Underground New York A Subterranean World of Marvelous Mechanical Installations and T By WILLIAM R. STEWART HE great buildings of New York, which in bewildering sequence rear their daring summits skyward, have produced a city underground of which the visitor to the metropolis sees nothing, and of which the average New Yorker himself has little idea. But if New York could be uncovered, what a spectacle would be revealed! Tiers of sub-stories extending to a greater depth than the bed of the F st River, would dot all the Lower City; batteries of boilers in every block, with explosive energy sufficient to wreck. the metropolis, would frown gloomily from the rock-excavated depths: sewers, with their waste and rainfall of a great city, would dry their dank sides in the sunlight; and everywhere huge water and gas mains, pneumatic tubes, telegraph and telephone conduits, and pipes of all sizes, would twist and coil like so many giant pythons in an eastern jungle. A City's Vitals It is the very vitals of the city which are below the pavement. There life throbs in every piston thrust, in the hum and buzz of dynamos and fans and the roar of furnaces. The "sky-scrapers' must have their bases well fastened in the earth; and to care for them, there has been evolved a new type of sub-cellar dweller with whom the person who lives overground has not yet had time to familiarize himself. As many as 200 to 300 employees work entirely underground in many of New York's great buildings at the present time. Numbers of these live forty, fifty, and sixty feet below the pavement, where are located the great boilers and engines that furnish the 2,000- or 3,000-horse-power energy which is required to run the elevators, filter and heat the water, make the ice, and perform the other functions of a well-conditioned twentieth century structure. For six days in the week, sunshine and daylight are strangers to these toilers of the depths. Far over their heads the rattle of the streets is drowned by iron-cased CORNER OF COAL BUNKER UNDERNEATH AN OFFICE BUILDING.-FOUR HUNDRED TONS OF COAL IN SIGHT. of coal, are some of the features of the building below the street which those who pass above little suspect. To dig and equip the hole under one building alone -that of the Mutual Life Insurance Company, on Nassau Street -cost $800,000. The underground crew of an office building of the larger class numbers almost a hundred men. These are divided into a chief engineer and two assistants, several other engineers and oilers: and the rest, coal passers, cleaners, carpenters, etc. They work in shifts of eight hours each, and during that time never see the outer air. Well-appointed lavatories and baths afford them all the facilities of the best-appointed private houses, and meals are served underground in perfectly ventilated and brilliantly lighted dining rooms. An idea of the magnitude and variety of the machinery under the great buildings in New York City is obtained from the estimate that the length of the water, steam, drain, and other pipes in many of them is fully one hundred miles; that from fifteen to twenty-five miles of pipe are required to connect the boilers with the heat-radiators: and that in the private telephone systems of the individual buildings from thirty to forty miles of wire are employed. Over 300.000 gallons of water are used in the principal structures every week-day, each drop of which is filtered in the filtering plant in the basement. Water and Air Filtered Indeed, filtering is one of the prime features of the underground life of the New York sky-scraper. Even the air good enough for the person on the street, will not do for the man underground until it is filtered. In all the large buildings of new construction, there is a huge pipe, or shaft, twenty feet or more |