Seattle rebuilt itself on top of itself. If you walk through Pioneer Square today and look down, you’ll see glass prisms set into the concrete beneath your feet. They’re called vault lights. They were installed in the 1890s to let sunlight filter into the city below. The original city, the one that’s still there, one story beneath the streets, sealed off and mostly forgotten.

And Seattle isn’t unique. Across America, entire networks of tunnels, abandoned subways, and buried infrastructure sit beneath our feet. Most people walk over them every day without knowing anything is there at all. I wasn’t looking for underground cities when I started this research. I was investigating urban infrastructure, trying to understand how American cities evolved during the industrial period.

Standard historical work, the kind of thing you do when you’re trying to trace how we got from horsedrawn carriages to highways in less than a century. But then I found the photographs. Images of Seattle’s underground passages still lined with old storefronts. Pictures of Cincinnati’s abandoned subway stations.

Platforms that have never seen a single passenger. Documentation of tunnel networks beneath Los Angeles that most Angelenos don’t know exist. And a pattern began to emerge that I couldn’t ignore. American cities have been built on top of themselves. What we see on the surface is just the latest layer. And beneath that layer, the earlier versions remain, sealed away like time capsules no one talks about.

Let me start with Seattle because it’s the most dramatic example. On June 6th, 1889, at approximately 2002 in the afternoon, a cabinet makers apprentice in a shop at Front and Madison Streets accidentally overturned a pot of glue that had been heating on a stove. The glue spilled onto wood shavings and sawdust covering the floor.

Within minutes, the building was engulfed. The fire spread to a neighboring liquor store which exploded. Then it reached two saloons nearby and they exploded too. The city’s fire chief happened to be out of town. Volunteers attempted to fight the blaze but connected too many hoses at once, draining the water pressure to almost nothing.

By the time the flames were finally extinguished the following morning, somewhere between 25 and 30 blocks had been reduced to ash. The estimated losses totaled 20 million, an enormous sum in 1889. Here’s where the story gets strange. Within days of the fire, city leaders made a decision that would reshape Seattle’s geography permanently.

They decided to raise the entire street level of the commercial district by approximately 12 ft. The official explanation was practical. Seattle had been built on tidal flats. The streets flooded regularly. Sewage systems didn’t drain properly because the city sat too close to sea level. Raising the streets would solve these problems once and for all.

So, that’s what they did. But they didn’t wait for the street raising to complete before rebuilding. Property owners eager to capitalize on an economic boom immediately constructed new buildings on the old low ground where their previous structures had stood. They knew their ground floors would eventually become basement. They built anyway.

For years, Seattle existed in a state of architectural limbo. The new raised streets sat one story above the original storefronts. Pedestrians had to climb ladders to move between the street level and the building entrances below. Eventually, the city built sidewalks that bridged the gap, creating hollow tunnels, some as high as 35 ft, between the old ground and the new.

By the mid 1890s, the transformation was mostly complete. Building owners had moved their businesses to what was now the ground floor, abandoning the original street level entirely. The city installed those glass vault lights in the new sidewalks so the spaces below wouldn’t be completely dark and for a while people continued to use the underground passages.

Then in 1907 after three people died from bubonic plague the city condemned the underground entirely. The official reason was fear of rats spreading disease with the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition coming in 1909. But the effect was to seal away an entire version of the city and pretend it had never existed. The underground didn’t stay empty.

During Prohibition, the abandoned passages became speak easys, opium dens, gambling halls, and flophouses for the homeless. The same spaces that had once been legitimate storefronts transformed into a shadow city, where illegal activity flourished precisely because the authorities had declared the area off limits.

It wasn’t until 1965 that a local historian named Bill Spidel began offering tours of the underground, and even then only a small portion was restored and made accessible. Most of Seattle’s original city remained sealed, deteriorating in darkness beneath the streets that buried it. The official story explains all of this as practical urban planning.

