Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

I got into a conversation with someone recently about exploring secret urban nooks and crannies.

We got onto this conversation because of two sites I'd discovered recently, one commemorating the former Charlie Conacher Research Wing of Toronto General Hospital, and the Viewing Hole, which contains documentation of urban exploration.

I also discovered a site dedicated to the PSU steam tunnels, which reminded me of the kind of exploration I used to do at Penn State. Of course, in my case, most of it was related to my job with the Penn State Audio Visual Services.

I really ought to go back sometime and document some of these spaces, if they still exist. Maybe I'll go back with my sister and do a little building spelunking.

You get to know all sorts of strange nooks and crannies when you work for AVS because let me tell you, they keep TVs and film equipment in some of the strangest places you could imagine. In some buildings you had to open a lock box that had a key to go in the room where you would get the equipment. You got to see the funky underside of buildings; the pipes and boilers and storage areas.

One of the funkiest was Borland Lab. Let me put it this way, in the AV scheduling office, there was a photo of Lon Chaney as the Phantom of the Opera, with a hand written note underneath that said, "Welcome to Borland Lab." And if you'd been there even once, you knew what they were talking about.

Borland Lab had the creepiest storage space for AV equipment that you can imagine. It was located in a storage area on the top floor, which you got to either through the stairs or through a rickety service elevator that was probably built in the 1920s, if not earlier.

Borland Labs is where they make the famous Creamery ice cream, and it's also where they store some of the flavors for the ice cream. You would think a place like that wouldn't be too creepy, but it is.

If you took the stairs, you ended up walking down a dark corridor which always reminded me a lot of that scene at the end of "M" where they're chasing Peter Lorre through some sort of urban subterranean area, complete with caged off areas.

The Borland storage space was a lot like that. There were locked cages with bags of flavoring mix in them. You would expect it to smell kind of good, but the storage area was, instead, suffused with a sweet, dank smell.

I was always convinced I could see people darting back into the shadows as I walked down the corridor. The lights were always on, but they were only a few bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling that didn't illuminate the corners.

The TV was kept in its own storage cage, and you had to unlock it and push it on its wheeled cart out of the cage. I always felt as if someone was going to jump out of the corner at any moment.

If I avoided being jumped by shadowy figures, I wheeled the cart the rest of the way down the narrow corridor until I hit the service elevator, which looks like an old metal deathtrap. Into this I had to push a heavy television. The elevator usually bounced a little bit as I did this. And once I pushed the floor I wanted, the elevator made a clanking noise and then proceeded slowly downwards. I could watch the brick wall passing by through the metal grate in the front.

Somehow, no matter how many times you moved a TV in Borland, you never got used to it.

In addition to the odd niches I found as a member of AVS, there were other quiet spots I used to go to when I wanted to be alone. This is difficult to do at Penn State, since the campus is so crowded that the most popular space are nearly always full of students sleeping, studying or playing Frisbee.

On the campus mall, there are two twin buildings with Gothic bric-a-brac, Burrowes (the English building) and Sparks (its dark twin). In front of Burrowes, below the level of the front steps there is a big stone wall with green space behind it. There are a few windows to some of the offices, as well. I nicknamed it the Secret Garden and had a friend take a picture of me there (at the top of this page).

There were some interior spots where I liked to go to, those that were less frequented. I used to actually go down to the lowest level of the stacks in Pattee Library, which almost nobody went to. "The stacks" is the term for the core of Pattee Library, the oldest section of the library. It's got narrow stairs between floors, only one person wide, and one very small elevator. It's where they house the oldest collections in the library, including a lot of science books so out-of-date nobody would be likely to find them useful any more.

There are several reasons the stacks are not frequented. One is that, as I said, it's a little creepy. Second, there was an unsolved murder on the second floor of the stacks in 1969. The third reason was that in my day, the late 1980s, there was a particularly unsavory individual known as "Jack the Zipper" who used to whack off in the stacks and flash unsuspecting coeds.

For all of these reasons, the stacks were a great place to go if you wanted to be alone. And more so on the very lowest level, which only housed student graduate theses and such relatively non-circulating items. I never ran into any spectral personages or other unpleasantness there. Or in fact, too many library patrons.

My other favorite secret hangout was a women's rest room in one of the older buildings, Henderson South. It had a separate room where there was a couch. Hardly anybody used it, so if you just needed some space to do some reading you could be totally alone, in a totally quiet area.

There were other nooks and crannies here and there. And there were plenty of strange architectural spaces which my friends liked to use for their film projects. For example, the West Halls area, which had some super cement and brick archways. I ought to go back there with some black and white film and set up some artistic shots.

I only hope that if I go back again, those shadowy creatures in Borland don't finally catch up with me.

More explorations on the Penn State campus:

November 6, 2003 - Penn State of Change

Copyright 2003 by Alyce Wilson

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