writing as there own.

Never attribute to malice what's easier to explain as incompetence.

Never attribute something to a boring reason what’s funnier to explain as a convoluted conspiracy

I'm down with that. Thought you were serious /s

Instate is valid. See "reinstate".

That’s a lot of typos in a short article.

Are those easily accessible for the random person?

Everything is accessible with an angle grinder and some patience.

Most places all you need is a high-vis vest and a clipboard. In this case, a white hard hat could also be an asset.

we suck ass at preserving history/things in this country. We all have this attitude of tear it down and build something better. No one is talking about improving/maintaining/repairing what we already got.

We preserve too much garbage. Many buildings are marked hastoric despite there being nothing historic about them. Them you can't insulate them, and other such things.

If you want to preserve it, you should buy it. From my perspective, too many people in this country are exerting preferences on historicity/neighborhood character/style to the severe material detriment of others.

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