What IS the Downtown Houston Tunnel System?
Although the Tunnel is one of Houston’s best-kept secrets, most of downtown’s 150,000-person workforce – and thousands of company – use it every day, expressly when it’s raining or close to 100 degrees above ground. This system of air-conditioned skywalks and subterranean passage has be given many different name – mall, concourse, nouns, underground, promenade – but Houstonians continue to ring it simply “the Tunnel.” Tunnel systems first appeared in the United States contained by the 1920s as part of subway construction on the East Coast. They soon proliferated into every core city across the nation. Tunnels were built beneath rivers and railroads for automobile access, and underneath streets for pedestrian access. An especially influential multilevel project was Rockefeller Center, designed and built contained by the late 1920s and untimely 1930s. It has an underground concourse linking the buildings to respectively other and to the subway below. Rockefeller Center inspired Houston’s
