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This beautiful luxury home in New York’s Adirondack State Park has an awesome secret-it’s built on top of a former launch control center, and has an additional 2300 square feet of space which lies safely underground.
And now this cabin/bunker can be yours for a mere $1.75 million! Maybe Bruce Wayne is looking for a vacation home, complete with pre-constructed BatCave? You can see more pics of this survivalist dream house at the link below.
Tim Biskup is no stranger to the strange, so it’s fitting that his new series of paintings should feature polygonal heads of some rather strange creatures.
They look like simple 3d models juxtaposed into a Pop Art painting, with a swanky color palette to match. Their unusual, kooky, and their eyes are all over the place! Follow the link and check out this polygonal menagerie for yourself.
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We’ve all heard of underground societies, but rarely is the term used in such a literal manner as these amazing underground cities featured on Dornob.
Cities, empires and religions have risen and fallen around these unique underground havens once used by early Christians to hide from Roman armies, yet they remains occupied to this day – 100 square miles with 200+ underground villages and tunnel towns complete with hidden passages, secret rooms and ancient temples and a remarkably storied history of each new civilization building on the work of the last.
Read more about these amazing homes and enjoy the stunning pictures at the link.
Environmental Graffiti has a gallery of images from an underground crypt in Belgium. It was used for burials for decades, but maintenance was discontinued because of the expense. After years of decay, access to the crypt was closed for safety reasons. But you can see it still. Photographer and urban explorer Sven Fennema takes you on an underground tour with fascinating pictures from his book Anderswelten (Other Worlds).
“The air was very cold and wet, and you could see your every breath – also an experience I will never forget. It was as if death was close beside you somehow. The crypt was full of those strange plastic flowers – still with their bright colors – but it was also full of spiders’ webs and other kinds of decay.”
(Image credit: Sven Fennema)
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Why
are there secret ancient underground chambers and tunnels connecting old
farmhouses, churches and even cemeteries and forests in Bavaria, Germany?
Nobody knows - even the experts are baffled:
The vaults could not have served a practical purpose, as dwellings or to store food, for example, if only because the tunnels are so inconveniently narrow in places. Besides, some fill up with water in the winter. Also, the lack of evidence of feces indicates that they were not used to house livestock.
There is not a single written record of the construction of an Erdstall dating from the medieval period. "The tunnels were completely hushed up," says Ahlborn.
Archeologists have also been surprised to find that the tunnels are almost completely empty and appear to be swept clean, as if they were abodes for the spirits. One gallery contained an iron plowshare, while heavy millstones were found in three others. Virtually nothing else has turned up in the vaults.
There's one thing they do know: there are hundreds of these secret underground mazes all over Germany and Austria.
Link (Photo: Ben Behnke) - via BLDG BLOG
The River Fleet in London is a tidal river that once provided water for many industries. Over the years, it became quite polluted, then was consigned to flow underneath the city as London grew, until it was eventually incorporated into the sewer system. But the river is still there, filling its tunnels at high tide and ebbing to a trickle at low tide. Read about what happened to the River Fleet and see plenty of pictures at Kuriositas. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user sub-urban.com)
Who knew? A tunnel dug underneath the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea is open for tours, even though you cannot access the ground above it! This is just one of several odd and interesting corridors you can read about in a list at Atlas Obscura. Others are in Vietnam, Brooklyn, Liverpool, and Australia. Link
Photo: Stephen Alvarez [National Geographic]
If you’re looking for something to do on your next vacation that’s a little different than the usual sightseeing fare, National Geographic has 10 jaw-dropping suggestions that all take place underground. That’s part of the Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky in the picture above. Other suggestions include the Underground City of Montreal, the Cu Chi Tunnels of Vietnam and the Berlin Nuclear Bunker in Germany.
The United States has an underground nuclear waste dump in New Mexico containing 2 million cubic feet of radioactive materials (so far). It is scheduled to be sealed up in the year 2070. But… nuclear waste will be dangerous for about 10,000 years. How will we warn people about the danger of the area so far into the future? A panel of experts was assembled to brainstorm ideas about how to communicate with humans thousands of years from now, when it’s likely they won’t have our technology, language, or customs. As you would expect from a brainstorming session, some of the ideas proposed were quite bizarre. Read about them at mental_floss. Link
Archived TV and film footage is kept safe and sound underground in a salt mine in Kansas. The Hutchinson Salt Mine in Kansas covers 900 underground acres. When a section is finished as a mine, that space can be used for climate-controlled storage, through a company called Underground Vaults (which sounds like a name for a coffin company) and Storage. So far, around 50 acres are dedicated to storage facilities. In this interview, sales manager Jeff Ollenburger said,
It dates back to the Cold War era in the late fifties…a group of Kansas businessmen were seeing a need in the business community to store sensitive and vital records and information underground. It was the height of the Soviet Union and United States’ tension in the Cold War. Nuclear warfare was top of mind for everybody, and to get everything that was important underground was a key driving element of the security of the day, and it was that need to find a location that led that group to Hutchinson, to the salt mine. Here we’re in a salt mine that has been in operation since the twenties. And space was not a limiting factor–there was plenty of room, controlled access in and out, and a perfect storage environment, so it just kinda came to be that it was the ideal spot.
