Having spent a lot of hours walking the streets of old Bay View -- that is, the tightly-packed byways that once huddled in the shadow of the old steel rolling mill near Russell and Superior -- I've often heard tell of a network of tunnels, false walls and secret doors in subterranean Bay View.

While I've seen at least one basement door that opens into a space beneath the sidewalk on Russell, it didn't tell me much. It did, however, feed my imagination. Sadly, one person I had hoped would give me some insight a few years ago passed away before I got the chance to ask.

This being bar month at OnMilwaukee.com, I got to thinking about it all again: the rum runners, the bath tub wine, the local grocers trafficking truckloads sugar up from Chicago on the sly to feed the hungry stills steaming away in Milwaukee basements. So, I asked Milwaukee's history -- and Bay View -- go-to guy.

"The only Prohibition-era tunnel I've heard about supposedly ran from the old Bennett farmhouse, which still looms over the 3200 block of Kinnickinnic Avenue, to a secret opening on the west side of the hill," John Gurda told me in an e-mail. "The story has never been confirmed, to my knowledge."

That's a bit outside the area I expected, but Gurda hinted that I might have been sniffing around the right parts of the neighborhood.

"My surmise is that you'd find the greatest concentration of bootleg-era 'improvements' in the area around Groppi's (Russell and Wentworth) and Three Brothers (St. Clair and Conway)."

As in any city, Milwaukee also built atop nature and what it couldn't erase, it controlled. In Bay View, such work resulted in another subterranean feature, Gurda noted.

"The most historic underground passage is probably the tunnel that carries Deer Creek the length of Delaware Avenue to Lake Michigan, exiting at the foot of Russell Avenue."

That exit point can be seen, just south of the Coast Guard station.

If you live in Bay View and have a Prohibition basement story or photos. Bring 'em on.