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As with any college, IIT has its share of stories, passed down from class to class, from senior to freshman. But at IIT, these legends don’t take the commonplace form of the ghost haunting the women’s dormitory. The pragmatic mind of the IIT student has conjured up a different brand of mythology curiously befitting an institute of technology. The rumors and legends of IIT are far too numerous to cover in a single story, but we’ve picked a few of our favorites to share with you.

Conspiracy Theories
The tallest building on campus is also the center of some of the tallest tales. If we’re to believe the rumors, Big Brother is a constant presence on the IIT campus, and he’s a very busy man. Conducting government experiments, bringing in mysterious shipments from the lake via an underground road, and unleashing “carnivores” and spy squirrels on innocent students. And where is this work conducted? In the secret basements of IITRI, which supposedly extends as far down as it does up.

I took a tour of IIT Tower with Maintenance Supervisor Tim Hinko, who has worked at first IITRI and now IIT for 25 years. Tim gave me a thorough tour of both the IIT Tower and the buildings that connect to it, though 90% of the time I had no idea where I was. Although there are two levels of basement below the surface, there’s not much beyond that unless you want to explore the sewer pit, and Tim’s words of warning as I approached it (“just watch out for the cockroaches as you get closer”) were enough to quell my desire to explore farther.

I saw little to foster the rumors surrounding IITRI, though there was certainly a time when the suspicions would have been well founded. IITRI was once a hotbed of chemical, biological, and defense research, featuring everything from rocket propulsion systems to ejection seats. Armour Research Foundation first made a name for itself in 1939, when the Snow Cruiser was unveiled. The government certainly took an interest in IIT during the Cold War years, as it fought to maintain dominance over the Soviet Union. The frantic pace of the space race is evidenced in this selection from the 1956 Annual Report of Armour Research Foundation:

The Russians are racing rapidly to the side of the Americans in more and more events and passing them in a few. Just 15 years ago we were sending them Studebaker six-by-sixes and canned sausage with a bay leaf in each can because they could not produce enough machinery and foodstuffs to meet their own needs. At the end of the year they had left us literally on the launching pad, with their moon impact and moon photos.

Apparently, the idea of one day relying on the Russians for our automotive and culinary needs helped urge our engineers and scientists forward. At one time, the cafeteria served approximately 1,400 meals a day—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Tim Hinko remembers, “Everyone in IITRI, no matter what they did, had security clearances. Even with this clearance, there were rooms that had teletyping equipment, and they had to cover everything over with black tarp before we were allowed in. We had to sign in the exact time we walked into the room, and we had to sign back out when we left. No one was allowed in the room without one of the staff members who had higher security clearance than we did.”

Hinko also recalls seeing an infant cruise missile in the building, which might explain all those rumors about missile silos under the expressway across from the tower. They didn’t exist, but what was beneath the Dan Ryan was a shooting range, connected to the tiny building at 3458 S. Federal by a tunnel that ran under the Metra tracks—which would have made for an interesting lunch-hour getaway.

Among the more innocuous research projects were the canoe tests conducted in the Life Sciences Building, which used to have a swimming pool in the basement. Basically, researchers spent their days dumping as much stuff as they could into the canoes to see how much weight it took to sink them. I want that job.

The Engineering Research Building was home to two spheres of high-pressure air. Jacques Cousteau used to visit Chicago to test his diving equipment in the spheres, since it was the only place where he could obtain precise calibrations. After the Cold War, one of the spheres was shipped off to Comiskey (now called U.S. Cellular; no mystery how that came about) and painted to look like a gigantic baseball. Its sister sphere was brought back to life during the Reagan years, when they sucked all the air out of it and used it as an atmospheric testing resource for Star Wars experiments. Everything old was new again.

What none of my sources could neither confirm nor deny is that IITRI also serves as a safe house for the president of the United States if war happens to break out while he’s visiting the Windy City. (Perhaps that would explain why the top three floors are blacked out—to foil spy satellites?)

Sometimes Truth is Stranger Than Fiction
The basement of IITRI is also rumored to be the home of a nuclear reactor that is cooled by the fountain in front of Perlstein Hall. This story actually appears to be close to the truth. IIT was indeed home to the first industrial nuclear reactor, but it was housed in IITRI’s neighbor to the north, 3440 S. State (which is now suspiciously 3424 S. State).

The building was designed specifically to house the reactor, which went “critical” on June 28, 1956. The press release from that day describes the value of peacetime nuclear research: “Short-lived radioisotopes, useful in medical, industrial and scientific research, will be produced. Atomic fission, the ‘splitting’ of atoms which produces radioactivity and neutrons, takes place in the reactor core, a steel sphere one foot in diameter.” The reactor resided there for two decades, until it was officially decommissioned in the mid 1970s, when experts finally decided that the risk of accidentally decimating the City of Chicago was too great.

When the shield wall was being dismantled, the crew separated the lead bricks that comprised it into those above and below an acceptable level of radioactivity. Those glowing with life were disposed of (heaven knows where!), but the others were left lying around, much to the students’ delight, and can still be seen serving as doorstops and decorative office pieces. One brick even lies in state in Machinery Hall in the office of David Schmidt, director of Environmental and Occupational Safety.

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