Why there are abandoned tunnels under Dallas

We love a tunnel on this show. A few months ago Kara told Matt all about the FBI's secret tunnel under the Russian embassy in Washington. Today Matt takes Kara back underground, digging into the rise and fall of the pedway: an infrastructure idea that spread through North America in the 1960s and 70s, from Montreal to Dallas to Calgary, with mixed results. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

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  G'day, Matt Bevan here, this is If You're Listening. Last week, we looked at how Donald Trump's trade war is playing out in two very different Canadian provinces, Quebec and Alberta. Now, we love a tunnel on this show, and a few months ago, we did an episode about the FBI's secret tunnel under the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Today, I thought I'd take us back underground into a style of tunnel network that's found in many Canadian cities. This story is about the rise and fall of the Pedway, an infrastructure idea that spread through North America in the 60s and 70s with mixed results. I'm joined again by supervising producer Cara Jensen-McKinnon. Hello, Cara.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  So Cara, you have been working at the ABC's Ultimo office for some time now. Yes. I worked there for nine years and I discovered that you can actually go from the ABC building as far as David Jones in the CBD without going outside.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Yes, I have done this. I have done this before. All the way there? Yes, mostly to stay out of the rain, but the longer I stay underground, the more fearful I get that I'm going to get some weird like underground mole sickness.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  I don't like to do it, but I have done it in my life.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  Now, why you would want to go into David Jones, really, who knows? I've never needed to go into the David Jones there in town, but I have done it for the fun of doing it through the tunnel system. And this, when I was exploring how far in Sydney I could go underground without getting wet, got me interested in the idea of, in the world, where is the biggest system that you can do this in? And I learned about Alberta, which is where it links to the story that we did last week. Alberta has two big cities in it, Edmonton and Calgary. And both Edmonton and Calgary have what is called a Pedway system.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  I mean, I wouldn't have called it that, but that's what they're called, a Pedway system. Sure. I've sent you a link, I think, the Calgary Plus 15 system.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Wow, so it's extensive.

• 3:01Speaker 03

  It's enormous. It is a 16 kilometre system across the downtown area of Calgary. And it means that you can be in the downtown area of Calgary and never need to go outside into the extraordinarily cold temperatures. And there is a similar system in Edmonton as well, not as big. I kind of went, oh yeah, this is kind of cool. Yeah. But I didn't think about it all that much. Right. Until this last week, when I started looking into the history of this. And it's stranger and a lot more fun than I expected it would be. Amazing. This is the history of Pedways. The history of mole people who live under Alberta. In fact, Alberta is only a tiny part of the story.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Okay. Basically, Pedways started in the early part of the 20th century as a totally disorganised thing. There are a few examples in Houston, Texas. Will Horwitz owned a bunch of movie theatres that were all kind of like on the same street across an intersection. Okay. He was like, well, I don't want to build three air conditioning systems. So what I'll do is I'll dig tunnels between the different theatres.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  And I will just put an air conditioner in one of the theatres and the air-conditioned air will just blow down through the tunnels to the other theatres. And I won't have to pay for a bigger air conditioning system.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  I like being so cheap that digging a system of underground tunnels is like the solution you come up with. I know. Surely it's cheaper to just have five air conditioners. It was a different time.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, all the way up to the 1950s, people would put a big sign out the front of their shop saying that it was air-conditioned, because it was quite a treat for a shop to be air-conditioned. Chicago also started building sort of just ad hoc, not particularly well organised tunnels between the different downtown buildings in Chicago. But it wasn't until the 1960s that it really started taking off as kind of a movement. The guy who was behind this was this guy named Vincent Pont. Okay. Who was a Boston architect and he was involved in the designing of this big downtown shopping area of Montreal in Canada.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  He built what's called the Plusville Murray, which is kind of, if you imagine the Queen Victoria Building in downtown Sydney, it's sort of a mixed office block slash food court slash shopping mall, right in the middle of Montreal. And he convinced the architects to basically build the giant underground area underneath. Then he went, well, why don't we link it to the underground areas of the buildings that are across the road? And gradually, the city of Montreal kind of went, what we're going to do is we're going to create an incentive system for the owners of all these buildings around Montreal

• 5:57Speaker 03

  to build tunnels between each building and to create a network across all of Montreal.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  You can see the size that Montreal's system got to. It is very big.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Is it because the streets are like rammed and they have so many people that they need to move half the people underground?

