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There’s something strange on the bluff behind Omaha’s Florence Boulevard.

Buried in overgrowth along a steep wooded hillside is a collection of peculiar openings. Peel back the brush and you’ll find the exits of century-old tunnels, framed with stone and concrete.

Some are packed in with dirt, leaving just enough space to peek inside at a cold trail toward the houses up the hill. One has a mouth that opens up to a wide passageway with graffiti on the walls and rebar that pokes out of a thick-packed dirt wall.

The most haunting of the tunnels behind the boulevard has no end in sight.

Underneath a thick slab of concrete, in between two cinder blocks, the slim tunnel has a push-button light switch. Overhead lights line the tunnel, but they’re dead. Snails crawl along the walls, condensation drips from the ceiling, and soft dirt melts underfoot.

All of the tunnels point toward the houses along what was once known as “Omaha’s Prettiest Mile.” The stretch, near Miller Park, was home to notorious political boss Tom Dennison during Prohibition.

Rumor has it that the tunnels formed a network for bootleggers.

“It was a very active neighborhood, but you never knew what was going on,” said Diane Greer, who has lived across from Dennison’s old house since 1975. “It was all underground.”

The consensus among neighbors is that the tunnels were probably built to lead down the hill to a pasture and spring where a city stormwater detention pond now sits. At the property line ran train tracks for the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis and Omaha Railway. The unobstructed path to the railroad would have been an ideal way to transport liquor by moonlight.

Nebraska instituted its prohibition on alcoholic beverages in 1917. One year later Dennison bought a home on the block — the one with the graffiti-scarred tunnel. The timing is suspicious for a man with a reputation for controlling the city’s bootleggers at the time.

There has been little documentation of the goings-on around Dennison’s Florence home. Works by local historians Orville Menard and Jon Blecha focus on Dennison’s activity elsewhere in the city, including the rumored tunnels that connected his businesses downtown, in one case providing a passageway to a brothel.

Historians Howard Hamilton, Jack Atkins and Max Sparber said they have heard stories about the Florence tunnels, but the only ones backed up by historical record are quite innocent. If Dennison was bootlegging, he kept it very quiet.

Sparber, a research specialist for the Douglas County Historical Society, said tunnels like these were probably used for privacy, for running cables down the hillside or for servants’ entrances. He doubts Tom Dennison would have run bootleg out of them.

“Dennison had control of the mayor, and he had control of the Police Department,” he said. “You could easily just load up liquor onto a truck and drive it across town and unload it in broad daylight without any fears of anything happening. In that kind of environment, it’s very hard to justify the idea of building long tunnels from one place to another and then having people carry stuff under the street.”

The stories circulating in this neighborhood, however, tell of firearms found in the woods, secret rooms with whiskey stills inside and other clues that the block might have been a hushed hub for more nefarious activity. But those stories may be about as trustworthy as the eroding tunnels themselves.

As you move along the hillside, every tunnel has its own tale, its own way of making you think twice about what might have happened underground.

THE ABANDONED HOUSE

Neighbors have always whispered about the bizarre tunnels in their backyards, but never more than the day one of them collapsed at the abandoned house at the end of the block.

The house — seven houses south of Dennison’s — sat vacant for six years until just recently. Thieves stole copper inserts from decorative fencing, windows were smashed in and the place fell into a state of disrepair.

Then one day about two years ago, a hole opened up.

Just behind the back door a tunnel collapsed in on itself, creating a cavity where a pear tree once stood. The tree sank more than 10 feet and revealed a perfectly preserved tunnel.

Neighbors peered down into the hole. They saw wiring, a surprisingly elegant interior and, along each wall, entrances to side rooms.

“It was pristine,” said Jessie Lambson, who lives two doors down. “No dust or anything.”

To some, the tunnel was no secret. A former resident named Nancy Maxwell took a few neighbors inside the tunnel years ago through a doorway in her basement.

“It was unbelievable,” said Eric Gustafson, who lives down the block and had been inside the tunnel. “They had tile corners, poured concrete ceilings with arches. There were two offshoots in it. That’s supposedly where the two stills were.

“There was a name and a date. It was almost like a mausoleum.”

Sparber, the historian, said the home was built in 1914 by HC Madden, a railway executive. He used to store veggies from the garden in his 90-foot tunnel.

Down the hill, all that’s left of the tunnel exit is a pointed concrete roof that’s cracked, with wooden support beams keeping it open in an A-shape. There’s about 1 foot of clearance left — just enough to peer inside a few feet.

When the backyard caved in, word spread. Most neighbors wandered over to take a look at the opening.

“We were just glad to get the thing filled,” said Thomas Wood, who lives five houses to the north. “We were worried we were going to lose a kid in it. Because if a kid had gone in there, it would’ve never gotten out. It went down so steep. You could only see the top of it.”

