tomatos and radio wires
5/27/2007
Behind a (usually) securely locked door located near the RM apartment, the Shoreland has a hallway leading to three basement levels full of stuff from its hotel days (a lot of early 1970s Fisher-Price toys, a small garage full of landscaping equipment, an incredibly upscale steak restaurant that looks the same as the day it was closed except with a thick layer of dust all over the stacks of menus and silverware). They removed the three flights of stairs so students wouldn't go down and mess around in these places (the University certainly wasn't going to maintain them or otherwise do anything useful with them). We're going anyway, of course; it's just dangerous as hell without stairs.
J. got to the first basement level by jumping; that idea scared the living hell out of me (three story drop if he missed!) so I took an extra T-shirt, looped it around some plumbing, and slid down to the steakhouse on the second basement level. D. stood by the doorway to the lobby and watched to make sure no one was coming.
The bottom basement concealed a portal to a place reminiscent of Coney Island at sunset in a pixelated GTA-like alternate universe. The guy my aunt had been dating in the late 1980's challenged someone else to a waterboat race with grim stakes and airbrushed t-shirts; I took a light beer from the mini-cooler and went back to the Shoreland for fear that I'd be stuck in the place once "I Ran" stopped playing from loudspeakers I couldn't see.
Back in the sub-basements, I picked up an old toy gas pump with a face and started bringing it up to the lobby level. I arrived at the door to find a man who greatly resembled Lars Schvartz in a RH&C Engineering jumpsuit asking my confederates to leave. He was smiling, though, and seemed amused that we'd discovered the subbasements rather than pissed at us.
He told us of a three-story greenhouse in Fallers, where some apartments on the west side of the hall had wooden balconies with a gorgeous view of Hyde Park. One June night about 20 years ago, a student had a party in one of the apartments that got out of hand and ended with people falling off the balconies to their deaths, so Housing glassed off the entire area and planted some tomatoes in a thin layer of soil at the bottom. The tomato plant was now three stories tall and bore fruit the size of basketballs, but no one could eat it.
"It sustains itself," said the engineer. "Sunlight comes in through the glass, and the tomatoes that fall to the bottom water and fertilize the plant."
A few years ago, someone had gotten into the greenhouse somehow and left four Shoreland shot glasses sitting on a third-story rafter inside as a taunt to the people whose apartments used to have access to the balconies.
Later, I'm back in my room trying to talk sense into a SL Scav teammate who thinks we can get shirts printed for 99 cents each.
Behind a (usually) securely locked door located near the RM apartment, the Shoreland has a hallway leading to three basement levels full of stuff from its hotel days (a lot of early 1970s Fisher-Price toys, a small garage full of landscaping equipment, an incredibly upscale steak restaurant that looks the same as the day it was closed except with a thick layer of dust all over the stacks of menus and silverware). They removed the three flights of stairs so students wouldn't go down and mess around in these places (the University certainly wasn't going to maintain them or otherwise do anything useful with them). We're going anyway, of course; it's just dangerous as hell without stairs.
J. got to the first basement level by jumping; that idea scared the living hell out of me (three story drop if he missed!) so I took an extra T-shirt, looped it around some plumbing, and slid down to the steakhouse on the second basement level. D. stood by the doorway to the lobby and watched to make sure no one was coming.
The bottom basement concealed a portal to a place reminiscent of Coney Island at sunset in a pixelated GTA-like alternate universe. The guy my aunt had been dating in the late 1980's challenged someone else to a waterboat race with grim stakes and airbrushed t-shirts; I took a light beer from the mini-cooler and went back to the Shoreland for fear that I'd be stuck in the place once "I Ran" stopped playing from loudspeakers I couldn't see.
Back in the sub-basements, I picked up an old toy gas pump with a face and started bringing it up to the lobby level. I arrived at the door to find a man who greatly resembled Lars Schvartz in a RH&C Engineering jumpsuit asking my confederates to leave. He was smiling, though, and seemed amused that we'd discovered the subbasements rather than pissed at us.
He told us of a three-story greenhouse in Fallers, where some apartments on the west side of the hall had wooden balconies with a gorgeous view of Hyde Park. One June night about 20 years ago, a student had a party in one of the apartments that got out of hand and ended with people falling off the balconies to their deaths, so Housing glassed off the entire area and planted some tomatoes in a thin layer of soil at the bottom. The tomato plant was now three stories tall and bore fruit the size of basketballs, but no one could eat it.
"It sustains itself," said the engineer. "Sunlight comes in through the glass, and the tomatoes that fall to the bottom water and fertilize the plant."
A few years ago, someone had gotten into the greenhouse somehow and left four Shoreland shot glasses sitting on a third-story rafter inside as a taunt to the people whose apartments used to have access to the balconies.
Later, I'm back in my room trying to talk sense into a SL Scav teammate who thinks we can get shirts printed for 99 cents each.
Labels: 1980s, family, physical Shoreland anomalies, Scav, Walsh
posted by Kat at 2:13 PM
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