we proceed to head to south campus and find the route to the steam plant.
heading to campus a little before two at night, we walk along desolate streets lit orange by campus street lamps. every so often, a car drives by while we stroll, chat, and make big gestures with our hands to appear as if we are actually carrying on a significant conversation. first stop was franz hall and deciding against entering the alley between franz and young through a loading bay, we walk through the inverted fountain plaza instead, surveying the scene and ignoring the handful of college students talking and hanging out around the fountain. walking into the science quadrangle and rounding franz’s corner, we go down the plant-filled alley, looking in bushes for the floor grate which would let us into the depths of campus. finding the entrance locked, we head for murphey instead.
the area around murphey hall unfortunately has a small scattering of campus maintenance and facilities personnel, who from what we can guess, get off work at two. surveying the area while looking as if we were just taking a late-night final-exams study-break to walk around campus and get some air, we poke around murphey only to abandon the exploration momentarily, after finding out we were in clear view of some personnel walking down the opposite side of the street. perhaps moore would be open and kinsey under construction was looking more and more feasible.
crossing over the “bridge” between the dickson and schoenberg plazas, we take a seat on the steps of the music building to break and rethink our plan of action – we would check out moore, loop back to investigate kinsey in the more inconspicuous alley beside powell, and give murphey another go.
moore, whose doors lock at night offer us no entrance, and despite several open windows, all are too high up and out of reach. the door at the end of the loading alley across from the math sciences building is also unfortunately locked and we move on. to our surprise, kinsey is well-sealed by covered construction fences, and neither of us expected construction companies would do such a good job of it. have you ever had lecture in that hall? i casually ask a friend as a maintenance worker passed. i think people even have physics in it. time to return to murphey.
as we approach the building, two facilities workers are waiting by the curb, most likely for a ride home. few if any people are out now, and seldom do we see a random car drive by. reaching the end of murphey, looking all the while as if we were just heading to the bus stop or the sororities, we jump a low wall into some bushes. duck-walking along the side of the building, and trying not to step on too many crunching leaves, we pass by office windows and over metal grates. finding an unlocked one and noticing a small rung ladder leading down into darkness, we lift the cover and shine in our flashlights. a dead end. looking more like a dungeon or oubliette, nothing but two small windows to basement offices and a drain lie at the bottom. we slide the grate back into place and continue over to the main door of the building, around where an entrance grate should be located, according to our map.
tucked into a set of bushes, we find the grate. though unlocked, the grill is far too large and heavy to lift and secure easily. shining our flashlight down, we follow the metal-rung ladder to a puddle on the floor. it seems the wooden ladder which bridged the metal ladder with dry ground a short distance away had disappeared since my trip three years ago. we agree that we would use this entrance only as a last resort. it was time to check out haines, which had let us in numerous times, and royce, an original entrance from my first explorations.
passing haines, we take a look around the secret window, which always seemed like a good bet. this time, however, it was locked from the inside – both of them. it looked like ucla was getting smart, probably [and hopefully] at the expense of students getting dumb [and caught]. with no way in, we move to royce, hoping my old pathways were still open. royce is unfortunately locked. after a careful survey of the surrounding area and a closer investigation of the lock however, we were in with a click. quickly moving around a corner and out of sight, we pause momentarily to listen for stray noises. feeling safe, we press the elevator call and duck out of the way to insure us from any surprises when the doors slid open. coast clear, we take the lift to the basement level after noticing we could only go lower if we had an access key. emerging into the room with the shelf of blueprints and now, numerous boxes of envelopes, running on my memory we head for an unmarked door ahead of us leading to a well-lit metal stairwell. double checking the door and remembering it locked from the outside, i prop it open with a piece of cardboard. we walk down the metal staircase, which vibrated to a tremendous roar each time we moved, forcing us to pause frequently and listen for security. reaching the sub-basement and discovering the door out is locked, we are forced to head back up and abandon the attempt here. very luckily, the door i propped earlier was still open; if it wasn’t, we could have very well been stuck in the stairwell until daylight.
exiting royce, we head to dickson hall, recalling the building was also under construction, and being tucked into a corner of campus, might offer a less-secured way into the depths below. reaching dickson, we find one gate slightly ajar. moving into the shadows, we writhe through the gate and explore the construction site. the place is deserted. plastic tarps strewn about the skeletal frame of a building that once was and will be again, wave like forgotten ghosts in the abandoned wasteland. locating the stairwell to the basement, and moving about the familiar landscape – the only place that has remained familiar over the past three years, we find the concrete hole in the wall and enter ucla’s underbelly.
