Imagine you've been working non-stop for weeks on end and you finally got a break and manage to get a weekend off. You are tired, sweaty and your body is sore from working for about the last month. You head into town for a shower, a change into some clean clothes, a drink and maybe see what you can get up to. You wonder if you are in a bit of a sketchy part of town but hey, everyone else around you looks just like you do ready to unwind on a Friday night. One drink turns into two, two drinks turn into three, maybe you get offered something special by the bartender in your watering hole of choice and pretty soon you are maybe one or two sheets to the wind in pretty short order.
Then all of a sudden BAM!!!! The floor seems to drop out from beneath you and you are out cold. When you come to you are in pitch blackness and of all things your shoes are gone. Maybe there's someone near you but you can't see a damn thing so you don't really know. You are cold, disoriented, hungry and more than a little hung over. You feel a little bit of fresh air in the dank spot that somehow you've ended up in so you feel and inch your way towards it, stepping on something sharp along the way that feels like its cutting into the soles of your naked feet. When you finally get to the fresh-er air, all you find is a metal grate in a brick wall, solid and unforgiving with bars like a jailhouse cell. Maybe you can make out someone moving beyond the iron you are now gripping so you yell for help. Absolutely nothing happens. Ever. Nobody cares.
You may not really know what's happened to you right at that point but you've just been Shanghaied. The next three to six years of your life are going to be hell on Earth, if you even make it that far. The worst part is, you don't really understand how bad it's going to get yet. You will when the buyers show up.
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| Hobo's. Note the roped off grate in front of the window. |
There's a place in Portland's Old North End today called Hobo's Restaurant and Lounge. It seems like a nice enough place on the outside. Maybe even a good place to get a drink or two or three on a Friday night. You might have to walk past a few actual hobos on your way to the entrance, a symbol of just what the homeless situation is like in Portland, but you'll be fine. Open the door to the place and you'll find a classic dive bar, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. Long bar, dimly lit with wooden bar stools notched and worn by countless barflies, shelves stocked full with liquor and tap beer in front of a mirrored wall.
Go to Hobo's at just the wrong time, though, and you'll find some shady characters there, men or women determined to lure you underground and tell you about the city's dark past of kidnapping and coerced labor, of young men and women taken against their will and forced into servitude. They'll have you walking around pitch black basements that seem to go forever, terrified of seeing ghosts. If you are lucky, they'll even give you an operable flashlight and let you see the light of day again.
That's exactly where we found ourselves on the last night of our stay in Portland, determined to learn something about the city's more sinister history. And we actually paid these shady characters for the pleasure of taking us underground. Strange happenings indeed.
That's exactly where we found ourselves on the last night of our stay in Portland, determined to learn something about the city's more sinister history. And we actually paid these shady characters for the pleasure of taking us underground. Strange happenings indeed.
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| Opium den? Or something more pedestrian? Difficult to say. |
Portland, Oregon was established for good in the middle of the 19th century. The place where the current city is standing was used as a stopping place along the Willamette River in the 1830s before the city was named in 1845 (based on a coin flip) and incorporated in 1851. The site proved an ideal one at the confluence of the Willamette and the Columbia Rivers with both a deep harbor and an easy journey to the Pacific Ocean.
When the early settlers of the Pacific Northwest started arriving in Portland, they found themselves surrounded with old growth forests. And of course like any member of our species looking to make a quick buck, they figured why not start cutting all these trees down. Who cares that they have been here for decades or centuries (some reports have Douglas firs in this neck of the woods at 300 feet tall and 10 feet in diameter!), let's make them into timber, build ourselves some homes and stores and make a little money in the process. The first west coast sawmill was already operational in Fort Vancouver, Washington as of 1827. All the place needed was some customers and some workers.
About 20 years later, the Oregon Trail was open for business. What had started as a pathway laid out by fur traders and navigable by foot and horse only had by the mid 1840s been widened and improved to allow the passage of wagons, which meant families and settlers and anyone just looking for a new start somewhere different. Hello, customers! Hello, workers!
Logging back in the 1800s in Oregon was tough work. I imagine that kind of work is completely backbreaking anywhere in the world today. But in Oregon in the second half of the 19th century? Think axes and saws worked entirely by hand. Think frontier life! Think no infrastructure to get around meaning you likely stayed out in the woods for days or weeks on end. Think poor sanitation and worker safety. Think no labor laws. And have you ever been in the woods of Oregon? These trees are tough and the land is mountainous. People started out cutting down trees next to the Columbia and floating them down the river. That kind of quick and easy method of getting lumber to market would only last as long as there were trees near the river. After that, they would need to be moved by the muscle and sweat of young men.
