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Under the Streets
6:25 am
Fri April 20, 2012

Past meets present in hidden world under St. Louis streets

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Credit (Rachel Lippmann/St. Louis Public Radio)
Credit (Rachel Lippmann/St. Louis Public Radio)
What's behind this door in the basement of City Hall?
Credit (Rachel Lippmann/St. Louis Public Radio)
"Any kind of utility you can imagine," says Rich Bradley, the city's chief engineer. The tunnels do run from City Hall to other government buildings, but are not escape paths.
Credit (Rachel Lippmann/St. Louis Public Radio)
The various pipes carry water, fiber optic, electric and steam to the buildings.
Credit (Rachel Lippmann/St. Louis Public Radio)
Looking out from Soldiers' Memorial, there's no evidence of that tangle under the streets. The previous tunnel runs roughly along this path.
Credit (Rachel Lippmann/St. Louis Public Radio)
This map from Trigen St. Louis Energy Corp. shows in detail the steam pipe system near Soldiers' Memorial. Trigen operates the city's steam system, including the pipe that burst.
Credit (Rachel Lippmann/St. Louis Public Radio)
Paint on the streets near the ruptured steam pipe shows just how much crews have to deal with when they dig.
Credit (Rachel Lippmann/St. Louis Public Radio)
The Lemp Brewery in south St. Louis.
Credit (Rachel Lippmann/St. Louis Public Radio)
Like most 19th century brewers, Adam Lemp built his business on top of a cave - it provided temperature-controlled storage in the days before artificial refrigeration.
Credit (Rachel Lippmann/St. Louis Public Radio)
A conveyor belt on the cave ceiling once carried kegs of beer from storage.
Credit (Rachel Lippmann/St. Louis Public Radio)
The company used this opening to bring down machinery used in the brewing process.
Credit (Rachel Lippmann/St. Louis Public Radio)
Scars in the wall show where workers used dynamite to widen what started as a natural hole.
Credit (Rachel Lippmann/St. Louis Public Radio)
After the invention of artifical cooling, the Lemps used the cave as a private playground. These are the remains of props from an underground theater.
Credit (Rachel Lippmann/St. Louis Public Radio)
The theater included state-of-the-art (for the time) lighting and a ceiling painted to look like the blue skies of the Bavarian Alps.
Credit (Rachel Lippmann/St. Louis Public Radio)
The caves then found a third life as a natural dump for rubble from buildings that were once part of tourist attractions built around the caves. Most of the 30 caves in the city were eventually filled in this way.
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When a 20-inch steam pipe buried 15 feet under the streets of St. Louis burst two weeks ago, most people focused on the potential health hazards in what was blown skyward.

But the blast got St. Louis Public Radio’s Rachel Lippmann thinking - what’s under the streets that we don’t know about until it’s revealed?

This is what she found out.

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Grand viaduct
3:13 pm
Wed February 15, 2012

Grand Blvd. viaduct to open to traffic about 30 days later than planned

Credit (via Twitter/St. Louis Board of Public Service)
The Feb. 15, 2012 photo shows the progress of construction on the new Grand Ave. viaduct in Midtown. It's expected to open to traffic about a month late because of construction delays.
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St. Louis city officials say the new viaduct that will carry Grand Blvd. over the railroad tracks in Midtown won't open to limited travel until the middle of June.

Crews had been hoping to open one lane of traffic in each direction by mid-May, says city Board of Public Service president Rich Bradley. But construction crews encountered poor soil conditions and a water line when they began digging.

"You dig in the ground in the Mill Creek Valley there, you can find just about anything," Bradley said.

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