By Michael Bushnell
Northeast News
November 18, 2015

Standing in the glass foyer of the State Street Securities building at Eighth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue and looking east along the Eighth Street corridor, it’s easy to see where the “new” 1904 Eighth Street tunnel began its descent below the streets of Kansas City toward the West Bottoms and the bustling stockyards below.

What is now a nicely landscaped city street with a planted median was once the entrance to a streetcar tunnel constructed in 1904 to allow for easier and more direct access to Union Depot and the meat packing district in the West Bottoms from downtown.

The scene on this postcard shows the east entrance to the second Eighth Street tunnel. The original tunnel began some two blocks west near Eighth and Washington Streets. Up until 1996, the only evidence of that tunnel was three or four rows of the brick archway protruding above the ground line of a parking lot marking the tunnel’s east portal.

Twenty to 30 streetcars a day passed through the tunnel en route to Union Depot and the stockyards district below.

On the heels of his construction of the Ninth Street incline, considered the engineering marvel of its day, Robert Gillham consulted with railroad executive D.M. Edgerton on a new, less “thrilling” direct route from downtown to the West Bottoms. The result was a 900-foot streetcar tunnel blasting through the bedrock of the high bluff overlooking the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, emerging from the side of a steep hill overlooking the West Bottoms near what is now the Broadway exit off Interstate Highway 35.

The tunnel opened to much fanfare, but the 8.5 percent grade of the tunnel proved too steep, as the massive wire cable that hauled the cars had to be replaced in less than three months.

Cable maintenance remained an issue for many years. Following the turn of the century, engineers with the Metropolitan Street Railway Company began construction of the second tunnel beneath the original tunnel, but at roughly half the grade, using the same west portal as the original 1888 tunnel. The new tunnel was completed and put in to service in 1904, thereby rendering the original tunnel obsolete.

For safety reasons, the older tunnel was capped and left dormant for more than 90 years. The new tunnel remained in operation until 1956, when it was closed to make way for a new highway project. Ironically, at about the same time, a fleet of modern, diesel-powered buses replaced streetcar service in the city.

This card, published by the Southwest News Company of Kansas City, Mo., was sent to Miss Hildegard Weinhagen, 2909 Henriette St., St. Louis, on Aug. 8, 1906. The tunnel was re-discovered in 1996 and is now under the ownership and management of State Street Securities, a subsidiary of DST Systems and remains in excellent condition, considering its 120-year history.