We began our evening in the Kern Graduate Center. Students were bustling about in the main lobby when we arrived; apparently there was some sort of corporate presentation being conducted in one of the classrooms. We got in the elevator and punched the top floor, hoping to find a machine room, or even roof access. Unfortunately, the best we could turn up was a vertical shaft running the height of the building with a metal grated floor. A fairly typical arrangement in campus buildings built after the 1950's. As is often the case, the space is used for janitorial storage.

Taking the east stairwell down as far as it would go, we found an unlocked access staircase to the machine and supply subbasement, which was lit. Most likely, the janitor was somewhere in the building above us. At the bottom of the access staircase was a janitorial storage closet that appeared to have been built around the building's backup generator.  Unfortunately, I forgot to record its power rating.

Many of the newer and larger buildings on campus feature natural gas or gasoline generators. I've never seen one running. Presumably in the event of a power outage, these generators automatically start and keep important things running, like sump pumps. The exhaust is piped directly outside.

Shivan and I started checking utilities. It took only a few moments to find the building's steam line, which ran out the north exterior wall to a covered trench and beyond, with no apparent access. The lines themselves are insulated and supported by rollers on a set of steel bracing pipes, probably to allow for movement caused by thermal expansion and contraction.

Besides steam, we found a huge air exchanger/filter chamber, with airtight doors on each side. With some effort, we managed to pull one of the doors open against the suction of the chamber. Inside was a monstrous cylindrical fan attached to an electric motor. Despite myself, I meditated upon how long a gas introduced here would take to propagate throughout the entire building, a macabre intellectual game me and my friends play: How could a deranged killer use this to his or her advantage. These thoughts probably stem from the 1997 rifle slayings down on the HUB lawn. At the same time I was horrified, I was planning how I would have done things differently. I mean, if you're going to go crazy and kill people, you might as well do it effectively.

Adjoining the subbasement is a large electrical room, filled with upright fuse cases. Inside these eight-foot-tall cases are, well, fuses. BIG fuses. Typically cylindrical in shape, these fuses are about two feet long and about four inches in diameter, or slightly thicker and shorter than a poster mailing tube. We also found some much smaller 2000 amp / 600 volt fuses. We poked around some more, but that was about it for the subbasment of Kern.

Across a little bit of quad from Kern lies Rackley, where we suppose the department of education resides. Why? One of the first things we did was check for roof access. We hit the top floor in the elevator and found ourselves in.. an elementary school library. Yes, there were Sesame Street books on the shelves, along with other children's publications. Weird. On the north end of the library was  fire stairwell that possibly contains roof access. Unfortunately, it was equipped with an alarm, and, in any case, the library was still open and staffed. We looked around for a minute, then left, checking for anything at the south end of the building, but only finding locked doors. In the basement, we found a machine room (steam, A/C, electrical, sewage, water, yay) on one half. On the other side of the building  was a crawlway basement. Both padlocked grates leading to it were locked. We moved on...

Next in line was the Music building. Or rather, Music I, Music II, and Arts/Playhouse-Theater, all connected on the surface. Music II is pretty unexciting, and the Playhouse Theater was occupied with a production, so we moved on.

We kept heading east (north) until we eventually reached Borland Lab. Borland houses the Penn State Creamery, with a complete dairy facility. There are a number of classrooms and offices, as well. We proceeded on foot to the top floor in the northern stairwell, wherein lies grated roof access. Locked. Damn, zero for four. But that's okay, because we found something neither of us had seen before. The Creamery's "Attic."

The attic is a long hallway that runs above the ground level east/west hallway. But it's not really a hallway, instead a huge space with 2"x4" board frameworks supporting wire mesh partitions and doors. Everything from ancient PSU Housing food point registers to decrepit ice cream machines, boxes of Styrofoam coffee cups to glass carboys. There were also a number of stainless steel components we could only begin to guess about. Neat, but hardly exciting.

No longer interested in the attic, we went down to the ground floor in the eastern stairwell of the building. At the bottom we found another door that headed down yet another stairway to a plumber's cache of some sort and the subbasement crawlspace. Like most of the old buildings on campus, Borland contains a legacy of pipes and wires that have been abandoned for years. Sometimes, they simply are no longer used. Often, they are replaced with newer ones, but the obsolete or broken equipment is simply left to rot, which is cheaper than removing.

