What's Inside This House On Wade Avenue?

http://wunc.org/post/video-whats-inside-house-wade-avenue

by sethbannon • 13 years ago

73 30 13 years ago

mrjatx• 13 years ago

Ha, pretty neat. I used to do work on cellular towers and you'd be really surprised at how they manage to hide towers. I'm talking fake trees, church steeples, etc. When you do tower surveys you're given GPS coordinates and every so often I'd wind up having to comb an area up and down to figure out where the tower was.

andr2• 13 years ago

In the earliest days of the London Underground, trains used steam engines, which would collect steam and release it only at specified openings above tunnels, so as to not suffocate everyone. In posh areas, fake housefronts like this one: http://www.urban75.org/london/leinster.html were built with a hole behind them, and trains would release steam as they passed under the hole.

More such cases in Brooklyn and Paris: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2388179/When-house-h...

andr2• 13 years ago

Also, a military bunker in Moscow, masked as a house: http://englishrussia.com/2011/11/18/declassified-bunker-of-t...

christiangenco• 13 years ago

Fun pop culture fact: 23/24 Leinster Gardens were just featured in the British Sherlock series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Last_Vow#Sources_and_allusi...

IbJacked• 13 years ago

There’s a “house” a couple of miles from mine which is actually a power sub-station. It's located in a heavily wooded, up-scale neighborhood, and would have looked really out of place if it wasn't concealed.

But, the fake house still looks a little strange, as it doesn't have quite the level of finishing of a real home.

pstack3• 13 years ago

Which is kind of bizarre, because how much extra effort would it have taken them to pave a walkway to the door and have some lights on a randomized timer during the night, to give the impression that someone uses the home? Although, I guess that would be creepy if you lived in the neighborhood and never saw the people, too.

DonGateley• 13 years ago

I wonder what the threshold of detail is to remain effectively invisible or beyond notice. That's all that's needed. I'm sure that's been deeply studied by the military.

mindcrime• 13 years ago

Damn, I've driven by there hundreds of times and had no clue anything was unusual about that house. Never even noticed that there was no driveway.

When I first started reading this article, I had a feeling it was going to be something to do with AT&T, possibly related to The Big Hole[1][[2].

Nothing quite so exciting though... Still, pretty neat.

[1] http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/big-hole-deep-secret/Conten...

[2] http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread188702/pg1

gjmulhol• 13 years ago

I have, too, and for some reason always assumed it was either some sort of abandoned funeral home or a sort of religious organization artifice, a meeting or banquet hall or something. It was always just a bit to clean, dark, and empty to be a regular house.

eitally3• 13 years ago

Me, too. I kinda assumed it had been annexed by the church next door. One of the churches in "downtown" Cary had done something similar (bought a number of the surrounding homes for extra meeting/education/banquet space).

mnemonicsloth• 13 years ago

Why Keep It Hidden?

Because yuppies. It's all of two blocks from the biggest Whole Foods Market in the Triangle.

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Having spent some time there this seems like an eminently reasonable answer.

rosser• 13 years ago

I'm not sure why you were downvoted.

Because smugness?

pstack3• 13 years ago

Because nobody but yuppies would prefer not to have a giant substation or maintenance station of various sorts slammed right into the middle of a neighborhood?

Also, for things that would otherwise simply not be covered at all, it keeps kids and vandals away and other potential liabilities.

eitally3• 13 years ago

As the article states, not because yuppies, because church and general environmental sensitivity on the part of the city management. They planned to disguise it forty years ago when it was planned, as I'm sure many communities have similarly done. Imho, this is similar to the practice of disguising urban cellular towers, a la http://twistedsifter.com/2012/08/examples-of-cell-phone-towe...

moocowduckquack• 13 years ago

I just looked up the company Whole Foods Market that has those premises, they started in Austin in 1980, so presumably the City of Raleigh must have some of the best public officials in the world, given they can predict both yuppies and the future location of specific businesses.

TDL• 13 years ago

Because aesthetics matter.

