With storms battering the US and Donald Trump back in court claiming immunity this week, light relief comes in the form of a news story we didn’t know we needed: the discovery in Brooklyn of a secret tunnel, apparently dug by a faction within the ultra-religious Chabad-Lubavitch community. The tunnel, which runs for 15m (50ft), starts under the synagogue and peters out beneath a ritual bath house several buildings along. When cops arrived on Monday to fill it with concrete, they met with strong resistance from the tunnellers. What can only be described as a melee ensued.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but let’s start with “illegal tunnelling”, which, with all due deference to a group of worshippers in distress, triggers in the abstract a bolt of joy at the sheer range and eccentricity of human behaviour. The tunnel in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighbourhood was reportedly dug by a group of young male students, characterised by Hassidic leaders as “extremist”, for purposes that remain obscure. What is known is that residents in homes neighbouring the synagogue reported suspicious sounds coming from beneath the floor. When city officials turned up to investigate, they unearthed some kind of religious take on The Shawshank Redemption that contravened – big New York obsession, up there with homicide – various building regulations and codes. It’s not a prohibition many of us have had cause to test, but I guess you need a permit to dig a tunnel in the city?
So much to enjoy here: the bafflement of the cops who, when they turned up, presumably under the illusion they were facing a quiet afternoon on the job, were instead met with a group of furious young men refusing to budge; the subsequent arrival, as things started to kick off, of every news outlet in the city, only adding to the confusion. And, of course, the delight everyone is taking in telling this story. One must assume that, as we speak, the New York Post is putting all its resources into tracking down the tunnellers, or as it refers to them, the “renegade diggers”. As books were thrown, furniture was overturned and reporters reached in desperation to find synonyms for “tunnel” (my favourites: “dusty crevasse” and “makeshift passageway”), members of the NYPD milled about in the manner of those trying not only to figure out what was going on but, in a larger sense, how their lives had led them to this moment. No one was injured.
The entire story, of course, belongs to that very particular “only in New York, kids” subcategory of entertainment, a shining example of which comes around every few years like a comet – often involving real estate, and guaranteed to scatter joy on all those not directly involved. Cast your minds back a few years, for example, to the woman who found an entire three-bedroom apartment behind the bathroom mirror in her Roosevelt Island rental unit. Or, going back further, the legendary story of the “mole people” of the NYC subway system. Or, reaching back even further to the crown jewel of this sort of thing, the events leading up to the New York Post’s greatest headline of all time: “Headless body in topless bar”.
But back to 770 Eastern Parkway, referred to locally simply as 770 and the Chabad global headquarters, and the mysterious tunnel. According to some reports, the students in question were engaged in a power grab designed to “expand” the synagogue, which – it would be hard to love the logic more – they saw fit to express via the medium of tunnelling. Accounts vary as to whether it was a men’s or a women’s mikvah that the tunnel emerged in. If the latter, it suggests some unexplored American Pie-type subplot that could lift the whole episode into legend.
In Brooklyn on Monday, police arrested 10 people for criminal mischief and criminal trespass and one for obstructing governmental administration. Engineers have been sent, meanwhile, to make sure that the illegal tunnel hasn’t compromised the structural integrity of surrounding buildings. Religious leaders at the synagogue are rightly upset, but for the rest of us it is, perhaps, permissible to enjoy a light moment in an otherwise grim and foreboding start to the new year.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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