FRESNO, Calif., Sept. 28 (UPI) -- Fresno, Calif.'s Chinatown has a secret: tunnels underneath the neighborhood that once housed some of the city's most disreputable nightlife.
Archaeologists are beginning to map out the brick-walled passages using ground-penetrating radar, the Fresno Bee reported. The passages are believed to radiate out from abandoned basements.
Many people believe the tales of an underground nightlife were a legend surrounding the city's past as a railroad town bustling with gambling and prostitution. But former resident Rick Lew told the Bee he knew the passages were real because he entered them as a child through a trapdoor in his grandfather's liquor store in the 1950s.
There is little left of above-ground Chinatown because of later construction.
The archaeological project is funded by the city and operated by an organization trying to preserve the historic Chinatown. Kathy Omachi, vice president of Chinatown Revitalization, told the newspaper the group will try to match the radar findings with the memories of older residents who remember the neighborhood in its boom days.
Archaeologists would then decide where to dig trenches to uncover the passages, the Bee said.
Chinatown was home to Chinese laborers and to successive waves of immigrant Japanese, Armenians, Mexicans, Portuguese, Basque and others.
