hang out and get drunk and party

October 2, 2020 3:43 PM

A secret ‘man cave’ has been discovered in a room beneath Grand Central Station. “The supervisor of the locksmith shop – who is not a licensed locksmith – could not access the room because only actual locksmiths had access.” However, it pales in comparison to the full-sized secret badminton court discovered during the redevelopment of Kings Cross.
posted by adrianhon (38 comments total)

It also featured...a drawing of a stick figure with an erect penis next to a dog.
At least they were honest.
posted by agentofselection at 3:50 PM on October 2, 2020 [8 favorites]

apparently it’s against MTA policy to set up a secret room and drink while you’re working

Another clear case of Health & Safety gone mad.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:54 PM on October 2, 2020 [12 favorites]

Then there’s Track 61—an entirely secret train track that was used exclusively by rich people which led straight to the lavish Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Surely they mean the Walled-off Astoria, amirite?
posted by ZenMasterThis at 4:06 PM on October 2, 2020 [19 favorites]

This warms my heart.
posted by swift at 4:07 PM on October 2, 2020 [7 favorites]

"...almost-clever Metro-North employees..." Heh, this article is funny as well as informative.
posted by jessamyn at 4:11 PM on October 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

Can't hold a candle to Paris's covert catacombs cinema (with P.A. system, bar, lounge, workshop, and couscous maker).
posted by Iris Gambol at 4:11 PM on October 2, 2020 [8 favorites]

However, it pales in comparison to the full-sized secret badminton court discovered during the redevelopment of Kings Cross.

We can't bring up secret sports courts in high-traffic places without mentioning the half-basketball court in the Matterhorn at Disneyland!
posted by LSK at 4:16 PM on October 2, 2020 [9 favorites]

"It just completely destroys the reputation of Metro North, it's so disturbing on so many levels," said Rinaldi. "These employees should not be doing this when they're on the job, so to have this thing set up it completely unacceptable."

Translation: "I don't have a good time at my job so nobody gets to!"
posted by deadaluspark at 4:33 PM on October 2, 2020 [23 favorites]

I love these spaces and I love the people who make and maintain these spaces.

Until very recently my workplace had a secret lounge accessible via a hidden door, with comfy overstuffed chairs and beer/wine on tap. Alas, this artifact of a bygone era was dismantled in favor of a conference room last year... (and of course I haven't even been to the office since March anyway).
posted by turbowombat at 4:52 PM on October 2, 2020 [9 favorites]

I read about this the other day and the first thing that came to mind was the novel Slakes Limbo, which I absolutely loved as a kid.
posted by niicholas at 4:53 PM on October 2, 2020 [8 favorites]

"I'm a locksmith...and I'm a locksmith."
posted by maxwelton at 4:56 PM on October 2, 2020 [28 favorites]

Man Builds Secret Apartment At Mall, Gets Away With It For Four Years
posted by ActingTheGoat at 5:00 PM on October 2, 2020 [11 favorites]

Hidden Studio Suspended Under a Bridge
posted by ActingTheGoat at 5:02 PM on October 2, 2020 [6 favorites]

"It just completely destroys the reputation of Metro North, it's so disturbing on so many levels," said Rinaldi. "These employees should not be doing this when they're on the job, so to have this thing set up it completely unacceptable."

I had never heard of Cathy Rinaldi before today, but I did spend six summers working in a sprawling steel mill. Let me tell you, Ms. Rinaldi is charmingly naive about blue collar workspaces.

In non-industrial setting: my dad lived in a bungalow for several years post-divorce, and when he remarried and had a growing family, he had the old six-hundred-square-foot place torn down and replaced with a much larger house. The basement of the old house did not match where the new place’s downstairs would be, and iirc, my dad was told the difference between filling it in and keeping it was pretty trivial ($200 or so). He kept it, and it became a hidden fort/playroom for my younger siblings. Ventilation, power, and lights were all hooked up.

He sold the place twenty years ago. I don’t know if it has changed hands more since then, but I wonder what the current owners must think of a half-sized door hidden behind the furnace that takes you to a decently-sized room under the front foyer.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:47 PM on October 2, 2020 [18 favorites]

> Then there’s Track 61—an entirely secret train track that was used exclusively by rich people which led straight to the lavish Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

That's overstating the case a bit. The designation "presidential siding" was possibly used simply for publicity value ... By 1978, the platform was known as one of the many places in Grand Central Terminal where squatters lived.
posted by offog at 5:49 PM on October 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

A secret room hidden inside Grand Central? Did they find Peter Lake sleeping for a century in there?
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 5:49 PM on October 2, 2020 [9 favorites]