A city prone to flooding seized the opportunity presented by disaster to fix a fundamental problem. And maybe that’s all it was, but the speed of the decision bothers me. The willingness to simply bury an entire commercial district rather than rebuild it at the same level. The fact that for years Seattle functioned as two cities stacked on top of each other and then one of them was simply erased from daily life.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. We walk on top of the old city every day and most people have no idea it’s there. Portland tells a different kind of underground story, one that’s become tangled in legend and dispute in ways that make the truth harder to find. The tunnels beneath Portland’s old town and Chinatown definitely exist.

That much is verified. What happened in them is where things get complicated. From roughly 1850 to 1941, Portland earned a reputation as one of the most dangerous port cities in the world. Ships arrived from across the Pacific, their crews exhausted from months at sea. Many sailors deserted rather than face another voyage.

This left captains desperate for replacement crew members and desperation created opportunity for a particular kind of criminal enterprise. The practice was called shanghaiing named for the Chinese port city. It meant kidnapping men usually after drugging them or getting them drunk and selling them to ship captains for around 50 ahead.

The victims would wake up already at sea with no choice but to work or starve. The tunnels allegedly made this easier. According to local legend, the basements of Portland’s bars and hotels connected to a network of underground passages that led to the waterfront. Trapped doors in saloon floors could drop an unsuspecting victim directly into the tunnels.

From there, they could be transported to waiting ships without ever appearing on the street where someone might intervene. The stories describe holding cells carved into the tunnel walls, cages where kidnapped women were kept before being sold into prostitution, and a shadow economy of human trafficking operating entirely beneath the feet of ordinary citizens.

Here’s where I need to be honest about the evidence. The Oregon Historical Society has stated plainly that historians have found no evidence to substantiate the existence of a tunnel network used for Shanghai. Their digital history manager has pointed out that the harbor wall wasn’t built until 1929, which means the tunnels would have flooded regularly during Portland’s rainy season.

The earliest mention connecting the tunnels specifically to Shanghai doesn’t appear until the 1970s when a local historian named Michael Jones began offering tours. The colorful stories about trap doors and holding cells may be exactly that. stories invented or embellished to attract tourists to what were actually just basement storage areas and passages used for moving goods out of the rain.

The strongest skeptical argument is that Shanghai definitely occurred in Portland. That much is documented, but it happened on the streets and in the bars, not through some elaborate underground network. Random sailors were drugged and carried to ships through ordinary means. The tunnels are a romantic addition to a real but less dramatic history.

And yet the tunnels exist. That’s not disputed. Something was happening in those passages, even if it wasn’t the dramatic kidnapping operations that legend describes. They were used for opium dens. They were used during prohibition to move alcohol. They connected buildings in ways that allowed people and goods to move unseen.

The question isn’t whether Portland has an underground. It does. The question is why the official historical establishment works so hard to separate the tunnels from the documented criminal activity that occurred in the same place during the same period. I don’t have a definitive answer, but I noticed that the pattern of acknowledgement followed by dismissal repeats itself whenever underground history becomes inconvenient.

Yes, the tunnels exist, but they weren’t used for that. Yes, criminal activity occurred, but not in the way people think. The effect is to transform something tangible and visitable into something vague and uncertain. To make you doubt what’s literally beneath your feet. Cincinnati offers perhaps the strangest underground story of all because it’s not about what was hidden.

It’s about what was abandoned in plain sight. In 1916, Cincinnati residents voted to build a subway system. The vote wasn’t close. More than 80% of citizens said yes to a 6 million bond measure that would fund a 16-mi rapid transit loop connecting downtown to neighborhoods like Over the Rine, Norwood, and Oakley. Cincinnati was going to join the ranks of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia as a city with modern underground transportation.

The plan was ambitious, but achievable. The route would use the bed of the old Miami and Eerie Canal, a waterway that had become stagnant and useless by the early 1900s. Laying subway tunnels in a drained canal bed was far easier and cheaper than boring through solid rock. Construction began on January 28th, 1920 at the intersection of Walnut Street and what would become Central Parkway.

By 1923, workers had completed over 2 mi of underground tunnels. Four stations were built beneath the streets, fully finished with platforms ready for passengers. Three above ground stations were constructed along the planned route. The subway was becoming real. Then it stopped. Not because the tunnels collapsed, not because the technology failed, not because riders rejected it.

