What could have been? Right?

And while the truth seems to be much more practical than the myths, who doesn't love a good myth about their city?

Most of us step right over the purple glass blocks on the sidewalk downtown without even noticing them. They're easy to miss. But those purple panes are windows into a layer of Salem that we no longer are able to explore. 

And depending on who you ask, they're either windows into a forgotten Chinatown, or just the roof of an old coal vault.

That disagreement is the real story. And while some circles in Salem debate what its underground was, much of it has already been filled in by the city..

Here's what we found.

Let’s start with the part that isn't in dispute.

Downtown Salem has a formally recognized historic core. The Salem Downtown State Street and Commercial Street Historic District, a seven-block stretch, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2001, and it reflects the city's commercial growth from roughly 1867 to 1950. 

Many have (or had) basement spaces that extend out under the sidewalk. 

The purple glass started out clear: grids of glass blocks set into the pavement to let daylight reach the spaces below. Over a century, minerals in the glass reacted with sunlight and slowly turned violet. The color change is chemistry, and it's now the most visible trace of whatever was down there.

There's one underground system nobody disputes at all: the Oregon State Hospital tunnels. Nearly two miles of them, used to move patients and supplies between buildings, and even under Center Street when the hospital campus stretched across both sides.

The argument is about everything else.

To understand the disagreement, you have to go back to 2010.

That fall, retired Linfield College historian John Ritter and Rebecca Maitland, creative director of the Reed Opera House, started exploring the basements and passageways of downtown Salem by flashlight. 

While Ritter was poking around the basement of the city's tallest office building, a sagging bookcase caught his eye. He and Maitland slid it aside and found a doorway into a room no one had set foot in for years. Ritter called himself and Maitland an "Indiana Jones pair," minus the whip and gun, though he noted he did use a cane a lot.

What drove Ritter, though, was something he never found. In a video for the Statesman Journal, the historian, who had studied Salem for some four decades, described months spent searching for the city's underground Chinese opium dens. His reasoning was an assumption as much as a discovery: every city with a large Chinese population, he said, had opium dens and residence quarters, so Salem's had to be down there too. 

He was confident the tunnels would turn up if they kept looking through enough old buildings. "A lot of them were filled in," he said, "but a lot of them are still here."

The public response to the story of Salem’s underground was enormous. One early tour had room for 100 people. More than 300 showed up.

Television covered it too. A 2010 KATU News segment followed one of the first historical tours, and the scarcity was part of the appeal: the reporter relayed that only about 30 people in the previous 50 years had seen what that night's group saw. The same segment showed how vivid the tunnel-as-network idea had already become. Standing beside an underground entrance,a guide explained that it marked a tunnel below, one that supposedly ran two blocks to Trade Street, so a person could drop in at one spot and surface two blocks away with nobody the wiser. Ritter, on camera, called the work "just the beginning."

An Associated Press story carried that account across the country, and from there it traveled. The original Statesman Journal reporting, by the local historians' own description, was "picked up and embellished" by newspapers and TV shows nationally and internationally. Voice of America, the US government's international broadcaster, is one concrete example: in a November 2010 piece, it told a global audience flatly that below downtown Salem was "evidence of a long-lost Chinatown," and that anti-Chinese sentiment in the 1880s had "literally drove some of them underground." Each retelling rounded the corners up a little: vaults became tunnels, tunnels became a network, a network became a hidden city.

That is the version most Salemites have absorbed in some form. And it's the version that, fifteen years later, local historians are pushing back on.

The legend of the tunnels still has passionate, well-researched defenders, and one of them came on our podcast.

Chelsea Anne is the researcher behind Ghosts of the Grand and a dark-history tours she launched at the Grand Theater last year. The version she lays out is a hard one.

In her telling, the tunnels trace back to deep racism against Salem's Chinese residents. Chinese immigrants arrived in the late 1800s and, at first, were part of the community, running noodle houses, shops and laundries downtown. Then the city turned: ordinances and violence pushed Chinese residents off the streets, to the point that being on the sidewalk in daylight could get a person killed. So the community moved down, into building basements and then into tunnels dug to connect them, so people could move around the city without ever surfacing.

She places a Chinatown around what's now the George Lai Sun Alley by the Grand Theater, named, she says, for a man who served as the de facto mayor of Salem's Chinese community. She points to small, oddly shaped rooms in the Grand's basement and the neighboring Brick Room as possible opium dens, and to bricked-up archways and a doorway that opens onto nothing but a wall of brick.

