(The Reno Gazette-Journal posted the following article by Susan Voyles on its website on May 12.)
RENO, Nev. — A 100-year-old pedestrian tunnel under the railroad tracks at Virginia Street and the secrets it might hold will remain a mystery until Reno s railroad trench is dug in fall 2004.
But the archaeologists hired by the city have found many other artifacts, including cisterns once used for firefighting, a conductor s watch that could be 100 years old, pieces of bottles, Chinese pottery and a railroad spike modified for a coat hook.
All of the items found along the trench are being studied and will be displayed at the downtown Amtrak passenger station after the trench project is expected to be finished in 2006.
When the trench is finished, the rail station will be moved underground, and the existing ticket counter area will serve as a small museum.
The tunnel has frustrated the archaeologists — and work crews — best efforts so far.
This past week, archaeologists had hoped to get into the tunnel. The south entrance was dug up at Virginia Street near the tracks while the street has been closed for installation of a new storm drain.
But drilling through concrete and sand used to plug the entrance to the tunnel was unsuccessful, and the entrance was reburied.
“Our best hope is when we come through with the trench, we’ll go right through the middle of it,” said Mark Demuth, an environmental consultant for the city.
Demuth is working with Western Cultural Resource Management archaeologists to record and salvage the layers of history unearthed by the trench.
The entrance to the tunnel unearthed last week is beneath the sidewalk in front of the Fitzgeralds Casino-Hotel employment office. The other entrance would surface inside the entrance of the Eldorado Hotel-Casino.
The 180-foot long tunnel, once called the Reno Subway, was built in 1902 to get people safely around the tracks.
The tunnel quickly became the home of derelicts, vandals and other deadbeats until it was closed in late 1918 for pedestrian use, according to a column written in 1989 by Philip Earl, of the Nevada Historical Society.
In fall 1918, the deadly Spanish flu epidemic hit Reno, and the disease was believed to have first spread in the subway, Earl wrote. After that, the subway was used for another 10 years to store building materials and then tires.
In the early 1900s, the railroad dominated downtown, and getting across six sets of tracks at Virginia wasn’t easy, Steven Mehls, a historian for the Western Culture group, wrote in his preliminary report.
Railroad sheds were built where Center, Sierra and Arlington now cross the tracks, Earl wrote. Virginia Street did not exist north of the tracks.
On Thursday, Western Culture archaeologists Krista Frank and Ben Lee found a piece of green glass, an oyster shell and several ceramic fragments while digging around a cistern near the tunnel that also was exposed while the street is closed.
The large brick cistern is the second one uncovered since summer 2001. Like the first at Center Street near the tracks, it was used to store water for fighting fires.
In both cisterns, archaeologists found river rock used as fill. They were hoping to find and study garbage.
Lee had a story to tell about the oyster shell. Years ago, the railroad brought fresh seafood from San Francisco for people to eat, but it was expensive.
“An oyster shell was a status symbol,” he said.