Cool underground NYC discovery

Once upon a time, there were slaughterhouses on the island of Manhattan. But, even in the 1870s it wasn't easy to move a herd of cattle through New York City, so that job was done underground. Now, Gothamist has found evidence that two of the "Cow Tunnels" that took cows from dock to death may still exist below 12th Avenue at West 34th St. and West 38th St. Exploration, ahoy!

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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Crubellier

Much of the land around Camden Town in London is riddled with subterranean tunnels built for the horses which used to work in the old railway goods yard at Chalk Farm. In the last few years, sadly, the Stables Market has encroached heavily into the old tunnel network, including the construction of at least one whole floor of a shopping centre which was simply abandoned after completion. Chunks of the network were destroyed in the last couple of years as a consequence of the construction of a block of flats in the shell of the old Jim Henson Creature Shop in Oval Road.
jonathan levy

A few years back around Midtown Manhattan there was a gas scare that turned out to be a methane haze from a cattle show at MSG from thousands of cows mooing: “Pull my hoof.”
Anonymous

I suspect a certain percentage of those cows were sacrificed en route as tributes to the area Mole-men.
MitchSchaft

Aren’t these tunnels how they moved the gold from the World Trade Centers before they imploded ‘em? ;)
JoshP

i sooo have the wrong job.
loonquawl

“Exploration”? Those tunnels were (as the source tells us) for crossing the street. So it is a maximum of 50m of cow tunnel… should be a real treat to explore those.
Btw: look at the diagram on http://www.ediblegeography.com/ to see why any mysterious tunnels mere 10 feet under the surface of 12th Avenue are bs.

Is this a new trend? moo moo as a soft form of woo woo?
uricacid

I laughed at this comment in the original piece

“You may be surprised to learn that this is only a small part of an underground cow railroad that operated in the 19th century, ferrying cows from meat-eating states into free, vegetarian states.”
hobomike

And if you go down there, I’m sure after a few yards, you will be met by some families who’ve been living down there for years!

There are still slaughterhouses in Manhattan. Some legal (chicken), others not so much.
Rich Keller

And herding them along would have made you a cthonic psychopomp on your way to an abattoir. My favorite HPL and Clive Barker words used to describe the same location are enough to make me chitter.
Anonymous

first off, the greenwich st. story from 1997 refers to tribeca which is nowhere near 34th street. tribeca was a produce warehouse district until the 1970′s, so it’s possible something is down there. the street has been excavated many times in recent years. i would think it would have been rediscovered by now.

secondly, the are around 34th street is filled with underground railway tunnels. this is how everything gets in and out of penn station. i’ve heard that the homeless camp out in the abandoned ones. cow tunnels? maybe. it seems more likely that a structure like that would have been built in the meat packing district below 14th street. the now famous highline is the railroad system that served those warehouses.

another note, the meatpacking has a well documented refrigeration system that circulated cool water to the various warehouses through an underground network of pipes. i believe it still functions.
Anonymous

When I was a child you could go to Wilmington, Delaware on the day cattle were delivered to one of the butcher shops, and there would be great torrents of fresh blood gushing out of a pipe in the curbing and running down the street into the storm sewers. I have no idea if this was actually legal. Flies abounded, and children dared each other to taste it.

Wilmington had an interconnected sewage/stormwater system that used rainwater to periodically flush out the pipes, so this made sense, sort of, if you consider ancient Rome to be state of the art in waste management. People are kind of pissed off about it now, but they are having a hard time finding all the interconnections. You still don’t want to go swimming in the Brandywine immediately after heavy rains. Too many clark bars.