A Hacker Adventure in Urban Exploration

by Quidnarious Gooch

In the summer of 2015, I decided to go on a little adventuring with a friend.

Little did I know I would stumble onto a gem of phone history.

This is the view from the outside.  It looked like a normal run down old place, right?

First things first, we decided to hop up on the rooftop.  Neat stuff, pretty stylish and Portal 2-esque.  This was probably a dumb idea in hindsight because we later found the ceiling crumbling in half the building.  Whoops.

We got in the place.

As we started mapping everything out, our first assumption was that it was part of a school, because it seemed to be some sort of dormitory.  We also found communal showers (not pictured).

    

Seeing these seemingly untouched "Do Not Disturb" cards was probably the eeriest part of it all.

We were certainly not the first people there.

We later found a map of the campus.  The other buildings were already demolished, sadly.  We also discovered a dining menu.

We wondered what juicy stuff people had been learning at this place.

Words cannot explain how neglected and totally ignored this place must have been.

We finally found an intact room number placard.  It was not a dormitory.  We still weren't sure what it was yet, but we now knew that this place belonged to AT&T, although the purpose was still unclear.

Eureka.  A folder left behind with a map to the building.

It was a training center for new employees.  Whoa.

Some rooms were completely emptied, while some still had all their furniture like they were simply walked away from for the last time.

Books gave us a clue as to when the building had been in use.  The Yellow Pages said 1989-1990.  We couldn't imagine how this building had been abandoned and fallen apart so quickly.  We put the pieces together with more exploration.  We concluded that this had been an AT&T phone technician training facility.

This place was eerie.  Technology itself is eerie, especially to anyone who was legitimately a phone phreaker and ever themselves dealt with the ominous sounds of the inner switching systems and fiddled with the machinery when they weren't supposed to.

These hotel-like rooms with the TVs and lamps and drawers and stuff really gave me vibes like we were near someone... but we weren't.

The fact that this place was frozen in time, yet relentlessly showed the effects of time passing, was very cool.

Back in the day was a great time indeed.  But now we move forward and readily take on the new dimensions of systems security (or lack of such) in this world.