When I was in library school, I worked as a document delivery intern at Harvard Law School. One of my jobs was to page items from the "closed stacks" which were deep-storage areas accessed through unmarked doors off hallways in the basement below Langdell Hall. These book stacks were dark and had automated lighting that turned on when you got close and turned off as you moved away, so as you walked back into these (quite large) underground rooms the lights would come on around you, but turn off behind you, so you'd be in a pool of light among all the old law books, surrounded by deep darkness. One day, back in the far far corner of one of these stack areas, I stumbled upon a set of couches, between them a coffee table with ashtrays and some sci-fi paperbacks, and a side table with a table lamp and an old-timey radio. It was a pretty comfy looking set-up - just a little smokin' and readin' lounge. I never got to really use it; I had to check out keys to get into these particular stacks and people were usually hot to get whatever I was retrieving... so never had a lot of free time. Plus I think I would have had an absolute heart attack if I was back there in the corner, and saw the little pools of light clicking on and off as someone walked back towards this spot.
posted by niicholas at 6:46 PM on October 2, 2020 [23 favorites]

I have to say looking at the picture this isn't nearly as cool as I imagined.
posted by eagles123 at 6:52 PM on October 2, 2020 [10 favorites]

and the supervisor of the locksmith shop -- who is not a licensed locksmith -- could not access the room because only actual locksmiths had access.

I see what you did there.
posted by clavdivs at 7:51 PM on October 2, 2020 [5 favorites]

Holy Cow! Slake’s Limbo!!! I loved that book!
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 8:00 PM on October 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

Saaaaammmmmeeee.
posted by jessamyn at 8:13 PM on October 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

My one bizarro subway experience consists of riding through the "Ghost Stations" of East Berlin a time or two back in the 1980s.

They were stations on the West Berlin subway line, that just happened to lie in East Berlin when it was divided. So the stations remained in place--unused, darkened, and heavily guarded by the East German security forces--and West German trains just kept rolling through them, many times a day, slowing down but never stopping.

It was pretty strange to ride through that section.
posted by flug at 9:00 PM on October 2, 2020 [16 favorites]

I was an apprentice pipefitter at a Southern California shipyard in the early ‘90s, and “tanks” were a big part of the pipeshop’s remit. Big tanks. Fuel tanks, ballast tanks, freshwater tanks. They were big as buildings. There were tanks within tanks and tanks under storerooms and tanks under gyms and more aft and some nextdoor. I was part of the crew that had to test them for integrity. We sealed all the vents and pumped them full of compressed air and stood around for an hour until the Navy signed them off. Then we tore down and tested another one. You see a lot of the lower parts of a ship that way.

Also after a while you started to find some quiet out of the way tanks where you could tuck into a pitch black corner after lunch, switch on yer headlamp, and spend the afternoon reading Madame Bovary.
posted by notyou at 9:09 PM on October 2, 2020 [12 favorites]

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
posted by bendy at 10:08 PM on October 2, 2020 [10 favorites]

The MTA is run by lazy men who would rather retreat to their man caves than work to improve transit for the residents of NYC and its surrounding counties.

But enough about Governor Cuomo...
posted by thecaddy at 4:53 AM on October 3, 2020 [5 favorites]

"It just completely destroys the reputation of Metro North"

I think the reputation of Metro North is more likely based on whether or not they do their frickin jobs, not on the required amount of discomfort during downtimes... but otherwise A+, sounds like a boss I'd work for
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 5:35 AM on October 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

/
posted by fragmede at 5:58 AM on October 3, 2020

The bosses rhetoric about this drove me mad. Let workers have their space to rest! They don't even have any evidence that people went there during their work hours. If you're working a split shift and just want to take a nap or it's your lunch break and you want to watch tv and chat with your friends this sounds great. All they found was a half drunk beer and they lost their minds. Work sucks let them have this!
posted by dis_integration at 7:10 AM on October 3, 2020 [13 favorites]

This story made me laugh because I've built myself little away spaces in most of the places I've worked.

At the museum, I found a little room that was originally built to house a condenser barrel for the HVAC that had never been installed as a result of a regulatory snafu that made it necessary to place it further into the galleries. To reach it, you had to go through a locked door to the basement air handler room, go behind the main air handler, tiptoe around a bundled-up Polynesian outrigger, squeeeze through a tight gap, then climb the rungs of a rebar ladder through several stories to get to a narrow concrete room accessible from no other part of the building.

I outfitted this space with tatami mats, painted the walls a lovely soft blue, installed a few mosaic pieces I'd made there, and had nice string lighting and some cushions, with a selection of books, a boom box, and an old laptop I used primarily to watch old episodes of Lost In Space. The whole room thrummed with this windy, industrial sound that was a lot like those simulated womb sound machines they use to calm fussy babies. I had many cozy naps there, read a lot, and just took a break from the workload of 10-12 hour days for which, as a salaried employee, I was paid for eight.

