A spooky subway tunnel under Fort Worth? Yes, there is one (but you can't go inside)

March 5,2018

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Star-Telegram article by Gordon Dickson 

Many Fort Worth residents — particularly those who have moved here during the past 15 years — probably don't realize that 42 feet below the surface of downtown lies a spooky, abandoned subway tunnel.

The old M&O Subway tunnel has been sealed off since 2002, but three years ago the Star-Telegram got a chance to visit the old underground passage and shoot some video.

We visited the tunnel with members of the Leonard family, which once owned a landmark department store downtown.

From 1963 to 2002, the M&O Subway ferried shoppers from a remote parking lot on the north end of downtown to Leonards Department Store and later the Tandy Center mall at RadioShack’s headquarters.

Today, one entrance is buried under the Tarrant County College Trinity River Campus and the other is secured by a padlocked chain-link fence that stretches across an archway in a limited-access high-rise office at 300 Throckmorton St.

In all, the tunnel is approximately 1,000 feet long. During our tour, Ryan Johnson, asset manager for Spire Realty Group, which owns the tunnel, had the line of the day when he said this:

“If I was going to shoot horror movies and have zombies, and they were coming out of the center of the Earth, that is exactly the type of scene I imagine they’d be living in down there."

Gordon Dickson: 817-390-7796