I don't know how we get on the topic, exactly, but he asks if I knew that the building had a sub-basement. Of course, I did not, being the head-down, trying-not-to-get-noticed peon that I am. Turns out that Chris didn't know either until last week, when his supervisor took him down there to get a few things out of storage.
According to him, there was this crazily huge space underneath the building, just whole hidden areas that most of us didn't know about. The sub-basement (which is now used as a warehouse of forgotten junk and dust) was once the main printing facility for the paper - back in the days of William Randolph Hearst the sub-basement was full of huge, loud presses running day and night, being loaded onto trucks which were then rotated on huge turntables and sent back up the ramp to the street directly above.
And, actually, it would seem that the presses were down there until relatively recently, since you could see the still-unfaded signs indicating that ear protection was needed for the area.
Chris said it looked like something out of Half-Life. And then he proposed a field trip.
Like I was gonna say no.
So today we grabbed our cameras and went down there. We took a turn off the basement break room, then suddenly we were in a dingy tunnel straight out of a bad horror movie - ventilation ducts with torn insulation exposing the shiny metal beneath, broken railings, soot-stained walls with barely legible writing.
Another turn and we were in the first storage area. Low ceilings, narrow corridors running between cells of chain link fence. Inside, just the bric-a-brac of any office - chairs, shelves with office supplies, hundreds upon hundreds of boxes - all piled in a way that suggested that the folks running the joint were more interested in speed than in being able to recover anything. But then there was the odd item that was, well, odd. Like a folding army cot. And a bread-warming oven. Posters of landscapes. Dartboards. Sinister-looking bits of metal.
We press on, ducking our heads under exposed duct-work (well, I had to duck my head a bit less than Chris, but, you know) and around another blind turn. Here's where the FPS look starts to hit: another corridor, this one festooned with warning signs, the walls painted a color that was once white above, and red below. A walkway with a rusty handrail running beside and above a broken, rusted conveyor belt with menacing components jutting out at odd angles.
We followed the conveyor and a mass of pipes down a set of stairs to an even lower level, and coming round the corner into this huge space. I couldn't tell you how high the ceilings were, but it looked to be about two stories there, underground. And more chain-link cages, filled with even more random crap (now augmented by metal filing cabinets). It was hard to get a good look into the storage areas because although the space was fairly well lit in the center, the storage areas somehow receded off into shadow. It was a neat trick what with so much light.
The walls were what was really impressive - just towering above us, massive ink stains twenty or thirty feet off the ground. Just freakin' ancient looking concrete. Catwalks that just hung in the middle of the air, coming from and going no-where. Above us, an office jutting off the wall, its door boarded up and the windows glowing just slightly, with no visible way to get up there. On the same wall, lower down (but still a good fifteen feet from ground level) an emergency exit stuck right into the wall - whatever ladder or platform led to it long-gone. And along the sides of the warehouse above our heads, mysterious lit alcoves. On the wall, a clock and an American flag, both stained black with years of ink.
Off to one side, and mostly hidden, I found a metal stairway leading up into the dark. The stairs were covered in a uniform layer of dust. The stairway wrapped itself around an old, rusted lift, mostly brownish-red with just a hint of its original blue clinging to it. The gate for the lift was somehow torn, and it probably wouldn't have worked anyway, so up the narrow steps it was. Nothing on the platform above except years of dust and a lone ladder standing in the middle. But at the far end, sunlight peeked through a huge set of doors. I must have been up on a supplementary loading dock.
The climb down was a little more awkward. And by this time, the dust and old ink in the air was making it hard to breathe so, having seem much of the sub-basement (but not all, as there is purportedly a tunnel that leads underground to the old Mint across the street - as well as the maintenance areas for the machines that once moved the huge turntables set into the floor), we left, having satistisfied our curiosity, imagined monsters around the bend, and, honestly, lamented that all the lights seemed to be working properly.
Some things are just better in the dark, you know?
