Wilhelmina and I met up at the Wabasha Street Caves yesterday morning for the Cave Tour. While I didn’t learn a ton that I didn’t already know, it was still totally worth the $5 admission to actually see the inside. “Inside” means both the restored nightclub, which still holds a weekly Swing Dancing Night every Thursday, as well as a few of the unused caves behind it.

The caves that were part of the original Castle Royal are covered over with steel infrastructure and stucco and completely finished out with electricity and running water. After the original club closed at the start of WWII, the caves were repurposed a number of times. They became a roquefort aging facility for Land O'Lakes, which put down concrete slabs in the unfinished caves in order to better roll wheels of cheese across them. (The concrete also effectively seals over any gangster bodies that were buried there during the original nightclub years.) Then the nightclub had another run as Castle Royal II before it became a disco in the late 70s. After the disco closed, it became a teenage hangout called The Library, which lasted for about a year. Then it was finally abandoned and turned into a major headache for the city. You can still see the scorch marks from hobo fires in the 1980s.

At some point in there, the city also crammed it absolutely full of trash from the 1952 Mississippi Flood. When the current owners bought it in 1991, it was two days away from being bulldozed. They’re a construction family, and they paid a fortune to clean the trash out of one of the cave sections so as to have a place to store their heavy equipment. (Several caves beyond it are still packed with trash because it would cost too much to have it hauled off.)

I’m glad they decided to restore the nightclub and find another place to store their equipment, because the place is such an interesting aspect of St. Paul history. The tour also includes quite a lot of information on the part it played in the gangster culture of the city and the extent to which it’s haunted today. (I shall leave it to Wilhelmina to comment on that. She’ll do it far better than I could.) All in all, quite recommended by Thinkery: admission is reasonable ($5), and it’s an excellent way to spend an hour geeking out on local culture.