So given all that kind of life, it's pretty easy for me to understand how loggers would feel about cutting loose in the Old North End (sometimes known as Old Town Chinatown among other things) on payday after a few weeks felling trees. But if they didn't keep their wits about them and a sober head on their shoulders, they might find themselves in a dark cell under whatever bar they chose that night in a lot more trouble than they ever wanted to be in their lives.
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| Box of old loggers shoes mysteriously discovered in the tunnels below Portland's Old North End. |
Back to Friday night at Hobo's and we've met one of those shady characters I talked about earlier. We'll call her Cindy because, well...that's her name. Cyndi works for the Cascade Geographic Society, a non-profit organization under the leadership and guidance of one Michael P. Jones, which is dedicated at least in part to keeping the history of Portland's Old North End alive and well in the 21st century. We've met up with her for one purpose: to head underground into the spaces where some unsuspecting logger out for a good time on a night in town might have found himself suddenly and very much against his will about 150 years ago.
We met Cyndi and a group of people just like us who were curious about the legends of the Portland underworld (literally the underworld) in the courtyard of Hobo's for a quick safety and history lesson before daring to head down underneath the place to see what we could find. A few notes before we start and we'll skip the safety stuff here because you don't really need that to read a blog now, do you?
First thing we need to know is that in Portland in the 19th century, kidnapping drunk young men and selling them to sea captains willing to take a chance on buying the abilities of an unconscious (or is he dead?) potential sailor was fairly common. Sure you paid money upfront and didn't really know what you were getting but its not like you need to pay them for their services, right? I mean, you just bought a person. You own them. All you have to do is keep them alive. And maybe then even not. This practice was called crimping or more commonly Shanghaiing because you would likely end up at some point in Shanghai, China after having been forced to cross the Pacific as property probably less valuable than the cargo the ship was carrying.
Secondly, we are lucky to know all this thanks to Michael P. Jones, who stumbled upon a series of tunnels under the buildings of downtown Portland as a seven year old boy with the help of an old sea captain who passed along his accounts of what happened below the streets. The fact that there was (or still is) a network of tunnels below the city makes Portland unique as a crimping town; in other cities, the Shanghaiers would need to wait for ships to come into port before knocking out and selling potential seamen into slavery; in Portland, the tunnels served as holding cells. Cool, right? And I get that this all sounds pretty Scooby Doo and a little on the unbelievable side but just bear with me a little. We'll get to all that.
One final thing: the tour is not just about Shanghaiing. There may have been white slavers selling women into prostitution and, um, don't be surprised if you encounter a ghost or two. Um, what was that? Tell you more about it underground. Let's go!
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| Heading underground. Follow Cyndi and grab a flashlight from the box on the right on the way in. |
To this point, we've accepted without question that there's this underground maze of tunnels below the city of Portland. Why is that, exactly? Cyndi had that explanation handy for us.
River cities all over the world often look like they are a solid landmass built up to support mankind on either side of a wide waterway. The current picture the traveler sees when visiting may be way different than the original landscape and Portland is no exception. Apparently there were a series of streams that were buried below the city grid in the 1870s and captured inside arched brick tunnels. Buildings that formed the early downtown Portland were built on top of these tunnels and businesses often found it handy to have a basement, especially when some were connected directly to the Willamette River along the tops of those tributaries that were buried.
As the city filled up, human waste became a problem. The first solution was open troughs in the centers of city streets but (and with no surprise here) this situation soon became intolerable. Where the old streams went, the sewers were destined to go in the 1890s. Like the streams, the sewers were also buried in tunnels below the buildings of downtown and routed to dump right into the Willamette River winding through the city. Nice, right?
Incredibly, this dumping-raw-sewage-into-the-river-situation lasted until the mid-1920s when the smell at the waterfront from exposed sewer pipes at low tide and periodic floods of the Willamette which backed sewage waste into downtown streets and buildings became just too much. The solution? Build a floodwall along the river and pump the sewage elsewhere. When this project was finished in 1929, there was a basement below almost every street and building in downtown Portland which used to be the buffer for sewer backups. Every building including those in the Old North End. Voila! The Shanghai tunnels!
River cities all over the world often look like they are a solid landmass built up to support mankind on either side of a wide waterway. The current picture the traveler sees when visiting may be way different than the original landscape and Portland is no exception. Apparently there were a series of streams that were buried below the city grid in the 1870s and captured inside arched brick tunnels. Buildings that formed the early downtown Portland were built on top of these tunnels and businesses often found it handy to have a basement, especially when some were connected directly to the Willamette River along the tops of those tributaries that were buried.
