LONDON, Sept. 3 - London's subway network virtually shut down at the height of the rush hour on Monday evening when 2,300 maintenance workers walked off the job in what they said would be a three-day strike over pensions and security.

Transportation officials then closed nine subway lines, the bulk of the system. They said it was too dangerous to keep the network going without the workers, who are responsible for maintaining and repairing tracks, signals, trains and the like. Just three lines - the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines, which are maintained by workers who belong to another union - were operating Monday night.

Commuters across London left work early in a rush to make it home before 6 p.m., when the strike began. Commuters arriving later found that their stations were locked or - in those stations still operating - that signs had been put up explaining that most of the lines had stopped operating.

Transport for London, the local agency that runs the subway system, predicted that the strike would cause "massive disruptions for millions of Londoners" and urged passengers to seek "alternative routes" - a difficult proposition in a city as large, sprawling and choked with road traffic as London.

The maintenance workers say that if their demands are not met, they will remain off work for three days, and strike again for another three-day stretch next week.

Adding to the general feeling of annoyance, the mayor, Ken Livingstone, said motorists driving into central London during business hours would still have to pay the congestion charge of 8 pounds a day, or more than $16, during the strike.

City concourse gets a breath of fresh air
Warren of tunnels is now scrubbed daily.
By Joseph A. Slobodzian
Inquirer Staff Writer

As a sensory experience, few things can match Philadelphia's Sherwood Forest in August.

For the uninitiated, Sherwood Forest is what police and public works crews call part of the concourse below 15th Street linking Suburban Station with tunnels to City Hall, the Municipal Services Building, and the Broad Street Subway.

It's a copse of concrete columns inhabited not by Robin Hood's Merry Men but by a band of homeless people seeking shelter from the elements. And in August, when Philly's temperature and humidity soar, the pungent odor of urine-soaked concrete is unforgettable.

But help is here.

The Center City District, the privately funded organization created to improve cleanliness, safety and the quality of life downtown, has begun tackling the quality of life below ground along 31/2 miles of corridors connecting the subways, Market East Station and the Gallery, Suburban Station, and much of South Broad Street's Avenue of the Arts.

For the first time, at least in anyone's memory, crews are cleaning the concourses 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Center City Underground

JOE ANASTASIO, a slim, dark-haired Web designer for a Wall Street publishing company, was standing outside Madison Square Garden, dressed in black work boots, a torn blue check shirt and a bomber jacket. It was a brisk Sunday morning in the spring, and among the swirl of tourists clutching maps and hockey fans in Rangers jerseys, he might easily have been mistaken for a Metropolitan Transportation Authority track worker heading to a shift.

That is how Mr. Anastasio likes it. A 33-year-old native of Astoria, Queens, he is an urban explorer, to use a term he and his fellow adventurers accept somewhat wearily, along with urban spelunker, infiltrator, hacker and guerilla urbanist. Urban explorers, a highly disparate, loosely knit group, share an obsession with uncovering the hidden city that lies above and below the familiar one all around them. And especially during the summer, they are out in full force.

Alone and with cohorts, Mr. Anastasio has crawled, climbed and sometimes simply brazenly walked into countless train tunnels, abandoned subway stations, rotting factories, storm drains, towers, decaying hospitals and other shadowy remnants of the city’s infrastructure the authorities would rather he did not enter. Although he records his adventures on his Web site, ltvsquad.com, anonymity

is, for him, a necessary tool.

film about mutant ants living in the LA sewer system