Tuesday, April 16, 2002
Through passages darkly
I came across serveral sites that document abandoned places in the United States—mostly industrial locations or institutions no longer used or long forgotten by previous owners, and the brave (or foolhardy) souls that now examine and document such places.
It brought me back many years to FAU, which
has an interesting history—it used to be an airport back in the sixties (in the image linked
to, the old runway system is in blue (which are now used as a main road and
parking lots—one rather loooooong parking lot) and the current
Boca Raton Commercial Airport (which is an active airport) is in green). In
the 60s it was converted to a graduate level university and in 1984, it
opened up to undergraduates. I started there in 1987 (and thus utterly
dating myself, but this is good, as the Statues of Limitations have now run
out) and several years into my tenured undergrad career, some friends and I
went spelunking into the FAU Tunnel System.
Now, this being Florida you would think that being only a few feet above sea level there wouldn't be a tunnel system, but lo, there was. Next to the Biology building was a set of stairs leading down to some double doors, with just enough of a gap to let a large screw driver in to pop the door open. So one night, about four or five of us grabbed some flashlights, a large screw driver, and proceeded to decend into the depths of FAU.
The tunnel system connects all the buildings on campus (or at least we theorized—we didn't actually explore the entire system). We entered near the Biology building (the red dot on the linked map) and proceeded south (down, like on all maps). Along the tunnels were large water pipes (about half of which were hot to the touch) and smaller ones carrying electric, phone and network connections. When we came to the first T-interection, we turned left (east) which would lead us to the Administration building. Halfway down the tunnel we came across some large disks set in the floor, with some pipes sticking straight out. We were pretty sure they were presure plates connected to pumps, should the tunnel system flood. We carefully avoided stepping on the disks but three quarters the way down one of us stumbled and triggered one of the pumps, which cause a rather large ruckess. We turned, and admist shouts of “Run away! Run away!” fled back down towards the main north/south tunnel.
We turned south again, and kept heading south, past the other left tunnel towards Administration (we wanted to avoid the plates). We found evidance of prior spelunkers in the graffiti lining the walls (one definitely dated to 1976). The going was not that bad until we hit the southern junction, which proved quite difficult to navigate as we had to climb over and under some large pipes. We ended up heading to the left (west) towards the University Center.
Now, at the time we weren't all that sure where we were so at the next manhole cover we found (above us) we stole a peek. On the map, the lavender dot shows where we popped up and at the time, we could see the on-campus Police Station. Not good. We ducked down and got the manhole cover mostly back into place and we kept heading west.
As we progressed towards the University Center it was clear that we were hitting one of the oldest sections of the tunnel system—it was getting dirtier and smaller so that by the time we reached the end we were all doubled over and nearly dying from the heat.
We turned back east, climbed over and under at the intersection and kept going east and ended up inside the electrical room of the Humanities Building. Not much left at that end of the tunnel system we headed back, bypassed the entrance near the Biology building and again headed east towards the Computer Science and Engineering building (where we all hung out, being Computer Science majors). We could tell this was recent construction by the large size and relatively cleanliness of this part of the system. There was some debate about contining on towards the end of this particular section but since we had already spend several hours down in the tunnels it was decided that we should exit the system, head home and get some rest.
“X” marks the spot
One other thing about FAU being an old airport—when ever a runway is decommissioned, large Xs are painted on the runway to signify a no longer used runway.
This part of the runway is now a parking lot (albeit a long narrow parking lot). I would tend to drive out to one of the large Xs and park my car on it. Silly perhaps, but hey, why not?
