Oh, the charms of sailor lore!
Despite its genteel little-big-town spirit, Portland has historically tough on visitors. When Presidents Reagan and G. H. W. Bush visited PDX in the late 80s and early 90s to shore up support for their aggressive foreign policy programs in Asia and the Middle East, Portlanders welcomed Ronny and Poppa Bush by rioting outside the Federal Building. An aide-de-camp of President Bush, describing a particularly difficult 1990 visit, referred to Portland as “Little Beirut” and the name stuck in a big way. Last Friday at the East End on Burnside, had you been so inclined, you could have witnessed local indie-punk outfit Little Beirut tearing their way through “Love During Wartime,” an absurdist ode to Condie Rice.
And while a few hundred (or a few thousand) roaring protesters are nothing to scoff at, a far worse fate awaited many of Portland’s most famously ill-treated visitors.
Hey, my bourbon tastes funny…why’s e’rybody spinning round like that...all a sudden I don’t feel so…
Shaghai!
And Bush thought he had it bad. Although Victorian Portland boasted all the trappings of a properly civilized city, by the 1870’s the local practice of drugging and kidnapping unsuspecting bar patrons in order to sell these “sailors” off to ship captains earned Little Beirut the slightly more sinister name of “Unheavenly City.” Of course, the illegal practice of abducting dockworkers and other laborers in order to outfit a ship’s crew was common all over the world, but in Portland the story had a particularly hellish twist. Hoteliers and bartenders (heretofore to be called “slave traders”) used the dense network of underground tunnels that connected basements and cellars across the city’s Northwest corridor to various locations along the waterfront to transport their victims; men would be drugged, bound, and dragged underground through the catacombs to the Willamette River, where individuals known as crimps paid for the right to sell the men into service aboard one of the ships crewing up for a Pacific voyage. If a suitable captain could not be found, the slave traders would leave their captives in crudely fashioned holding cells near the docks, where I imagine more that a few confused young men must have experienced the world's worst morning after. In this way, as many as 1500 men per year were “shanghaied.” Imagine: after a hard day’s work for a local mining or logging outfit you head to the nearest public housefor a drink, and the next thing you know you wake up with your hands bound en route to the Orient.
“Where am I? What is this!”
“You’re on board the Darling Mary, boy!”
“Well, Jesus, cut this rope, let me off.”
“I’ll let you off, provided you work your piece, just as soon as we get to Shanghai!”
Nowadays several bars and hotels run official Shanghai tours through sections of the tunnels. And while I’m sure that these sanctioned tours are informative and maybe even mildly creepy, anybody with balls will of course want to find their own way into the “Portland Underground.” Rumor has it that the main arteries run underneath NW Couch, Davis, and Everett Streets, but your best bet is to find a way into the basement of one of the historic hotels downtown, on the south side of Burnside west of 10th Ave. The tunnels are supposedly a hotbed of supernatural activity (well, duh) so make sure to wear your monster-stomping boots!
1852 Map of Portland area & rivers