Despite the cave-in, the people in the neighborhood don’t seem to be too worried about the other tunnels.

“Nobody ever comes to our meetings and says they’re afraid the tunnels may cave in on somebody,” said Rosalind Moore, president of the Miller Park-Minne Lusa Community Association.

The giant hole was paved over with a thick slab of concrete — a new patio for the empty house. If you peek around the edges, though, you can see it’s washing out.

THE TWIN STILLS

Continuing north along the hillside from the A-frame tunnel, it’s several houses before you’ll see another tunnel exit. But if you look up the hill, you’ll see the properties in between have mysteries of their own.

Behind the houses, a building shared by two residences sits on the edge of the bluff. A stairway on each side leads down to a pair of rooms hidden underneath the conjoined garages. From those rooms, lead piping extends out the back. Neighbors hypothesize it was some sort of ventilation for whiskey stills.

One of the homeowners, Nick Push, filled in his hidden room with concrete. Push said his neighbor Sharon Bryant told him she found a still beneath her garage when she moved in about 40 years ago.

Push said his neighbor Nancy Maxwell, who lived in the abandoned house, said the previous owner stopped by one day and told her about her home’s history during the waning days of Prohibition.

“Her parents had rooms underneath our backyard off of that tunnel,” Push said. “They would store bootleg liquor in those rooms that was made in our garage. They would then run it down the sidewalk and the steps in the back, and I don’t know if they would take it to the railroad tracks or further.”

A MYSTERY TUNNEL

Keep moving north along the hillside toward the big boss’ house. There’s a tunnel exit boxed off at the top and filled in except for about 6 inches that might’ve washed out over time.

The neighbors don’t know the tunnel exists. The homeowner doesn’t know it exists. There’s no sign of any tunnel entrance in the basement.

It’s a dead end.

THE ROOM IN THE HILLSIDE

Next along the bluff, carved into the hill, is a pantry-size room. It’s littered with empty soda and beer cans from the ’80s and ’90s, plus other garbage. Just like the tunnel nearby, it’s another mystery.

Its location, between two tunnels to the south and two or three to the north, could indicate it served as a central storage room for the bootleggers before running the product down the hill to the train tracks, neighbors say. Of course, it might just have been a root cellar, too.

AN IMMINENT COLLAPSE?

It’s hard to spot on the hill, but Thomas Wood swears his house has a tunnel.

Cracks in his driveway follow a path from the side of the house straight down the drive, into the garage and point out the back. The concrete in the garage looks shattered, almost like scorched desert dirt. There, he said, a tunnel may be caving in underground.

Follow the cracks to the backyard, which drops off. It’s too steep to traverse and too dangerous with a recently downed oak tree. But just beyond the oak, Wood said, there’s a red brick wall running west to east, pointing toward the train tracks. The retired contractor said there’s no way it’s a retaining wall — it has to be a tunnel.

Inside the house, there’s no secret opening. Instead there’s a small basement room underneath the back porch with a brick wall that has a mix of new brick and old. There’s also a sink, an abnormally large floor drain and a wide staircase.

“When do you see a basement stairway that wide?” he said. “There was some serious hauling going on over here. If I was a detective, that’s what I would think.”

When you’re living in a house built by Edward Cackley, the owner of Cackley Bros. wine and liquor house, what else are you supposed to think?

THE LAST ONE STANDING

The march across the hillside hits a suspenseful peak right next door to Tom Dennison’s old place. Cinder blocks and a thick slab of concrete, topped with large stone bricks, frame an eerie exit in the woods. It’s wide open. Construction debris and an orange garden planter sit in the first few feet inside the tunnel. On the north wall there’s an old fashioned push-button light switch. No luck.

Enter 10 feet, 20, 30, 40, there’s only darkness in the distance. Shine a flashlight down the 60-degree tunnel and you’ll see hung lights, soft dirt floors, packed dirt walls, looping tree roots, condensation dripping from overhead and snails crawling on the walls.

Some raccoons are braver than some reporters. One critter made it all the way through the tunnel years ago, before homeowner Janice Simmons’ husband, Paul, passed away. That night, they heard a scratching at their basement door. The next week Paul boarded over the doorway with cork board. He hung his tools there.

Simmons has lived in the neighborhood for 38 years. She has never been inside her tunnel. She wouldn’t let her daughters go in, either. Only Paul.

She said the family that lived there before them came by one day. They told her about the Halloween parties they used to hold in the tunnels. It was all lit up back then.

Sparber, from the Historical Society, said the house was built in 1918 by Edward Anderson, a watchmaker. Over four years he chiseled out a 135-foot tunnel to the pasture to take partygoers out to the natural spring in the back.

A 1987 story in the World-Herald: “The only liquid associated with the tunnel was milk. They kept a cow in a pasture that was located on the flat riverbank below the house.”

But bootlegging? No proof.

