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The Riverside Park Tunnel runs underneath Riverside Park
from approx. 123rd St. to 72nd St. The railroad continues in
both directions-- at the level of West Side Highway to the
north, and in a concrete valley below road level to the
south. The railroad has been extant in one form or another
since the 1850s; the tunnel has historically been the
property of the New York Central Railroad, part of Cornelius
Vanderbilt's railroad empire in the later 19th century. The
railroad, which is used by Amtrak today, goes north from
Penn Station along the west side of Manhattan and across the
Harlem River on a bridge at the north-west tip of
Manhattan.
In the early 20th century, it was recognized that the
railroad blocked access to the river, uglified the park, and
decreased property values in the area. Under the auspices of
Robert Moses, and as a means of employing labourors during
the early 30s, the railroad was covered with a
steel-and-concrete structure, enclosing an area around the
tracks 66 feet wide and up to 30 feet high. The concrete
walls are two feet thick; giant steel girders support the
ceiling, and sewers, utility rooms, access stairways, and
other railroad-related structures are built in. A
cross-section of the tunnel, with the two sets of tracks in
the middle (heading straight at the viewer) would show the
two side walls (66 feet apart, and approximately 10 to 15
feet high). Above them, fitting over them like a widened,
upside-down U, is a slightly wider structure of the roof and
two walls. These top, wider walls are 15 or more feet
high.
Supported on top of the tunnel ceiling is a broad
pedestrian plaza. Riverside Park itself is built on a slope
as the land angles down from the level of Riverside Drive
(on the east) to the Hudson River (on the west.) The Park is
therefore terraced, and this is what allowed the "tunnel" to
be a tunnel-- it was built into a hillside, or more
accurately, it acts as a giant retaining wall half-engulfed
by the hill. The pedestrian plaza above the tunnel is two
terraces down from Riverside Drive and one level up from the
West Side Highway. Because the land slopes down to the
river, however, directly to the west of the pedestrian
plaza, the outside of the top, outer wall is exposed. From
the West Side Highway, it looks like a 15-foot retaining
wall.
The Tunnel was abandoned for many years starting i
believe in the 1950s. At some point, it became a haven for
those who did not have homes aboveground. What had been
utility sheds or storage rooms became homes. In about 1991,
Margaret Morton and Jennifer Toth both published books.
Morton's was a photo-essay on the tunnel and its residents,
called "The Tunnel." Toth's book, called "the Mole People,"
was a sensationalized and unresearched blend of fact and
fiction, but although it was less than perfect in terms of
specious speleological information, it was efficacious in
bringing the human element to light. Toth ended up on ricki
lake or something talking about "the mole people who eat
rats and blah bluh-blah" which is where she belonged to
begin with.
Slightly before the books came out, Amtrak bought the
tunnel and began cleaning it up so as to run trains thru it.
Most of the residents were evicted and at the very least the
thriving communities documented in "the Tunnel" ceased to
exist. At this point, Amtrak trains run thru the tunnel
approximately every 40 minutes during th day and
occasionally during the night. Some folk to still dwell in
the tunnel, most or all in the side rooms on top of the
lower wall. The place is fantastic, however, for the
industrial archeology look, and the quality of the graffiti
(yes, you can see all the murals shown in Morton's book--
all the latest, greatest works of Freedom Chris, Smith, and
Sane, and gawd knows who else.)
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