“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” that you might suspect otherwise.
Downtown St. Paul (the “Loop”) is underlain by a great utility labyrinth, situated from 20 to 75 feet below street level. Estimates of its total length vary greatly, and I’ve seen figures ranging all the way up to 70 miles. This system was carved out within a generation, roughly the thirty years from 1875 to 1905, in several big chunks, and all by hand tools such as pickaxes and shovels at the rate of 4 to 6 feet per day per man. The passages are typically 3.5 by 6.5 feet in size and marked with street signs. It’s difficult to specify exactly how many levels of passages there are because they frequently interweave, but I’d say there’s about half a dozen in most areas. City engineer George M. Shepard’s “typical cross-section” of Wabasha Street, published in a 1937 newspaper article, gives you the flavor of these “catacombs,” “St. Paul’s downtown area being honeycombed with more tunnels than perhaps any other city in the world.”
St. Paul’s utility labyrinth is bounded like a box: on the top by limestone, on the bottom by river level, on the north by the deep gash of Interstate 94, on the east by Lowertown (a valley where the sandstone is absent altogether), on the south by the river bluffs, and on the west by Seven Corners. When I explored these tunnels in the early 1990s, the “game” was to find a way of portaging between the utility labyrinth and adjoining tunnel systems. For example, did the utility tunnels connect with the well-known Capitol complex of pedestrian tunnels north of the interstate, with the Trout Brook system in Lowertown, or with the Fort Road Labyrinth to the west? Finally, we wanted to get as deep as possible—the elusive “door to China” we often joked about.
Utilities placed in these tunnels included water, power (gas and electric), steam heat, telephone, and, in our own day, fiber optics. Not to mention the storm and sanitary sewers. Let’s look at each of these utilities in turn.
The Water Department carved its tunnels from 1875 to 1890, bringing water from Lake McCarron in Roseville and beyond. The warm tunnels prevented the mains from freezing during cold Minnesota winters. The big water main runs directly under Wabasha Street on its way to the bridge, then heads over the river to the West Side, which had been annexed to St. Paul in 1874. A door in the basement of City Hall opens into these tunnels, from which the meter readers used to fan out to monitor the city’s water use.
The St. Paul Gas Light Company was established in 1856. Coal was retorted to generate an artificial gas that differed from our modern natural gas in its composition and lower calorific value. In 1885, their Hill Street Station was built against the bluffs, and by the next year the first gas ran through mains in sandrock tunnels under the Loop, bringing the Gaslight Era to St. Paul. (Nowadays, of course, natural gas is used mainly for heating and cooking, not illumination.) Occasionally the gas would leak out into the tunnels, leading to flying manhole lids if accidentally ignited. In 1973, two trespassing youths struck a match in the tunnels and were blown off a ladder, both breaking their backs when they landed, and their parents sued the city for creating an attractive nuisance. (When did utilities become an attractive nuisance in our society?)
Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his telephone at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. Within a decade, the Northwestern Telephone Company began carving its own set of tunnels under St. Paul. An amusing incident from the early days of their construction tells how the sandhogs, tunneling in from the river bluff, set up an impromptu subterranean bar to celebrate upon having reached 8th and Wabasha. These tunnels were larger than the rest, prodding columnist Oliver Towne to quip that “the telephone caverns” are “the aristocrats of tunnels.”
In New York City, which has often been a utility bellwether, there was a big incentive to place utilities underground after the famous blizzard of 1888, which caused the lines and poles to droop and snap with the weight of the ice. The poles were thereafter chopped down, and the lines buried. By 1893, St. Paul had passed an ordinance forbidding poles in the downtown area, too.
Birdsill Holly is considered the father of district steam heating, which involves supplying steam heat to the buildings of an entire district in a downtown area from a central boiler facility. The first big district steam heating system in the nation was built by the New York Steam Company, which began supplying its Manhattan customers in 1882. By 1905, the American District Steam Company began service to the St. Paul Loop through steam tunnels that it had carved in the sandrock. Competition among the power companies led to duplicate tunnels on opposite sides of the street, but in 1916, Northern States Power Company was incorporated, and several formerly separate parallel tunnel systems were now joined under one banner. These tunnels weave through the sandrock like teredo-worm borings in the wood of old sailing vessels, deftly avoiding one another, and leaving rollercoastering passages where one passes over or under the other. They are linked horizontally by cross-cuts and vertically by “interconnects,” and often separated by numbered silver doors, which serve as bulkheads to isolate gas leaks. (I counted at least 50 silver doors.) In some cases, owing to interference with telephone transmissions, the companies couldn’t use each other’s tunnels, and had to dig their own, which added even more mileage to the system.