THE BOSS’ HOUSE

Here it is: the boss’ tunnel.

Beneath twisting tree trunks, a concrete archway opens up a mouth just large enough to crouch into. Inside, large stone bricks frame a tunnel that’s about 7 feet wide and goes about 15 feet deep before stopping at a compacted wall of dirt with exposed rebar. Overhead, there’s a ventilation tube.

It smells like the basement of a musty old house. There are two spare tires leaning against the dirt wall, with a soccer ball, a basketball and an old gym dodgeball in the foreground. In one corner an animal has burrowed into the hill. On the opposite wall, in red spray paint, are symbols, one of which looks like a cat with one fang.

Becki and William “Doc” Brenner, who own the house now, haven’t been down to see the tunnel. Their children and grandchildren have, as has an Omaha police officer who once chased two ladder-thieving children down the hill.

In their basement there’s a small room with a dirt crawl space that they believe once led into the tunnel. In one corner you can see new brickwork clashing with old brick where the Brenners theorize their tunnel was blocked.

The whole bootlegging system ran through here, neighbors say. Tom Dennison, the crime boss of Omaha from the late 1800s through his trial and death in the early 1930s, owned the house. He was accused of running a crime syndicate that owned the city’s gambling, prostitution and bootlegging operations plus a few politicians and parts of the Omaha police force.

Dennison, or course, said otherwise.

“I haven’t been interested in bootlegging,” he said in a 1930 interview. “And I’d shoot myself before I’d fatten off the earnings of a woman.”

Dennison purchased this house in 1918, one year after Nebraska began its statewide prohibition. It was built three years earlier by Fred Crane, to whom Dennison sold the house back by 1923.

Thomas Wood, from two doors down, doesn’t think the tunnels were built for bootlegging, but a few years later, they proved rather opportune.

“It just worked out really, really well,” Wood said.

Sparber said Dennison was a very private man who didn’t like to mix work and home.

“He always kept the criminal side of his life at arm’s length,” he said. “It’s very hard for me to believe he would bring any of that into his house, where he would be most vulnerable.”

Eric Gustafson, who lives across the street, has another theory about what the tunnels might have been used for.

“(If) you had the attic fan on and you were pulling air up from the riverbank, through the tunnel and into the house, it would’ve been natural air conditioning,” he said. “That would be awfully efficient.”

For every logical explanation, there are five more pieces of bootlegging evidence that can be hard to dismiss. Like the tunnels that ran under the street, pointed right at Tom Dennison’s house.

TRIBUTARIES

Diane Greer has been collecting decades of stories on Dennison.

Gun ports underneath the porch of his home, a diagonal driveway for his cronies to look over his house — she’s heard it all. It became a bit more believable when she saw some of it for herself.

Greer lives directly across the street from Dennison’s house and owns the property immediately to the west of hers, where her daughter now lives. Her house doesn’t have a tunnel, but her daughter’s apparently did. There’s no sign of it in the basement, but when the yard fell in on the east side of the house about 15 years ago, there was little denying it.

“It was, like, 10 feet deep by, like, 6 by 6 — it was huge,” she said. “The whole yard just caved in — plop.”

In the hole was a wood-framed tunnel running underneath Florence Boulevard and pointing straight at Dennison’s house.

Strangely enough, the house on the south side of hers had one too.

When the Gustafsons moved in next door to Greer about 20 years ago there was a basement doorway into a tunnel, which had been backfilled by Howard Grant, the home’s previous owner. The tunnel kept washing out into the basement, so Eric Gustafson closed it off. It’s a pantry now.

Before he moved in, the tunnel caved in — he estimates sometime in the 1970s — somewhere between his house and Dennison’s.

Gustafson said he was told that the road collapsed, buckling under the weight of a semitrailer truck as it drove over his tunnel. But the City of Omaha’s Public Works Department has no record of such an incident. And they said they definitely should, if it happened at all.

NEIGHBORHOOD LORE

The tunnels of Florence Boulevard have their own local mythology, developed by a decades-long game of telephone.

Chuck Martens, who runs the popular Forgotten Omaha Facebook page, grew up in the neighborhood. He said he heard that revenuers during Prohibition knew there was a whiskey still somewhere along the hillside because the fish in a nearby pond were humongous. The belief: They had gobbled up all the mash the bootleggers dumped into the nearby spring.

Neighbors to the north and south of this block said they had tunnels in their basements, too.

One of the houses is even rumored to have a secret passageway that’s activated by pulling a book on a bookshelf. Just as in “Scooby-Doo.”

“We’ve been here 15 years, so I’ve heard a lot of stories,” Nick Push said.

Everyone has a different tale to tell. But discerning the truth? That’s not easy.

When it comes to the bootlegging rumors, it seems it’s just a matter of what you’re willing to believe.

“A lot of it is rumor and innuendo,” Push said, “but that’s what makes it interesting, right?”