99% Invisible - 115- Cow Tunnels

Episode Date: May 20, 2014

The westernmost part of Manhattan, between 34th and 39th street, is pretty industrial. There’s a bus depot, a ferry terminal, and a steady stream of cars. But in the late 19th early 20th centuries, this was cow country. Cows used … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Oh, there's a horse. And this is front of the show Sean Cole. And it was 39th and 11th. And Manhattan. And there's a horse. A horse-drawn carriage, of course. There aren't just random horses wandering around Manhattan.

They're probably where at some point. I am actually going to meet a woman to talk about cows. It's hard to believe now. Now this area is really industrial. There's a busty poe. But this part of Manhattan, the westernmost part, between say 34th and 39th streets. This was cow country. So we're talking the late 19th, early 20th centuries. You had cattle being herded across 12th Avenue, which is now the Westside Highway. Nicola Twilly is a woman I wanted to talk to about cows. She writes a blog called Edible Geography. There are pictures of 12th Avenue showing the cattle here, showing cowboys, which is crazy.

Get a long little doggie. And cows were brought to this part of town, to be made into beef. You've heard of the meat packing district? Well, this was like the meat hacking district. It was nicknamed Abitwar Place, and it was a hive of bone boilers and hide stretchers and large renders. So this, if you can picture it, One boilers and hide stretchers and large renders.

So this, if you can picture it, would have been a disassembly line for every single part of a cow. The cows would be ferried across the Hudson River from New Jersey, on a cow boat and land at the dock here, and at first, you know, marching a few cows across 12th Avenue to the slaughterhouse was fine. You can hold up traffic for that. But then came more cows and more cows. And more folks in their carriages and then the train came through and cars.

All of a sudden, cows are in the way. I mean, cows move at a different pace. And so there were reports of epic cow jams on 12th Avenue. What does a cow jam look like? That sounds horrible. I know. I think it was just people felt like, you know, the pace of cows and cowboys and cow-drowing on 12th Avenue

was no longer suited to modern life. So. So, so. This is what we're here to talk about today. I cannot wait. Me neither. Here we go That's why people invented things like the cow tunnel

Cow tunnel cow tunnel. Oh, it's the best Let's hear it again cow tunnel. Cattle tunnels Say it again cow tunnels Whenever you say it, it's funny. I know. I mean, you have to love them. Cow tunnels. Cow tunnels. In Manhattan.

Or as Nicola called them in a piece she wrote for Gismoto, the lost cow tunnels of New York City. And when Nicola says that people invented things like the cow tunnel, for the purposes of this story, that really could mean one of two things. Either people invented the tunnels to march the cows underneath 12th Avenue to the abattoir, or people invented this crazy cock and bull story about the cow tunnels. More bull than cock in this case. Because everybody loves a good vaguely plausible urban myth. And so, Nicola Twilly has been on a years-long quest to figure out whether the cow tunnels

ever actually existed. Because, after all, the idea of cows loathing along under your feet in New York City, at least how we think of New York City now, is insane. And this is a woman who writes a blog that's generally about food and place. And if anything exists at that same intersection, it is the cow tunnel. I just a dedicated infrastructure for animals like that. It's a new genre of architecture. Exactly. The cow tunnel. When you think about all of the tubes and tunnels and weird things that are underneath the street,

we have tunnels for cars, we have tunnels for subways, we have all these tubes filled with electrical cables and the internet and all this. I mean why shouldn't the cows have their own subterranean infrastructure too? Nicholas first happened on the cow tunnel story by chance. So I was reading a book called Raising Stakes by Betty Fassel. It's Fassel, actually. Stakes, of course, is spelled S-T-E-A-K-S.

Yes, the kind that could be Porter House or, yeah. Or T-bone. Exactly. Or Sirloin. Any of the above. Striploin, rump. I like sang rump. Exactly. Skirt.loin, rump. I like saying rump. Exactly.