In 1890, the St. Paul Street Railway Company, with its plant situated near the Hill Street Station, began to electrify its lines, running the cables through yet another set of sandrock tunnels, supported on heavy iron frames. These tunnels were abandoned in 1953, when buses replaced streetcars. One sandrock tunnel carried cables all the way to another tunnel, the historic Selby streetcar tunnel, 1,500 feet long, which opened in 1907. The Selby tunnel allowed St. Paul’s cable cars to get to the top of the plateau behind the downtown. After the demise of streetcars, the abandoned Selby tunnel was used by the homeless. I recall exploring its darkened recesses back in the 1980s, before it was firmly sealed. The tunnel inhabitants could see our silhouettes perfectly as we entered, while we could only vaguely sense their flitting forms, putting us at a disadvantage. But even today, you can smell the sandrock tunnel which serviced the Selby tunnel, through one of the ventilation portals near the Cathedral, marking the deepest shaft in the utility system.
The Twin Cities, however, has never had a large population of “Mole People” like New York City, in the sense of people who live in subway and train tunnels. But a large underground homeless population was developing in part of St Paul’s labyrinth many years ago. An 1878 newspaper clipping on “The Cave Dwellers” reports that: “Beneath Rogers’ block, in St Paul, there are a number of labyrinthian excavations made in the sand rock for sewerage and storage purposes, shaft holes connecting them with the buildings fronting on Third street [now Kellogg Boulevard]. The entrance to these vaults is from the river bank, and heavy doors and locks preserve them for the private purposes for which they were intended.” It goes on to report how the vaults were taken over by “a gang of at least forty thieves” who built campfires below ground, sending smoke into downtown buildings, leading to an exciting subterranean battle with a platoon of police sent to flush them out. This maze was still accessible until recently. I recall edging precariously along ledges, like a mountain goat, on the 80-foot cliff face near the Wabasha Street Bridge. Fortunately, the cliff was re-landscaped during the reconstruction of the bridge in the late 1990s, removing the temptation for people to risk their necks. But the holes led to a maze of crawlspaces around old building foundations in the Kellogg area, and it was for some reason utterly infested with centipedes, which I tried not to get down my collar. In some places we found caches of old glass bottles, which could be identified using collector’s guidebooks such as Munsey’s. The crawlways looped back out to the bluff face at several points, allowing me to experience, like some oversized squab, the nauseating interior of a pigeonhole, lined with poop and feathers. At another place there was a deep elevator shaft leading down to the river-level Cobb Caves, an old cavern depicted in the 1874 Andreas Atlas, and most likely the actual scene of battle against the “Cave Dwellers.”
There were other historic caves connected with St Paul’s utility labyrinth. In the ceiling of the Exchange Street tunnel, for example, there was a dark void, easy to miss. Climbing up into it I found myself in the City Brewery cave, a horseshoe-shaped void filled with bathroom fixtures. Originally, of course, the cave had its own separate entrance in the bluffs. City Brewery was founded at Eagle and Exchange streets in 1855, and was later acquired by Frederick Emmert, who used artesian well water in the brewing process. This brewery, which closed in 1901, catered to the Eagle Street saloon district, the most notorious of the establishments being known as the “Bucket of Blood” for its vicious brawls.
Nina Clifford was the most famous madam in St. Paul history. She ran a bordello at 147 Washington Street that existed for half a century (1887-1937), kitty-corner from the Minnesota Club (built 1915). It’s been claimed that the sons of many well-to-do families were sent to this bordello upon coming of age, to learn the basic manuevers. One of the most persistent rumors is that there was a tunnel running from the club to the bordello, so that discreet visits could be paid to this temple of Venus—which could otherwise be reached by the garish red stairway down the bluffs. If there’s any truth to the story, it was likely that the “Tunnel of Love” was actually only one of the utility tunnels in the vicinity. But if that’s true, pleasure-seeking men in any building in the Loop could have enjoyed the same clandestine access. Upon investigating the rumor below ground, however, I did not find any open connection between the tunnel and the club, although it’s possible it was sealed up long ago. In 1997, when the present Science Museum of Minnesota was under construction, the bordello site was dug up and yielded 14,000 artifacts. In 2005, I was featured on “Weird Underworld,” an episode of “Weird US,” on the History Channel, and I was interviewed about the bordello by the hosts, Mark and Mark. Unfortunately, they miffed my grand entrance onto the program, which involved dramatically emerging from below a St. Paul street by throwing off a manhole lid. They couldn’t get their lines straight for the camera man, and it would have been humorous had not my arms grown weary with the repeated flinging.
