(no subject)

[stormdog]

On Thursday night of last week, I joined netrage and Craig, one of the HVAC guys who's working on rehabilitating the heating and cooling system, at the Rhode Opera House in downtown Kenosha. We were on an expedition to determine where the water that we're still having problems with in the women's restroom and the basement was coming in. The theories were either down from the roof, or up from some underground source like a leaking pipe. The first place we checked was up.

This is the view from the first level of the roof, on top of the grand hall, looking up toward the second level roof which is over the auditorium and the third level roof over the stage. The Rhode is has a long, narrow grand hall or lobby, about two stories tall. At the interior end of the hall, the building widens out into a corridor that serves the original five aisles of the auditorium and a second floor mezzanine serving the five aisles of the balcony, as well as a third floor projection facility. At the stage end of of the auditorium, the theatre rises to about five floors, or seventy feet, to give room for the flyloft and rigging to operate curtains and flying scenery. The metal panels on the right seal the orginal outside air intake for the theatre. That's going to be opened up and fitted with new grills during the course of the project and will be used once again. The metal-sealed window to the left side leads to the bathroom in the projectionist's booth; it was sealed up after having been broken into at one point.

We found a few problem areas that are almost certainly letting water in; at one corner of the second level of the roof, capstones are missing from top of the encircling wall; water can run right down inside the theater along the interior of the brick work. As well, there was a spto where the material of the roof was no longer sealed against the wall and has pulled slightly away from it. Both places where water is surely worming its way in. Significantly, that corner of the wall is right over the women's restroom on the first floor and other problem areas higher up in the building. The theater doesn't have the money right now to have the whole roof redone, but we're hoping that some judiciously applied fixes will fix the greater part of the problems for a minor part of the cost.

After climbing around all three levels, listening to the music from some sort of festival that was going on a block south, and pointing out a few other buildings of interest to each other, we decided to check into the situation under the women's room. Going down? When Craig (who's in the first roof picture) was first looking over the theatre to get a sense of the scope of the work, one of things he knew he needed to do was to get into the plenums under the auditorium. Because of the cavernous proportions of theatres of this era, the air circulation system can't come in from overhead; the hot air would never get down to the people. Instead, air is pushed out through chambers that run the length of the auditorium, front to back, and rises up from under the seats to keep the audience warm. Those underground chambers are called plenums. These forced air systems were powered by a single fan at a central point in the building. To the right is the outside casing of the fan in the Rhode along with the drive wheel. A rubber belt ran around that wheel and then to a motor that drove the wheel. The fan is part of the rehab project that's going on right now. A custom high torque, low RPM motor has to be fabricated for this fan. The reason that it's so huge is that it can move vast amounts of air at very low speeds, so it's quieter than any forced aire system of this size has a right to be. At about a hundred RPM, this six and a half foot fan will move, if memory serves, about 30,000 cubic feet of air per minute. On this fan, metal scavengers had at some point stolen chunks of the supporting structure and had left the fan and mount hanging from half of it's supports. They'd torched and cut sections of the fan housing too. Fortunately, they left enough to be repairable. If they'd have done any more damage to this essentially irreplaceable equipment, it may not have been able to be restored. The company that made this fan produced models ranging from three to eight feet tall. Craig tells me that if more power than that was needed, they'd be installed in pairs.

But back to the plenums. After going as far as in his search as using crowbar and hammer to unbrick a basement door (turned out to be the door into the orchestra pit) and lifting a four foot by six foot concrete slab out of the ground in one of the entranceways (which turned out to be a trap door into the basement, probably used to install electrical equipment), he finally found the way in; right through ductwork in the machine room. In the picture of the drive wheel, you can see duct work running up and to the left away from the fan. That's the duct work in the picture to the right. (That's netrage standing under it, by the way.) Opening the trap door there reveals a passage up into the guts of the heating system, right under the feet of the audiences who packed into the theatre for the latest movies and plays. It amazes me that in all the hours I spent during my high school days crawling every place in the theatre that I could find, I never found any of what you're about to see. But I was a lot younger then and I guess I just wasn't confident enough to tell my dad or any of the other folks over there that I was going to crawl into a heating duct and see where it went. They probably wouldn't have let me anyway. Oh well; I'm glad indeed to have the chance to see it now. Not only is it fascinating to see more of this building that I love so much, but I have a deeper appreciation for early century architecture in general, and theatres in particular, the more I get to know about them. These places were truly marvels of engineering and I am in awe at the ingenuity that went into designing the infinite number of individual aspects of the space to all work together as a cohesive unit. It's truly beautiful. Once inside, a short scramble leads to a maze of ductwork channels, curling and twisting into all the nooks and crannies of the theatre. As small as the space really is, I could imagine getting lost in there, at least temporarily. I don't think it's big enough to really lose your way in, but I could see having a panicked moment or two as you try to figure out which duct you just crawled out of. I should note too that, while I've never been claustrophobic to any degree, I felt a few twinges down in those spaces. Below are a few of the hundred or so shots that I took as I was squeezing over pipes, and around corners. There were two or three times that I had this sudden realization of being somewhere so remote that not even spiders were around, trapped underground by tons of metal and concrete....

