Robert Davidson bought the Blue Note Tavern in 1948. The saloon on Center Street had served hard drinks for Tacoma’s hardworking class since 1933 – and it came with a mysterious bonanza.

In a floorless back room, a seemingly bottomless shaftlike hole had opened in the ground, where the seller disposed of the tavern’s discarded cans and bottles.

Sure, rats used the shaft like an expressway to Cheeseland. But why mess with a good thing, Davidson figured. The mystery hole, a bit under 6 feet wide, saved Davidson a business expense he’d otherwise spend on city garbage service.

So he kept tossing the Blue Note’s empties into the darkness for another 12 years.

The origins of the Blue Note’s hole date to 1907. But the story of what lies under Tacoma disappeared in 1915 for more than a generation. It exploded back into Tacoma’s psyche and onto the front pages of its newspaper in 1959.

Then it quietly disappeared again – until this month.

With all the fanfare it could muster, Tacoma Goodwill Industries unveiled in March a blessed, ambitious initiative to triple the unemployable people it trains and places in jobs.

To accomplish that means construction of an $18.7 million training cen-

ter and headquarters.

BCRA, Tacoma’s largest architectural firm, built a model of the headquarters that showed how it would create a commanding presence as it wrapped the corner of Tacoma Avenue South and Center Street. Two old buildings would come down to clear the way for underground parking and the four-story building.

Goodwill CEO Terry Hayes recently visited City Hall to provide an early heads-up on the project. Afterward, a routine internal e-mail alert circulated among the city’s Building and Land Use Services team members.

Thank goodness for institutional memory. Senior team member Cap Pearson recalled a historic file rarely accessed. The file contained old newspaper articles, photographs, engineers’ drawings, letters, notes on interviews with old-timers – and a report chronicling the birth, the abandonment and the death of a Union Pacific railroad tunnel dating to 1909.

Did the tunnel run under the corner where Goodwill plans to build?

Except for an obscure reference in the mining section of the city’s Geographical Information System map database, the records routinely used by property developers don’t show a tunnel. A title report on Goodwill’s property turned up no mention of a railroad tunnel.

Then last Tuesday, a drilling crew from Redmond-based Geo Engineers Inc. bored its fourth test hole on a hunt for signs of a tunnel. Forty-eight feet below Goodwill’s planned headquarters site, the crew struck a void.

“We think we hit it dead on top,” said Scott Shaw, project architect for BCRA. “The tunnel does exist.”

The revised Goodwill expansion plan now calls for shifting the future building north to the corner of South 27th Street and Tacoma Avenue, eliminating underground parking and paving above the tunnel for surface parking, Shaw said Wednesday.

“It was a surprise to us to find out about the tunnel. But it’s not going to change our plans,” Goodwill’s Hayes said.

Yet below part of Tacoma, according to the city’s historic file, lurks the ravage from an early 20th-century railroad war that poses a modern engineering challenge for future development.

By 1907, Tacoma had become a nexus of railroad competition. The Northern Pacific, Great Northern, Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads and their subsidiaries coveted a larger piece of the trade action through the City of Destiny.

But getting goods from ships at sea level and up and out of the geologic bowl surrounding the city posed a problem for the railroads. Union Pacific’s New York barons floated an idea that newspapers called the “Big Bore.”

A tunnel with an easy grade. More than 70 feet deep in places. A mile-and-a-half long. Punched through the hillside at South 24th Street and Jefferson Avenue, arcing south then west. With help from City Hall, the UP bought the sparsely populated swath.

Digging started from the north portal in April 1909 with more than 300 men working three eight-hour shifts.

One Tacoma newspaper gushed over the tunnel as an omen of the city’s arrival as a metropolis:

“To realize that the city is rapidly building up by the increase in number of large institutions, by the development of new undertakings of moment calling for the expenditure of immense sums of money is the duty and should be the delight of the people. The Union Pacific tunnel, constructed at great cost, by contractors of large experience, employing the latest improved machinery and tools, will be the forerunner of numerous and fresh opportunities for labor, adding facilities in the matter of travel and other fields for commercial enterprise and great expansion in the growth and wealth of the city.”

Not so fast, mister.

By early June, two test holes bored near the south portal opened up 6-inch streams of water. By mid-July, the contractor confessed to “draining an immense underground lake” from the north portal that the foreman described as “an underground Lake Superior.” Despite pumping at full capacity through an 8-inch pipe, one shaft remained nearly full of water.

By the end of July, Union Pacific management sent word of its displeasure and impatience with the increasing costs of engineering delays caused by the water gusher. The newspaper headline read simply, “FRICTION.”

By early October, however, crews had tunneled more than a half-mile from the north portal. But there the flood of water blocked the power shovels.

By November, the digging stopped altogether. One estimate put the amount of water pouring from the tunnel at 15 million gallons a day at its peak, and Union Pacific didn’t run submarines. Back in New York, UP caved to Mother Earth and paid to haul its trains on a competitor’s track.

By 1913, the abandoned tunnel began to collapse in so many places that the railroad and the city undertook a new public works project to fill it. First with dirt and rock, then with cordwood. The railroad deeded the properties back to their original owners.

The Big Bore got wiped from official records and maps by 1915.

Until 1959.

Over that 44-year span, unexplained things happened. The hole appeared in the Blue Note Tavern. A tenant at 2826 S. Yakima Avenue, while tilling his garden, opened a bottomless hole and lost his shovel in it. Overnight his house dropped into a 100-foot-wide depression and broke apart.

Then in 1959, Woodworth Construction started building the Yakima Avenue bridge over Center Street – and encountered unstable ground when it dug for the north abutment.

The city hired local engineer John Petteys to lead an investigation. His research located the tunnel and filled the city’s historic file on the Union Pacific tunnel. To prevent collapse of the Yakima Avenue bridge in 1960, crews had to design and build a 280-foot-long barrel-shaped concrete-and-steel vault over the tunnel and set the north abutment on top of it.

Then Petteys’ report, and the story of the tunnel, went into the city’s file. For 47 years.

Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785

dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com