A Bwog daily editor reports on a distressing development in the world of tunneling:

A year ago, your correspondent made a bid for tunneling immortality. With sharpie in hand, I went in search of the Columbia tunnel system's holy grail--a Manhattan Project-era cyclotron rumored to be somewhere in the upper campus tunnel system.

It turns out that while the 'tron was in fact accessible from the tunnels (by way of an unnecessarily complicated although perhaps more adventurous process where you have to follow a tunnel under Mudd and hop over a wall...there was a great description on the old CU tunnels Wiki, which has mysteriously been taken offline), the thing itself resided on the first floor of Pupin--which is totally locked, unless you feel like going to the Pupin 1 men's room and negotiating the crawlspace between this heating duct and the ceiling.

So negotiate it I did. And what I found, readers, after squeezing myself between a couple of water conduits and dropping into a dank and long-abandoned janitor's closet, was a dungeon-like hallway of empty offices and industrial apparata--interesting, but hardly worth the Mission Impossible-like maneuver it took to get there. But an early-decade cleanup of rooms that had gone virtually untouched since the Manhattan project thankfully spared the building's main attraction (for tunnelers, at least): a single room containing a scattered mess of papers and scientific instruments, in the back left-hand corner of which sat a true piece of Columbia lore: the hulking, oblong outer shell of the cyclotron.

But this adventure is now all but impossible. On a recent visit to Pupin 1 (to use the men's room, actually), I found that a construction company had moved into the once-abandoned hallway; painting over the generations of tunneler grafitto, and occupying an empty office adjacent to the cyclotron room. It's hard to say if this is a short-term headquarters for the new science building at 120th and Broadway, or if the first floor is to be completely gutted and converted into usable space. From the looks of it, Turner hasn't moved in on the cyclotron's territory, but that's likely not important to adventurous Columbians: with people now working in Pupin 1, it looks like the 'tron is off-limits, and that a uniquely Columbian tradition will have to be put on hold.

If you're like us, you've spent many a seminar playing "guess the biggest secret of the person sitting next to you." We've concocted a twisted past habit or two, but we didn't think of naked urban spelunking until this article in the Times today provided us with ample imagery. The piece has weird Pupin lore, overt fetishization, hip post-industrial aesthetics, "human vulnerability," and all the rest of what you love. Thanks Nick Kelly for pointing it out.

The system's far more intriguing history is written on its walls, says Bwogger Armin Rosen. Tunnel graffiti is a running history of everyone who found their explorations momentous enough to permanently commemorate....

But there's nothing boastful or egotistical about the hastily-scrawled notes found on practically every flat and indeed most of the cylindrical surfaces in the tunnel system, and if the point of the near-ubiquitous Benoit tag is to say "I was here," then the "I" is conspicuously absent--to this day the tunnels' most notorious explorer is without face and name.

The artist of the less notorious but just as abundant "mouse" graffito leaves tantalizing clues as to his identity: "still here in '06, if anybody cares," reads one note adjacent to the 119th street parking garage. But the mouse artist remains anonymous as well. This penchant for anonymity is hardly surprising in an environment as alienating as the tunnel system. Subterranean in both the literal and figurative sense, the tunnels are the domain of a subversive and adventurous few--It takes a particular kind of person to want to go down here, and an even more particular kind of person to actually go down here. Tunneling therefore creates a sense of kinship with the past; an ironic sense of connection within a world that doesn't seem to be connected to anything. Among such kindred spirits, identity is nothing more than an afterthought; an annoying bit of ephemera that has to be discarded in the interest of leaving something truly enduring. Benoit will endure. John Galt, who apparently misses the point of even tunneling in the first place, probably won't.

More photos and commentary after the jump!

New Yorkers may spend more time underground than denizens of every other town, so says the New York Times. But those of you planning to explore the Columbia tunnel system had better do it now, reports Bwog trailblazer Armin Rosen. Because after almost forty years of the tunnels being locked, guarded and officially closed off to students, administration has vowed to lock, guard and officially close the tunnels off to students....

I guess there's a chance that this is something more than administrative redundancy, and that spelunkers will find the school's sprawling system of claustrophobic underground passageways forever sealed off by swipe-points, security cameras, one-way doors (the kind with a knob on only one side of the door; common throughout the system and the subject of much speculation among tunnelers) a nd other means of depriving the enterprising student of fun and adventure. But I doubt it. My personal opinion is that the tunnels, which contain water and power conduits, generators, storage rooms and other facilities vital to the functioning of this school will remain inadvertently unlocked so long as people will have to frequently enter and leave them. Indeed, it didn't take a lock-pick or a sledgehammer to gain entrance to the tunnels under the Schermerhorn extension on a Tuesday morning in December. A maintenance worker had serendipitously left the door open.

After 20 years of safe subterranean spelunking, admin. to shut off access to fun...oops, dangerous chemicals...

...and will make damn sure you stay in your boring science and math classes...

...but the utter thrill of manipulating financial aid loopholes remains. Go agency!

Er...go agency?

Meanwhile, GS students, as always, find a "nontraditional" way to cheat the system

And, oh right...don't forget to resist Man Law...or expansion, because of...uh, yeah, you've read this all before

So, the folks at Gothamist have brought this picture (via flickr) to our attention.

According to the information on flickr, this dude is a professor, and he's standing in the tunnels, our tunnels.

Does anyone know his name? Maybe we could send him in as a post-deadline entry to the IvyGate hot prof contest.