So Steamy !

The City of Eugene has purchased an old steam plant that was built in the 1930's.   Mark and I toured it last Saturday.

They plan to remodel it over the next two years and turn it into a public brew-pub / music venue / shared office space / riverside destination.

The steam plant used to provide steam heating for the City of Eugene and Peacehealth Hospital (when it was near the U of O campus).  It hasn't produced any steam for (I want to say) a decade. 

 We were on a tour with about ten other folks.  I was with a group of photographers who pretty much stopped listening to the tour guide so we could snap photos of all the half-century old tech.  I mean, really; who could resist a dial that reads "Power Factor" ?

 I was so busy photographing Mark that I failed to get a good photo of the valve he was turning, which had a lot of words on it.

It was too bad that safety concerns prevented us from climbing up on the catwalks.








I spent too much time trying to get a good photo of this yellow hook, which was part of a giant crane on a track.  The whole structure was about three stories tall.











The crane was used to hoist massive generators through sliding barn doors on the south-east side of the building and ease them along the length of the building. 

I wish we could have stayed longer -- I could have easily spent three hours in there photographing stuff

 What struck Mark was that the actual boiler was something like five stories tall and had human-sized hatches in it.

 I came away from the tour with an increased appreciation of the building.  From the outside, it looks like a typical brutalist architecture (I think this is partly because of a later addition to the building's south-east side).  But after seeing the inside, you can see that the building was responding to and designed for showcasing the boiler and support structures. 

The whole place was a steampunk stock photo opportunity.  In fact, Mark had to remind the tour guide that the photographers in the group had started to leave the building, but had stalled out surrounded by all the steamy.