But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,

But often, in the din of strife,

There rises an unspeakable desire

After the knowledge of our buried life

                                              — Matthew Arnold



John Hewitt sits behind his desk, munching on a hamburger and drinking a shake. He is 80 years old, a Korean War veteran and lifelong Tacoman. I’ve stopped by his office in the historic Bradley Block, by Fireman’s Park on Pacific Avenue, to ask about the sidewalk. But right now we’re talking about his friend Murray Morgan, the newsman and historian who passed away in 2000. We talk about Alan Liddle, with whom Hewitt bought the building in the ’60s, who had a stroke awhile back. We talk about the old Hewitt mansion on Fourth and E, where a parking lot now stands.



Now, about that sidewalk. Was he aware of the photos on the Internet? Of all the speculation?



Why the light shining up from below?



“That was my son-in-law’s idea,” says Hewitt.



So it’s hollow under there?



Just vacant space. Part of the basement.



Ever notice anything strange? Secret Chinese smuggling tunnels, perhaps?



Nope.



Mind if I take a look?



A spiral staircase leads to the basement and a room full of files. I pass through a door into another room, bigger and cooler, and pull a string for the lights. Sure enough, I see those sidewalks, daylight bleeding through cracks, lightbulbs rigged beneath glass blocks — hence the weird glow outside. I see sealed off portals where further access to the vaulted walkways is barred. Most curious, however, are the dwarves, witches, animals, and orphans huddling together in the shadows.



Back upstairs, Hewitt explains that he was once part owner of Never Never Land, the old fantasy park at Point Defiance. When the place shut down, its denizens landed in the cellar.



“Kids loved Never Never Land!” I gasp. “What happened?”



Hewitt settles back and breathes deeply. And that, friends, is another story.

Holes in the ground

The story that brought me there is this: Under the ground lies a hidden Tacoma. Turkish baths, bomb shelters, bars, and, of course, the infamous tunnels. Tunnels connecting buildings to buildings and buildings to the waterfront and the waterfront to farms. Tunnels connecting tunnels to tunnels.



“There is nothing better to capture the imagination of man than the contemplation of a hole in the ground,” Charles Wolverton wrote in the Tacoma News Tribune, Oct. 7, 1951. If not necessarily true of man, this certainly seems true of Tacomans. Wolverton’s piece on the local underground is but one installment in a narrative that reaches back more than a century and likely will continue long after this article joins his in the dustbin of time.



In a development Wolverton could not have foreseen, enthusiasm for the topic has exploded with the Internet. One afternoon online turned up a dizzying array of rumors, including talk of tunnels under Stadium High School, a tunnel leading from Stadium to Tacoma General Hospital, a tunnel from Stadium to the waterfront, a tunnel from Stadium to the old railroad building on Pacific, a tunnel from the Rust mansion to the smelter, World War II Japanese internment chambers, a tunnel for moving supplies during World War II rationing, tunnels Chinese used to smuggle opium before they were run out of town, tunnels they used to sneak back in after they were run out, not to mention a 20-meter-long and six-meter-high bas relief sculpture created by ork and dwarf artists as a monument to the Metahumans who died during the Night of Rage.



So what is the real story?

Mystery, legend, myth

Robert Jacklin was Alan Liddle’s partner in the architectural firm Liddle and Jacklin, which had its offices in the Bradley Block; he says the hollow sidewalks I saw are remnants of old steam tunnels. Michael Sullivan, a historic preservation consultant, UW Tacoma lecturer and expert on downtown Tacoma, concurs.



“There are old steam tunnels all over downtown,” Sullivan says. A central steam plant located on the Foss waterway once supplied much of downtown with heat via ducts just like these. But Sullivan, a lover of lore himself, is quick to point out that they may have served less official purposes too.



“There were speakeasies all over town,” says Sullivan, and the tunnels likely were used to move hooch.



He tells me of other known oddities, most notably the "Big Bore," a mammoth tunned project that started near South 25th Street and Jefferson and made it as far as Center Street and South Yakima, that was abandoned when it filled with water and drained the Union Pacific railroad of cash. Even now, it complicates the occasional construction project.



