They were home to gamblers, drinkers and prostitutes. Opium was the drug of choice there, and people from all walks of life visited -- always in secret. They were the center of a thriving underground business and pleasure arena where the unspeakable and immoral would occur. These were places where the wealthy and poor, the law abiding and criminal, would come together to partake of a world on common ground: underground.

They were the secret tunnels of 25th Street.

So what could have been so much more illicit to produce such a shroud of secrecy and cover-up? Were upstanding citizens, policemen or politicians being bribed? Was it deemed a necessary evil for business during Prohibition? Did the reputation of the upper 25th Street world make it necessary to burrow underground in order for the everyday citizen to participate in the gambling and drinking so they wouldn’t be associated with the rough-and-tumble street above?

Similar subterranean areas in other cities suggest these secret underworlds housed the unthinkable. Some have denied the existence of such places for upwards of 75 years or more.

Moose Jaw, Canada, is one such city. Only when part of Main Street collapsed in the 1970s, leaving a truck planted in part of the old tunnels, did city officials finally acknowledge they were indeed a reality.

The tunnels of Moose Jaw * were home to Chinese rail workers who built them as a refuge from the "yellow peril" head tax. In the early 1900s, the Chinese suffered this impossible tax due to white rail workers believing their jobs were in jeopardy because of Chinese immigration. So the Chinese workers built and lived in the tunnels, even raising their children in the rat-infested darkness.

In the 1920s, with the advent of Prohibition, the tunnels served a new purpose: bootlegging. Gangsters, even the likes of Al Capone, frequented the tunnels, using them as a haven for gambling, drinking and other illegal activity. Politicians and law enforcement were involved just as deeply as the mobsters, helping maintain their profitability.*

Allegedly running from Union Station all the way up to the former Ben Lomond Hotel, the tunnels of 25th Street were supposedly similar, housing the same dens of illegal operations.

Ogden Mayor Matthew Godfrey says there are indeed some tunnels underneath 25th Street, but not in the way most people think.

"The tunnels are actually a series of vaults underneath the stores, and many of them are connected," Godfrey said. "Where the sidewalk is was actually part of the store for delivery purposes. They would take goods down there, and those were the storage areas for the shops. There were doors between the vaults and the rooms were large--the ones I’ve been in were about 15 to 20 feet wide, I guess--and when all the doors are open, I can see where it would look like a tunnel. As far as any rooms going across, not just up and down, under the street, we’re not aware of anything like that."

As for a sophisticated underground world running under a large part of the city, that remains a mystery, and probably an urban myth.

"We have public infrastructure--sewer lines, water lines--that are down 10 feet under and we’ve never seen anything to document traversing tunnels," the mayor continued. "The tunnels they say existed all the way from Ben Lomond Hotel to the Union Station would have to be down there pretty deep for us not to have found them."

According to an article published in the Ogden Standard-Examiner in July, 2001 (Readers‘ recollections of the Ogden tunnels 7/22/01), some citizens say they’ve been in the tunnels and saw first-hand what went on down there. Most of these people were children at the time, ages 7 to 9, and their experiences took place in the 1930s or 40s. These folks told of strange smells (possibly opium?), dirt floors, smoky rooms, Chinese men, prostitutes, gambling tables and tunnels underneath 25th Street running from what they thought could have been Ben Lomond Hotel to Union Station. Most, however, said they were unsure, as they were small children at the time. Mayor Godfrey himself says he's been in the vaults at Union Station. He's had people tell him they went into Union Station and traveled up to the end of 25th Street.

"Bob Geier manages Union Station, and he swears they (the large network of tunnels) do not exist," Godfrey said. "He's been in every square inch of the place and hasn't ever seen anything like that. So I asked him to show me." There are theories as to why people may believe such a network exists. According to Godfrey and Geier, there are long crawl spaces underneath the building. Union Station offers tours to people, and when they enter the spaces, they are only given a small flashlight. The tours run through these long corridors and tourists are taken on many turns and then told they are under another part of town when, in fact, they are still under Union Station. "Bob says he's done that kind of stuff, you know, ghost tours and things like that," Godfrey said. "So his theory is that they've just taken people down there, gotten them lost and fooled them into thinking they'd gone somewhere, but they really hadn't."

As for those who tell the stories of bars, gambling and other illegal activity under the city, the mayor believes these are probably true, but only up and down 25th Street.

"There are allegations of reputable people going into the bank, going down into the opium dens or the brothels and then coming back up through the bank a few hours later. And the shop owners respected those businesses down there because they were profitable. So that's why they weren't common knowledge," said Godfrey. "And that's possible along 25th Street because those storage vaults do connect, so you could travel from store to store.So we think that's what happened.” In fact, according to the mayor, a former police chief chased a murder suspect through those very tunnels back in the 1970s.

Though most of the vaults have been filled in due to construction and renovations throughout the years, there are some still intact. So why don’t we open them?

"We've tossed around the idea of recreating some of the ones that we know are still down there," Mayor Godfrey said. "But that's a huge project.

"We have the Heritage District exploring the idea. They'd like to see if this may be a project that would qualify. But part of the problem is that we're going to use federal tax dollars to recreate these reported opium dens and brothels, bring tourists in and have park rangers showing these places of illegal activities recreated with tax-payer dollars and we're saying, 'Well, yeah.' There's just the concern of whether or not something like that would be approved," Godfrey explained. "But we are going through the process, doing a study and putting together a plan. We have to go through a large process to get this kind of thing going. We hope to have a master plan in place to submit to Congress by the first of the year. Then we can take the next step, which is actually doing the project."

Whether a vast network of tunnels ever existed as some have said, we may never know for sure. But maybe we will soon be able to see for ourselves and envision the possibilities of an intriguing, forbidden underworld that might have been right here at home,deep beneath Ogden’s 25th Street.

* This info from "Moose Jaw tunnels reveal dark tales of Canada’s past" by Dennis Bueckert, Canadian Press, 1/12/00)

Jen Davis - Winter 2003

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