• 6:17Speaker 03

  This is the reason that it really took off. You've absolutely nailed it. In the 1960s, there's an enormous boost in the number of cars on the roads, right? Basically, all these downtown areas had all this foot traffic. They kind of just went, we want to bring cars into the downtown area. All these annoying pedestrians are in the way. So what if we put all the pedestrians either underground, in the case of Montreal, or in the case of Calgary, on the second floor? Okay. Calgary's entire system is called the Plus 15 network because it's 15 feet above ground.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  It is entirely bridges between buildings.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Wow, yes, okay.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  American cities got really excited about this idea, being able to get all these annoying pedestrians out of the downtown area, because of course, all these downtown areas were built for foot traffic and some cars.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  And suddenly there was a bajillion cars. It was horrible and it was a terrible traffic jam and there was nowhere to park and there were all these pedestrians everywhere. And so the business was sort of shifting out to suburban shopping malls and downtown areas were kind of dying.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  It feels crazy that you wouldn't do it the other way around and put the cars in like a tunnel network, but that you'd just be like, okay, we obviously have to delete the people.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  To just have like an abandoned car city.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  We need cars driving around, people, you can be underground.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  You won't see the light of day.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  So basically, all these cities, cities like Montreal, Minneapolis, Calgary, Houston, Cincinnati, Toronto, two dozen large cities in North America started doing this. They kind of did it through planning controls. They would say to developers who were building new buildings, we will let you have extra commercial office space if you also build a bridge to the building next to you and have basically a corridor going straight through the middle of your building that the public can walk through anytime, day or night. To give you an idea of the extensiveness of some of these systems,

• 8:32Speaker 03

  I've got a video here that was filmed in 2020. This was one of those, you know how Red Bull, the drink company, occasionally pulls these big stunts, these crazy stunts?

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Where people like jump from space to the earth?

• 8:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, that kind of thing. Yes. This is one of the tamer ones, but still pretty fun. Okay. They've got like a motorcyclist to basically ride through the Minneapolis Skyway system on his motorbike at high speed, doing tricks and stuff. So check it out.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, he is going really fast. Okay. Hi guys, I'm Aaron Colton and I'm inside the Minneapolis Skyway system on my electric motorcycle.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Wow. All right, here we go. One wrong turn and he's smashing through a glass wall to his death. Absolutely.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  So the Skyway system, for anyone that's not from the northern states, is how you get around in the winter in Minnesota because it's absolutely rigid.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  In this video, there are in fact like pedestrians around?

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. So now he's riding his bike down an escalator and there are people going down the escalator on the other side.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  It's like the most annoying thing a person could do, really.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  It really is. It's obnoxious. Let's be honest.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  You can start to see some of the facilities that are connected to the Skyway. Now he's gone into like a concert hall.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Yes, he's like doing wheelies on a stage surrounded by like chairs and instruments.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Again, obnoxious. I mean, yeah, it's really obnoxious what he's doing.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Wow, this thing is making music.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  He rides then into the arena for the Minnesota basketball team.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Man, I haven't been inside this arena since I was a little kid.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Oh, he just caught a ball while he was riding. Yeah. And then he's now just shot the hoop. Yeah, pretty cool. Okay. Pretty cool dude. All right, I'm coming around. I'm coming around to this guy.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  They haven't actually deliberately cleared the pedestrians. And yet also, there's basically nobody in there. Okay. You may have noticed that. Yes. That's kind of the thing. In 2000, there was a Canadian movie released called Way Downtown, and I've got a little bit of the trailer here for you.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  There's the four of us in on the bet. Randy, Sandra, Kurt and myself. The deal is who can go the longest without going outside. This is made easy since the downtown clump is all connected by walkways. In theory, we could go without fresh air till we retire.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Cool. What? Is that a premise for an entire movie?

• 11:03Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, the premise for the movie is that these four colleagues have made a bet that they see how long they can go without going outside and they live in Calgary, which has the plus 15 network.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  And that's the whole movie.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Well, I believe the movie is mainly about them losing their minds.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Right, a great advertisement for the tunnel network.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the thing is, by the end of the 20th century, there were all of these massive tunnel networks. There's the Toronto PATH network, which is the largest one in the world. It's 30 kilometres. Oh my god. Have a look at the link that I've got there for you.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Wow, it's like the entire city, basically. Yeah, it's enormous.

