Today in 1904, the opening of the New York City subway system.
More than 100,000 people rode on just its first evening in operation; today, it transports millions of passengers a day.
The system and its infrastructure are mostly underground, aside from the entrances to hundreds of subway stations, and a few bits of equipment that are hiding in plain sight.
Like an equipment room that’s disguised as a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights.
The address is 58 Joralemon Street.
You can go there, it’s a residential block, but if you look closely at number 58, the windows are blackened, there’s no furniture inside and there’s nobody bringing Ring Dings and Pepsi for a dinner party with friends.
According to Untapped New York, that’s because it’s not actually a residence.
It’s just designed to look like one to make the neighborhood a little nicer.
Inside, there’s a ventilator for the subway; it also has or had some big electrical equipment.
The space is also an emergency exit for a nearby subway station.
There are several fake houses like this in NYC; it makes sense that the system would have infrastructure all around the city, and that it would take steps to keep them hidden.
Other cities do this, too: London and Paris have similar structures in place for their mass transit.
And Toronto has hundreds of false structures, though theirs are for covering up the city’s electrical substations.
They’re literally powerhouses.
Most power lines are just lines, but Europe could soon have something called the Austrian Power Giants.
These are designs for electric towers that are shaped like animals that have connections to the country’s nine states.
So if you want your electric towers to look like stags and storks and so forth, now you know where to go.
A Fake Brownstone in Brooklyn Hides a Secret Subway Ventilator (Untapped New York)
power lines shaped as animal sculptures supply electricity across austria (designboom)
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