The physical plant and the tunnels: the Lung, the Pump Room, the buried founder's lab, and the Tunnel Club

texture · UNDATED (standing plant, dug with the founding earthworks; inflation-day "the fourth Monday of November"; the boy-culture dramatized 11/11 YDAU)

• When: standing since founding (the ~sixteen tunnels carved with the hilltop's founding earthworks); the Lung goes up for the indoor season (traditionally the fourth Monday of November) and comes down in spring; the subterranean boy-culture dramatized 11/11 YDAU, 1625h, 26 m below the Show Courts
• What: E.T.A. occupies ~75 hectares — 32 asphalt + 16 Har-Tru courts, the pink-bricked neo-Georgian Community & Administration Bldg., subdorms, Headmaster's House — and is "abundantly, embranchingly tunnelled. This is by design": a warren links Comm.-Ad., the weight room/sauna, the laundry, the prorectors' housing, the late founder's optical/film lab, the Physical Plant, and the Lung's Storage and Pump Rooms. The ~sixteen tunnels were "carved out of sedimentary shale and ferrous granite [...] at more or less the same time the hilltop's bulge was shaved off and rolled and impacted level for tennis" — the founding earthworks. The Pump Room, ~twenty meters beneath the center courts, is a six-vectored wind tunnel that pressure-inflates the Lung — the TesTar/ATHSCME-erected inflatable dendriurethane dome covering the sixteen center courts each winter (stored below, awaiting the administration's decision to inflate it against winter). Inflation-day is a communal barn-raising: 14-16s haul heaters and lights while ATHSCME helicopters sling the dome's nacelle-fan. Off the tunnels also lie the prorectors' living rooms, F.D.V. Harde's Physical Plant and Maintenance offices, and "Dr. James Incandenza's old optics and editing facilities," now used for Leith/Ogilvie entertainment-production classes and optics tutorials — the founder's film-lab repurposed as classroom. The hilltop siting is a recruiting trump-card "in the recruiting war with Port Washington and other Eastern-seaboard academies" — and a geography with consequences: the grounds overlook the E.W.D. waste-displacement launchers ("what the Québecois call les trebuchets noirs"), and down the hill's other side decays Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital, whose grounds house Ennet House — the physical hinge between the academy and the halfway-house world (See the Ennet thread; the AFR thread (event 14)). The tunnels double as the drug-culture's covert theater (event 10) and, in the post-Eschaton week, as punitive labor (uninjured Eschatonites "punitively remanded below ground" to clear the Lung crew's access route); they also house the sub-14 boys' Tunnel Club, whose "least vague raison d'être has to do with exclusion." See JOI's timeline (event 18) (the lab-and-tunnels legacy).