At 6:14 on Tuesday morning, a boring machine forty metres beneath Bellrow stopped making the noise it usually makes and started making a different one.
What Dr. Avery Solmes found on the other side was a subway platform, tiled in green, last used in 1912, complete with a wooden bench and a sign advising passengers to mind the step.
"There is no record of it," Solmes said. "There is no permit, no decommissioning order, no map. There is a bench."
There is, however, Harlan Pike, who has operated a newsstand in Old Quarry since 1989 and has told anyone within earshot for nineteen years that the city built a subway line and then simply stopped mentioning it.
"I have a chart," Pike said, pointing at a chart. "It's been taped up there since the second Ostrowe championship. People bought their gum and laughed."
Transit director Desmond Quay described the discovery as "historically fascinating and operationally catastrophic", and confirmed that the bicycle highway route would require what he called "a rethink, or possibly a different word for a rethink."