No water, no insects or animals, constant temperature and humidity, and that’s why so many Hollywood films, videotapes, props, and other memorabilia are stored there -plus governmental archives the company won’t tell us about. Link -Thanks, John!
Looking at these amazing pictures posted at Country Life, you can almost picture a super villain lounging around, petting his (evil, of course) cat.
This "Subterranean Mansion" in Bowdon, England, is entirely built underground and comes complete with a swimming pool with waterfalls and slide.
This ultimate super villain lair can be yours for only £2 million.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by calebkraft.
Pat and Diane Farla of Shropshire, England moved into their home three years ago and wondered what a rectangle in the floor represented. On Good Friday, they has a few drinks and decided to find out. They pulled the metal grid up and found a narrow tunnel which led to an underground chamber! The room held a wooden cross, brick seats along the wall, an open chest containing newspapers from the 1930s, and some hooks hanging from the ceiling. The Farlas also found a stairway leading back up to a cupboard in their dining room.
The Farla said the deeds of the detached house dated from 230 years ago and they believe that at some point it had been used as a pub.
Richard Westwood Brookes, historical documents expert for nearby Shropshire auctioneers Mullocks, said: ‘If the deeds are over 230 years old and the room dates back to the 1700′s, there’s a chance it could have been used as a Catholic hideaway or for other nonconformist religious groups.
‘There’s a possibility a room like that could be used as a clandestine Catholic church as you couldn’t be a Catholic during that time – you would be persecuted and executed.
‘It may well have been a Catholic priest hole – but it all depends on what the age was.’
He added that if it had been built during World War II it could have been a type of bunker.
Link -via Metafilter
Found in the Luray Caves, Virginia, this has got to be amongst the most astonishing musical instruments in the World.
The organ was designed by Leland Sprinke in 1956 and replaces traditional organ pipes with the stalactites found naturally in the caverns. The Great Stalacpipe Organ literally ROCKS!
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by cakehead loves evil.
When they were not too busy conquering distant lands, the Romans liked to dig. German hydromechanics professor Mathias Döring discovered that Roman engineers spent a century digging a 66-miles long underground aqueduct to bring water to modern day Syria:
The soldiers chiseled over 600,000 cubic meters of stone from the ground — or the equivalent of one-quarter of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.
“Over the first 60 kilometers, the tunnel has a gradient of 0.3 per thousand,” explains the project director. That works out to 30 centimeters per kilometer — an astonishingly shallow angle of descent.
Link – via britannica
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.
The tunnel under Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn was New York’s first subway tunnel. It was built in 1844, then abandoned in the late 1850s. For over a hundred years, the tunnel seemed to be only a rumor, until an teenage urban Indiana Jones named Bob Diamond decided to unearth the tunnel once and for all. Link
London artists now have a solution to the dilemma of renting expensive studio space to work in. Furniture designer Auro Foxcraft purchased four old Underground subway cars for 200 pounds each and mounted them to a rooftop, creating some unique, affordable office space.
Located atop a warehouse in Shoreditch, London, Village Underground as it’s called, only costs artists 15 pounds a week. And while the roof is a work area for artists the warehouse below is used to exhibit their work.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.
Need a cool hideout or a secret lair for all your evil plans? A mile long tunnel under central London is up for sale right now for only $7.4 million. This Cold War relic is perfectly suited for all super villians in need of a good “underground” hideout, especially since it comes with a bar, two canteens and a billards room.
Link Via BoingBoing
Web Urbanist has a neat list of the 7 Underground Wonders of the World, featuring labyrinths, crypts, catacombs and other creepy underground places.
This one to the left is the catacombs below the chapel in West Norwood Cemetery in London, England.
Link – Thanks Craig Kohler!
Update 10/16/07: They’ve got 7 More Underground Wonders of the World.
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