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TUIVIVEL
By RICHARD GREY
IN the vicinity of Eighth and Washington streets the buzz has been going around recently that somebody was getting ready to use the Mushroom Tunnel for something. The Mushroom Tunnel starts at Washington street on Eighth and bur' rows half way through the rock bluffs to the west. A stout door with steel grating and secured by a large padlock bars entrance to the shaft to tramps, curiosity seekers, and persons who have no better place to keep out of the cold.
It is the Mushroom Tunnel because once upon a time Warren Douglas Meng, a newspaper editorial writer, used to grow mushrooms there for market. Afterward he sold his lease on the tunnel, which belongs to the Kansas City Public Service company. The tunnel was not built for growing mushrooms. It was built to take cable cars through the rock bluff to the old Union Depot in the west bottoms, instead of taking them down the precipitous Ninth street viaduct which plunged down Ninth street from Pennsylvania avenue at a dizzy grade and brought up at a covered passage way, known affectionately as the cattle chute, to the railroad passenger station.
Occasionally even the sturdy little cable cars ran away and shook off riders. That happened the day President Grover Cleveland came to Kansas City with his young bride. Francs Folsom Cleveland, to lay the cornerstone of the Y. M. C. A. at the northwest corner of Ninth and Locust, now the Studio Building. That was in the middle "80"s. The building had been erected on faith, hope, and charity, mostly faith and hope — which were deflated considerably when the panic of 1893 punctured the boom of the '80's.
The original Eighth street tunnel served satisfactorily enough until trolley cars took the place of cable cars. Then its grade was too steep. So the street car company went a block east and dug another entrance on Broadway, leaving the first half of the tunnel stranded some distance in the air.
A concrete ceiling sealed it off from the west end.
In 1927 when the present Public Service company acquired the street railway property, the street car tunnel had become so damp from drippings from above that the company waterproofed the upper, disused tunnel, evicted the mushroom ranchers and sealed the tunnel off.
Not long ago the wetness once more became aggravated. So the company once more opened the upper tunnel, installed electric lights and created considerable mild excitement in the area, which is mostly wholesale and squatter. An elderly Irishman, with few teeth and little hair, gave it as his opinion that "the Metropolitan" — the old name of the street car company — was planning new uses for the old tunnel.
Maybe, it was hazarded, it was to be equipped as an air raid shelter. No such