Looking at some web sites today, you’d think that St. Paul’s utility labyrinth was some big new discovery. While digging through the MSS files, however, I came across a sheaf of detailed trip reports prepared by the Minnesota Rovers, an outing club, dating from the early 1960s. Their nocturnal excursions involved trips of as many as two dozen college students to the St. Paul utility tunnels. (Now that’s what I call an exploratory herd.) The yellowing pages are filled with humorous details of their escapades, as when you were requested to “Park and make sure no one’s watching you.” It seems the students actually enjoyed being chased by the utility workers, however, and brazenly invading the NSP plant itself, they used to purchase food from the vending machines. Given the late hours, it’s no surprise that one report mentions getting a cup of coffee for 5 cents, presumably to remain wakeful during the expedition. It was all in good fun.
Back in the days when I went exploring, one way that was used to enter the utility system involved a subterranean space in the sandrock that one guy described as “Dr. Seuss’s tunnels,” owing to the their bizarre and fanciful configuration. Small wormholes would unexpectedly open up into large rooms. Well, one passage led to a narrow stairway, carved in bedrock, at the top of which there was a steel door, painted red, which was locked half the time. When open, it gave direct access to the water main tunnels, the uppermost level of the utility labyrinth. There was usually a bit of nervous anticipation creeping out into the forbidden sandrock corridors.
The tunnels were illuminated with strings of lights, spaced about one light every hundred feet or so, which could be turned on or off with switches every block. During each visit, different strings were lighted, and we were relieved to find that the pattern had nothing to do with our own comings and goings. The heat, and the fact that we could see lights for many city blocks, led to optical “phantoms”: it would appear that a distant light was suddenly darkened, as if a utility worker had passed in front of it, heading our way. But we actually saw very few of the latter species, especially since we usually confined our visits to the wee hours, and holidays. At that time of night, it was safe to explore even the subterranean breakrooms of the water department workers, which were equipped with microwaves, TVs, and other amenities. We never removed anything or left any messes.
The air in the utility labyrinth was indeed hot, even though the system was naturally ventilated by strong convection updrafts, the air entering at holes under the Wabasha Bridge and whistling up through manhole lids in the downtown streets. Owing to the pervasive asbestos contamination from deteriorating pipe-wrap, which menaced utility workers until it was removed in recent years, asbestos fibers covered the floor like snow in certain tunnels, and the more health-conscious among us wore respirators. But alas, try wearing a hot mask in a hot tunnel for very long.
Frequently, I wore khaki clothing, a desert color, for camouflage, hoping to blend in with the similarly colored sandrock walls, for whatever it was worth. I made several trips with a photographer, and it was unnerving to remain stationary for as long as half an hour while he “bracketed” his artistic shots. I felt that it was an excellent way of getting caught.
Occasionally we’d come across rat mummies, desiccated in the desert heat of the sandy tunnels. I noticed that many of them appeared to have partaken of baits, their rotten spines, still tenting up a parchment-like skin, twisted in the characteristic S-shape indicative of death by neuropoison.
One of our goals was to explore the long-rumored passage running under the Mississippi River. Wading through waist-deep raw sewage in one tunnel, we actually came to a stairway leading steadily downwards, as if it was going to pass entirely under the river, but it stopped short at a large sewer vault. In fact, there is a passage going under the river, a siphon bringing raw sewage over from the West Side, via Navy Island—but nothing that a human being could pass through.
As for storm drains, there was one really big one, forming the lowest level in downtown St Paul, the St. Peter-Rondo tunnel, which drained the interstates in the vicinity. This tunnel ran right under the Ramsey County jail and doubtless the inmates occasionally watched our doings. During especially cold winters this tunnel accumulated large ice dams at joints in the tunnel, where groundwater seeped out and froze because of the cold air being sucked in through the river outfall by the powerful convection currents. One winter’s day, having gone far up the storm tunnel with John, I noticed that the water level had risen several inches during the course of our trip. I became alarmed until I realized that it was just a daily fluctuation, involving snow that had melted during the warmer winter midday. Upon going back downstream, we began to scamper back over the ice dams when one of them suddenly broke loose. I rode it, bronco fashion, down to the outfall, colliding with other dams along the way.
Once, just by coincidence, we happened to be under the streets during the St. Paul Winter Carnival’s torchlight parade. Looking up from the bottom of a manhole shaft, I could tell that the parade was passing overhead. I jokingly asked my friend, in a loud voice, what would happen if someone knew we were down here. Immediately, someone on the street above shined a flashlight down through the open grating! That shut me up pretty quick. I suppose I could have told them I was searching for the Winter Carnival medallion. Later that same evening, when exiting from the outfall on the Mississippi, we were startled by a burst of light and loud explosion in front of us, just as we came out. It was the beginning of the fireworks show on Harriet Island. In order to prevent this sort of subterranean tourism when the Republican National Convention came to St Paul in 2008, officials welded shut many of the manhole covers in the downtown area.
Excerpted from SUBTERRANEAN TWIN CITIES.