Hemisphere Building

The Hemisphere Building was not built in 1989, despite the date on what most people had assumed was a datestone. It was built in 1932, by the Van Nuys family. Originally a part of the Van Nuys Printing Corporation, it was bought by Brown University upon the Corporation's failing and dissolution in 1969, and used as, first, a Human Resources and general campus administration office center, and, since 1992, the Computer Information and Technology administrative offices.



On March 22, 1989, just after 10:00am, machinery began to whir to life in the bowls of hidden spaces underneath the basement floor. The apparently solid cement basement revealed itself to in fact be two pieces which split and slid sandily apart, revealing a building-wide but shallow (4 feet, perhaps 4 and a half) sub-basement (this still above whatever room or rooms housed the machinery which revealed it). The machinery failed, and the floor, instead of retracting the entire width of the building and causing the whole structure to crumble, only revealed a two- or three-inch-wide strip running the center length of the building. Employees were evacuated, but no one had been hurt, and damage was estimated at under ten thousand dollars, mostly to the wiring and to a few bits of broken furniture and electronics which had fallen during what most of those inside and nearby had thought was an earthquake.  (Damage estimate does not include inspection or repair to the basement floor itself.)

Investigation revealed a four foot tall crawlspace, a single room running the width and length of the building.  Inside this space were between sixty and eighty dusty objects, apparently the dead, dried husks of some sort of biological incubators - wombs or eggs. Inside these incubators were only desiccated strands of an unknown substance, many, many years past doing any harm to anyone.

The remaining Van Nuys family claimed no knowledge of what these dead objects were or should have been, nor why they were to be released on that particular date.

The room was cleaned, the objects burned. The basement floor was repaired, and the crawlspace is now used for storage.