Skirt. And she's reading along, and there was this one little passage on page 22. You could miss it quite easily if you are reading too fast. It's a sort of two-line thing. And she says, traffic was so heavy in the 1870s that a cow tunnel, in quotation marks, was and capitalized actually. Was built beneath 12th Avenue to serve as an underground passage, and it's rumored to be there still, awaiting designation as a landmark site.

And then she just carries on, you know. As late as 1880, Horowitz writes, blah, blah, blah. That's what, that's literally one sentence. Exactly. And I thought that's weird. I wonder if they're still there. So I googled it. And then what did you find? I found Brian Whippred.

I think is how he pronounces his name. Yeah, that's how I pronounce it. Brian Whippred is a utility specialist for whitelinger associates in New York. It's a structural engineering firm. What I do for wideling is figure out how to get from point A to point B underground in New York City. Like if Khan Edison is cutting a trench for electrical cables, they need an navigator. As well as investigate all kinds of anomalies and strange things that they find underground when doing digs.

So Brian went searching for the truth about cow tunnels more than 10 years before Nicola. In 1997, he published an article in a local, local newspaper called the Tribeca Trib, which is what Nicola found in her web search. The headline was, Bum Steer. I will summarize it here. Brian's talking to a con-ed worker named Fred. Just Fred, no, last name. And Fred says he was watching a work crew install a new drainage basin downtown,

which is, by the way, nowhere near the side of those old slaughterhouses. They dig and dig, and then finally they hit this kind of wooden barrier, wooden. They break through it, and it's hollow on the other side, and then a quote unquote old man from the neighborhood steps up and says, Why see you found the cow tunnel? So Brian walks the story around, asks a whole mess of people, and everybody's heard of the cow tunnel, but when they talk about it, the facts are never the same.

But A, it's somewhere different, and B, it's made of different items, and C, it was built at a different time. And when Brian finally circles back to Fred, Fred says, well, actually, I never saw it. It was a buddy of mine who saw it. So again, that's how Brian told the story in his article in 1997. Sitting in his office with me in 2014, he told it this way. We were digging some test pits for Verizon. Wait, but so you were there and digging and...

Right, and so we dug down about five feet and there's this brick and curved surface that looks like a vaulted roof. So now the story has completely changed in Brian's mind. Suddenly he's the one watching the work crew, not Fred. And in this telling, the blockage they hit while digging is brick, not wood. And he talked this way for another 10 minutes before he finally stopped and said, wait a second.

You know what? You sort of caught me in the beginning of this because I was like, gee, I could have sworn I saw it and then you're just like, you know what, I'm thinking back to the article. I didn't. So I knew it was the same damn thing Fred did, aren't I? Yeah. I want to tell you how big it is and where it goes. I see cattle tunnels every day, man.

There's one over there. I know, I started doing the same damn thing. This is what happens with the cow tunnels. And why the truth of them is so hard to get a hold of. It's like as soon as you start to retell the story, it gets loose and begins to bend. It's like an instant fish tail, except it's about cows. And somehow, the folklore of it just stretches further and further out until nobody can remember how the story started. And so when Nikola Twilly wrote her first blog post about the cow tunnels in 2010, she went solely off of Brian's article, which uncovered nothing, and that one line in the Betty

Fussell book. But around the same time she hit publish, a little shred of hard-ish evidence popped up, the cow tunnel version of the Shroud of Turin. It's a coffee table book, called New York in the 19th century. You have it here. Yes, and there's a picture in here that shows this is an 1877 engraving from Harper's weekly of a cow tunnel at 34th Street. Cattle being driven up through a tunnel looks like a wooden tunnel and it says tunnel

from the dock. Huh? Emerging from it's almost like from the tunnel and there's a cattle in there with a little whip keeping them moving. And they're strung up by one foot and it's so merely executing. Yeah, and then exactly and the rest of the pictures get kind of gruesome. But wow, so that seems to be evidentiary. Right, there's a picture of a cow tunnel and it's like, okay.

