Lengthy post alert:
Credit where credit is due, I was really inspired by AdventureDan's Urbex Love Story and figured I'd go ahead and share my own. Granted, it's not as impressive or suspenseful but it presents its own intrigue.
A few years ago, I visited a tunnel near my house that I watched (with excitement) get built under a new shopping center. It really wasn't very special at first, but a particular room in it caught my eye. It was surprisingly dry, tall, and featured an interesting step that would serve as great bench. I got the idea pretty quickly that a party down there would be wild, as I was especially inspired by what I had seen Cataphiles in Paris get up to.
To make my dream a reality, our first order of business was to get enough electricity in there to run a decent sound system. Somehow getting grid power would be great (and is potentially in the works) but the best I could feasibly do was a large deep cycle marine battery. Combined with my ammo can battery, I get a meager 1,164Wh or about the same amount of energy as two big macs. In order to haul in the 100+ pounds of crap that would be needed to setup something decent in there, I used a folding wagon which turned out to be a great little tool. Next hurdle, was the issue of constantly fiddling with flashlights for stable light. We first tested hanging a small work light from a hole in the ceiling. The results were nice, but they could be better. To solve this issue, I picked up a couple 15W RGB LED lights on amazon and put a couple concrete anchors in the ceiling to attach them. This worked perfectly, stable light on the ceiling completely changed the feel of the whole room and started to make the place feel more homey. Next I realized getting extremely inebriated and climbing out of this tunnel in the middle of the night was not the best idea. To solve this, we installed very discrete hooks on the walls to hang hammocks in order to sleep down there. It sounds like it would be a quiet place to sleep, but the sound of water echoing throughout the tunnel is actually kind of maddening when you're trying to sleep.
Since it was becoming clear that few people ever came in this tunnel (its a bit out of the way) and we had done so much for it, we decided to put our mark on the place. I put together a design in Photoshop and with the help of some friends painted it as "Tunnel Club Dallas." The tunnel is not located in Dallas, no, though not too far away. There are reasons for this I won't go into, but after painting the wall I knew the first form of vandalism on the wall would likely be someone covering over Dallas. To which I was right. We have since repaired the vandalism of our vandalism though.
I know there are mixed opinions around here on painting or leaving a trace in urbex sites. I considered this when painting the wall and wanted to make it as clean and tasteful as possible, but my apologies if it still offends you. Everything we take in, we take out. Trash especially. All lights are removed when we leave and all that's left is the paint on the wall and a few hardly noticeable bolts in the ceiling.
Hopefully you all enjoy the pictures of our work in this tunnel and can provide some suggestions of what project we should take on next in here. I'd like to expand the lighted area for sure, but certainly y'all have some more creative ideas. If you're wondering: the most people we've ever had down here at one time is 15. It was pretty neat.
Apologies for the intense JPEG compression, had to get these down to 100kb
This was the first test of the sound system in the tunnel with the small work light:
Here's a look at the wagon with battery and retro portable sound system ready to go:
The first time the ceiling mounted lights were put up:
A tighter version of the above shot:
Testing the color capabilities of the lights:
A look at the hammocks fully setup, now it's starting to resemble a hobo encampment:
While installing the hammock hooks a small rain blew through:
But sitting in the hammock keeps you completely dry:
One last look down the tunnel: