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If
there has ever been any tunnel system that made the discovery
of an underground pirate ship around the next corner seem almost
possible, it was the maze of ancient sewer tunnels beneath Saint
Paul.
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The
entire system, well over a century old, was rife with giant sewer
rats, albino cockroaches, hand-carved tunnels, bricked off passageways,
and bizarre architectural features. Some tunnels were entirely
brick, others were brick lined below and raw sandstone above,
while still others were carved out of the naked sandstone without
any reinforcing walls.
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To
travel through the sewers usually meant walking on narrow ledges,
hunched over beneath the low ceiling, straddling a trench of raw
sewage. In some stretches the tunnels were too low to walk at all,
and we were forced to crawl, liquid sewage burbling right beneath
us. At least one person would slip on the narrow, sandy ledges each
time we ventured through these tunnels. The invariable sequence
of sounds: a thick splash, an all-too-literal exclamation of "shit!",
followed by laughter from everyone else … the person laughing loudest
usually being the person who had been laughed at for getting a shitty
sewage shoe the last time.
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Rats
scampered ahead on the ledges, disappearing into the hundreds of
dead-end side passages that brought sewage into the tunnels from
individual sewer connections. Their eyes would glow blood red as
we they watched us hunch past, unwelcome intruders in their kingdom.
Many of the oldest side passages were catacombed with rat burrows:
the unwary explorer crawling through such an area would place a
hand or knee on apparently solid ground, only to sink down into
a rat burrow beneath the soft, sandy surface. We wore thick gloves.
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While
some tunnels were still active, much of the system was totally abandoned
and disused, the sewage trenches choked with sand. In some areas,
this eroded sandstone created "underground beaches," with the kind
of soft, white sand normally associated with a tropical paradise,
not a sewer system far beneath Saint Paul, Minnesota.
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The
History of the Saint Paul Sewers
Stolen
from Sigrid Arnott and edited to our liking
Sanitation
legislation in the United States began in mid-19th century cities,
where crowded conditions encouraged the spread of disease ...
(read more)
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