We found a few interesting artifacts down there. A popcorn bag and sardine tin from who knows how long ago, and out under the grand hall there were a few movie posters with electrical planning notes written on them. Whoever was working down there must have grabbed whatever paper happened to be around to make notes on. I was really tickled to find those; I have no idea when the last time anyone was working down there was, but I think it was before the current tenants moved in.

There were other interesting things to find in the ducts and chambers. All the way to the lake side of the building was a pipe run stretching all the way to the far end of the foundation, out past the stage. Three quarters of the way down the run was an old tag wired to a valve wheel. Craig hadn't been down to see what it said, so I decided that I had to squeeze down there with my camera. After five or ten minutes of belly-crawling and leap-frogging the camera and flashlight along the concrete floor and the tops of pipes, I made it to my goal. I was in awe. Someone wired this tag to this valve back when the the theatre was built, probably as the foundations were being poured, eighty years ago; fifty-two years before I was born. I wonder what it connects to...

Then we went through a little metal door way and we were in one of the actual plenums. I didn't quite know what to expect, but I wasn't disappointed; this was certainly the neatest and most unusual man-made underground space I've ever been in. The plenum is a rectangular concrete serviceway that extends across the entire length of the auditorium, stopping where the orchestra pit under the stage begins. Along the entire length of one side of the plenum runs the duct that leads eventually back to the fan. Hot air was, and will be, pushed out into these ducts where it exits through louvers in the top and rushes up and out the scores of small holes in the ceiling, each of which connects to a ventilation grill below the seats in the auditorium. These chambers are about five feet square at the entrance and shrink progressively down. I can't say quite how small they get because I didn't go farther than I could comfortably make it on hands and knees. There has to be an accessway like this because the louvers that control air flow are manual. To get airflow just in the front or back of the auditorium, someone has to clamber down into each of the five plenums and open and close the louvers as appropriate. The same is true for the ducts running under the grand hall and out to the lobby. Everything is manually operated and requires no small amount of wiggling through obstacles to make it to. Seeing all of this helps me put some of the things I've seen in the abandoned Palace Theatre in Gary together in my head. I wish the basement of the palace wasn't flooded; it would be so neat to go down there and find a way into the plenums there and see how the structure compares. Maybe I'd even find a wallet like the one Craig turned up in one of the side ducts under the Rhode (he managed to locate its owner, who'd lost it about thirty years ago, all the way out in Alaska and return it to him). Everything down in the ducts and plenum chambers, as well as in the dirt-floored crawlspace under the grand hall, was dry as a bone. we're fairly sure that the water that's been coming in and causing damage is leaking from the spots on the roof that we looked at. All the pipes and passages down underground were in good shape.

After a couple of hours spent crawling and sliding around the artificial caverns, we climbed back down into the machine room and up the stairway to the door into the men's room and cleaned up a bit before leaving for the day. We were more than a little messy. And there are still a few place I haven't been. While we were on the roof, Craig opened up a trapdoor that I'd always thought was sealed; down inside was a crawlspace above the ceiling of the grand hall. He's also climbed out and around the concrete ledge around the inside of the domed auditorium ceiling above the auditorium, some forty feet above the seats. I'd looked at it before, but was never sure if I could trust it. Now that I have the answer to that question, I need to see it myself. As the machine room project progresses and completes, I'm going to try to get some pictures of the finished product in operation. Even better than that, Craig's worked with one of the facilities managers at the Chicago theatre during the course of his work and tells me that he can take me in there for a tour. The Chicago theatre! I can't wait for it! You'll definitely see the pictures here.