Well, I don't know about that though. This is Nicolattilly again. I mean you can't actually see Where the tunnel is. There's a cow emerging from a tunnel. It's an engraving not a photograph But there's a cow emerging from a tunnel. Well and the cowboy in the picture is about two-foot tall So there's all kinds of problems with it. The cow was about ten times his size. So I don't know. I wasn't I wasn't buying it. I needed more. I needed more. So she did what she says bloggers like her never do when they're researching a topic. She called people. I talked to the city's director of archaeology and she sort of let out this

sigh as if she'd be not this question before. Oh really? Well after I wrote about them the first time it sort of bubbled up on a few blogs and I suppose those people were actually doing their job and called her. And she had said what to them probably what she said to me which was no evidence never found anything. And the woman was like, why don't you talk to the head of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation? They got the meat packing district preserved.

So we talked to him, Andrew Burman, very nice, very apologetic, sorry, no evidence of cow tunnels. Geez, I know. So I am about to really fully write these things off as a myth when I decide to call C.C. Saunders of historical perspectives incorporated, which basically consults with big projects, construction projects and that sort of thing. And they gauge whether there's historical,

archaeological, important stuff in the area. That's why I... That's why I... Yeah, that's my dumbed-down layman's take on it. She calls me back from a ferry on the way back from Staten Island. She's just been doing a dig. Oh, of course they exist. Yeah, no question. Like, don't be ridiculous. I'll send you the blueprints, soon as I get home. After all this, there are blueprints? Yeah. I don't have an original at this point,

but I have the copy that we put into our report that we did when we studied the reconstruction of Route 9A, otherwise known as the Westside Highway. This is not CC Saunders. Correct. I am Phaleen Schneidermann. I have never been CC Saunders, but, I am Phaleen Schneidermann. I have never been Ceci Saunders, but I've worked with her for about 26 years.

And Ceci said Phaleen was basically the cow, Taneleon at their shop. So back in 1991, the state contracted historical perspectives to do an historical study of that former meat packing area at 12th Avenue in the upper 30s. This is when the state was looking to redo Route 9A. And Feline wrote the report. So she did a ton of research,

looked at all these old maps and documents, and built up this picture of the kinds of structures that used to be along 12th Avenue there. Tenements, warehouses, cattle tunnels. Stop right there. On the very, very last page of Philean's report about that meatpacking area, page 28. Could you just read what it says? Sure. Well, an underground cattle pass was built and used by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. It extended about 200 feet

beneath 12th Avenue in the shoreline to the block between West 38th and West 39th Street. Pardon my bad grammar back in 1991. It was not meant to say that it was 200 feet beneath 12th Avenue. It was 200 feet long and beneath the Avenue. This place modifier. The tunnel was built in 1932 and may still be present. Wait a minute. 1932. I know. That's late. Yeah, and you know that was during when all of this Construction is going on in the city or being planned at least new bridges and tunnels Cars or more and more a factor and you've still got cows needing to get again like two hundred feet from the dock to the slaughterhouse so that New York could at the end of a long day of building

Have steak for dinner. so how big was it? The tunnel, 9 feet wide by 7 feet high. And that was ascertained from a New York Department of Docs permit number Manhattan.673-a. Wow. Yes, so. That seems pretty ironclad. Well, yeah, I would say it wasn't ironclad, concreteclad, but yes. To actually see a blueprint. Again, Nicola Twilly. It was sort of a you know

a lottery-winning moment. I felt pretty good. It's like finding like the designs for the law city of Atlantis. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, it really, I mean, I was pretty stoked. And so what did you think then? Well, really, I thought I have to go out there and dig. So we're roughly here. After looking over the blueprints, Nicola paused for a minute to write up a new blog post and then went out to the area where the tunnel had been

to see if there might be any sign of it, any hope that it might still exist. Some people swear it's intact. Not the tunnels intact. That the tunnels intact. People have said that if we might be able to find an entrance in one of the piers, in one of the buildings without having to excavate the roadway itself, I mean, I don't know. I mean, there is the West Side Highway construction.

