Since the early 2000s, decommissioned New York City subway cars have been seeded into the waters around New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia and other eastern states, creating infrastructure for fish habitats along the coastal shelf running from New York to North Carolina. Artificial reefs like these can increase sea life concentrations dramatically in otherwise-flat subsurface regions, boasting up to hundreds of times as much biomass per area of seafloor.

In late 2000, the Metro Transit Authority began dumping 1200 old cars into the water; in 2007, another 1600 were added to the list. These frameworks of these sunken cars serve as replacement rock outcrops on which corals and plants grow, leading to oysters, mussels and further sea life. Photographer Stephen Mallon has spent years capturing this deliberate subway-dumping activity in action on the surface.

Meanwhile, sequential underwater images show the subsurface results over time. The progress photos above and below were shot after 5 years and 10 years, respectively, demonstrating just how rapidly and effectively these places can become populated, first sparsely and then densely.

The critical amount of biomass that develops makes these cars hotspots for diverse populations of underwater creatures all along the food chain, together forming self-sustaining regional ecosystems.

In turn, these locations can attract fishermen and divers as well, keen both to see the thriving populations of aquatic life but also to explore the underwater ruins of modern machines. Far as they may be from their original subterranean homes, these train cars still manage to serve citizens of cities along the Atlantic coast in their own unusual ways.

Five years ago, who would have thought that what started as an offbeat visual culture weblog would turn into a full-fledged (but still and always free) cosmopolitan online magazine? After just half of a decade, WebUrbanist now has over five hundred thousand feed and email subscribers, not to mention over a million monthly visitors.

The constant curiosity of authors (including Delana, Marc, Stephanie and Steve,, with Kurt as executive editor) and ongoing diligence of developers (Jeff and Mike) has been crucial, of course. Still, at the end of the day, it would all come to nothing without you, the readers, RSS subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook fans and Pinterest friends supporting these efforts. Your ongoing help sharing our stories with friends via email, blog posts, StumbleUpon and Reddit has been essential in building WebUrbanist’s audience and is much appreciated.

Much has happened over this long-yet-short period of time, including multiple major redesigns of the publication, from the underlying code to numerous iterations its layout and logo. We hope this ongoing evolution seems fitting, though, since the core topics we cover – architecture, art, design, travel and technology – all revolve around creative exploration, iteration and (re)invention.

For anyone new to the site – or at least its latest redesign – we recently re-categorized every single article in the archives. Each individual past post can now be found under exactly one of five main sections (per the paragraph above) as well as one of twenty-five subcategories , linked in various ways on every page, including via a new drop-down menu on the sidebar. We hope this helps make the ever-larger annals more accessible to new and existing readers alike. Thanks again for your patronage – now onto the next five years!