By Daan Brok & Gerjanne Hoek
Have you ever wondered what worlds hide beyond the boring classrooms we inhabit all week? Or, to be more precise: what lies under and above? So have we. In all our main campus buildings, there’s a bunch of spaces students normally never get to see. And being the young explorers that we are, we shamelessly asked Onno, housemaster since day 2 (on day 1 they found out they forgot to hire a housemaster) to give us a tour round the campus. Follow us on this adventure through weirdly-shaped corridors, up narrow ladders and down creepy hallways.
Our adventure started in the basement of Franklin, the old town hall. We descended the stairs that you would normally go up to go to F-16 or the old ‘Gothic’ halls. There, we were faced with a gloomy hallway with old tiles, full of cardboard boxes with mundane contents (we assume, we didn’t check). In this hallway we find ourselves facing six doors, all leading to other parts underground, and we made Onno open every single one of them. One leads to a room that used to be a bathroom, but is now converted into storage space for the Vleeshal, the exhibition room in the Franklin building that you can access from the Market Square. Another leads to the so-called ‘bezinkput’, basically the well/hole in the ground in which all residue from toilet visits came to smell and be absorbed into the ecosystem (it’s no longer used, bless us). Another leads to something more interesting, we think: a large complex of tunnels that spreads from the old, Gothic entrance hall to the student desk and below Helm Square to Theodore. We felt totally guerilla.
The tunnels are relatively new. They were built after the town hall had been bombed during the Second World War and had to be completely renovated. The picture with the silver tubes gives a pretty good impression of what we saw there: ventilation tubes going from one big room with massive ventilators and other air-refreshing machines to the big halls in the building, and to Theodore. It felt like we were in a parallel universe! In the seemingly endless hallways we stumbled upon some treasures of yore: old and lonely desk chairs that were ruthlessly discarded because someone didn’t like the fact that all chairs were different, Roosevelt Academy promotional material and a Soviet Union propaganda poster (?!).
When we finally made our way out of the tunnels, we decided to go higher. We went up to the Maquettezaal, where we took a backdoor and were faced with the relics of what the room used to be: an exhibition space for maquettes (models of parts of the city) and the film room of the municipality. There was still an old model standing there, gathering dust. After gathering all of our mental strength, we went up two very wobbly ladders and found ourselves on top of the ceiling of the Burgerzaal. As you can see in the picture, we were able to walk down the length of the Burgerzaal on a wooden walkway between the metal beams that were put up to make sure the town hall wouldn’t burn down again. It was a very weird experience. Did you know they replace lightbulbs through the floors of the attic??
Now this is only a small part of our tour: we also visited the basement of Eleanor (with relics from the time before the war when it was still a bank), the inaccessible rooms in the Elliott basement, the attic above Franklin 16 (with a SCANDALOUS anecdote about a student, stuck on the toilet, escaping by crawling over walls and through a pitch-black corridor) and we have a great story of how UCR was accused of throwing a party in Franklin’s clock tower. Be sure to check out the digital version of this story when it comes out for more!
For Part II, keep an eye out for the Fall 2016 Print Edition!
Daan Brok, Class of 2016, is an International Law and Politics major from ‘s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands.
Gerjanne Hoek, Class of 2018, is a Linguistics, Politics and History major from Bunschoten-Spakenburg, the Netherlands.
