SubTropolis is a 55,000,000 square foot or 1,100-acre (4.5 km2) manmade cave
in the bluffs above the Missouri River in Kansas City, Missouri. More than
1,000 people spend their workdays in its bustling enterprise zone
where some 55 businesses have set up shop.
The underground industrial park known as SubTroplis opened for business in
1964 in an excavated mine the size of 140 football fields below Kansas City, Mo.
The tenants are attracted there by lower energy costs due to its 68F-72F year
round climate and its cheap rent.
About 10 percent of Kansas City's commercial real estate is underground,
says Ora Reynolds, president of SubTropolis landlord Hunt Midwest. Landlords
have made a cottage industry out of underground industrial space, thanks to rock
formations near the Missouri River that allow trucks to drive into the
old mines instead of tenants needing to use elevators to get things in and out.
Subtropolis boasts 17-foot-high ceilings supported by rough-hewn
columns. The 270-million-year-old limestone deposits are six times stronger
than concrete, according to Hunt Midwest's marketing materials.
Subtropolis's cool climate helped attract cloud computing company LightEdge,
which has become the anchor tenant in what Hunt Midwest hopes will develop
into a major data center.
The U.S. Postal Service uses Subtropolis as a distribution hub for postage stamps,
storing hundreds of millions of stamps in the facility.
The USPS rents more than 500,000 square feet there.
The National Archives and Records Association keeps old tax records and federal court documents at the facility.
Pick a fight with the Internal Revenue Service and the paper trail may lead to these shelves.
Vanguard Packaging prints retail packaging and supermarket displays in its 500,000-square-foot space.
Vanguard calls itself the most sustainable packaging company in North America.
Journey to the center of the earth - or at least, to EarthWorks, an educational program
that schools students on the Midwest's natural habitats in its 32,000 square-foot space.
Some cannisters in this archive hold the original film from the movie Gone with the Wind.
"I have no idea how many pounds of coffee I have down here," says Joe Paris,
vice president at Paris Brothers, a specialty foods company. "I have thousands
of bags. Some of them are 60 or 70 kilos. It's a lot."
SubTropolis is down the road from an assembly plant at which Ford manufactures
F150 pickups. This has attracted companies such as Knapheide, shown here, which
manufactures steel bodies that get rigged onto Ford trucks.
Another tenant in SubTropolis's Automotive Alley is Ground Effects, which provides
a variety of conversion services.
Road runners have been competing in 5-kilometer and 10k races inside SubTropolis's
seven miles of roadways for over 33 years.
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