Downtown Foot Tunnels
I have been hearing about the pedestrian foot tunnels beneath downtown Dallas for years.  Maps of them exist on the internet and are posted around the city itself, but I've never been there during the day when they're accessible.  One afternoon, Deb and I made a (relatively) early start of it and got down here before they closed around 5pm.
They're more or less featureless.

This is one of the first pictures I took down here, and those are the legs of one of the few people we saw the entire time, most of those we ran across were in the first few minutes after we got down there.  Before long, the entire place was empty.
Many of the passages looked basically like this, something you'd expect to see in an airport.
A zoom in on Deb on the other end of the hall (in case you didn't notice her in the previous pic).
A look up out this atrium area....
...which was growing pretty much nothing.  I think they lock jay-walkers in here.
Another sparse area.  In some spots like this, there were newsstands, small restaurants, and even a barber shop, but little else, and in most stretches there was nothing at all.  Unfortunately, everything was closed by the time we were down there, so we didn't get to see inside.  However, that did at least add to the creepy atmosphere.
A view through a window at one of the abandoned spots where a restaurant once was.
Another empty area with a really bad combination of colors.  Seriously, someone did not think this through.
However, there were some attempts at including interesting artwork into the design of the place.
For example, this metalwork stands in front of a window overlooking the trunk of one of the trees that grows in this spot.
A little further around the corner there are other such pieces (though none of the others featured real trees), as you can see in the windows behind and surrounding Deb.  Most of these were faux fossils which were sort of an apt metaphor for the venue itself.
The final word:  Since it took me three or four years from the time I first heard of these tunnels until I finally got around to exploring some of them, it was kind of a let-down. Judging by the maps we had of them, Deb and I only got through about a quarter of the accessible system, but I think the word she used to describe them afterward was "underwhelming."  They are interesting primarily in how sparse and uninteresting they are as well as perhaps for the fact that they're right beneath the city itself, and there's some irony in that thousands of people pass through the area above most days and don't know they exist, but that's about it.  I can't speak for all of these since I haven't seen everything, but what we saw wasn't worth the cost of parking (which we didn't pay anyway; we parked outside downtown and made an afternoon of it on foot).  I only took a dozen pictures from this entire part of the day, just to give you an idea.
Alexplored 4/10/07.  Some pics by Deb.
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