Every town has some sort of history in it. Everywhere you go, there’s always something, and depending on the town, the more those older buildings remain into the modern era, the more history there are.

In my hometown of Bend, alot of the old buildings were torn down to make room for newer buildings as the town grew. But a century ago, it was a small logging town. Loggers would move cutdown trees onto the Deschutes River and let the river guide those logs towards the mills in the area that is now The Old Mill District. But the older, the bigger the town is, the more history there is.

I’ve lived in the heart of Portland Oregon for 3 1/2 years and history was in every corner. The Lincoln Hall at my Alma Matter was the original Lincoln high School prior to relocating towards the Goose Hollow neighborhood. My dorm apartment was constructed shortly after the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, hence the pharaoh carvings in the building. But it’s not just about buildings, there’s so much more history than a flip of a coin to name this town. There’s a dark side, a darker side than what we are seeing right now.

Even though Portland is bad now with the homeless, druggies, riots and other stuff, that does not compare to what happens in Portland 200 years ago. In the 1800s, Portland was one of the most dangerous port cities of its time. With drugs, kidnappings, prostitution, gambling, it was technically recognized as a typical Wild West town, but under the sailor’s, cowboy’s, and saloon patroon’s feet is much darker.

Since Portland was considered a port town, people needed a way to get goods from the ports to the restaurants, saloons, and hotels nearby without obstruction, they used a tunnel system throughout the city. But those tunnels were used for a different purpose. With the opium wars ranging in Asia and people of the west having Gold Rush fever, asking and persuading men to sail across the world is an impossible feat. So they have to do it in a way that is effective but also scary. What they would do is they would find able-bodied men, spike their drinks to a point of unconsciousness, take them into the tunnels via trapdoor or just manually taking them down. If it’s a trapdoor abduction, they placed a used brothel’s mattress as padding. They then would take their shoes off (to prevent escape due to shards of glass on the ground), hold them in a holding sell with many men and eventually be shipped out to Shanghai. Hence the name Shanghai tunnels. Each man costs $50, approximately 1,500 men were “shanghaied” annually during it’s heyday. And it’s not just for men to be shipped out, they unfortunately kidnap women as well, but for a different reason. But the tunnels weren’t just used for trafficking.

In the prohibition era, many people find ways to hide the booze and also hide the entertainment, and Portland is no different. There were many speakeasy around Portland in the tunnels, especially in one of the oldest restaurants called Hubert’s, where they used have a bar area prior to the prohibition and then they have to move the booze downstairs. Bootleggers were the players for those speakeasy in Portland and they run it! Who’s the boss? A lady named Prohibition Rose. There’s not much about her because she was never caught, she was sleek, and she finally gave up years after Prohibition ended. And it wasn’t speakeasy that was underground. A hotel turned apartment had a fight club in the basement.

With all the bad and ugly history that the tunnels have, there’s one thing that remained the same in the tunnels and today: a place for people to get high. Inside the tunnels, there were opium dens for those wanting to get high. Yes, THE opium that started the Shanghaiing business in Portland.

There’s so much more history to Portland and everywhere else. But when you want to look somewhere, look beneath your feet.