As the city filled up, human waste became a problem. The first solution was open troughs in the centers of city streets but (and with no surprise here) this situation soon became intolerable. Where the old streams went, the sewers were destined to go in the 1890s. Like the streams, the sewers were also buried in tunnels below the buildings of downtown and routed to dump right into the Willamette River winding through the city. Nice, right?
Incredibly, this dumping-raw-sewage-into-the-river-situation lasted until the mid-1920s when the smell at the waterfront from exposed sewer pipes at low tide and periodic floods of the Willamette which backed sewage waste into downtown streets and buildings became just too much. The solution? Build a floodwall along the river and pump the sewage elsewhere. When this project was finished in 1929, there was a basement below almost every street and building in downtown Portland which used to be the buffer for sewer backups. Every building including those in the Old North End. Voila! The Shanghai tunnels!
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| Comfy bed for a quick nap? Don't believe it. It's so the merch won't get damaged. |
Our entrance to the Shanghai tunnels was through a steel door in the sidewalk right in front of Hobo's. One minute we were on NW Third Avenue; the next we were in the basement below the bar with a flashlight that didn't work. For the next 90 minutes or so, I'd be walking around listening to Cyndi regale us with tales from the tunnels while hunched over so there was no way I could possible hit my head on doorways, ceilings or wet sewer pipes (ewww!).
This crimping enterprise was some seriously nasty and sinister stuff. The imaginary scenario I started this post with seemed to be all too real and anyone could be in on the gig except the target himself. Think you are getting a good deal when the bartender offers you discounted liquor or something extra special from the back because you look like a gentleman of discerning taste? He's probably either a Shanghaier or in league with someone who is and trying to get you incapacitated as quickly as possible.
That moment the floor seemed to drop out below you? It probably actually did and you were just too drunk to notice. Bars and saloons had trapdoors (they called them deadfalls) in the actual bar areas which could be opened to drop you right down into the basement onto a mattress (don't want to damage the merchandise by breaking bones; need a soft landing) with a couple of guys down there to welcome you into a cell and quickly re-set the deadfall.
And that feeling of stepping on something sharp with bare feet? Shanghaiers knew you couldn't get far without shoes (which they removed), especially if there were shards of glass mixed in with the dirt. Even if you did manage to get far, they just needed to follow the trail of blood to find out where you got to. We saw all this stuff: a deadfall with an old filthy mattress below for a soft(er) landing, a box of old loggers shoes found somewhere in the labyrinth below the city and we even got to reach our fingers through one of the old cell grates. Creepy, creepy stuff indeed.
If you got snatched, by the way, you could count on at least three to six years of forced labor, that's if you even made it to Shanghai or wherever the ship that had enslaved you was taking you. If rations got tight, some ships' crews were know to engage in cannibalism and there was nobody lower in the pecking order than a Shanghaied sailor. Hearing all of this with the sounds of boots and shoes walking back and forth on the circa 1885 floors of Hobo's above you made it somehow even creepier.
As if all that wasn't bad enough, apparently the tunnels were used for other purposes too. Able bodied men weren't the only victims of kidnapping who spent time involuntarily below the Old North End. There were likely countless numbers of women who were snatched and forced into sexual slavery or prostitution. Cyndi showed us a wooden box with a chair that these women were held in while their captors "broke" them to accept that their fate was hopeless. She did this while relaying the story of one especially ruthless white slaver who claimed he could break a kidnapped woman or girl in just 24-48 hours. Chilled by tales of men losing years off their lives while in slavery? The women never came back.
We also gazed with wonder at a room with a three tiered bunkbed allegedly used as an opium den. This was Old Town Chinatown at one point after all and there's nothing like whiling away the afternoon on a bed smoking some opium to make you feel a little chilled out. And yes, getting raided by the police was a risk so the operators of these dens set up their own security system in the pitch black tunnels consisting of a series of empty tin cans on a string. Hear the sound of cans clanking and get the heck out of there. By the way, the bottom bunk of the three we saw was the most expensive; closer to the ground means less distance to fall.
And wasn't there something about ghosts in there? Yep for sure. Cyndi started us off with warnings not to freak out if the women on the tour heard someone talking to them or the men felt someone who was decidedly not there tugging on their shirts. She claimed she'd witnessed both as well as the door to the wooden box with the chair mysteriously closing on its own.
And that's not all. People have claimed to have heard a baby crying or a woman singing lullabies in one part of the tunnel where a prostituted woman and her child were kept. There have also been reports of full body apparitions, particularly of a prostitute turned police informant who was killed in the tunnels by the very police she was helping out. Believe in ghosts? I do (not kidding). I'm freaked out a little by the very suggestion of the supernatural.
