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Rushing between classes in the course of the daily grind on the University of Maine campus, it is easy to become distracted by the Stevens Hall cupola or the hundred-year-old brick walls, forgetting the world that lays hidden underground.
For the adventurous, however, a stroll to the bottom of any number of gloomy staircases can reveal an array of details about the history of the campus and the individuals who helped write it.
Collections of carefully preserved and tagged animals, a repurposed shooting range, the official offices of a supposed secret society, portraits of John Wayne — it’s all down there, right under your feet.
Basements have long been relegated to the world of storage, where items not necessary to everyday life are sent to remain out of sight. They are also the domain of the pack rat, a place to keep those things that really should have been sent to the trash long ago but, thanks to the safety from prying eyes available in a windowless subterranean vault, can be kept without fear of an accusatory glare.
In a sense, the basement of a building is a truer representation of its occupants than the manicured and preened upper floors. The story told by the basement’s contents is somehow truer than that of the carefully selected items allowed a glimpse of sunlight through full-sized windows.
Take, for example, the respective cellars of the wings of the Stevens Hall complex. The north and south wings tell very different stories about who uses the rest of the building. Even though both buildings were built during the 1930s as additions to the original center structure, their substructures today bear little resemblance to one another.
Reaching the bottom of the staircase in South Stevens, home to both the department of anthropology and the Maine Folklife Center, is like walking into Indiana Jones’ garage. The time-weathered plywood walls give off an aroma of dust, which goes nicely with archaeological rock flake samples sitting inside dutifully labeled plastic bags.
Aside from similar nondescript stairwell doors, the complex’s northern building is a far different facility. Instead of musky wood walls and poured cement floors, the visitor here is greeted by blinding white tile floors and painted cinderblock walls, a decorating motif that exudes an air of sterility like that of a hospital hallway.
Unlike the focus on studying the long-since departed found in the south building, the basement of North Stevens is teeming with life. The rooms that extend from the central hallways running the length of the structure house offices and psychology experiment laboratories — an underground extension of the department’s main office in neighboring Little Hall, which has no useable basement of its own.
Across campus in the basement of Carnegie Hall, home to various art studios, the objects once again tell stories of those who walk the halls during business hours. Being an art building, the walls here actually do talk — scribbles and doodles peek out from white boards and, obviously, the works have a considerable amount to say as well.
Behind the door to Room 11, a 3D art studio, a board bears the heading “Someday,” an aptly wistful name for a list with no items actually enumerated. In place of the all-important things to do are drawings and the proclamation that “ninjas suck.”
Just outside the door to that studio is a retro clue to the 1906-vintage building’s age: A sign above a locked wooden door alerts the reader to a Halon 1301 fire extinguishing system, popular in the 1960s but phased out by the late 1980s due to its ozone-depleting tendencies.
Then there are the subterranean chambers of the Buchanan Alumni House, as clean and new as the main floors with the addition of soothing soft-rock mood music. Built to house the history and numerous traditions of the university’s 146 years, the lower floors here house the meeting space for the Senior Skulls, the men’s secretive society whose office is clearly marked by a plaque bearing its name.
Toward the end of the Grove Street Extension, the Bryand Global Sciences Center sits above a truly impressive underground chamber that houses collections for the earth sciences department.
Depending on which staircase is used to access the lowest level, the experience can either begin on a deceptive or awe-inspiring note as one leads directly to the storeroom and another ends at the far end of an off-white hallway lined with machine room doors.
One thing is for certain: You will know when you have found the correct room. Crude wooden shelves filled with various geological equipment and samples fill the two-story tall room, which sits behind an unlabeled metal door.
Some of the items here belie the staid reputation of the average geologist. Written on one corner of a blackboard shoved into a random nook is the inscription, “how many rocks does it take for someone to care,” to which another author replied “1 rock + 2 rocks = no one cares.”
On the other side of the room, a portrait of John Wayne in military fatigues sits underneath a tabletop foosball set leaned up against a filing cabinet.
Even some facilities lacking an expansive underground structure lend some clues as to the work taking place above. Rogers Hall, home to the University of Maine Lobster Institute, has only a single basement corridor, but lining the walls is a collection of lobster tracks.
There are those instances, however, when the foundation of a building offers few clues to the upper floors’ daytime inhabitants. Merrill Hall, which hosts the Child Development Learning Center, is built on top of a blazing hot, low-ceilinged crawl space with a dirt floor, a setting more familiar to the set of a horror movie than adjoining a playground.
By far, the strangest collection is found underneath Murray Hall. Officially, the building is home to the biological sciences and the electron microscopy lab, both of which might help contextualize the basement’s contents.
Immediately after exiting the main stairwell, one is confronted by a streak of what appears to be blood spattered on the wall. A note nearby explains the stain is actually part of a teaching exercise for Irv Kornfield’s forensic science class, a graphic illustration of what happens when a human artery is punctured.
Around the corner stands a row of display cases with large, plate glass doors, behind which rest a collection of stuffed birds, carefully arranged into lifelike poses by a taxidermist. Several metal cabinets throughout the substructure are filled with avian and mammalian samples, preserved for close inspection by future students.
These halls do not only lead to chambers of death, however. Sitting across from a row of the aforementioned cabinets is a 7-foot-tall home arcade game named “Quarterback Pass Attack,” the football equivalent of various basketball shooting contests.
In a separate storage room, the majority of which is filled with chicken-wire cages, is a fully decorated Christmas tree accompanied by a light-up reindeer hidden behind a ventilation shaft.
Of course, not all doors are open to the public. Several in those buildings given to the hard sciences carry signs warning about X-ray radiation or the dangerous lasers within, and private laboratories are generally locked. The doors that swing freely, however, can reveal some unexpected treasures for those who care to explore.
Just don’t forget to look down.
Bangor Daily News