The subway stopped because of politics, inflation, and a series of decisions that prioritized other things. World War I had driven up construction costs dramatically. The original 6 million was no longer enough to complete the project. Estimates suggested another 10 million would be needed. A new mayor, Murray Seaood, made it his goal to stop construction entirely, viewing the subway as a project of the previous administration that he wanted no part of.

Negotiations with the neighboring cities of Norwood and St. Bernard, dragged on for over a year. By the time the stock market crashed in 1929, any remaining hope of completion evaporated. Central Parkway, the boulevard built on top of the subway tunnels, opened to traffic on October the 1st, 1928. The celebration lasted a week, but beneath that parkway, the tunnels sat empty.

The stations sat empty. The platforms that had been built to receive passengers received no one. A 1948 editorial in the Cincinnati Inquirer declared the project pointless, arguing that street cars were heading toward oblivion and the whole concept of mass transportation had changed.

Today, the Cincinnati subway remains the largest abandoned subway tunnel system in the United States. The tunnels are still there. The stations are still there. In the 1950s, a 52-in water man was installed in one of the tunnels because it was cheaper than digging a new one. During the Cold War, one of the abandoned stations was converted into a nuclear bomb shelter, complete with sanitation, water, and heating systems.

The city still maintains the tunnels because Central Parkway sits on top of them and needs structural support. As of 2008, estimates suggested it would cost 2.6 6 million annually just to maintain the tunnels, 19 million to fill them with dirt, and over a 100 million to actually finish the subway and put it into service.

The tunnels could still be used. Engineers have confirmed they’re in good condition and could remain viable for another century, but they sit empty while commuters above sit in traffic on Interstate 75, which was built along the same route where the subway’s eastern section was supposed to run. Cincinnati voted overwhelmingly for public transit. They built most of it.

Then they abandoned it and constructed highways instead. New York’s underground tells a similar story, though on a grander scale. The city’s first subway line opened on October 27th, 1904, and its crown jewel was City Hall Station at the southern terminus. The architects George Lewis Hines and Christopher Grant Lafage designed it to announce that New York had arrived as a world-class city.

The station featured Gastavino vated ceilings, the same technique used in Grand Central Terminal. Brass chandeliers hung from the arches. Skylights let natural light filter down to the platform. The tiles were arranged in rich tones of red, green, and cream. When it opened, the station reportedly featured a fountain with a goldfish pond, a live pianist, paintings on the walls, and oriental rugs on the floor.

This was what public infrastructure looked like in 1904. a subway station designed with the care and attention usually reserved for cathedrals. The station closed on December the 31st, 1945. The official explanation is practical. The platform was built on a tight curve only about 200 ft long. The original trains had five cars with doors only at the front and back where the curve was tightest.

As trains got longer, the gap between the cars and the curved platform became dangerous. Passengers couldn’t board safely. Rather than redesign the station, the city simply closed it. City Hall station still exists. The six train still uses it to turn around at the end of its downtown run. If you stay on the train past Brookton Bridge, which you’re technically not supposed to do, you’ll pass through the old station as the train loops back up town.

For a few seconds, you can glimpse the Gastavino tiles, the vated ceilings, the chandeliers still hanging in place. Then the train rounds the curve, and you’re back in the modern system. The New York Transit Museum offers tours of the station a few times a year, but only to members, and tickets sell out almost immediately.

The skylights that once illuminated the platform are still there in City Hall Park, now covered with concrete slabs. The most beautiful subway station New York ever built, sits empty, preserved, but inaccessible, a ghost hidden in plain sight. City Hall isn’t the only abandoned station in New York. Worth Street closed in 1962. South Fourth Street in Williamsburg was never used at all.

Construction began in 1929 and abandoned during the depression. Before the 1904 subway even existed, there was the Beach Pneumatic Transit, a oneb block underground railway that operated from 1870 to 1873 using air pressure to push passenger cars through a tube. It had nearly half a million riders in its single year of operation, then was shut down and forgotten so completely that workers accidentally rediscovered it during later construction.

