"Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world." Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness |
| The following is a brief account of the Trout Brook/Phalen Creek system, the largest storm tunnels under St. Paul, Minnesota. I say "brief" because several years ago the Ramsey County Historical Society asked me to prepare an article (not yet published) on these subterranean streams and I began to accumulate what has become a large file on them. The subject is deeper and more complicated than first appears, but I was able to work out the major problems to my own satisfaction. Phalen Creek was named after St. Paul's first murderer, who built a cabin there circa 1840, while Trout Brook was named after Edmund Rice's Trout Brook Estate, which was sold to the Northern Pacific in 1883. Originally, both were surface streams running along the eastern fringe of downtown St. Paul, in the area now known as Lowertown. Trout Brook, which drains McCarron's Lake in Roseville, was tributary to Phalen Creek, which drains Lake Phalen. They joined together forming a wetland at the Mississippi River. The bridging of this wetland was a costly headache, as you may gather from reading the old city council minutes. The result was a massive cut-and-fill job. Baptist Hill, an unwanted mound of glacial drift 50 feet high, in what is now Mears Park, was carted away to fill this wetland. In 1893, city engineer George Wilson undertook the task of burying the lower reaches of these streams, even though some other segments had been roofed over before this. Wilson's handiwork still exists, and is easily distinguished by its Platteville Limestone rubble masonry walls and innovative steel beam ceiling. For myself, however, the most endearing details are the so-called Trout Brook gargoyles, which are curious looking spouts that vomit water into the tunnel. The tunnel is large enough to drive through, and indeed something like that happened in 1983, when during a heavy rainstorm, Lowertown flooded and a Thunderbird was swept into the open channel segment along East 4th Street. The car ended up in the Mississippi! These streams are represented in early, but now defunct, street names. Conduit Street was named after Phalen Creek, Brook Street after Trout Brook, and Canal Street for the combined flow below the confluence. The stream valleys, being low-gradient routes, appealed to the railways, and the isolated area between the two streams became known as "Railroad Island." Going upstream from East 4th Street in the old Phalen Creek Tunnel today, you won't get anywhere near Lake Phalen. Under East 7th Street, adjacent to the old 3M plant, you walk through what is perhaps the finest example of a large circular brick sewer to be found anywhere under the Cities, and then come smack up against a blank wall at Ocean Street. In fact, most of the water is entering at Greenbrier Street. The real Phalen Creek was diverted into the Belt-Line Tunnel in the 1920s. These hydrologic relations held until the late 1980s. To help alleviate flooding in Lowertown, the decision was made to decouple Trout Brook from the truncated PCT, giving it a separate outfall 500 feet upriver from the old Canal Street outfall. I once wore a wetsuit and flippers, paddling on my back like an otter, and swam the thousand feet or so to where the new tunnel joins the old one. In the upstream direction, I soon learned that the real Trout Brook becomes merely a side-passage. The big part of the tunnel runs under Maryland Avenue to Lake Como, for which it functions as the overflow. Upon nearing the lake, however, the tunnel hunkers down to a crawl passage, for which kneepads were appropriate. The complete trip from Lake Como to the Mississippi River is 5 miles, and there are more obstacles along the way than I have touched upon, including a small-diameter aperture to be squeezed through. It was defintely not something to be undertaken lightly. |
| A photo showing the limestone rubble masonry and granite pavers that city engineer George Wilson used to construct much of the Trout Brook Tunnel in the 1890s. The newer, upstream segments, designed by George Shepard in the 1920s, are ferroconcrete. |
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| By Greg Brick |