“Our waking existence… is a land which, at certain hidden
points, leads down into the underworld – a land full of
inconspicuous places from which dreams arise.” -Walter Benjamin,
The Arcades Project Few places in the world are as enshrined in
the pantheon of urban explorer mythology as the Carrières de
Paris, often referred to more colloquially (though inaccurately)
as the Paris Catacombs. Since 2008, we have spent dozens of
hours underneath Paris, exploring the system and meeting those
who map and build it. And despite that lively and active present
day cataphile culture, it is clear from looking at the history
of these spaces that we are all only a blip in the long history
of subsurface Paris. Parisians are melded into the very fabric
of the earth through these quarries. As early as the 13th
Century, open air quarries, and later mines, were sunk into the
Left Bank of Paris to feed architectural projects on the Right
Bank. Eventually, as the city became pressured for space, people
began building over the Lef