Stories from the Archives

It's Too Darn Hot

Cleveland in the winter makes heat a very relevant topic. With a windchill that typically drops below 0 Fahrenheit, one may think that global warming is the biggest joke of the century. The heating we have today, which is typically electric radiator heating in most public building and central heating in the dormitories, is a wonderful development. People can stride around the Kelvin Smith Library in shorts and a t-shirt, although I often wonder how they get back to where they live. Perhaps they just live in the library.

One does not have to pay a heating bill on campus if you live within the university system, or at least it's lumped in with all the other costs. The situation we live in today, however, has been vastly different. And, of course, the source of one particular legend: the underground passageways.

Prior to 1850 at the Western Reserve College, students used wood stoves as a source of heat. Students were expected to furnish their own logs, which could be purchased from local suppliers and kept inside. This may seem inefficient, but a wood stove is very warm and still in use today where electrical or fossil fuels may be inefficient.

In 1850, however, the college implemented the usage of coal stoves as the source of heat to be used in all the college's buildings. The reason behind replacing the coal stoves was that coal was much more modern and efficient as a fuel source, and a way to modernize the college. Students would typically by the ton at the beginning of the year and were to keep it in a coal bin.

While many today have never actually had the pleasure of dealing with coal, those who have will tell it's filthy and generally unpleasant to handle. The dust from the coal gets everywhere, and it can be heavy.So it can be understandable why students took to keeping it in their closet against university policy. Students were also known to pirate each others' bins, leading to the further perceived need to maintain one's own coal. There are accounts of coal literally crashing out of the closet upon health inspection by college officials, much to their chagrin.

Skip forward a century. Individual coal furnaces are no longer existent due to their pollution and general impracticality. Instead, heat is generated by steam pipes that bring in heat to radiators and then is taken away to be heated back up again. The source of the heat is steam plant, which stood near today's University Health Services building. In order to get the steam generated at the steam plant (which still burned coal, just in a concerted, massive amount), it had to be pumped via large pipes, or tunnels, into the building which would then break away into pipes.

This is the source of the rumor that there are hidden tunnels hidden below case: they are. The entrances to these tunnels are no longer marked but one can find their way down to them from some of the older science buildings. Fortunately for any wary adventures, steam is no longer produced and pumped down these tunnels, so for now they are empty. It would be prudent to advise my readers, however, that it would be imprudent to go down there. Because of suspected activist action during the 1970s and '80s on the Case Western Reserve campus, campus security has locked these tunnels and recently put in motion sensors. So for now, the only ones allowed down there are the rats clever enough to find a way.

By Greg Wu (gregory dot wu at case dot edu)

Sources: Case Western Reserve: a History, by C.H. Cramer