Saint Paul's Lilydale area, south of downtown, is home to a large number of manmade "caves" used for a variety of purposes over the span of a century, from cheese cellars to beer lagering to mushroom farms. In recent decades, these caves were popular hangouts for high-school and college students, and regular destinations for area urban explorers.
All that changed in 2004, when three teenagers asphyxiated in a large cave complex filled with smoke and carbon monoxide. The city bulldozed the entrances shut and stepped up efforts to keep people away from the caves. It's a temporary measure, however much the politicans would like everyone to believe otherwise, but it does mean that, if it's not impossible to get into what are commonly, if incorrectly, known as the "Wabasha Street caves", it's certainly a lot more difficult than it used to be.
This photo is one of the last taken of any cave in the area. It's of a fairly large maze of tunnels set a distance away from most of the other caves, and one which the city originally missed when doing their bulldozing. Before this error was rectified, I took the opportunity to get some high-quality images of the cave, one of which is seen here.
The ceiling in this section of tunnel is perhaps twelve feet high. Light comes from a few dozen tea candles, as well as an electronic flash, which illuminates the section of tunnel visible thru the oval opening in the center of the photo. It was photographed on 120-format Fuji Superia 100, a slow-speed color negative film, in a tripod-mounted 6x4.5cm Zeiss Nettar 515 camera with a 7.5cm, f/4.5 Nettar Anastigmat lens, exposed for several minutes at f/8. The camera, dating from just before WWII, produces negatives almost three times the size of a 35mm frame, and is quite possibly the smallest medium-format camera made, ever. Some color adjustments were made to minimize the contrast between the very orange candlelight, and the comparatively "blue" daylight-balanced flash. If I were to do it again, I'd put more candles down the first tunnel on the left, to lighten that area and better delineate the difference between the two sandstone walls.