Parts Of New York City Are Built On The Ruins Of English Cathedrals

Parts of Manhattan are actually built on the wartime ruins of English towns - churches, homes, pubs, libraries, shops, and businesses - all shipped to the U.S. as ballast during World War II.

The city is thus, in an instant, revealed to be a weird layer cake of other cities, of ruins smoothed over ruins, paved under concrete and utterly unknown to the people driving over it everyday - unaware that, beneath them, there are still perhaps recognizable chunks of English cathedrals all packed in gravel and other broken chips of rock.