I suppose the American narrative is that when you're on my clock you're on my time, or, if you work in food service, if you have time to lean, you have time to clean, but those attitudes can fuck themselves forever, as can the people who most frequently enforce those things.

When I was running a giant clocktower, I found a room where a long-abandoned radio station console lived, so I cleaned it up, installed a cruddy old Empire sofa and a lamp, and napped there. In the old school building I ran for a while, I turned a basement storage room full of rusted rakes and paint cans into a cozy sitting room with a little couch, room to park a Vespa, and a selection of pocket-sized books on photography, and while I was managing a community theater, I'd curl up in the fake living rooms on stage. I've had a tent tucked in the woods next to the office park where I was a high security document archivist so I could sneak out on my lunch break and listen to radio drama on a minidisc player until an alarm would alert me to the need to return to my scanners.

Now I'm at a large university, working in an off-campus lab with lots of strange little hidden spaces left over from when the building was an interrogation center for the NSA, and I have a master key, but I won't tell.

I thank Virginia Woolf, under my breath, get out my keys, and slip away when need be.

I understand everything about the instinct to find a bolthole and nothing about people who can no longer connect to that part of themselves that desires such a refuge.
posted by sonascope at 10:23 AM on October 3, 2020 [60 favorites]

"It just completely destroys the reputation of Metro North, it's so disturbing on so many levels," said Rinaldi. "These employees should not be doing this when they're on the job, so to have this thing set up it completely unacceptable."

Huh! You would almost think she was talking about the people who money into that Allianz structured asset fund Oopsie!

Or if you like it with less outrage: Insurance Journal
posted by Pembquist at 1:21 PM on October 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm having difficulty understanding being super mad about this because I got the same kind amenities at the popular tech company I worked at for many years. Heck, ours were way more expensive. I mean, if they do their job, who cares? Totally get it should be recorded as expenses and available to all employees, but we make it so difficult to treat public employees well, that I understand how it happened, I guess?

Maybe with more context, I'd be more upset, but, on its face, it's just "yeah, sounds like a break room?"
posted by jmhodges at 1:47 PM on October 3, 2020 [7 favorites]

These are all child's play compared to the guy in Chicago who built an apartment with pirated electricity, a TV, game console, microwave and heat, beneath a drawbridge on Lakeshore Drive and lived in it for three or four years.
posted by srboisvert at 5:00 PM on October 3, 2020 [5 favorites]

I like how they report that bit about the supervisor not having access as if, oh well, shrug, that's an unfortunate thing about locksmithing. If I'm the supervisor: wrong. And hey, I'd be all for converting it to a breakroom since it obviously wasn't needed for anything else. But I'm not having people in a space unless I can vouch for the safety, lack of nudie pictures on the walls, etc.

Sounds more like a flimsy denial by that supervisor, reported as fact.
posted by ctmf at 6:39 PM on October 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

Reminds me of the dude who lived in the depths of the music building at University of Washington for over a decade. Most of the comforts of home, but judging from 25 2-liter bottles filled with urine, indoor plumbing was not among them.
posted by Sublimity at 7:23 PM on October 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

I'm afraid to ask if he had jars full of poop.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:04 AM on October 4, 2020

Also in this vein: the homeless guy who dug a secret bunker under Hampstead Heath (a park in London).
posted by automatronic at 4:37 AM on October 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

Beyond the simple pleasures of beer and naps, these were clearly connoisseurs of life’s finer things.

Leaving aside the drinking parties complaint implied to be from a disgruntled worker: Wow, what incredibly breathless reporting from someone who apparently has never had any exposure to industrial maintenance besides depending on it to get to and from his job and enable his job to be there in the first place. Do you have crystal chandeliers and the best of Mozart on repeat in your cube? Chateau '48 on ice in your desk side globe bar?

Minus all the cloak and dagger about the keys (which honest was probably butt covering as I can't imagine the locksmiths working in the room you need to traverse to get to a breakroom had no knowledge) this seems like a perfectly normal break room that I've set up with tact acknowledgment or explicit instruction dozens of times that was even being used for the storage of workplace materials.

Even the mattress is in theory no big deal. Lunch time is your own time and if you want to spend it sleeping instead of eating that's up to you. And some graveyard maintenance jobs you are paid to literally just be there in case something goes wrong; you have no other tasks. I've played many the game of cribbage and chess while waiting for something to happen.

The only thing offensive here is apparently at least two union wiremen were using this space and they didn't ever throw a wall plate on the light switch.
posted by Mitheral at 6:02 PM on October 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

The only thing offensive here is

...that someone was apparently drinking a Lagunitas IPA and/or - God help us all - diet cranberry juice.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:38 PM on October 4, 2020 [1 favorite]