Underground history

• By PAM BORDELON
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Oct 29, 2009 - Page: 1D

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Most people who have called Baton Rouge home for a while have heard the tales of the tunnel running between the Hilton Capitol Center and the old King Hotel in downtown. But did you know it’s not the only one?

When Baton Rouge gets one of those rain storms that dumps several inches in a matter of hours, the streets of downtown drain into an underground tunnel that takes the water not to the Mississippi River, which seems the logical ending, but out toward LSU to Dawson’s Creek to the Amite River and ultimately to the Gulf of Mexico. Part of this drainage system is a tunnel running under Beauregard Town.

Named for founder Capt. Elias Toutant Beauregard, Beauregard Town is the second-oldest neighborhood in Baton Rouge. It’s bounded by North Boulevard, South Boulevard, East Boulevard and, on the west, St. Louis Street. Government Street (or the “Grand Rue” as Beauregard’s original plans referred to it) runs through the middle with four streets — Beauregard, Grandpre, Penalvert and Somerulos — approaching it on diagonal angles to form an “X,” typical of the European manner of town design of the time.

The tunnel was first mapped in 1936, but the first trip to the entrance for the city-parish Department of Public Works drainage and bridge engineer Jim Ferguson was for a recent interview. It runs all the way from South Boulevard to the Old Governor’s Mansion, from St. Ferdinand to the interstate.

Attorney Fred Benton discovered the tunnel on a vacant lot he owns a block or so off Government Street when neighbors informed him that a group of homeless people were living in the structure. He then had the post-Gustav debris and vegetation that was hiding the entrance removed and, with buddy David Norwood, decided to do a bit of exploring in an old brick portion of the tunnel. Going into the tunnel is not something Ferguson recommends. He wouldn’t venture much past the initial opening of the South Boulevard entrance. “We (DPW) used to go up in it and check on it,” he said. “Now we check it using video.”

Over the years, certain parts have been repaired. “You know those sags in the roads downtown — that’s typically what they’re following,” he added.

“I always kind of knew where it was — not many (people) are aware of it. Before there were streets in Baton Rouge, the land had natural contours and this was a low spot so it would have been a natural ravine,” Ferguson said.

“We’ve found references to part of the tunnel all the way back to 1880, so we know it pre-dates that. We’ve found 1820 references to bridges, so sometime between 1820 and 1880, it became covered.”

All along the tunnel, buildings are built on top of it — often because no one knew there was a tunnel underneath or because the construction predated any regulations preventing such construction. “A lot of these shotgun houses predate the Civil War,” Ferguson added.

One of the most unusual is a house on South Boulevard where the tunnel begins. It actually straddles what is today referred to as Corporation Canal. The house is a few doors down from New St. Luke Baptist Church, and according to the Rev. Joseph Armstrong, the house is about as old as the church, which was begun in spring 1928.

Armstrong, who has lived in the area since 1958, recalled one of his 80-year-old, now deceased church members talking about getting water from the “creek” to mop the church floors as a young girl. The large neighborhood surrounding the church was a bustling one back then, with a grocery store on the corner of Myrtle and Highland.

“The Interstate took most of the houses through here,” said Armstrong, who also lost his childhood home to the project. “But the man who owned that house wouldn’t sell. They were supposed to top it (the canal) all the way through.”

Corporation Canal drains all of downtown and goes under Highland Road, coming above ground near LSU, then it goes underground again. It is part of the Bayou Duplantier Watershed, which encompasses approximately 13 square miles and is comprised of three sub-regions: Corporation Canal, University Lakes and Bayou Duplantier.  “It’s odd because it’s so close to the Mississippi River that it doesn’t drain into the river but even before it still drained this way and never into the river,” Ferguson said.