As for those sneaky Chinese, Sullivan suggests such tales arose from prejudice surrounding the 1885 expulsion, when mobs rounded up the “coolies” and marched them to the city limits.



When I ask him about another Pacific Avenue rumor — that underneath the Olympus Hotel lay the remnants of a bomb shelter and a passageway leading to an underground barbershop — he becomes excited. “There’s a barbershop entombed under the Winthrop Hotel. All of the counters, mirrors, tile — everything is still there. Completely sealed up!”



Hear that sparkle in Sullivan’s voice? That’s the real story, not the “hole in the ground.” It’s about mystery in an era of total information. It’s about legend and myth, a kind of folk history, the history we love and understand best. It’s a story about stories. John Hewitt-type stories. Stories like chain-smoked cigarettes, each one igniting the next. Stories connecting stories to stories.

Out of sight and mind

Micheal Boos, manager of the Olympus Hotel Apartments, is quiet, if not unfriendly. He has the air of someone who deals with a lot of crap and is loathe to add to the pile. Yeah, he’ll let a reporter look around, but he’s not getting excited about some rotten pit.



We take the elevator downstairs. The door creaks open to a scene of decaying splendor. The hotel’s luxurious supper club is just a basement now, a depository for the unwanted, out of sight and mind.



We look at the boiler room, an old bathroom, a room with romantic murals on the walls. I lift up a metal plate in the floor, but all I find is pipes. We stand under the sidewalk, where the old steam tunnel ran, under the footsteps of the masses. 



Ever seen anything weird down here?



Nope.



A bomb shelter?



A bomb shelter?



A secret passageway?



Huh?



How about a barbershop?



Boos takes me upstairs and through a locked door. Inside is a kind of storeroom, a jumbled pile of furniture. On the wall is a photograph of a barbershop somewhere in the old hotel.



So where was it?



Boos has no idea.



“What we need is a flashlight,” he says.

Just some stories

Some of these stories made it all the way to the Library of Congress, thanks to the Federal Writers’ Project. The depression-era back-to-work program employed writers to create works such as guidebooks and ethnographies and to record oral histories, including Tacoma’s contribution, “Mysterious Chinese Tunnels.”



V.W. Jenkins tells of a tunnel he found under the State Hotel (close to 7th and A Street) that dove off sharply toward the waterfront. Zimmerman also claims to have ventured 150 feet into a tunnel originating near the docks, with one branch pointing “straight toward Pacific Avenue.”



Oscar Cayton reports spelunking a passageway starting near present-day Fircrest. He claims he found “several pieces of broken dishes, a few pieces of Chinese money and some paperbound books in Chinese characters” and even “the rotted remains of wooden bunks” in a timber-reinforced shaft.



Another Tacoma old-timer, William Zimmerman describes a veritable ant farm of “secret mole-like passageways,” used for “smuggling Chinese at so much a head, narcotics and Shanghaiing sailors.” Nothing he’s seen himself, mind you. Just some stories he’s heard.



Such claims have largely been explained and demystified. Still, interest in them seems only to grow.

Not ruling anything out

I call Bob Baumgras, chief custodian at Stadium High School. He confirms the existence of tunnels. They run all over under the old building. But they’re just pipe chases, he says — access to utilities — and during the renovation most got sealed off.



But later that same day my phone rings. It’s Baumgras.



“I feel like maybe I was too cut and dry,” he tells me. “This old place has a lot of mystique, and I don’t want to ruin it.”



He likes the stories as much as anybody. His predecessor at Stadium swore up and down there was a tunnel leading from the school to the bowl; Baumgras has looked and looked, and looked — but darn if he can find it. Still, he’s not ruling anything out. The old chief isn’t doing so well these days, according to Baumgras, but he’ll ask him to give me a call. He warns me to be prepared for a long conversation; the man likes to tell stories.



Baumgras has a story of his own. A few years back a kid ran into one of the tunnels, but Baumgras wasn’t concerned. He pulled up a chair by the entrance, figuring he’d just wait him out. Funny thing, though. The kid never returned. Did he wind up at the waterfront? On Pacific Avenue? At Tacoma General? In Shanghai?



Baumgras doesn’t know, but that’s OK. It makes for a better story.