Columbia, Underground?

I just returned from teaching the University of Kansas Geography Field Camp near Can(y)on City, Colorado. The students there work on research projects in human and physical geography, and this year my cultural group got interested in alternative landscapes in the region, that is, those places that do not conform to and/or are not fully incorporated within the dominant state-capitalist framework. Bishop's Castle near Rye in the Wet Mountains is a great example -- Jim Bishop has constructed a life-size castle there complete with fire-breathing dragon, dungeons, buttresses, and moat. The county has repeatedly tried to shut him down (for insurance primarily - he has none), but he has prevailed thus far, accepting donations only and requiring visitors to sign a release.

Anyway, the students started to look for alternative landscapes in Can(y)on City, and in the process of sifting through all the officially sponsored/sanctioned tourism sites, they stumbled on the legends of a series of underground tunnels in the city. There is only one documented tunnel, an odd one: an underground shopping mall built in the late 1800s under the sidewalk in front of the town's first hotel -- it had a shoeshop, general store, and etc. -- and was illuminated by grates in the sidewalk above with small glass infillings. Apparently it was constructed as a novelty by the hotel's owner. But rumors (and evidence) of other tunnels exist, and most of these appear to be connected, in urban myth anyway, to the town's deep and dark history of conflict between the Ku Klux Klan and the region's (Italian) Catholics (there were no African Americans in the vicinity, so the KKK targeted Catholics). According to many accounts, the KKK built the tunnels to hold secret meetings and escape from meeting places, while the Catholics built tunnels to ferry Catholics (especially nuns) from the town's Abbey to safety across the railroad tracks.

The students weren't able to document/discover any of these other tunnels, although many signs of possible tunnels exist on the landscape: the same glass-inset grates in other places downtown; a sealed-in archway in the basement of a business on Main St., a doorway in the middle school (the KKK built the school in the 1920s) to a pipe room and then a sealed-in doorway beyond that. To me, the interesting thing was that this real-and-possible tunnel landscape -- especially the underground shop -- wasn't advertised or described in official tourism literature or by the staff at the Visitor's Center. It was urban legend of a history connected, in resident narratives at least, to the town's unsavory history of rule by the KKK (from ~1920s - 1950s).

So, I simply wonder: what is Columbia's underground landscape? I'm sure there are tunnels somewhere ... how do people describe/interpret them? Are they significant in local historical narratives? Are they as clandestine as those in Can(y)on City, Colorado? I know, for instance, that Lawrence, Kansas has maps of its underground tunnel networks, readily available to the public. No such maps -- or even willingness to have such maps produced (we asked the Historical Society!) -- exists in Can(y)on City; the burden of (KKK) history is too great, it seems, to unveil and sanitize this "underground" landscape for the public.

What might Columbia's tunnels and underground places reveal?

Beginngs III?

My formative and most memorable experiences with places stem from childhood exploration and adventure. I grew up on the north end of Fargo, North Dakota, (the 2011 worst weather city in the United States according to a weather.com competition) a portion of the city that full of small town character and seemingly immune to rapid economic development. Like many children growing up in a middle class residential neighborhood, I spent a majority of my waking hours exploring my home and neighborhood, inside and out. I vividly recall clambering up the maples in our backyard, stalking gray squirrels as they scampered across the wooden fence, playing basketball every weekday with the postman after he visited our mailbox, and collecting various rocks used for landscaping, sharing my discoveries with those of my neighborhood friends. These early adventures provided a fertile setting for developing a sense of place. 

As a child growing up in the 1990's, my sense of place rarely went beyond the bounds of my neighborhood and places that I could travel on foot or by bicycle. The daily experiences of the neighborhood were occasionally punctuated by trips to the grocery store, mall, and local parks as well as vacations at the lake cabin and to see relatives in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis & St. Paul, MN). Perhaps the most salient aspects of my developing sense of place were not what I did, or discovered, but how these childhood places made me feel, or how I felt about them. At home, I felt comfortable and secure, at the park and in the backyard I felt adventurous, at the pool I felt extremely nervous-to the point of sometimes feeling physically ill. Though I have memories of the most minute feelings (too numerous to go into detail here), some were more enduring and profound then others. I vividly remember the senses of awe that I felt one snowy December evening when I was 10 or 11, looking out the window at the white blanket of snow covering the lawn, the street, and houses. Large flakes fell silently to the earth, illuminated by the glow of the streetlights reflecting off of the cloak of clouds above. I recall a feeling of tranquility as I looked into the night sky after returning from Dairy Queen with my family one summer evening. After experiencing the perpetual traffic and endless concrete of South Fargo, I wondered how anything could look so serene. The feelings resulting from my early interactions with place helped cultivate a relationship with the place(s) I inhabited and experienced. 

These early place experiences laid a foundation for my interest in places both in my own backyard, far away, and even imagined. I feel that I could not have ever developed as a person without connecting to place. This notion is perhaps why I chose to pursue geography as a field of study. Even though the 1990's were not that long ago, I feel that children today are growing up apart from the places they inhabit. Even at a primal age, a child's life is increasingly technocentric and rootless. Virtual spaces in many aspects have supplanted or relegated physical places. This apparent shift in society seems to present a profound trend-where cell phones, videogames, the Internet, social media, etc. contributes more to a child's development than grass, trees, physical play, streets and sidewalks- the stuff of physical places. I am extremely interested in how the increasing tendency to rely on and utilize technology affects younger generations' attitudes, beliefs, and experiences with places. Moreover, I am also interested in the converse, the effects of limited interactions with places on the development of children. Ultimately, my interests and intents revolve around reconnecting children to the places they inhabit, investigate, and imagine. 

Technology is never going to go away, on the contrary, it will only continue to proliferate at an unfathomable pace. Society will continue to become more reliant on virtual spaces and nodes of connectivity rather than physical interaction and experience. Although there appears to be a strong dichotomy between the electronic realm and the physical world, this division can be reconciled. Fortunately, Bob Boone has realized this with his proposed Habitation project. The use of technology to collect, analyze, and disseminate information about places provides a wonderful mode of merger. What is most exciting for me is the potential a project like this has for connecting children with places. Considering the contemporary child's love of everything digital, technology has the potential to be used a way back into place. For children, the addition of a technological component may make the exploration of a place interesting and relevant. Moreover, an accessible, bioregional, and collaborative database is an exciting and meaningful medium for contributing to an open sense of place and community, for adults as well as children. 

I am excited and privileged to be a part of this endeavor to learn and share our discoveries and explorations of Columbia and Boone County Missouri. I look forward to learning more about the concepts of place, place-based education, and bioregionalism in order to help further the intentions of this idea and project.