After an outing that took us from the outskirts of the East Valley to the extremes of Avondale, we decided to poke around our very own backyard in downtown Tempe. To the North, pitch-black rooms lit only by our cell phones housed ancient machines, gears sealed by decades of rust, whose motors once drove steam and smoke up, up and up through a wild crop of pipes. Only a handful of blocks away stands a modern analog, Centerpoint Condominiums, with that chic glass silhouette belying its dusty lifelessness. Some places grow old and retire; some never see a respectable birth.

To the South, a subterranean stairwell and a lucky yank on a heavy door led us down into a flip-side place – a section of the underground tunnel maze that every city or large institution has. This particular network was a utility system, distributing heat, water and electricity across its many nodes and extremities. No matter where you are, there's this entire mirror-world beneath your feet, and it's not always as unexciting as heat tunnels; I've read about a bowling alley buried under Central and Pierce in downtown PHX – unbearably curious, isn't it, but even more so is simply thinking about what's down there, just six feet below the sidewalk, that someone forgot to tell someone about, and so on, until its existence is known to only a few. Or none!

An update from a very recent trip should go up later this week.

         

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Halcyon_Days_2.zip (2142 KB)