Although it's always interesting, Shivan and I had both seen this basement crawlspace before. We decided to leave when the low ceilings began to make our backs sore, rather than proceed across to a hellishly hot steam utility room. Maybe next time.

After this, we looped back towards central campus. Walking along the many paths that crisscross the patchwork of quads that makes up the UP campus, one is likely to pass many rectangular grates set in the ground, with stangely thawed snow connecting them and warm air rising from below. Sadly, these are locked with a circular lock (similar to the variety used to secure soda machines) to prevent access. Still, we grabbed a some images for posterity. With all too few exceptions, most of the tunnel access points outside of buildings seem to be vigilantly locked. We must try harder and emerge, er, descend victorious! Or something like that. Which is why I'm always looking for new leads.

Now in central UP, we stopped in for a visit at East Pattee, the site of much construction over the last two years. Basic changes: two elevators in the main lobby, instead of the previous four. The old shafts are now networking hub closets with new floors. No walls, yet.. The roof/machine level was locked.

Central Pattee has also seen some changes. A new elevator's getting installed where circulation used to reside, and they painted the stairwell dome red and blue checkered on yellow. Ugh. Shivan and I decided to take a break and stopped to look at the local water works maps. We checked for Roof-level access in the tower and the top of the stacks, but everything was secure. Sigh. The more public a building is, the more locked down it tends to be.

Leaving Pattee, the adjacent Burrows was a natural next choice. The side door was locked, and so in a move lacking subtlety, we tried the front door... and it was open. We proceeded to the top and found a trapdoor in the stairwell. Locked. Back to more basement-grubbing. In fairness, Burrows has a nice machine room, and a neat electrical room. Not unlike that of Kern, but with a much louder 60hz main hum. I sang a cadence in tune with the throbbing electrical drone.

In addition to having a nice machine room, Burrows has a very large subbasement below that, with all the trimmings. There's an amazing quantity of desks and other mundane office supplies behind locked metal wire enclosure. It's amazing anybody could get the stuff down there. It's also amazing somebody actually cares enough to lock it down. Some of it looked as if it had been around since my parents were in college. Although it was interesting to browse around the academic storage, it alone didn't justify the sore backs and necks being caused by the low ceilings. Fortunately, Shivan showed an eye for shadow and pipe, which I exposed onto film

After this, we left Burrows and checked Oswald Tower, one of the tallest structures on campus. Its doors were all locked, unfortunately.

Pond Lab

Pond was a natural next choice, leaving the Oswald Tower perimeter, since it's the next building to the East. Ran a quick run through the building after photographing the blocked entrance door. Some time in 1997, one of the four main entrances was blocked when an elevator was installed in a former stairwell. I'm glad the original door structure was left, given its facades.

While in Pond, we also took some photographs of its basement, but didn't notice anything new from prior trips.

Osmond/Davey/Whitmore

Osmond, Davey, and Whitmore are all connected via basement public tunnels, and so are considered one building. Get into one, you've entered them all.  Whitmore was effectively locked, but we were able to enter Osmond. We proceeded through the basement tunnel to Davey and were delighted to find an open electrical room with a section of 'ZONE J' tunnels, which I immediately dubbed 'ZONE J' south, since a similar (and unconnected?) branch of steam tunnels labeled ZONE J exists in the basement of Whitmore. Sadly, the tunnel was locked and we feared discovery since the electrical room seemed to double as a janitorial office, so we moved on.

We went to Whitmore via the public basement tunnel. The Mass Spectrometer room was open, with its lights on. Probably a grad student working late. We walked the length of the hallway to the utility/steam room, the only known building entrance to a linear tunnel that runs between Whitmore and Frear. The door to the room wasn't locked. (In fact, the door's lock looked almost as if it had been forced open at some point. We're not sure that it was like that the last time we visited. Perhaps someone had been indiscrete.) Even more surprising, the metal grate protecting the 'ZONE J' (north) steam tunnel access grate to a tunnel we had explored via a constricting surface grate was UNLOCKED! We merrily re-explored the near section with photographs, despite the oppresive heat.

By this point, it had gotten pretty late, so we returned to Shivan's car via the OPP Power Plant. Got a nice shot through the front door grate of the electric dynamos used to produce electricity with the excess steam, confirming it as not only the steam plant we knew it to be, but also a power plant. Go fig.