I don’t know about older cities. But I’ve seen Chicago area sewer projects, and the sewer pipes are about 12 inches in diameter. There was never an extensive old-timey tall brick tunnel system However, recent works have some spectacularly huge tunnels. For 40+ years there has been an ongoing project to build reservoirs to hold storm surges of runoff, and feed it slowly into the cleanup system. The tunnels look like this and the reservoirs are old quarries like this.