On campus and off, a remarkable number of libraries have extensive basements, or additions that are below grade. Outside of cities, corporate, industrial, and educational campuses, with integrated buildings on a limited footprint, are rife with underground spaces, like the steam tunnels clandestinely explored by collegiate rite and ritual. Street level itself is a mutable thing in cities, as exemplified in places like Seattle’s or Atlanta’s downtown, where storefronts from older street levels can be visited on underground tours.
It is simply an extension of the city below grade, without streets to cross, or weather to endure. This subterranean city can be an interconnected public space, where people might not even be aware they are underground, or care. Most tall buildings extend below grade, and sometimes these spaces are connected to shopping malls, subway stations, pedestrian tunnels, and parking garages, all below street level. In cities, lots of space can be found underground. One wonders at times if there may not be more enclosed space below the surface of the nation, than above it. There is also, of course, intentionally constructed occupy-able underground space, like basements, vaults, and tunnels. FORMER LIMESTONE MINE CAVERNS MAY be the largest redeveloped and occupied subterranean structures in the nation, but there are other kinds of mines and underground spaces all over the place, some of which have been redeveloped in curious ways too.
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