The Basement | Hacker News Reader

The Basement

cabel.me

486 pointschrislloyd36 comments

One of the things I like the most about these photos is the fact that the workers who cut & drilled the walls to install the "new" cables/conduit actually made an effort to not destroy the old clippings on the wall. Sure, there's a place where it's clear they had to seam or otherwise plaster over one section, but for he most part it looks as if they kept it as-is.

This makes me happy. I've seen so many other cases where people doing their jobs totally ignore their surrounds and paint over, cut through, or destroy the things around them with nary more than a shrug and a "just doing my job".

"Turns out, he claims, “they used to print The Oregonian down here, way back.”

The pressmen, one imagines, worked day and night down here, working the lumbering machines, spitting out another edition of the day’s business."

I used to be in that industry. I don't think they printed this paper in the basement (at least not a newspaper). I've had experience getting even small printing machinery into a basement (that was not even as sub grade as this one). It's a big task. You have to either cut a whole in the floor or take it down a bilco type basement door. Generally it would be on reinforced first floors or possibly even above that on reinforced floors (where it could easily be craned into windows if necessary). Then you have the issue with paper down and up most importantly.

It's hard to say exactly based on the info provided in the article. If this was done by web it most certainly wouldn't be in a basement as you would need ceiling height in addition to size and weight of the equipment. And it wouldn't make any sense. Also, you have issues with humidity in basements that have an impact on printing inks and paper. And you would also have the rolls of paper most likely (or sheets once again hard to say w/o more details) to get in and out of the basement? What would be the reason that you would want to do all that extra work?

You're correct, this was The Oregonian's editing office and the erstwhile home of the owner but not a press.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittock_Block

Right and further:

"The paper's offices and presses were originally housed in a two-story building at the intersection of First Street (now First Avenue) and Morrison Street, but in 1892 the paper moved into a new nine-story building at 6th and Alder streets"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregonian

This is most likely correct although that building does have an exceptionally large basement and sub-basement. It originally housed an entire electrical substation and steam generating plant that supplied steam to many nearby buildings.

I suspect this space (which could now be used by generators) and the tunnels and conduits previously used for steam (which could now be used for fibre and other connectivity) are what made the Pittock an ideal location for a carrier hotel.

Relevant: http://vintageportland.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/pittock-bloc...

"100 years from now, when another one of you goes spelunking around this basement, that data, those bits, today’s moments, will likely be long, long gone."

Well said. Back then the images were pasted on real walls and it adds to the emotional appeal. And now the images are pasted on virtual walls (aka Facebook/desktops).

I always wondered this. The new technology is great in spreading the images wide (wide in the spacial plane - I can see what was there in that room, and I'm sitting here far far away. That is the beauty of new technology. ). But it fails to spread it deep (call it in an emotional plane).

Quite an interesting point. You suggest that the act of doing something mechanical does add emotional value to it. But what adds even more is time. Look at your Facebook posts from five years ago, or even your tweets from last year. Time passing makes you feel different about things.

I think the emotional appeal of those pictures pasted to the wall comes from the sheer age of them, in sharp contrast to the high tech equipment in the same room.

I am more concerned about the preservation of our postings than the emotional value. Things that really matter will produce the same emotions regardless of the medium.

You've hit the nail on the head. I (very) occasionally visit a messageboard that was active about a decade ago out of nostalgia.

I think that applies to a lot more than images. I think that this new technology spreads our friendships wide (we can have many friends, including people we haven't met in real life) but not deep (more text messages saying "what's up?" and fewer long conversations in person).

Conversely, it can spread our interests wide, and much deeper than before (for those that we really care about).

Best we can hope for in the case of Facebook is some kind of rescue and archive act like for Geocities - although I think the Geocities archive started too late and some of it was lost :-(

To put things in perspective, 200 years ago there were no photos in existence to paste onto walls. So what we're feeling is a cultural nostalgia for a very short period in humankind.

True, but there are other kinds of images--paintings, sketches, drawings on a cave wall. We've been putting things on walls for a long time.