moving carefully through the sometimes pitch-black tunnel, i pull my arms in to keep from touching the heated pipes and electrical cords on one side and duck every so often to keep form smashing my head into the fluorescent light bulbs above. reaching the storage bay underneath yrl, we cautiously climb down the rickety metal ladder and take cover behind a large piece of machinery. maneuvering ourselves around and over some pipes, we look down the large warehouse, which is still filled with boxes of books. conveniently, there is no sign of life, and we hop over a file cabinet to reach the door into the blue hub room. unlocked, it opens with a gentle pull. moving about the giant blue pipes and immersed in the sound of the steady hum of pumping water, we find the dark entrance to the tunnel towards royce. reaching the end, we exit the door marked “service tunnel” and into a small machine room filled with steaming cracks in the floor and boxes of air filters. checking the maintenance bay under royce and finding it clear, we snake through to the other door down the hall, which luckily also opened right up. apparently, it seems most doors remain unlocked when an entire area is restricted. entering the unmarked door and going up the short flight of stairs, we were headed towards powell library.
under powell, wires and graffiti fill the tiny room connecting several tunnels. an old wooden door, looking very much like the one we could not get through on one of my first explorations, lies dusty and walked over upon the ground. on the wall another more modern and secure door seems to have replaced it. crawling over an incredibly large and treacherous bundle of wires and squeezing by some heated pipes, we were off to moore.
as we entered the earth-bottomed and broken-cement-strewn dump yard under moore hall, we notice a pair of people on the other end of the large underground room. also noticing us at the same moment, we all freeze, until a more careful scrutinizing of them leads me to wave them over. followed by a friend of hers, the girl comes skipping over, obviously relieved that we were not authorized personnel of some sort. fairly new to the underground scene, this was the girl’s third time down and the other guy’s second. i tell them that in all my subterranean trips, i had never come across other student explorers. it was truly a strange coincidence.
passing moore, we veer from the route towards the life sciences building to investigate the inverted fountain and see if there were any significant areas underneath. heading east, we notice a line of graffiti. new york, it read, followed by an arrow. under the supposed area beneath the inverted fountain, we don't find anything, and the areas under schoenberg are quite an equal let down, aside from the large graffiti covered machinery at the schoenberg-perloff junction. backtracking to the spot where we originally veered from our path, we were again heading down the life sciences route.
rectangular instead of round and incredibly hot, the tunnel lay on a straight downward slope. pausing to catch a breath and take a break from the eighty-plus degree heat, we stop at the intersection under the science quad before continuing south. below life sciences, a well-lit machine room churns out strange noises while one green piece of pump-machinery churns out water, which drips down the sides and splashes on the floor. we don’t think it is supposed to do that. continuing on, we begin the route towards the steam plant and into the belly of the smoking beast.
pitch black, the cramped tunnel snakes its way off campus and into westwood. somewhere around halfway, one connecting tunnel extends south. only graffiti would let us know it headed towards the medical plaza. skipping the detour, we keep going ahead, down deeper into the earth. with the beam from my flashlight too weak to alight the end of the tunnel, i can only point it to the ground, keeping us from walking onto anything. at the end of the tunnel, the farthest i had ever come and the farthest we would come today, lay a concrete hole that extended some ten to fifteen feet down. a propped-up wooden ladder was the only sign that someone had passed this way before. shining our flashlights down, we saw that a few feet from the bottom, lay another hole that extended even farther down – and by down i mean into the ground and not off to the side. it seemed to us that apparently one really could reach hell if they wanted to. for us however, it was time to turn back. nothing but the dim glow of a pinprick of light at the other end of the tunnel pierced the darkness when we turned off our flashlights. we were on the return to the life sciences building, the safest exit to the surface among our other medical plaza and steam plant options. back at the lit half-way junction, we pause to leave a date under a digital pressure meter on one of the ducts – one last scrawl to commemorate our college years.
under the life sciences building and passing the machinery and overflowing pump, we ascend a small flight of stairs and cautiously push open a door into the middle of a hallway. checking both sides to make sure the coast was clear like a child crossing a street, we exit the underworld and back into life. taking the stairs by the elevator, we go up to the lobby of the building and exit the main doors. inhaling a breath of fresh air and breathing out a sigh of relief, we take a moment to look at the new buildings which had sprung up around the ls building within the past three to four years. this area was no longer familiar to us; the small lecture hall on the side of the building had been demolished to make way for a new science building – i don’t even know its name. i am struck by the realization of how much time had actually pass. all that was recognizable during my first year in college as a science major had disappeared – the only thing that remained constant was the tunnel. just like dickson hall, our entrance tonight, where a large lecture hall had since been remodeled to become two building floors, the familiar had become the foreign. the only thing that remained constant was the in-between, underground.
since the construction of the campus, it is these tunnels that have remained constant and the abundance of graffiti that can attest to that fact. made up entirely of history, partly by legend, moderately by rumor, and always by adventure, the veins and arteries of ucla will always remain frozen in time and fond memory. goodbye ucla, thank you for all you have had to offer and allowed me to discover.
