PORTLAND’S
SHANGHAI TUNNELS
G'day folks,
Some underground histories are famous, but some have
remained just that, underground.
Even if you live on the West Coast, you might
not have heard the urban legend of Portland’s infamous Shanghai Tunnels. Portland,
a port city in Oregon near the Columbia River, has a gridlock of interconnected
basements and passageways under many of its streets. While not everyone
agrees what the tunnels were used for, there are certainly a number of
interesting theories.
Portland’s Underground has come to be known as the Shanghai
Tunnels in homage to the final destination of the numerous people human
trafficked from the city. Shanghai was a popular destination for trade during
this period because of the lucrative opium business perpetuated by the West.
While human trafficking occurs for many reasons, legend has
it that when ship captains arrived in Portland, many members of their crew
would abandon ship and make way down to California for the gold rush. Sea
captains became desperate to replenish their crew and are believed to be
one of the most common paying customers for a “shanghaied sailor”– usually
delivered drunk or incapacitated by knockout drops via Portland’s
Shanghai Tunnels shortly before sailing time. The delivery men,
or “crimps” collected a fee known as blood money.
Cascade Geographic
Society operates tours of sites that they have
excavated under the once dangerous North End neighbourhood under the
guidance and determination of one man, Michael Jones, who claims to have
become fascinated with the tunnels and their history after first exploring
them illegally as a child.
According to the society’s research, thousands of civilians
were trafficked through Portland, men and women alike. Shanghaiers would
capture drunks out in the street, or women walking alone to sell to other
cities as prostitutes. They would keep these poor souls locked up in cells
hidden in the pitch black underground. The society has uncovered piles of shoes
discarded after they were stolen from victims, who in the unlikely event that
they escaped a cell would have to walk barefoot over ground covered in glass
and inevitably leave behind a trail of blood to track them with.
While shanghaiers captured their victims in any number of
ways, perhaps the most fanatical is that of the hidden drop chute in floors.
The Cascade Geographic Society has found a number of them hidden in the floors
of North End Bars and even keeps one on display for their tour. Bar owners
would be paid off to look the other way when shanghaiers would slip a drug into
a patrons drink. When they would start to feel the effects, the bartender would
hit a button under the counter and the patron would drop into the basement
below and the door would swing shut again before anyone was the wiser.
If you take a walk beneath the streets you can find any
manner of dark places of the past. A number of opium dens were built during the
1800s when the drug craze had reached it’s talons into American soil.
Spots were sold on bunk beds three high, where the least expensive was the top
because the intoxicated had the farthest to fall. There were also cells where
trafficked women had their spirits broken by kidnappers before being
sold into the trade and even a stage where enslaved people were purportedly
auctioned off. The society has partnered with organizations that work to
prevent human trafficking around the world and has even set up a museum in
commemoration of the lives that were, and continue to be ruined by such an
obscene practice.
While the Cascade Geographic Society has done research and
excavation of the Portland Underground since the 1970s, collecting a number of
oral histories from those who witnessed the events and artifacts that they find
along their excavations, their account of history is not the one
widely accepted. The widely accepted truth is one most commonly
cited Barney Blalock’s 2014 book Oregon Shanghaiers.” A history that
argues that the underground was built during a time when the North End
(overlapped with Chinatown) was full of rival gangs, brothels, and opium
dens, and that the tunnels were used mainly to deal with rival gangs and escape
police raids. Blalock had gone so far as to say “The only truth to these
stories is this: yes, there were some people who were shanghaied in Portland,
Oregon. However, the likelihood of any of them being shanghaied via tunnel is
nil.”
According to Oregon news source Oregon Live, “Portland
State professor emeritus Carl Abbott writes the tunnels had other purposes:
“There were connected basements for ease of moving goods between buildings and
as escape routes from police raids, as well as drainage tunnels, so my
understanding is that several different architectural features get lumped
together as the Shanghai Tunnels.”
Many historians blame the Cascade Geographic society’s
tours for perpetuating a misleading story to tourists, but the Society
maintains that they only began giving tours because of the massive requests for
one after they began their excavation. When asked where so much of the miscommunication
comes from, Nita Kreuzer from the Society replied “No one else
has done the on-the-ground research over the course of decades like Michael has
done. As well, several folks who have come to us over the past twenty
years have been turned away from historical societies, for reasons we don’t
understand.
There are also ‘historians’ who give no credit to oral history;
maybe we wouldn’t, either, if those who have shared their stories didn’t have
such similar experiences, years apart and not knowing of each other. One
of our volunteers (he’s in his 70s) is a descendant of the England-trained
brick and stone masons who oversaw the work underground and actually had a
family member become a shanghaier; he has donated all photos and written
documentation to us.”
So, believe what you will, whether that be that people were
human trafficked beneath the streets or through them. Either way, Portland was
a city you didn’t want to be caught walking alone in no matter your gender.
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