Cristina Preda | Guest Writer
predad@imail.losrios.edu
Film student and underground adventurer Eric White stands in front of Downtown’s Citizen Hotel waiting to open the door for customers. Photo by Kimberly Nguyen
Occasionally a hokey story about downtown Sacramento’s secret underground tunnels will appear on a local news broadcast. A tactless reporter with a flashlight and hardhat will drag a decidedly unenthused cameraman into one of the city’s hidden tunnels, and tell a tale of the ghosts that haunt it.
The tunnels aren’t so secret these days, but one City College student recently stumbled upon a lesser-known part of our city’s below-ground history.
Eric White, a transplant from the northeast who works as a valet Downtown at Citizen hotel, first noticed the hole, barely large enough for an average-sized adult to squeeze through, in the nearby garage on 10th and J streets sometime in March. With a sense of adventure bred of growing up in small town Pennsylvania, White endeavored to find out what lay hidden in the dank space behind a wall of cool brick.
On a recent Sunday afternoon, White wormed through the hole, punched out crudely in the brick wall, and scaled across an unsteady plank a yard long to reach the inside. Once there, the rooms appear to have served as basement offices for a long-defunct business, separated from by splintering doors on creaky hinges.
White, a 22-year-old film student and staffer on Susurrus, City College’s literary journal, is a natural storyteller. Wandering through rooms cluttered with old furniture, industrial kitchen appliances, bicycles, mattresses and personal effects of long-gone transients, White talks enthusiastically about his adolescence.
“This is the kind of stuff my friends and I used to do all the time in Pennsylvania,” White remarks in quiet amazement while inspecting a giant fishing net tacked to the wall of an old restaurant’s bookkeeping office, complete with menus and reservation books.
After at least 45 minutes underground, dizziness sets in, but White manages to find a small opening in one of the rooms that filters in light and fresh air. Screens for a silk-screening business are stored there. Ads for beer, sports team logos, and cartoon fixtures from the 1980s, like Gumby, litter the room. White ponders lifting one of the screens, a Rams imprint, but decides against it after realizing its shoddy condition.
Dane Fleshman, a Sacramento State student, lifelong Sacramento resident and acquaintance of White, is familiar with the tunnels, but had no idea these old basements existed beneath fairly recent constructions.
“Leave it to Eric to find them, I guess,” says Fleshman, after he hears of White’s trip underground.
White, who will transfer to CSU Northridge as a film major in the fall, will leave Sacramento with fond memories and plenty to write about if his curiosity doesn’t get him in trouble with the law.
Ben Stone, who serves on the Susurrus editorial staff with White, jokes: “That guy’s gonna get arrested. Arrested or horribly injured.”
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