The Community Reporter is a monthly newspaper with a circulation of 12,000 serving the Fort Road neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota. In 2007, the editor invited me to contribute a feature about my investigation of historic caves under that part of town and the two articles that resulted were published in August and September. While completely factual, I wrote them more luridly than usual to appeal to a popular audience and you will find them as refreshing as a blast of skunk juice. Here are both parts in the original wording; the editor added the usual warning of the “don’t try this at home” variety, especially after the tragic deaths of the Lametti Co. workers in the St. Peter-Rondo tunnel that summer.
Deep Down Under—Exploring Fort Road Sewers (August 2007)
Hunched over in the low, narrow, Gothic-shaped sewers under a Fort Road mortuary, I was saluted by a splattering noise and sulfurous odor, and chose not to look too closely at what might be causing it. Presently, I expected to see latex stalactites dangling from the vaults. The black wall crud was speckled with a white, salt-like efflorescence. The sewer passages were festooned with damp, glistening, cobwebs that floated into my face, causing a tickling sensation. More agonizing than anything, however, were the deep, black, glutinous sediments that sucked at my waders and “boiled” furiously with every step, releasing methane and rotten-egg gas. What mess had I gotten myself into this time?
Welcome to the Fort Road Labyrinth, as I came to call it—the single longest, most interconnected network of sewer tunnels under the city of St. Paul. They run under every street at an average depth of about 30 feet, with drop pipes coming down from individual houses and buildings. These tunnels, which carry raw sewage, were dug with handpicks in the St. Peter Sandstone bedrock more than a hundred years ago, and the floors were paved with brickwork. I once painstakingly measured, on the sewer plats, the aggregate length of this labyrinth, and found it to be 30 miles—the length of the famous Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico—yet most of it is coiled up, like a ball of twine, under just a few square miles. The funny thing is, it’s almost totally unknown to the public at large.
The story of the Fort Road Labyrinth goes back to 1873, when “Sewer Contract No. 4” was awarded for the Eagle Street sewer in downtown St. Paul. This sewer followed the line of a former surface stream, Rice Brook, discharging to the Mississippi River at its lower end. From Eagle Street, the system was extended to the southwest, under Fort Road. The labyrinth was built in segments as the need arose to extend service to the ever-growing city. Finally, in the 1920s, the upstream end of the system curled deep under Highland Park, like the tail of a monstrous sewer alligator. Nowadays, the sewage flows to the metropolitan treatment plant at Pig’s Eye Lake, instead of the river.
Most of my exploration of the labyrinth was undertaken solo in 1999 and 2000, and I kept a “Sewer Diary” to record my impressions. My motivation was simple curiosity about this strange netherworld of fermenting brickwork. At the peak of activity I was making trips once a week. I usually explored alone because no one would go with me (for obvious reasons!), and it marked some of the loneliest moments of my life. There was no one to rescue me in case of an accident, so a broken leg, for example, would prove fatal. I once jokingly referred to the labyrinth as the “Diamond Mine,” hoping to motivate squeamish friends to accompany me, holding out the venal prospect of finding wedding rings that had gotten flushed down the drain. Unfortunately, nobody was that stupid, and I never did find any rings.
Despite the eerie isolation, I wouldn’t have cared to meet anyone down there anyway. In fact, what further unnerved me during these long solo expeditions was the ghostly reflection of flashlight beams from water surfaces onto the walls, producing the momentary illusion that someone was approaching or receding from me in the tunnels. After a while, you might even begin to hear voices in the dripping water…
I usually ventured into the labyrinth by walking up stormwater outfalls from the river, but St. Paul’s program to separate stormwater from sanitary sewage eventually plugged these easy connections, so I found another entrance, squeezing through a small hole in the river bluff. (I never used manholes in the streets, as this drew too much unwelcome attention.) I would then spend all day exploring, emerging at nightfall in a very ripe condition. I wore trash bags over my clothing, but even so, everything sometimes had to be discarded afterwards, being caked with filth.
