Mr. Pivner as Above so Below with Lewis Mumford's The City in History & The WPA Guide to NYC

[alice wellintown]

The underground city is a new kind of environment: an extension and
normalization of that forced upon the miner–severed from natural
conditions, under mechanical control at every point, made possible by
artificial light, artificial ventilation, and the artificial
limitations of human responses to those that its organizers deem
profitable or serviceable…Given the pressure to sink capital more
extensively into the underground city, less money becomes available
for space and architectural beauty above ground: indeed, the next step
in the city’s development, already taken in many American cities, is
to extend the principle of the underground city even to the design of
buildings that are visibly  above ground…with air conditioning and
all-day fluorescent lighting, the internal spaces in the new American
skyscraper are little different from what they would be a hundred feet
below the surface. No extravagance in mechanical equipment is too
great to produce this uniform internal environment: though the
technical ingenuity spent on fabricating sealed-in buildings cannot
create the equivalent of an organic background for human functions and
activities. All this is merely by way of preparation. But his heirs in
he underground city have no such illusions– they are the prey of
compulsive fears and corrupt fantasies whose ultimate outcome may be
universal annihilation and extermination; and the more they devote
themselves to adapting their urban environment to this possibility,
the more surely they will bring on the unrestricted collective
genocide many of them have justified in their minds as the necessary
price of
preserving “freedom” and “civilization”. The masters of the
underground citadel are committed  to a “war” they cannot bring to an
end, with weapons they cannot control, for purposes that they cannot
accomplish. The underground city threatens in consequence to become
the burial crypt of our incinerated civilization*. Modern man’s only
alternative is to emerge once more into the light and have the
courage, not to escape to the moon, but to return to his human center
–and to master the bellicose compulsions and irrationalities he shares
with his rulers and mentors. He must not only unlearn the art of war,
but acquire and master, as never before, the arts of life.

from Lewis Mumford's _The City in History_ "The Underground City"