ucla, underground.
heading to campus a little before two at night, we walk along desolate streets lit orange by campus street lamps. every so often, a car drives by while we stroll, chat, and make big gestures with our hands to appear as if we are actually carrying on a significant conversation. first stop was franz hall and deciding against entering the alley between franz and young through a loading bay, we walk through the inverted fountain plaza instead, surveying the scene and ignoring the handful of college students talking and hanging out around the fountain. walking into the science quadrangle and rounding franz’s corner, we go down the plant-filled alley, looking in bushes for the floor grate which would let us into the depths of campus. finding the entrance locked, we head for murphey instead.
the area around murphey hall unfortunately has a small scattering of campus maintenance and facilities personnel, who from what we can guess, get off work at two. surveying the area while looking as if we were just taking a late-night final-exams study-break to walk around campus and get some air, we poke around murphey only to abandon the exploration momentarily, after finding out we were in clear view of some personnel walking down the opposite side of the street. perhaps moore would be open and kinsey under construction was looking more and more feasible.
crossing over the “bridge” between the dickson and schoenberg plazas, we take a seat on the steps of the music building to break and rethink our plan of action – we would check out moore, loop back to investigate kinsey in the more inconspicuous alley beside powell, and give murphey another go.
moore, whose doors lock at night offer us no entrance, and despite several open windows, all are too high up and out of reach. the door at the end of the loading alley across from the math sciences building is also unfortunately locked and we move on. to our surprise, kinsey is well-sealed by covered construction fences, and neither of us expected construction companies would do such a good job of it. have you ever had lecture in that hall? i casually ask a friend as a maintenance worker passed. i think people even have physics in it. time to return to murphey.
as we approach the building, two facilities workers are waiting by the curb, most likely for a ride home. few if any people are out now, and seldom do we see a random car drive by. reaching the end of murphey, looking all the while as if we were just heading to the bus stop or the sororities, we jump a low wall into some bushes. duck-walking along the side of the building, and trying not to step on too many crunching leaves, we pass by office windows and over metal grates. finding an unlocked one and noticing a small rung ladder leading down into darkness, we lift the cover and shine in our flashlights. a dead end. looking more like a dungeon or oubliette, nothing but two small windows to basement offices and a drain lie at the bottom. we slide the grate back into place and continue over to the main door of the building, around where an entrance grate should be located, according to our map.
tucked into a set of bushes, we find the grate. though unlocked, the grill is far too large and heavy to lift and secure easily. shining our flashlight down, we follow the metal-rung ladder to a puddle on the floor. it seems the wooden ladder which bridged the metal ladder with dry ground a short distance away had disappeared since my trip three years ago. we agree that we would use this entrance only as a last resort. it was time to check out haines, which had let us in numerous times, and royce, an original entrance from my first explorations.
passing haines, we take a look around the secret window, which always seemed like a good bet. this time, however, it was locked from the inside – both of them. it looked like ucla was getting smart, probably [and hopefully] at the expense of students getting dumb [and caught]. with no way in, we move to royce, hoping my old pathways were still open. royce is unfortunately locked. after a careful survey of the surrounding area and a closer investigation of the lock however, we were in with a click. quickly moving around a corner and out of sight, we pause momentarily to listen for stray noises. feeling safe, we press the elevator call and duck out of the way to insure us from any surprises when the doors slid open. coast clear, we take the lift to the basement level after noticing we could only go lower if we had an access key. emerging into the room with the shelf of blueprints and now, numerous boxes of envelopes, running on my memory we head for an unmarked door ahead of us leading to a well-lit metal stairwell. double checking the door and remembering it locked from the outside, i prop it open with a piece of cardboard. we walk down the metal staircase, which vibrated to a tremendous roar each time we moved, forcing us to pause frequently and listen for security. reaching the sub-basement and discovering the door out is locked, we are forced to head back up and abandon the attempt here. very luckily, the door i propped earlier was still open; if it wasn’t, we could have very well been stuck in the stairwell until daylight.
exiting royce, we head to dickson hall, recalling the building was also under construction, and being tucked into a corner of campus, might offer a less-secured way into the depths below. reaching dickson, we find one gate slightly ajar. moving into the shadows, we writhe through the gate and explore the construction site. the place is deserted. plastic tarps strewn about the skeletal frame of a building that once was and will be again, wave like forgotten ghosts in the abandoned wasteland. locating the stairwell to the basement, and moving about the familiar landscape – the only place that has remained familiar over the past three years, we find the concrete hole in the wall and enter ucla’s underbelly.
