St. Louis once charged people a dollar to walk through an underground wonderland featuring prehistoric animal bones, odd rock formations, lagering rooms, and names like the Black Dahlia and the Dragon’s Den. Then it buried the whole thing under Interstate 55, because of course it did.

Cherokee Cave was part of the cave system beneath south St. Louis that had already served breweries, bootleggers, and local legend long before it became an attraction. In 1950, entrepreneur Lee Hess opened part of it to the public. Visitors descended beneath the city streets for a guided tour through a place that sounded equal parts geology lesson, carnival pitch, and fever dream. Newspaper accounts promised streams, waterfalls, strange formations, and the remains of peccaries — prehistoric “skunk pigs,” which is not a phrase any respectable cave should be able to offer.

There was even a kind of exhibit logic to it all. St. Louis took a naturally eerie underground space and made it more St. Louis by layering it with commerce, spectacle, and beer history. If the city had a subconscious, it would probably look like a cave with a ticket booth.

The attraction did not last. By 1961, the public operation was closed, and the area above was overtaken by highway construction. The cave itself did not simply vanish, but access became restricted, sealed, and mythologized. That may have improved its reputation. St. Louis likes its wonders better once they are difficult, questionable, or technically not open to you.

What lingers is the sense of a second city under the first one. Not metaphorically. Actual rooms, passages, voids, and old industrial uses hiding in limestone while traffic passes overhead pretending that is normal.

Maybe it is normal here. That is the unnerving part.