Concerned for my safety at this point? Don't be. I'm back out of the tunnels and secure at home unscarred and mercifully ghost encounter-free. About the scariest thing that happened down under the floors of Hobo's to us was our flashlight not working. And let me tell you, iPhones are better than flashlights.
For those of you who are skeptical of this entire story, you are not alone. Try looking all this stuff up on the internet and you might not find much of it at all. I know because I tried. Hard. What I did find was any number of online articles or blog posts casting doubts about the history of the tunnels under Portland's Old North End. These same folks claim the tours run by the Cascade Geographic Society and another outfit offering similar experiences are nothing but tourist traps and cite the complete lack of physical record as proof that nothing shady ever happened.
For me, I have no real idea whether what we were told that Friday night in the courtyard of Hobo's and then in the old tunnels below the place was a hundred percent accurate or not. The accounts are related as folklore passed down from an old sea captain to Michael P. Jones himself. And folklore by its very definition is as a good a part legend and myth as anything else. Do I believe there are ghosts down underground where we were taken? Maybe. Maybe not. I might prefer to believe because it makes the whole experience more real and intriguing to me. Do I believe something illicit or illegal happened in those tunnels, including maybe kidnappings or murders or selling men and women into slavery? Absolutely. I don't need any proof to believe that. There's no way everything that happened in those tunnels was on the up and up.
Here's what I do know. I paid less than the cost of a couple of beers to spend an hour and a half to get into an historic part of Portland that I couldn't possibly get to myself. I got treated to a story for that entire 90 minutes that fascinated me, intrigued me, connected me better to the history of Portland and maybe made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck at one part or another. Do I believe it all? No way. There are parts of the story that just don't add up to me. Do I believe some or most of it? Ab-so-lute-ly. I know I was told some tales that were totally truthful, even if I can't pinpoint exactly what parts those were. Don't knock it without trying it. Go underground and tell me you don't believe any of it then.
If you don't believe any part of the story that Cyndi and her counterparts tell you on these tours, I'm sure they might be OK with your skepticism. But there's one thing that they tell you towards the end of your time underground that they do want you to believe and that is that human trafficking is alive and well in our world today. And not just in some far off third world country. I mean right here at home in the good old U. S. of A.
The statistics from the Polaris Project, an anti-human trafficking organization are staggering. Over 40 million victims of human trafficking globally. 25% of the victims are children and 75% are women. The Ricky Martin Foundation is a similar organization based in Puerto Rico and the statistics on its website are equally, if not more, disturbing. The average cost of a slave is $90. A minor becomes a victim of sexual exploitation every 3 minutes in the United States. Check out a full list of organizations working to fight this evil on CNN. This stuff is real. Sorry to bring you down at the end of this post. And yes, it's THAT Ricky Martin.
That's all I have to say on this one. If you are ever in Portland, I think it's worth a couple of hours to go and do this. I know I don't regret it. All the photographs in this post were taken by me but they are used with the kind permission of the Cascade Geographic Society © 2018. I appreciate the courtesy extended to me.
This crimping enterprise was some seriously nasty and sinister stuff. The imaginary scenario I started this post with seemed to be all too real and anyone could be in on the gig except the target himself. Think you are getting a good deal when the bartender offers you discounted liquor or something extra special from the back because you look like a gentleman of discerning taste? He's probably either a Shanghaier or in league with someone who is and trying to get you incapacitated as quickly as possible.
That moment the floor seemed to drop out below you? It probably actually did and you were just too drunk to notice. Bars and saloons had trapdoors (they called them deadfalls) in the actual bar areas which could be opened to drop you right down into the basement onto a mattress (don't want to damage the merchandise by breaking bones; need a soft landing) with a couple of guys down there to welcome you into a cell and quickly re-set the deadfall.
And that feeling of stepping on something sharp with bare feet? Shanghaiers knew you couldn't get far without shoes (which they removed), especially if there were shards of glass mixed in with the dirt. Even if you did manage to get far, they just needed to follow the trail of blood to find out where you got to. We saw all this stuff: a deadfall with an old filthy mattress below for a soft(er) landing, a box of old loggers shoes found somewhere in the labyrinth below the city and we even got to reach our fingers through one of the old cell grates. Creepy, creepy stuff indeed.
If you got snatched, by the way, you could count on at least three to six years of forced labor, that's if you even made it to Shanghai or wherever the ship that had enslaved you was taking you. If rations got tight, some ships' crews were know to engage in cannibalism and there was nobody lower in the pecking order than a Shanghaied sailor. Hearing all of this with the sounds of boots and shoes walking back and forth on the circa 1885 floors of Hobo's above you made it somehow even creepier.
