Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
UNDER APPRECIATED
From holiday lights to a salt museum, subterranean surprises await
In several states, underground man-made wonders, including holiday lights, a salt museum and a Cold War secret location, are now open to view.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — As darkness falls during December, families across America pile into their cars for a dose of good cheer as they motor past festive displays of holiday lights.
One of the most unusual spectacles is in Louisville — and it’s not at street level. People drive past Santa and his reindeer and dozens of other seasonal displays, their headlights illuminating an otherwise deeply dark and massive mine.
“It’s the only fully underground light show in the world,” Mega Cavern’s Jeremy Priddy said of Lights Under Louisville, a 30-minute self-drive journey through caverns carved decades ago.
“We try to put one car into the cavern every four seconds,” Priddy said. “We’re usually packed.”
Limestone hasn’t been quarried in this cave since the 1970s. But over the past 10 years, it’s operated as a subterranean park, with tram rides, zip lines, electric bicycle tours and an obstacle course — all along, or above, 17 miles of roads crisscrossing Mega Cavern.
No stunning stalactites can be found hanging from the ceilings. Humans, not nature, created this space beneath the earth. In several states, man-made wonders — including one that was once top-secret — are now open to view.
Kansas
Just outside Hutchinson, Kan., hard-hatted visitors are plunged into pitch blackness as an elevator door closes and a 90-second ride heads 650 feet beneath the visitor center to Strataca, an otherworldly underground museum that pays homage to salt.
“It’s like going back in history 275 million years, and there you are in the Permian Sea; there’s something primal about it,” said Linda Schmitt, the museum’s former director.
Salt has been mined in Hutchinson since 1886, when a wildcatter drilling for oil struck salt instead. Tours take visitors to within 100 yards or so of where miners are still extracting road salt. Including the museum and the stillactive mine, there are a whopping 175 miles of tunnels.
“We’re going to stop here and take a look at formations geologists say it took millions of years to form,” tour guide Dylan Flynn said while slowing his tram. At stops along both tram and train tours, visitors can see and touch huge crystals of salt in hues of beige, black and red. While none of what’s been mined recently is pure enough to be used in the kitchen, it’s perfect for spreading on icy streets.
“A museum about salt doesn’t sound very exciting to a lot of people,” Schmitt pointed out. “But when they get underground and they see it, it’s huge and it’s sparkly and just absolutely unique.”
New York
New York City’s subway system includes an elegant destination deep below the bustling streets: Old City Hall station, a spot that, oddly enough, can no longer be reached by rail.
Manhattan’s first subway train departed City Hall station in 1904. Designed by prominent architects Heins & LaFarge, the now-disused station boasts vaulted tile ceilings, leaded skylights and sparkling chandeliers all intended to awe.
While No. 6 trains still pass by this relic of a bygone era, drivers haven’t stopped at Old City Hall since 1945. Even so, the sheen remains, as people discover during tours organized by the New York Transit Museum. Three times a year, tickets are offered to museum members, and they are quickly snapped up.
West Virginia
The Big Apple’s skyscrapers stand in stark contrast to the green mountains surrounding White Sulphur Springs, W.Va.
For 30 years, folks in this sleepy town kept a major Cold War secret.
What’s known as “the bunker” lies buried beneath the luxurious Greenbrier resort. Behind custommade, bombproof vault doors and surrounded by countless tons of concrete, the bunker was a safe haven that members of Congress could have been relocated to if a nuclear attack on Washington appeared imminent.
Hotel historian Robert Conte and his team lead daily, 90-minute tours through the two-story, 112,000-square-foot facility that for three decades was kept fully operational but never used.
Built at the same time as the resort’s West Virginia Wing in the early 1960s, the sprawling space was part of a hush-hush plan for what was known as the “continuity of government.”
Conte tells visitors that the massive construction program meant that the bunker, with its 153 rooms, was essentially “hidden in plain sight.”
“I think the people in town pretty much figured it out,” he said. “But they figured, ‘If the government is building it, it’s our job not to know about it.’ ”
Despite the passage of time and the end of the Cold War, the bunker remains a popular attraction at The Greenbrier.
“It’s the contrast between the spartan bunker and the lavish resort above it that makes it particularly interesting,” the historian said. “They didn’t build it under a Super 8.”
Kentucky
During the years when people were building fallout shelters in their backyards, the cavernous limestone mine beneath Louisville was deemed a safe haven if Russian bombs began to fall.
“Obviously, it’s a natural bomb shelter,” Mega Cavern’s Priddy said. “During that time, they had everything set up here to hold, maintain and feed … up to 50,000 people.”
During tram tours operated year-round at Mega Cavern, displays filled with mannequins simulate what life underground might have been like during a nuclear winter. The temperature isn’t the only chill in the air as visitors pass makeshift hospitals and living quarters.
With about a million people in the Louisville metro area during the 1960s and ’70s, only one in 20 would have been able to seek shelter in the cavern. Not surprisingly, many of them would have been local VIPs.
There was “a list of people they would allow into the cavern in case of a nuclear attack,” Priddy said.
Apparently high on that list was Col. Harland Sanders, the creator of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a company now based less than 2 miles away.