• 11:42Speaker 03

  Is covered in some way. Wow. And it's so big that they've had to sort of design a navigation system inside it. All the way along it, they have to have signs on the wall saying which direction you're walking, because people get so lost.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Because presumably there's no like skylights, you're just fully underground.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely underground. Or you're inside the second floor of a building. You're walking through the middle of a building, you know, and people get lost all the time. There are in fact apps and stuff that people can download when they're in Toronto to help them navigate the PATH system.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  But basically, it didn't work.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  It was a really terrible idea. To be clear, it works in the cities that are so cold and horrible that nobody wants to go outside in the wintertime. Yes. Those are mostly Canadian cities.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  In America, the idea of doing it for the purposes of getting the pedestrians out of the way, either it negatively contributed to making it seem like the downtown area was worse. Yes. The downtown area you're walking around. A ghost town. Well, it made it feel like you were walking around in a hospital, basically.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  The mayor of Dallas, Laura Miller, in 2005, gave a quote to the New York Times about the Dallas Underground system. And the quote is, "If I could take a cement mixer and pour cement in and clog up the tunnels, I would do it today. It was the worst urban planning decision that Dallas has ever made. They thought it was hip and groovy to create an underground community, but it was a death knell."

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not good. Dallas in particular, basically all the signs for the Dallas Underground network have been removed, and so people don't know it's there. Oh. And so it's this very strange underground sort of ghost place. Right. Part of it flooded. It really looks like the apocalypse has happened. And this is the underground mole people place.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Oh my goodness, yeah, there's one here where it's like fully flooded and mouldy and all of the kind of cladding's been ripped off the walls. It looks very disgusting.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's bad. They've had situations, like in the Houston one, they recently had the big hurricane that went over Houston, and basically all of the tunnels flooded. And buildings that would not have flooded were flooded because they were flooded up through the tunnel system.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  They have a cavity underneath them.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. So basically, the American experiment with tunnels that was exported by this guy Vincent Pont, the guy who built the original Montreal system, had travelled around America being like, "You should build tunnels, tunnels and bridges. Everybody loves them." And it turns out that they all hate them.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  I'm imagining he's like the monorail guy in The Simpsons.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Well, sir, there's nothing on earth like a genuine bona fide electrified six-car monorail. What'd I say? Monorail. What's it called? Monorail. That's right, monorail.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  A thousand percent that was him. He was a thousand percent the monorail guy.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  And it's gone about as well as the monorail went in Sydney.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Basically, in many of these cases, they were essentially just turning their downtown areas into shopping malls. It had all the terrible parts of the shopping mall, but with worse parking. In Canada, they are still popular in Toronto, Montreal and Calgary and Edmonton. Right. In Toronto, there is an annual 5K. Okay. That runs through the tunnels. It's an entirely indoor 5K running race that runs through the tunnels.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  I suspect that their tunnels probably aren't as haunted as the ones in Dallas. They're probably a little more maintained, so they're not running through like weird mould floodwater.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, in Dallas, it'd need to be a triathlon, I think. Exactly. They'd have to be a swimming pool. Yeah, so that's the story of Pedways, the rise and fall of an infrastructure idea. Because it was kind of an extraordinary thing that these cities managed to convince all of these private developers and private owners of all these buildings to be like, "I'm happy to have infrastructure going straight through my building." But yeah, didn't really pay off.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Have you seen the catacombs under Paris?

• 15:44Speaker 03

  I have not been down there, no.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Okay, well, it's terrifying and insane, but basically there had been so many people that died during the plague that they had bodies piling up. And they were like, "Okay, we're running out of space in the cemeteries. What should we do with these bodies?" And then some morbid guy was like, "What if we decorate the walls of the tunnels with the people's bones?" And not just like piled up, like really elaborate artworks, like if we make scenes out of the bones and we make, you know, funny little jaunty dancing sculpture things and we stack all the skulls up like bricks, like really terrifying stuff. There's the same haunting energy to these Dallas pictures, so maybe, you know,

• 16:29Speaker 01

  this could be a way to reinvigorate these places.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  To decorate them with the bones of the dead. Okay. I mean, they can't get any worse. No, can't get worse than the Dallas one. We should pitch that to the mayor of Dallas. Don't fill it with concrete, fill it with bones.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  On Thursday, we're diving into the Falkland Islands dispute. Argentinian President Javier Millay has spent the last few weeks reviving his country's claim to the British territory. But if it comes to a head, will President Donald Trump back Britain, America's closest historical ally, or his closest ideological ally, Javier Millay? That's Thursday. I'll catch you then.