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| Chair in a box. No desire to ever spend time somewhere like this. |
We also gazed with wonder at a room with a three tiered bunkbed allegedly used as an opium den. This was Old Town Chinatown at one point after all and there's nothing like whiling away the afternoon on a bed smoking some opium to make you feel a little chilled out. And yes, getting raided by the police was a risk so the operators of these dens set up their own security system in the pitch black tunnels consisting of a series of empty tin cans on a string. Hear the sound of cans clanking and get the heck out of there. By the way, the bottom bunk of the three we saw was the most expensive; closer to the ground means less distance to fall.
And wasn't there something about ghosts in there? Yep for sure. Cyndi started us off with warnings not to freak out if the women on the tour heard someone talking to them or the men felt someone who was decidedly not there tugging on their shirts. She claimed she'd witnessed both as well as the door to the wooden box with the chair mysteriously closing on its own.
And that's not all. People have claimed to have heard a baby crying or a woman singing lullabies in one part of the tunnel where a prostituted woman and her child were kept. There have also been reports of full body apparitions, particularly of a prostitute turned police informant who was killed in the tunnels by the very police she was helping out. Believe in ghosts? I do (not kidding). I'm freaked out a little by the very suggestion of the supernatural.
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| The way out! Finally! |
For those of you who are skeptical of this entire story, you are not alone. Try looking all this stuff up on the internet and you might not find much of it at all. I know because I tried. Hard. What I did find was any number of online articles or blog posts casting doubts about the history of the tunnels under Portland's Old North End. These same folks claim the tours run by the Cascade Geographic Society and another outfit offering similar experiences are nothing but tourist traps and cite the complete lack of physical record as proof that nothing shady ever happened.
For me, I have no real idea whether what we were told that Friday night in the courtyard of Hobo's and then in the old tunnels below the place was a hundred percent accurate or not. The accounts are related as folklore passed down from an old sea captain to Michael P. Jones himself. And folklore by its very definition is as a good a part legend and myth as anything else. Do I believe there are ghosts down underground where we were taken? Maybe. Maybe not. I might prefer to believe because it makes the whole experience more real and intriguing to me. Do I believe something illicit or illegal happened in those tunnels, including maybe kidnappings or murders or selling men and women into slavery? Absolutely. I don't need any proof to believe that. There's no way everything that happened in those tunnels was on the up and up.
Here's what I do know. I paid less than the cost of a couple of beers to spend an hour and a half to get into an historic part of Portland that I couldn't possibly get to myself. I got treated to a story for that entire 90 minutes that fascinated me, intrigued me, connected me better to the history of Portland and maybe made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck at one part or another. Do I believe it all? No way. There are parts of the story that just don't add up to me. Do I believe some or most of it? Ab-so-lute-ly. I know I was told some tales that were totally truthful, even if I can't pinpoint exactly what parts those were. Don't knock it without trying it. Go underground and tell me you don't believe any of it then.
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| I'm out! And totally unharmed. |
The statistics from the Polaris Project, an anti-human trafficking organization are staggering. Over 40 million victims of human trafficking globally. 25% of the victims are children and 75% are women. The Ricky Martin Foundation is a similar organization based in Puerto Rico and the statistics on its website are equally, if not more, disturbing. The average cost of a slave is $90. A minor becomes a victim of sexual exploitation every 3 minutes in the United States. Check out a full list of organizations working to fight this evil on CNN. This stuff is real. Sorry to bring you down at the end of this post. And yes, it's THAT Ricky Martin.
That's all I have to say on this one. If you are ever in Portland, I think it's worth a couple of hours to go and do this. I know I don't regret it. All the photographs in this post were taken by me but they are used with the kind permission of the Cascade Geographic Society © 2018. I appreciate the courtesy extended to me.
How We Did It
We made our way under the streets of Portland with the Cascade Geographic Society. They offer tours most all days of the week. Times vary. Sunday tours are at 4:30 pm; Monday through Thursday tours begin at 6:30 pm; and there are typically multiple times available on Fridays and Saturdays. The best thing to do is to visit their website for more information.
Online reservations are quick and easy. Meet your group at the completely excellent dive bar Hobo's at 120 NW Third Avenue in Portland's Old North End. We found street parking plentiful and totally free.
Online reservations are quick and easy. Meet your group at the completely excellent dive bar Hobo's at 120 NW Third Avenue in Portland's Old North End. We found street parking plentiful and totally free.
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