moving carefully through the sometimes pitch-black tunnel, i pull my arms in to keep from touching the heated pipes and electrical cords on one side and duck every so often to keep form smashing my head into the fluorescent light bulbs above. reaching the storage bay underneath yrl, we cautiously climb down the rickety metal ladder and take cover behind a large piece of machinery. maneuvering ourselves around and over some pipes, we look down the large warehouse, which is still filled with boxes of books. conveniently, there is no sign of life, and we hop over a file cabinet to reach the door into the blue hub room. unlocked, it opens with a gentle pull. moving about the giant blue pipes and immersed in the sound of the steady hum of pumping water, we find the dark entrance to the tunnel towards royce. reaching the end, we exit the door marked “service tunnel” and into a small machine room filled with steaming cracks in the floor and boxes of air filters. checking the maintenance bay under royce and finding it clear, we snake through to the other door down the hall, which luckily also opened right up. apparently, it seems most doors remain unlocked when an entire area is restricted. entering the unmarked door and going up the short flight of stairs, we were headed towards powell library.
under powell, wires and graffiti fill the tiny room connecting several tunnels. an old wooden door, looking very much like the one we could not get through on one of my first explorations, lies dusty and walked over upon the ground. on the wall another more modern and secure door seems to have replaced it. crawling over an incredibly large and treacherous bundle of wires and squeezing by some heated pipes, we were off to moore.
as we entered the earth-bottomed and broken-cement-strewn dump yard under moore hall, we notice a pair of people on the other end of the large underground room. also noticing us at the same moment, we all freeze, until a more careful scrutinizing of them leads me to wave them over. followed by a friend of hers, the girl comes skipping over, obviously relieved that we were not authorized personnel of some sort. fairly new to the underground scene, this was the girl’s third time down and the other guy’s second. i tell them that in all my subterranean trips, i had never come across other student explorers. it was truly a strange coincidence.
passing moore, we veer from the route towards the life sciences building to investigate the inverted fountain and see if there were any significant areas underneath. heading east, we notice a line of graffiti. new york, it read, followed by an arrow. under the supposed area beneath the inverted fountain, we don't find anything, and the areas under schoenberg are quite an equal let down, aside from the large graffiti covered machinery at the schoenberg-perloff junction. backtracking to the spot where we originally veered from our path, we were again heading down the life sciences route.
rectangular instead of round and incredibly hot, the tunnel lay on a straight downward slope. pausing to catch a breath and take a break from the eighty-plus degree heat, we stop at the intersection under the science quad before continuing south. below life sciences, a well-lit machine room churns out strange noises while one green piece of pump-machinery churns out water, which drips down the sides and splashes on the floor. we don’t think it is supposed to do that. continuing on, we begin the route towards the steam plant and into the belly of the smoking beast.
pitch black, the cramped tunnel snakes its way off campus and into westwood. somewhere around halfway, one connecting tunnel extends south. only graffiti would let us know it headed towards the medical plaza. skipping the detour, we keep going ahead, down deeper into the earth. with the beam from my flashlight too weak to alight the end of the tunnel, i can only point it to the ground, keeping us from walking onto anything. at the end of the tunnel, the farthest i had ever come and the farthest we would come today, lay a concrete hole that extended some ten to fifteen feet down. a propped-up wooden ladder was the only sign that someone had passed this way before. shining our flashlights down, we saw that a few feet from the bottom, lay another hole that extended even farther down – and by down i mean into the ground and not off to the side. it seemed to us that apparently one really could reach hell if they wanted to. for us however, it was time to turn back. nothing but the dim glow of a pinprick of light at the other end of the tunnel pierced the darkness when we turned off our flashlights. we were on the return to the life sciences building, the safest exit to the surface among our other medical plaza and steam plant options. back at the lit half-way junction, we pause to leave a date under a digital pressure meter on one of the ducts – one last scrawl to commemorate our college years.
under the life sciences building and passing the machinery and overflowing pump, we ascend a small flight of stairs and cautiously push open a door into the middle of a hallway. checking both sides to make sure the coast was clear like a child crossing a street, we exit the underworld and back into life. taking the stairs by the elevator, we go up to the lobby of the building and exit the main doors. inhaling a breath of fresh air and breathing out a sigh of relief, we take a moment to look at the new buildings which had sprung up around the ls building within the past three to four years. this area was no longer familiar to us; the small lecture hall on the side of the building had been demolished to make way for a new science building – i don’t even know its name. i am struck by the realization of how much time had actually pass. all that was recognizable during my first year in college as a science major had disappeared – the only thing that remained constant was the tunnel. just like dickson hall, our entrance tonight, where a large lecture hall had since been remodeled to become two building floors, the familiar had become the foreign. the only thing that remained constant was the in-between, underground.
since the construction of the campus, it is these tunnels that have remained constant and the abundance of graffiti that can attest to that fact. made up entirely of history, partly by legend, moderately by rumor, and always by adventure, the veins and arteries of ucla will always remain frozen in time and fond memory. goodbye ucla, thank you for all you have had to offer and allowed me to discover.
ucla, underground.