John Ritter told a broadly similar story. He hoped to find the sealed entrance to Salem's lost Chinatown, and believed it waited behind a wall on Liberty Street. He never found it. That detail matters, and we'll come back to it.

It's worth being precise about what this account is: the research and interpretation of passionate local historians working from old newspaper archives, books, and the buildings themselves. It's a vivid, human and genuinely unsettling account of how Salem treated people who helped build it. And parts of it are contested.

Here's the other side, and it deserves equal weight.

In 2024, the Statesman Journal ran a "Why is that?" piece on exactly this question. Its reporting, which drew on the Willamette Heritage Center, a serious local history institution, pushes back hard on the romantic version.

Their argument: what's under downtown are basement vaults, not a connected tunnel network. Those vaults were installed around the turn of the century and used mainly for deliveries, including coal, dropped through steel sidewalk hatches you can still spot on some blocks. The purple glass lit those delivery vaults, not a secret city.

Local officials say the genuinely extensive Oregon State Hospital tunnel system has, over the years, gotten conflated with downtown, and that the downtown "tunnel" tours, organized more than a decade ago to boost tourism, blurred the line further.

On the most sensitive point, the underground Chinatown, the pushback is pointed. According to the Statesman Journal's reporting, which cited the Willamette Heritage Center, there is no documentation of people of Chinese heritage living or working in tunnels in Salem, and systematic scholarship, archaeology and oral history have poked holes in those myths. The 2025 MarionTalk piece puts it similarly: it describes the idea of a subterranean Chinese settlement as a blend of ordinary urban infrastructure with the racist stereotypes of the era, and reports that the Chinese community Salem did have lived and worked in unremarkable above-ground wooden buildings, none of which survive today.

This is where John Ritter's unfinished search becomes the most honest part of the whole story. The man whose name is on the tour spent years certain that proof of an underground Chinatown lay behind a particular wall. He never produced it. That's not a knock on Ritter, who genuinely rediscovered this hidden layer of Salem and was beloved for it. But it tells you something that even the legend's most dedicated champion couldn't close the case.

So we have named, local, credible-sounding sources telling materially different stories, and What's Happening Salem isn't going to pretend that's settled. It isn't. But here's what is. Salem had a Chinese community, and it was treated shamefully, and that part is documented, not folklore. Oregon entered the Union in 1859 as the first state with racial exclusion written into its constitution, and that constitution barred people born in China from owning property in Oregon, a restriction that stood until 1943. The Willamette Heritage Center's multi-year "Finding Salem's Chinatown(s)" exhibit, led by curator Kylie Pine, traces how those laws played out locally: unable to own property, Chinese residents depended on landlords, whose neglected buildings the city then condemned. Salem's city council ordered part of Chinatown condemned around 1905, and the community's population fell from 367 in 1890 to 72 by 1920. None of that is in dispute.

What is disputed is the specific claim layered on top of it: that this persecution drove the community into a network of tunnels beneath downtown. 

Safety First

And while the history gets argued, the city of Salem has filled in downtown sidewalk vaults during its ongoing streetscape work. The reason, per the city, is safety.

Many of these vaults are more than a century old and no longer used for anything. Some haven't been inspected or maintained in living memory, and a vault can deteriorate without any sign of trouble visible from the sidewalk above. The risk isn't hypothetical. People have been injured falling through sidewalks into abandoned vaults in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Duluth, Minnesota.

Salem has had close calls of its own. In 2003, a vault discovered under the Grand Theatre appeared to be in danger of collapse, with missing sidewalk supports and rusting rebar, and crews moved the next day to shore it up. Vaults under the Grand and the Reed Opera House were filled in 2005 ahead of sidewalk repairs.

The process is essentially permanent. As the Statesman Journal reported in May 2024, after the old sidewalk is torn out, crews add masonry walls along the property line, pour concrete slurry into the vault, and build a new sidewalk on top. And the city has acknowledged a basic problem: when officials wanted to start safety inspections, no one knew exactly how many vaults exist downtown, or where they are.

Some of the purple glass is being saved. One grid was reset into a new downtown sidewalk; others are being preserved in the city's archaeology lab.

So here's our ask, and it's the part where you come in. 

What do you know about the ground under downtown Salem? Did your family run a business with a vault in the basement? Did you take one of John Ritter's old tours? Do you have photos, a story passed down, a memory of what's behind one of those bricked-up doors? 

Reply to this email and tell us. We're going to keep reporting this out, and Salem's own people are the best archive we've got.