Dr. Greg Brick
My own introduction to subterranean Nicollet Island involved more travail than treasure, as a member of a roving exploratory herd on a cold, snowy night in the winter of 1989. One guy removed the lid, which was partly in someone’s backyard, and a big cloud of steam billowed out. We scrambled down the shaft into […]
In addition to the Ford mines proper, Ford mined out 1.5 miles of passages below what is now Shepard Road, at a location several miles downriver. The passages are about 20 feet wide and 30 feet high—wide enough for two trucks to pass side by side, and higher than a telephone pole. The Civil Defense […]
Back in the 1980s, a friend confidentially informed me that he knew of a “huge old sewer lid” in the Warehouse District of Minneapolis and, peering down through the ventilation holes on that lid, he had seen deep into the bowels of the City. Although it smelled rather funky, he admitted, it sounded like there […]
Schieks Cave—aka Farmers & Mechanics Bank Cave—is the largest cave under downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. The otherwise excellent chapter on the cave’s history in the 1980 NSS Guidebook does not specify exactly when, or by whom, the cave was discovered. That information, however, is contained in the following newspaper clipping, slightly abridged, from the Minneapolis Tribune, […]
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 […]
Chute’s Cave, in Minneapolis, operated as a show cave from 1876 to 1880 (conservatively estimated). A newspaper advertisement for Chute’s Cave, from the Saint Paul and Minneapolis Pioneer-Press and Tribune, August 26, 1876, is transcribed below. Although there are earlier newspaper advertisements for Fountain Cave, in St. Paul, dating back to 1852, they are very […]
Norman Kittson was a famous fur trader in the early history of Minnesota. He built a huge mansion on the site where the St. Paul Cathedral now stands. After retiring from business, he built horse stables in the Midway area of St. Paul, and in Erdenheim, Pennsylvania. The St. Paul stables were known as Kittsondale. […]
While strolling along the St. Paul waterfront in the late 1980s I came across a manhole lid upon which the words “Trout Brook” had been crudely spray-painted in fluorescent, orange letters. Scanning the riverbanks in the vicinity, I spied a cavernous sewer outfall, more than garage-sized, disgorging a multi-hued stream of water to the Mississippi […]
“A great city is like a sieve.” Frederick Van Duzee As you walk the streets of downtown St. Paul there’s little to suggest anything special underfoot. It’s no until standing below the Mississippi River bluffs that you glimpse little holes in the cliffs near the Wabasha Street Bridge and see the magical “doors to nowhere” […]