Though a great deal of lore, if not tradition, at UCLA is associated with the university’s network of steam tunnels that run beneath campus, UCLA and its employees take steps to prevent students from getting in.
For decades, students have been finding ways to sneak into the tunnels, some of whom take it upon themselves to leave a mark for their own memory or for generations of visitors to come. But it is not easy.
“All the areas to get down here are locked,” said Leroy Sisneros, director of crafts and alterations for facilities management. “You do have to figure out a way to get in; that’s the first challenge. There are hundreds of access points. You can get in from almost every building on campus, but we ask our employees to be vigilant about security and keep doors locked.”
But UCLA Facilities Management, the organization that maintains the
grounds, buildings and physical infrastructure of the university, has
nothing to hide.
Any and all graffiti that comes to the attention of UCLA employees are removed as quickly as possible.
Students who venture below for the purpose of making an artistic statement, or so they can appreciate the marks of their predecessors, would be disappointed to find that the walls there bear no memories.
“We’ve found that graffiti compounds itself. If you leave it up, more people will come to tag the walls,” Sisneros said, explaining that university employees are assigned to repaint over graffiti on a yearly to biyearly basis.
Even still, remnants of a student presence remain.
The seldom-traveled paths themselves are littered sparingly with beer cans, cigarette butts and old library books. Many of these are scattered throughout the tunnels, perhaps to serve as a trail of breadcrumbs for former visitors.
Markings within the narrow corridors are sparse but seem to have a slightly longer life expectancy than those done on the main walls of larger chambers.
Messages written in marker on pipes and walls are normally those of facilities management personnel, but some students have disguised directions to different parts of campus in this way, avoiding over-painting. While some of the writing and painting consists of the standard, vulgar utterances of bathroom vandalism, other entries appear to reflect a bit more thought.
But the tunnels go deeper; these tubes are not the final destinations of most tunnel-goers.
“The whole point, for most people, is to get to the sunken bridge,” Sisneros said, referring to the buried Dickson Court Bridge, which holds up the segment of street between the flagpole and Portola Plaza. “Everything else is just tubes with pipes, electrical cables, communication lines and plumbing.”
“We would usually go in through YRL. To the left of the library there’s a grate that goes down into the old book stacks,” said Ben Pagliuso, a 2007 alumnus who said he ventured into the tunnels several times during his college career.
Pagliuso agreed with the common conception that the sunken bridge is the primary destination of most who go tunneling.
“One time we came out there and there were a bunch of dudes playing paintball. There’s definitely a lot of paint flying around down there,” he said, laughing.
He explained that he was first shown the steam tunnels by an upperclassman in his fraternity, Triangle, and that over the years he passed on some knowledge of the tunnel systems to younger friends and members.
“We would go down any time anyone new wanted to see it … sometimes with as many as 15 or 20 people (at once),” he said. “We didn’t ever send the pledges down there. It was more like something we went down and showed them. As much as I don’t believe them, they do say they’d kick you out of school if they saw you down there, and we don’t want our pledges getting kicked out.”
For some, the risk of getting in trouble is half the fun.
“There’s this feeling of doing something against the rules,” said one fourth-year mechanical engineering student who asked that his name be withheld to avoid disciplinary action from the university. “There’s a lot of piping there that can get really hot. If anybody were to touch the wrong pipe they could burn themselves pretty badly. I understand why they don’t want people down there.”
Sisneros explained that workers are often allowed to work in pairs when in the tunnels, avoiding whenever possible the scenario of an individual being isolated.
“We try not to publicize the tunnels for a number of reasons. One is that potentially it could be inherently unsafe to be down here. There’s not a lot of air flow here, so the air quality isn’t the greatest.”
But Pagliuso prioritized the fun and tradition of tunneling over the danger involved in being there. He said there is much to be seen that he believes university employees know nothing about.
“Definitely not,” he said when asked if he believes that all the historic graffiti has been painted over by facilities personnel. “It’s quite likely that they don’t even go down into those tunnels. Some are almost a half mile out of the way, so there’s no reason they would go down there. There were areas where you had to climb up through pipes and through cubbie holes that I don’t think they use or know about.”