Under the city streets A history of subterranean New York By Pamela Jones

1978 Hardcover, first edition

Dust Jacket

Holt, Rinehart, and Winston

Very good

The superstructural wonders of New York have been known and celebrated the world over, but underneath this "empire city" exists another far less familiar world whose creation, operation, and maintenance are in many ways even more extraordinary and fascinating. This is a world of millions of miles of maintenance lines, passageways, and centers of activity as crowed and complex as anything aboveground. Here are the support systems of the city: water conduits, steam and gas mains, communication lines, electrical cables, sewers, and underground railways.

The full story of how this hidden world was constructed - through a maze of subterranean rivers, lakes, and bedrock - is told here for the first time. It is a saga filled with acts of heroism and ingenuity, with tragedy and incredible accomplishment, all against the background of a burgeoning metropolis continually outgrowing its maintenance capacity. It is also a history of political and social change, of genius and corruption, and of the manipulation of money. To tell it all, Pamela Jones has dug into the records of the city no less assiduously than the stalwart engineers and laborers, the principal cast of her drama, dug under the streets. The result is a memorable journey into the guts and lifelines of the world's greatest city.