Well, you think about the Javit Center. When you think about the Lincoln Tunnel Center, when you think about the Lincoln Tunnel, that we're standing right next to? Most likely. If cow tunnel there was once upon a time, it was pulverized in all of that construction, and any void was filled in. Wait, so you have a blueprint of it?

So how do you know it was actually built instead of just planned? It's on other maps that were made of the area later. Oh, oxy. And it's in the 1953 port series from the Army Corps of Engineers, which I don't really know what that means, but there it is. And actually in her research, Nicola found evidence for that other tunnel at 34th Street that was in the Harper's Weekly picture. There's this New York Times article from 1875 that talks about it.

It says, there runs a tunnel under 12th Avenue where the animals are brought into the shambles. In fact, the cattle are never seen by the outside public from the time of their landing until they are converted into beef. And that's what's so interesting, it's such a pivotal moment. We are beginning to become completely detached from where our food comes from. These are, you know, cities are becoming things that somehow get fed mysteriously and invisibly at this precise moment. And apparently there's also one other cow tunnel of historic importance in Boston that also no one knows whether it exists or not.

O-contrare, Nicola Twilly. O-contrare. So wait, the train right now is going through what used to be a cow tunnel? No. We do know whether the cow tunnel in Boston exists, and it does, except it's in Cambridge mass, I stood on a bridge up above it with Charlie Sullivan. The way this neighborhood developed, the cattle market was established over on Master's Savanoo quite early, before the railroad came through, and farmers would drive their cows here over the roads.

Charlie's the head of the Cambridge Historical Commission. He says there used to be cow pens on either side of this bridge, the Walden Street Bridge, and a cow tunnel, called the Walden Street Cattle Pass, was built, so farmers could drive the cows from one pen to another. They didn't want to let them loose on Walden Street, so... Because they might... Because they would get loose. Like, loose-lose. They made like, walk loose. Walk into Harvard Square and have a cappuccino.

Oh, cow? Right. Yeah. Cows have minds of their own. Anyway, this cow tunnel is now on the national register of historic places. But other than a plaque that mentions it, you'd never know it was tucked underneath the railroad bridge, off limits to the public, next to an active rail line, which is fenced off, so that people don't get hit by trains.

So in short, the Commission preserved a structure that no one can see, no has any access to. Correct. The only way is to hop, try to hop that fence. You want to do that? Be fun. It would be fun. Interesting way to spend a fence. You want to do that? Be fun. It would be fun. Interesting way to spend a morning.

I'm not sure that I'm able to do it. Okay. That's okay. So, but feel free. Please tell me that you hop the fence without him. Please tell me that you hop the fence without him. It's not going to sound too wonderful. So, when Charlie was well out of sight and couldn't be accused of aiding in a bedding? Yes.

when Charlie was well out of sight and couldn't be accused of aiding in a bedding. Yes! And I am in. Like Flynn sort of. And I climb down this steep embankment through all these thickets. Oh my God, here it is. I can see it. The cow tunnel. Oh Lord, this is exciting.

It was basically a brick dome. original brick, from 1857. Oh, man, it's covered in graffiti. Engaded with a big black gate. Moo! No echo. Muuuuuh! No echo. Cow Tunnel 99% invisible was produced this week by Sean Cole with Sam Greenspan Katie Mingle, Avery Truffleman and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced in beautiful downtown Oakland, California out of the offices of Arxine.

An architecture firm who, if the needle rises, will design you the most beautiful cow Tunnel you've ever seen. Cow Tunnel. If you like the stories on this program, you can get more and more and more of them on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. But there will be cow tunnels at 99pi.org. Radio to PiO. From P.R.X.

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