![Sarah Efron [Journalist]](../images/header.gif)
radio stories| HOME |
| PRINT STORIES |
| RADIO STORIES |
| WEB CONTENT |
| ABOUT THE SITE |
The Underground Tunnels of Vancouver
The Early Edition, CBC Radio, October 30, 2002
Freelance journalist Sarah Efron went below the surface to delve into Vancouver's underground tunnels.
sfx: scary music/screaming
I'm somewhere underneath Richards Street. I'm in a long concrete tunnel. There are pools of water under my feet and ghouls and demons at every turn.
Sarah: Oh my God. It's a bride without a head.
Erin: It looks like a dinner gone wrong. There's a spider where her head should have been. A lot of blood.
Sudden scream--AHHHHH!
The tunnel runs all the way from the Post Office on Georgia Street to the old train station-now the sea bus terminal. Normally the tunnel is sealed off, but today, it's being used for a Hallowe'en horror fest. The annual event is only open to friends and family of post office employees. Marlis LaBrash is a Canada Post manager who takes a week of holidays each year to plan this truly frightening tunnel tour. LaBrash says the tunnel was built in the 1950s.
"It was built to bring the mail from the trains and to take the mail away from the trains. They had a special made bicycle down here. A guy came and rode around and picked up the bags when they fell off and put them back on. It was only used it for 3 years, and then it became standard to use the road to deliver mail, and then they were using airlines. So they shut this down and now do videos down here and Halloween."
Me and my friends are no newcomers to tunnels. It was a bit of a hobby back in university. We'd break into the steam tunnels at UBC. Now this is dangerous. The tunnels are lined with pipes which release streams of hot steam every so often. We scammed our way into the old CPR tunnel underneath the Cambie Street bridge. Once we even walked for two kilometers inside a drainage pipe in West Vancouver. My tunnel buddies Erin Shaw and Anita Parti explain the appeal.
Erin-it makes me feel mischievous to go into places you're not allowed to go into. Also there's a lot of history to them.
Anita-I like the criminal aspect, the sense of mystery that people above don't know we're here.
And we're not the only ones with this strange attraction to the underground. The phenomenon has been dubbed "urban exploration." There's even a zine in Toronto called Infiltration devoted to going to places you shouldn't go. It tells tales of breaking into abandoned buildings and underground bunkers.
Going into the post office tunnel revived our interest in the subject. We decided to hunt for some more buried treasures and spooky underground caverns. Our first stop-the much rumoured underground tunnels of Chinatown. Supposedly, when Chinatown was a den of gambling, prostitution and opium, there was a vast network of tunnels built to escape police raids. One of the last surviving sections is rumoured to be under the Sam Kee building on Pender-also famous for being the narrowest building in the world. We asked owner Rod Chow if we could take a look.
"In this particular one, this was a bathhouse, came here and took hot baths, and they said were also used for escape routes when there were opium dens back here in the old days."
Hmmm. It kind of looked suspiciously like the basement of an insurance agent, which is of course, exactly what it is. No winding sinister tunnels. Just a basement filled with boxes of files. I think these Chinatown tunnels maybe more hype than reality.
But still itching for adventure, we decided to pursue another rumour. Apparently, there's a tunnel which connects the Woodwards building with the old Woodward's parkade on Cordova Street.
Sfx: loud construction noise
The place looks like a war zone. It's being demolished and huge piles of rock were tumbling down from the upper levels onto the ground. But somehow, we convinced a very kind construction worker to take us into the mayhem.
Sarah-It's like a square tunnel, there's pipes along the side, there's a big pool of water up ahead….Oh my god there's stairs going up….What's in here?
Construction worker: Another corridor to Woodwards
The entrance to Woodwards is blocked off by a large wooden board. But we did get into the old Woodwards meat lockers.
"This conveyor belt used to move meat around. There used to be hooks on the old conveyor belts that would circle around through coolers and big racks of meat would hang for hooks. This would be a great place for a horror movie."
Anita: Oh my god, that's blood on the wall
Sarah: No, I don't think so…oh, it does look like blood.
There are old crates and cashboxes as well as knifes and syringes left behind by squatters. Soon this whole site will be demolished to make way for a historical tourist attraction. But oddly, part of the project includes the building of a new tunnel between Cordova and Water Street so visitors can enter the attraction from either side.
We headed away from the rubble and back onto street level. Nothing in the world can compare to the feeling of emerging from the dark claustrophobic tunnel, into the clear light of day.
For The Early Edition, I'm Sarah Efron in Vancouver.