Portland State oddities: below the basement

Students who go prowling in the sub-basement of Portland State’s Smith Memorial Student Union may be surprised to find a strange, metallic object just inside a storage room at the bottom of the staircase leading down from the building’s basement.

If by chance the door to the old room is open, the large metal machine can be seen sitting in a forgotten corner of a caged-off area, below the fusebox to the SMSU’s power system. The object isn’t that large—only four-and-a-half-feet tall by three-feet wide—but resting on top of a dirty black crate, it carries an imposing presence.

It’s a heavy piece of machinery that looks worn and forgotten, and its gray-blue paint is chipped. Although this aging object seems to be at home with the rest of the discarded items—piles of old desks, chairs, tables and keyboards—it sits alone.

Anyone who has worked in a commercial kitchen may automatically recognize this piece of machinery, but the average PSU student might wonder what exactly it is.

“It’s like an oversized drill bit,” said Chris Brown, a student from New York who had never visited the sub-basement before.

The machine resembles a huge blender, with what appears to be a huge drill bit hanging down from an extending arm. Warning labels decorate the top of the machine reading: “Never put hands in mixing bowl,” “Always unplug” and “Never put hands in chute.”   

Many students who work in the sub-basement, including those who work for KPSU, the university’s radio station, and student publications such as the Rearguard, Spectator and the Vanguard, say that they have never seen the mysterious machine that sits silently behind the closed doors at the end of the hallway.
Nicholas Kula, a sophomore engineering major, wasn’t sure what the object was.

“It’s not a paint mixer? What the hell is it?” he asked. “It looks like some sort of doomsday device.”

That description does fit the aesthetic stereotypes that surround the neglected metal object, with low hanging, body-sized pipes overhead and obscure, dangling light bulbs.

“It has a very imposing presence,” Kula said. “I have no idea why it’s down here.”

However, the reality is far more benign.

“My guess is it’s probably from food services,” said Sarah Christensen, a junior communication major, “an old piece of equipment that is not in use anymore.”

Robert Wise, SMSU’s building manager, confirmed this fact.

The piece of machinery is a dough mixer made by the Hobart Manufacturing Company, and was previously used in the Portland State kitchen to make pizza and other food, he said.

Wise said when Aramark Dining Services adopted Sbarro, the national restaurant chain, to make pizza and pasta in Aramark’s new food court, they had to retire the old dough mixer to the basement due to the fact that it could not produce the quantities of dough needed.

That was around August 2007, Wise said, when the old Hobart, which had been used since the original opening of the SMSU dining area in the 1970s, was replaced by a more dependable model. With difficulty, Wise and six other men lifted the old 500-pound Hobart from its 36-year-old perch on a palette and carried it to its current resting place in the SMSU basement, he said.

Though the worn dough mixer remains in working condition, it will remain in the basement until someone finds a use for it, Wise said, explaining that such an expensive piece of bakery equipment can be recycled for quite a bit of money, but the price of metal must go up before it can be sent to a recycling facility.

Until then, the inhabitants of the sub-basement have accepted the presence of the old Hobart that hangs out at the end of the hallway in its own museum of presumed junk behind the closed door.

“It’s the heart and soul of the basement,” joked Valentino Asuncion, KPSU program director.