EvanAnderson• 13 years ago

There are telco central offices disguised as houses, too. This one, in Anaheim, CA, US is a good example (CLLI code ANHMCA17RS3):

http://www.co-buildings.com/ca/714/

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=33.8449,+-117.741&ie=UTF8&ll=...

pstack3• 13 years ago

This is entirely common, all over the world. Maintenance, accesses, and vents to the New York subway system are hidden behind non-existent town and row-houses and you can discover them if you pan around Google Maps for awhile.

http://www.messynessychic.com/2013/01/29/the-fake-townhouses...

ivanbrussik• 13 years ago

We had this in the town I grew up in, only it was a house with the "mechanical room" for our water tower. People broke in all the time.

dm2• 13 years ago

How much more expensive would it have been to build this underground (with an access door somewhere) and make the above area a park or open land?

Are underground structures partially avoided because of the potential for them to collapse if not properly maintained or if a large truck drives over them for whatever reason?

I've always had the desire to build a basement that I can slowly expand overtime and have a huge underground facility. I wonder if this is possible? Didn't they do it at the White House and Vice President's house?

michaelt• 13 years ago

If you believe London's Evening Standard (not the most reliable of newspapers) in expensive areas of London it's common for people to buy 19th century mansions then build underground "mega-basements" [1,2,3,4] with features like pools, tennis courts and classic car museums.

So it's possible. It may be expensive.

[1] http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/kensington-digs-in-wit... [2] http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/daimler-heir-wins-figh... [3] http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/billionaires-chelsea-b... [4] http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/tetra-pak-heir-hans-ra...

rmk2• 13 years ago

It made it onto Channel 4's "Grand Designs"[1], so there is little doubt this is happening, being filmed and all.

Also, the Guardian has something about it as well: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/nov/09/billiona...

[1]: Grand Designs S12E06 -- "The Edwardian Artist's Studio" [2]

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEzcu9hWo-E [3]

[3]: GOTO [1]

kaishiro• 13 years ago

[Edit: Added a once and future home owner's dream :) ]

Actually, the whole pump station does seem to be mostly underground. In the video, the public works employee shows where the front door would be from inside the unit, and it's pretty far up on the wall.

And yeah, I rent (and love renting), but the one thing I miss in doing so is not being able to just "dig holes". One day maybe I'll finally take the leap.

jmccree• 13 years ago

The cost of underground construction varies significantly depending on local geological, soil, and water table conditions. In some areas with deep well drained soil underground construction is relatively cheap, as it's basically just earth moving. In others you hit granite bedrock after a few feet and you have to excavate the bed rock to go deeper. It's certainly possible to expand out from a basement, and every so often the news shows footage of elaborate underground tunnels for drug manufacturing etc beneath a normal house.

If you're interested in underground structures, you should check out limestone mines converted to office space or storage like subtropolis. They mine the limestone of a solid horizontal layer leaving pillars to support the "roof", creating an entire underground building millions of sqft and acres in size. Subtropolis is over one thousand acres.

Someone• 13 years ago

For subtropolis, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubTropolis. From there, http://www.huntmidwest.com/subtropolis/index.html gives you the site of the business. I find their brochure gives a good idea about what it looks like: http://huntmidwest.com/pdfs/subtropolis_brochure_2012.pdf

Impressive, but way more industrial than, for example, the centuries old limestone caves in the Belgian-Dutch-German border area (http://maastricht-students.com/2012/07/millions-of-years-of-..., http://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g188575-d318667...)

tux• 13 years ago

Kind of reminds you of house in "Resident Evil". O_o

asmithmd1• 13 years ago

Here is an odd "house" I noticed years ago in Falls Church, VA. Being right outside Washington and one town over from the CIA headquarters I thought it must have something to do with the them:

https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!q=320+N+West+St&data=!1...

eitally3• 13 years ago

My wife grew up practically across the street from that house and the way it was discussed in the neighborhood was that it is/was a CIA safe house. A utility station seems much more plausible.

cma• 13 years ago

this is sort of Cyberpunk inverted

What's Inside This House On Wade Avenue?

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