There were two ways into this place. One of the building's stairwells went all the way up past the attic to a landing where there were two locked doors. One went to the roof, and the other led into the room that houses the computers and winches and other machinery necessary to move 6 elevators up and down over 20 stories. A small locked metal box next to the elevator room door contained the door's key. A little bit of prying could get it open, but then afterward I'd replace the key but be unable to relatch the metal box. I don't like leaving signs of entry like that, so I found a new way in.

In the ceiling of the attic was a large metal trapdoor that led up into the elevator room through its floor. By moving a ladder from across the attic, going up and through the heavy trapdoor really fast and pulling the ladder up after me, I could get into the elevator room in a risky but satisfying manner. The elevator room was in two levels: the main elevators all ran from the main level, while the freight elevator, which went to the attic just below the main elevator room, was another level higher, up a metal grate staircase.

I lusted after the Soo Line Building's roof for a long time. It was my ultimate workplace adventuring goal. (Well, other than finding access to tunnels, but those were unlikely to exist, whereas I was reasonably certain that the building had a roof.) I'd test the locked doors to the roof pretty regularly, but they always remained stubbornly locked. I'd find building keys in various places and test them out, but they never opened the roof and I'd put them back where I found them. I was getting really sick of my assfaced manager and the job in general, and knew my time there was short. I guessed that the elevator room would be the key to accessing the roof, since it was more or less on the roof. Finally, I found a vent that was hinged and held in its frame by a simple hook and eye latch. By popping it open and crawling through a greasy, filthy vent, I was able to drop down and find myself on the roof at last.

It was the middle of winter, and it was fucking cold as hell exploring a rooftop 20 stories up while wearing only khaki pants and a thin button-up dress shirt. I ran around like a maniac taking pictures with my disposable camera. I wondered how many people in the taller adjacent buildings were witnessing my triumph and of those, how many would alert the authorities. After satisfying myself that I had seen everything (the thing I hate about roofs is that, unlike basements and tunnels, there are definite, known, and implacable boundaries limiting both exploration and imagination), I got the flock out of there.

After two crawls through the vent, I was filthy, and had a hell of a time coming up with a story to explain my disheveled state to my coworkers.

Looking down from the attic

The door to 2 1/2

A back room in the Catacombs

There are a couple of these down in the basement and subbasement levels. The first set of these, the Catacombs, are found behind a heavy sliding metal door. Inside, there is a dark, musty maze of book shelves reaching all the way up to the 15 foot high ceilings, crammed with yellowing records, files, and correspondence from the Soo Line Railroad going back to the 1940's. In some places, boxes had burst and tipped, leaving aisles choked with historical debris.

The Blueprint room is a usually locked room in the basement which was once left unlocked for a couple of days. The space was less interesting than the maze of the Catacombs, but the contents of the file cabinets that it was full of were far more interesting than the financial records and such found in the Catacombs. The main records here are blueprints and building plans for railroad stations, bridges, and other railroad structures, most of them brittle with age. There are also newspaper clipping that crumble if you touch them, antiquated surveying equipment, and a dead body.

OK, so I lied about the dead body. But there should have been one. I've been doing this for six years now and I've yet to find a single dead body, god damn it.

Too many ladders

This is a disused and abused room featuring peeling paint, several ladders, falling plaster, a small bathroom, and an open hole allowing access to the bottom of the pipechase between the room and the nearby stairwell. There's not a lot to see here, but I wound up hiding in it from workers on two occasions, so I like the place.

Lean green machines

While the Soo Line building is not all that big by downtown standards, it still a good-sized structure, and plenty old to boot. So, it should come as no surprise that the boiler room for the place is christly immense; it's about two and a half stories from floor to ceiling, chock full of machinery and catwalks. The place was a bitch to get to. The door from the building's two stairwells were locked at the subbasement level, and the passenger elevators did not go down there. The freight elevator opened up right across the hall from the building's maintenance office where building security and the maintenance workers were based. To get from the elevator to the door to the stairwell that led down to the boiler room (in the sub subbasement, if you're keeping track), you had to go down a hallway in plain sight of anyone who came out of the office. Just to make things even more fun, the boiler room door was usually locked. It made for a tricky little operation.

On one occasion, I had to hide behind a fake plant that someone had put in the hallway for some reason. Another time I convinced a guy who left the office as I was walking down the hall that I was confused and looking for the mailroom (which was in the basement one level up). This worked because I had thought to fish a big envelope out of the trash as a prop just in case I got caught. However, that kind of thing only works once, so I had to be extra careful on later visits.

The first time I succeeded in infiltrating the boiler room, I did not have a camera with me, which sucks because I did the most in depth exploration of the space on that trip. I found a filthy, disused old bathroom with pages from a 1970's Playboy in a cabinet over the toilet, which was pretty amusing. I also found a padlocked chain link gate that separated the boiler room from the transformer vault that is carved out of the bare rock down beneath the sidewalk outside the building. I played Sherlock Holmes and found the key to this tacked to a bulletin board in a small office type room near the gate, but when I returned later with a camera to document it, the key had been removed. I did not find any sign of Freddy Krueger.

Mo' machinery

Pipes, etc

Gauges and shit

At the subbasement level of the building, there are spaces under the stairwells closed off by forbidding metal doors. They were stick to open, but not locked. Inside was a lot of dust, records of boiler room maintenance from the 1970's, a few random motor components from the same era, yellowing boxes of filters, and not a heck of a lot else.

The Gate!!! Aaiiie!

So one of the stairwells in the building had a gate at the top of the basement stairs, at the first floor. Below that point, the paint was falling off the walls in huge, thick chunks, and it was just generally a mess not meant for the public to see. In that stairwell, on the landing between the basement and subbasement, there was a door. The door was padlocked shut, and apparently led outward from the building. It was an old metal door with a heavy duty latching/locking mechanism, and form the moment I saw that son of a bitch my imagination was set afire. Could this lead to the utility tunnels or old pedestrian tunnels rumored to be under downtown Minneapolis? Why was it such a heavy, metal door? The padlock was not going to go away on its own, so one day, after weeks of mounting suspense and curiosity, I helped it do so. Headlamp on, fully prepared to jump in and mount an exploration of some sort of abandoned tunnel system, I swung the door open.

As you can see, my amazing mystery door led to a passageway all of 2 or 3 feet deep, with a cinderblock wall at the end of it. Fuck.

Beyond the Portal