It's one of Victoria's most enduring urban legends.
Ask around downtown long enough and someone will eventually tell you about the secret tunnels supposedly running beneath the city’s streets. Hidden passageways connecting historic buildings, smuggling routes from the city’s rough-and-tumble past, or forgotten corridors sealed away generations ago.
Unfortunately for tunnel seekers, the legend once again ran into an inconvenient obstacle: reality. At the site of the former Hudson’s Bay warehouse, workers with Heritage Masonry and Conservation recently completed a major restoration project on a brick retaining wall dating back to the 1880s. For decades, locals had pointed to a bricked-up archway in the wall as evidence that something mysterious lay beyond.
“We love fixing old buildings, and one of the great things about that is you can’t predict it,” said Liam Hall of Heritage Masonry and Conservation. Hall had heard the stories himself. Like many Victorians, he’d noticed the small glass sidewalk prisms scattered throughout parts of downtown that illuminate spaces beneath the streets. Combined with the city’s colourful history, they helped fuel speculation about hidden passageways below.
When restoration crews began carefully dismantling portions of the wall, work that hadn’t been undertaken since the 1950s, there was finally a chance to find out.
“You pull back a couple of bricks and you open it up,” Hall said. “You get enough inside and someone literally gets a headlamp inside, and no one has seen it for 70 years. ”“There were burnt timbers, jagged old steel, some chain-link fence,” Hall said.
“People ask us all the time, ‘When are we going to go into the secret tunnels? '” Adams said. “And when we say there aren’t any, they’re very disappointed and they don’t believe us. ” The persistence of the tunnel myth is understandable.
Victoria’s historic downtown, with its narrow alleys, century-old brick buildings and remnants of the city’s frontier-era past, feels like the perfect setting for hidden passageways. But according to Adams, smugglers and criminals didn’t need elaborate underground networks to move goods through Victoria.
“No tunnels necessary,” Adams said. Among the rubble, workers uncovered six intricately carved stone rosettes that once adorned the long-demolished Turner-Beeton Building. To Hall, they represented something much more meaningful.
“To some people that’s just a hunk of stone,” he said. “But that hunk of stone was carved and chiseled and placed by someone who’s been dead for a hundred years. ” Rather than discard the artifacts, the restoration team placed the rosettes into a stainless-steel time capsule alongside other contemporary items, creating a new piece of history for future generations to discover.
“It might be a fun thing for someone to see for another day,” Hall said. Hall isn’t saying where in the wall it’s hidden, but offers a clue only a mason would detect.
“You’ll find it right beside two stones that have no business being there,” he says. So while the latest investigation may have closed the door on one supposed tunnel entrance, it probably won’t put an end to Victoria’s favourite underground myth. After all, a city built on stories isn’t about to let facts get in the way of a perfectly good legend.
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