The Pittsburgh Underground presents Tech Week Blues

As I write this, we just finished up day three of tech week on the latest show I'm working on. Fr those of you who aren't in the theatre industry, please allow me to explain. Tech week is the week before a play or musical opens, when all of the technical elements (set, costumes, sound, props, lights, etc.) are all supposed to come together to create a whole show. The operative word in that previous sentence is "supposed." Many theatre professionals also refer to this time period as "Hell Week," and with good reason. During this time, you can virtually be assured that whatever can go wrong, will.

As a result, much of my adventuring has been curtailed temporarily. So naturally, I've turned to find the underside of Pittsburgh, the underground, as it were. I ended up finding much more of the underground than I expected, on two different ends of the spectrum.

The first mini-adventure turned out to be a perfect example of seeing something unexpected. If you travel through the break room of a well known sandwich chain, you can find a staircase going down. This is intriguing, as the restaurant is on the ground floor. Four friends and I decided to investigate what was there. After going down the staircase, we found ourselves in an interesting maze of passages. Here are some of the interesting sights. Total exploration time: 2.5 Hours.

There were several blackboards throughout the building, and most of them had the phrase "Ouroboros Choked" on them.

A wall of what we think was a recording studio.

An abandoned escalator

An absolutely gorgeous vintage radio.

A few days later, I found myself underground in quite a different manner. One of the benefits, at least for me, of working with museums is that I have access to some absolutely fascinating things that very rarely ever see the light of day. In this case, I had a chance to check out this document:

That is a hundred year old hand written document of personal sketches from the American Civil War. In it, the soldiers wrote of their experiences during the War. I had a few hours to investigate this first-hand. A resource like this is literally one of a kind.

As it is now a little after 2 A.M., and I have work tomorrow, I do believe I will get some sleep. Good night all.