Under Angeles

Design writer Alissa Walker recently took a tour of L.A.'s original subway system, one whose tunnels are no longer in operation, though they remain down there—

[Image: L.A.'s original subway, now walled-off beneath downtown; photo by Alissa Walker].

—bricked off and all but forgotten beneath buildings downtown.

[Image:Photo by Alissa Walker].

Cue horror movie soundtrack here, with hapless apartment dwellers in a newly renovated downtown loft complex finding strange things coming up from the facility's voluminous basement floors; the power flickers on and off; pets disappear; strange sounds skitter and thump down the corridors at night, leaving muddy trails; then somehow, someone, as in the following photograph—

[Image: A walled-up sign announces, "TRAINS"; photo by Alissa Walker].

—knocks a hole in the wall, perhaps accidentally losing their grip on a piece of furniture as they move their new table or couch into the building, revealing the eery, abandoned subway tunnels below. And, soon, they go down to find the answers to what's gone wrong in their otherwise perfectly photogenic multimillion dollar building, only to open the door to something altogether much worse.

[Image: Photo by Alissa Walker].

In any case, absent of these clichéd public-transit-is-a-source-of-horror motifs, Alissa's write-up of the tunnel visit is worth reading in full—and, even better, they will be leading another such visit again some time soon. You'll see sights like this.

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