Unassuming Canadian Town Was Secret Center Of Prohibition-Era Intrigue

21 November 2004 - 9:00am

Vast underground tunnel system led to brothels, saloons.

Yes, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, "the friendly city," whose 33,500 inhabitants "attend church regularly and obsess about the performance of" their local hockey team, was actually "a prominent trafficking hub for liquor and drugs" during the Prohibition era in the United States. In 1985, "a truck fell through a downtown street, revealing a tunnel that led into a vast underground network. After some investigation, anthropologists and local historians concluded the tunnels connected several hotels that were long rumored to have hosted brothels and saloons during Prohibition...piece by piece an unsavory past emerged that the townspeople had a hard time squaring with their wholesome self-image."

Source: International Herald Tribune, November 16, 2004
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For the past half century we have been building communities for the wrong reasons. We built them to sell cars. This created all sorts of problems.