That's what I found so depressing in the (awesome) augmented reality video, "Sight":

http://vimeo.com/46304267

When the characters have their digital glasses on, the guy's apartment is full of pendants and shiny decorations. But you can see that without the glasses, the walls are bare.

Photography is new, but humans have affixed art to walls for millennia. It would be insane if that ended.

Interesting video.

After playing with user interfaces like Bump Top, the idea of just hanging an image somewhere doesn't have the same feeling as having it physically there.

I've worried about this. While we can sift through hundred-year-old photos of our great grandparents, what will our great grandchildren sift through a hundred years from now? We generate more photos and written word by orders of magnitude, but often this data gets lost as we fail to back up data, social networks shut down, or we simply no longer have computers or software designed to view antiquated data. I guess what scares me is that our digital heritage is so easy to wipe out or at the very least, misplace.

There's a flip side, though: digital material is also easier to copy than physical material. This means copies are more likely to get made, which means it's less likely that the loss of any one copy will totally remove the material from the historical record.

And you won't have boxes of super-8 film in your basement slowly rotting because no one has the time to encode them to a digital media. My family has tons of super-8, VHS and simple photos which will, in all likelihood, rot into nothingness because no one will fish them out of the basement in time.

There are problems with digital media (e.g. easy to lose it all if you don't have a good backup scheme, or don't continually keep up with current formats). But its easier that physically copying old media.

I'm in the middle of reading "Tubes" by Andrew Blum, which is the story of how the Internet was physically built. MAE-East, PAIX, Ashburn, and all that.

The Kindle version is $1.99 right now. I paid $9.99 for it last week.

http://www.amazon.com/Tubes-Journey-Center-Internet-ebook/dp...

Obligatory http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

90s-era

I guessed it was a newspaper shop before he got to the bit about the Oregonian. All the marks are in blue pencil, which was a common tool in graphic arts until the digital era. And because it's a big basement in an old building in the center of a big city, that to me says newspaper.

A non-sequitor of sorts - on the subject of Cables and Underground - if you have never read Jamie Zawinski's (jwz) Cable Story, it is one of the most fascinating real engineering reads I've ever read.

"What happens when a 230 kilovolt underground cable shorts out"

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/

And for a bit more info on the infrastructure spoken of above.

http://psc.wi.gov/thelibrary/publications/electric/electric1...

edit: Also, very nice post and find, Thanks!!

Really cool post. If you have ever been in a printing room while a press was operating, it's an amazing experience. It's crazy to think that through those small pipes more data is being passed - more variety, more volume - than was ever passed with all the cacophony of the press.

When something catches your eye on the Internet, do you pull out virtual scissors and paste the clipping to a virtual wall?

Pinterest.

I'm going to start printing out stuff and actually glue it to the wall behind my monitor. Should look awesome after a year or so.

Thanks for the idea.

I did this with lolcat photos when I first started my current job. Leaving a bit of extra white space at the bottom made them look like little Polaroids.

I have corkboards stuck up with double sided pads. Just a rotating display of (real) postcards, printouts and (actual) newspaper articles. A nice displacement activity is to pull everything off and start again.

I wonder how secure that basement is. Someone going down there with a chainsaw could do a lot of damage.

I’ve in a few basements with a boatload of fiber, and while guarded those watchmen are not paid enough to take on a mad man with a chainsaw.

I just think the crazy folk of America, aren’t angry enough at the internet to try to take it on so physically. (Nor informed enough, nor coherent enough in their planning….)

I believe this is in the Pittock Block building at SW 9th and Washington. While it's certainly not open to all comers, its no Fort Knox. Attractions upstairs include a police substation, two cafes, and a Swedish bric-a-brac-ery.

You're correct—this is the basement of the Pittock. Upstairs are many, many closets for rent to shove servers in.

Leads you to wonder where the 641a equivalent is in that building (or is it in the actual telco building nearby, which a lot of the fiber also runs through, with some additional fiber stubs from the exchange back to the carrier building)

I was expecting some archive.org advertisement at the end.

This is absolutely incredible. I don't have much more to say than that. Thanks for sharing.

I keep meaning to do an art walk like this.

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