The passages looked alike, so I carried a compass for navigation, and learned to use audible cues. Continuously thumping manhole lids under heavy traffic—what I called the Devil’s Hoof Beats—was the auditory signature of Fort Road, for example, the side streets being comparatively quiet. While I also carried food, the main problem was finding a place clean enough to eat it.
It was a long time before I overcame my fear of the swirling clouds of sewer gas. Initially, I considered renting scuba gear from a dive shop just to be safe. I envisioned my air tanks bumping and thumping against the walls for mile after mile! Eventually, I came to realize that as long as I felt moving air, I was safe—no matter how bad the odor. So the “swirling” part, at least, was good.
Overall, the labyrinth smelled vaguely like garlic summer sausage. But there were pockets of better and worse. Lengthy dead-end passages, flooded with stagnant blue-green septic pools, for example, were pretty overpowering. Laundromats, on the other hand, with their sudsy discharges, provided a welcome olfactory oasis in the sewers below. And walking under Fort Road towards downtown, I could always tell when I passed Cossetta’s, one of my favorite restaurants, owing to the pleasant steamy aromas, finally arriving under Seven Corners, where the passages branched out under the Loop.
I encountered rats, too—aplenty. One day, while strolling under one of St. Paul’s charity soup kitchens, I observed fresh pasta floating in the sewage. Following the stream, I came to a pipe vomiting pasta into the tunnel. Swarms of sleek, fat rats clustered about, feasting gluttonously in the sewers. They parted ahead of me in the narrow passage as I approached and closed the gap behind, squeaking in protest all the while. Laughing aloud to dispel the gloom, I actually welcomed comic relief like this, considering my perilous situation, far from human aid.
Owing to the bathwater and bodily fluids, the tunnels were pretty warm, even in winter, although during one winter trip my planned exit point, a river outfall, was barred off by a veritable dragon’s jaw of ice stalactites and stalagmites. There was an anxious moment as I punched and kicked my way through this obstacle to escape the labyrinth.
There’s very little graffiti in the tunnels, except for the initials of public works personnel, but I did encounter a very elaborate wall carving once, a tree—carved in relief!—with intertwined branches, and several feet high. It seemed symbolic of the labyrinth as a whole, with its endless branching passages.
In Part 2, I will explain how I found my way into old caves while exploring the Fort Road Labyrinth—especially the vast, abandoned lagering cave under the Schmidt Brewery.
Deep Down Under—Exploring Schmidt Cave and Others (September 2007)
In Part One, I described my exploration of the “Fort Road Labyrinth,” the 30 miles of sewer passages under the West Seventh neighborhood. Now I will relate my exploration of the extensive Schmidt Brewery Cave, to which I found access by means of these sewers.
To begin with, many old timers in the neighborhood will remember the former Banholzer Brewery Cave (whatever name they knew it by), down on the banks of the Mississippi River at the foot of Sumac Street. Newspaper columnist Don Boxmeyer wrote about this cave in 1984, recalling “a West Seventh Street boy’s world,” from his youth, “a misty, confusing underworld whose parts had names like King’s Cave, Three Sisters [three parallel passages], Frankenstein’s Bedroom, the Bear Hole, and the Dump.” The determined partier of yesteryear, bent double with his kegs, could shuffle through an old brick sewer on the bluffs until coming to a hole in the wall, by means of which he entered the cave. Or he could brazenly enter the front door, a cave entrance on the opposite side of Shepard Road, where there was a shed that opened into a passage sloping down into the heart of the cave. During the reconstruction of Shepard Road in the early 1990s, however, the cave was filled in with sand.
The Banholzer adventure got me to thinking. Maybe I could access other caves by walking through the sewers? While I was able to get into a small remnant of the old Funk Brewery cellars this way, extensive attempts to enter another local landmark, historic Fountain Cave, were a failure. But the Schmidt cave was to be a welcome consolation prize.
In historical documents, the Schmidt cave is referred to as “Stahlmann’s Cellars,” since they were dug out by Christopher Stahlmann, who founded the Cave Brewery in 1855. The cave was used for lagering (aging) beer, but by the time Schmidt acquired Stahlmann’s business in 1900, modern refrigeration techniques had taken over, and the cave lay abandoned until the present day.