The pattern repeats, build something magnificent, abandon it, seal it away, pretend it was never there. Los Angeles adds another layer to this story. Most people think of LA as a city built for cars, but that’s only been true since the 1950s. Before that, Los Angeles had one of the most extensive electric railway systems in the world.

The Pacific Electric Red Cars connected neighborhoods across the basin, and some of those red cars ran underground. The Pacific Electric Subway Tunnel opened on December 1st, 1925. It ran 4,325 ft beneath downtown, saving commuters about 15 minutes on trips between the central city and areas like Hollywood and Glendale.

Passengers boarded from platforms beneath the subway terminal building on Hill Street. The system operated for three decades before being dismantled in favor of highways and automobiles. The tunnels are still there. So, a roughly 11 m of other underground passages beneath downtown LA. During Prohibition, these tunnels connected an estimated 400 speak easys, allowing patrons to move between illegal bars without appearing on the street where police might spot them.

The King Eddie Saloon on Fifth and Main survived prohibition by pretending to be a piano store while serving alcohol in its basement, which connected to the tunnel network. Cole’s French Dip, located in the Pacific Electric Building, operated as a speak easy, where cops were regular customers. Local historians have documented that the mayor’s office itself was allegedly involved in running the bootleg supply.

Today, most of these tunnels are sealed. A few can be accessed through government buildings or by special tour operators who have obtained permission from private property owners. The Bunker Hill Transit Tunnel, a people mover project started in the late 1970s, was killed by the Reagan administration in 1981, leaving another set of incomplete underground passages beneath the city.

Los Angeles built itself underground, then abandoned those passages and rebuilt everything around the automobile. The tunnels remain. Forgotten infrastructure beneath a city that pretends they don’t exist. I keep returning to the same questions. Why do American cities bury themselves? Why do we build elaborate underground infrastructure then seal it off instead of maintaining it? Why does this pattern repeat in Seattle, Portland, Cincinnati, New York, Los Angeles, and dozens of other cities I haven’t even mentioned? The official explanations are always

practical. fires, floods, changing technology, economic pressures, political disputes. Each city has its own specific reasons for why its underground was abandoned. And taken individually, each explanation makes sense. But taken together, the pattern suggests something else. A systematic transformation of American cities that occurred roughly between 1890 and 1950.

Public spaces became private. Mass transit became individual automobiles. Underground networks that connected communities were sealed off in favor of highways that divided them. The infrastructure of one era was buried literally to make way for the infrastructure of another. I’m not claiming conspiracy.

I’m observing pattern. The choices that were made across different cities by different leaders for different stated reasons, all pushed in the same direction, downward, underground, out of sight, and out of memory. The most unsettling part isn’t what was buried. It’s how quickly it was forgotten. Seattle’s underground existed for less than two decades before being condemned and sealed.

Cincinnati’s subway was abandoned before it ever carried a passenger. New York’s most beautiful station served riders for only 41 years before being closed permanently. These aren’t ancient ruins. These are places built within living memory or close to it, now treated as curiosities rather than functional infrastructure.

What else might we be walking over without knowing? What other layers exist beneath the cities we think we understand? And if this much can be forgotten within a single century, what else might we have been taught not to see? The underground cities remain. You can visit Seattle’s passages on a guided tour.

You can ride through New York City Hall station if you stay on the six train. You can look up the photographs of Cincinnati’s empty platforms still waiting for trains that will never come. The evidence is there for anyone willing to look down instead of ahead. But looking requires accepting that the surface isn’t the whole story. That what we see was built on top of something else.

That the cities we know are just the latest version and beneath them earlier versions persist in darkness, sealed away but not gone. And that connects to something else I’ve been researching. The construction quality of these underground spaces, the architectural ambition, the engineering precision, it suggests a different era, a different approach to building, a different understanding of what infrastructure was supposed to be.

The underground cities weren’t just functional, they were magnificent, and then they were abandoned. Why would you bury something magnificent? What does it mean that we chose highways over subways, surface over underground, forgetting over remembering? Those are the questions I keep asking. And the answers, I suspect, lie in what else was happening during the same period when these cities were being buried and sealed and forgotten.

That’s the next investigation.