A Three-Day Expedition To Walk Across Paris Underground

For the first time, Nadar brought the underworld into full view, opening Paris’s relationship to its subterranean landscape: a connection that, over time, grew stranger, more obsessive, and more intimate than that of perhaps any city in the world. A century and a half after Nadar, I arrived in Paris, along with Steve Duncan and a small crew of urban explorers, with an aim to investigate the city’s relationship to its underground in a way no one had before. The only regular visitors were a handful of city laborers — the workers in the ossuary, who raked bones back and forth over the catacomb floors; the employees of the Inspection générale des carrières, who walked the stone passages by lantern light, bracing the tunnels to prevent them from collapsing under the city’s weight — and the occasional mushroom farmer, who took advantage of the dry, dark environment to grow his crop.

Source: longreads.com