In November 1999, along with fellow explorers, I tried to enter Stahlmann’s Cellars by following the brewery wastewaters through the labyrinth, tracing them back to the cave. Along the way, we were bathed by the foamy discharges of the brewery and passed through a stretch of tunnel lined with quivering jelly stalactites up to a foot long, dangling from the vaults above. This vile jelly, known to sanitation engineers as “sewer slime,” is a bacterial-fungal combination deriving nutrients from aerosols generated from splashing brewery waste.
We followed the slimy beer tunnels upstream as they got smaller and smaller, hunkering down to a clay pipe that we had to crawl through. Finally I came to a blockage that had to be dug away, on the other side of which was the great Stahlmann’s Cellars. I let out a whoop as I slithered into the enormous black void. My flashlight illuminated a primeval forest of colossal yellow brick piers, which were swarming with giant red cockroaches. Rats scuttled among the breakdown slabs on the cave floor. Festoons of vapor hung lazily in the warm, fetid air. We began to sweat like pigs, and removed our jackets.
The square brick piers, the largest of which were six by six feet in size, supported the cave ceiling, and the tremendous weight of the Schmidt brewhouse above. At this time the brewery was still running full steam, producing Pig’s Eye Pilsner and other brands. And I mean steam—there were noisy deluges of hot water from the brewhouse into the cave through a brick-rimmed hole in the ceiling several times an hour. The steaming cascade splashed into a deep pit, which contained a jumble of broken brickwork and other detritus.
After exploring the maze of passages below the brewhouse we arrived at the largest room in the cave, from which passages radiated outwards in several directions. Stahlmann’s Cellars is such a maze that we got lost, despite having left rock cairns to mark the route, as the old polar explorers used to do. Until we learned the maze better I relied on compass readings to navigate.
Down one passage, we saw a manhole lid in the cave ceiling, which as I knew from an old clipping, provided access to the cave from the basement of the Schmidt office building, this being the preferred entry point for the occasional newspaper reporter. At another point, a massive round arch of limestone rubble masonry and a stairway leading upwards, though choked with boulders, marked a former entrance to the cave. Down another passage, a trio of vertical wellpipes passed through the cave. These were the wells that supplied the much frequented pumphouse on Fort Road, which dispensed free “spring water” to the public for so many years.
A sandrock passage ran toward the former Stahlmann mansion at 855 West Seventh Street, now called the Marie Schmidt Bremer Home. Under the mansion itself we found a mysterious shaft leading upwards, its walls coated with white flowstone (a natural mineral deposit left by flowing water). With a diameter of three feet, this 30-foot shaft is large enough for a person to use, but its purpose was unclear. It brought to mind the kidnapping of Edward Bremer by gangsters in 1934, after which the family reportedly dug a tunnel from the mansion to the Rathskeller across the street.
We left Stahlmann’s Cellars by a different way than we had entered, following a long sandrock crawlway that began under the Bremer mansion and led back into the sewers. We were in for a nasty surprise, however, when some rats emerged from their burrows, squeaking in protest at the unexpected intrusion. After braving the whiskered gauntlet, and wading down the sewer trunklines, we emerged into the open air once again.
In June 2002, Landmark Brewery shut down, while Gopher State Ethanol, the nation’s first urban ethanol plant, which had begun production at the site in April 2000, continued in operation until May 2004, when it, too, shut down. We paid a return visit to Stahlmann’s Cellars in April 2006, this time with Andy Hine, who took some beautiful photographs. The cave’s microclimate had changed dramatically during the interval since our pre-millennial visits, however. In the absence of hot brewery waste, the cave was much cooler and there was very little life: no rats or cockroaches were seen this time. The living sewer jelly was gone too, having died back to a black wall crud.
For more information about the Schmidt cave, see my well-illustrated article in Ramsey County History Magazine for Spring 2006, “Stahlmann’s Cellars: The Cave Under the Castle.”