I spent about eight hours cleaning up a part of the movie theater this weekend. There are about eight more hours of cleaning left to do in that area.
The theater started out as a single screen in one building with a basement. Dick Smith, the man who owned it since 1970 until about 1996, purchased a second, adjoining, building around 1982 and added a second large screen and a third small screen.
The second building used to be a car dealership. The small screen is in their old garage. Under the garage someone had built a reinforced concrete bomb shelter. The bomb shelter is divided in to three rooms, all about 15 foot by 15 foot and about 10 feet high.
Dick used to own theaters in several towns as well as repair and refurbish equipment for theaters. At some point he began storing things from all of this in the basements of both buildings and behind the screen in the original theater.
Dick left all of the old equipment in the theaters when he sold them and retired. The next two owners left it all in place, as well. Since then the equipment has become obsolete as film formats changed and technology advanced.
We have cleaned out the area behind the first theater's screen. The area was his main work room. It is about 50 feet by 20 feet. It was completely full, with just a small path to walk back to the furnaces to change the filters.
We have also cleaned out a 12 foot by 12 foot storage room in the old garage area.
I started work this weekend on an area at the top of the steps above the bomb shelter and in the first room of the bomb shelter.
When Dick added the third screen, about 1984, he set it up so that the air conditioner's condensation would drain in to the basement. The hose carrying the water ended in an old whiskey barrel bottom with a sump pump in it. The sump pump would occasionally pump all the drainage water out in to the alley right behind the theater.
At some point someone removed the hose from the barrel and let the drainage pool on the floor. So, over the years, the humidity has increased in the basement. There is no exhaust or airflow in the basement. The high humidity and the cool air led to a lot of condensation on everything in the basement. This, in turn, led to rust, mold, mildew, and all the other wonderful things you might expect to find. Except mushrooms.
The first room seems to have been the main storage area. There were large, heavy lamphouses, piles of papers, cardboard boxes full of small bits and pieces of equipment, shelves made from old doors, dozens of empty and full film reels, and much, much more.
Almost all of the wood and cardboard in there had rotted. I ended up scooping most of that up, with the shovel, in to five-gallon buckets.
Each trip from the basement to the dumpster involved a trip up the stairs, fourteen of them, and then through four doors. I did have a wheelbarrow to help cut down on the trips outside.
We have filled up a large dumpster with what we have taken out so far. The dumpster is one of those that is about five feet tall and fits on the bed of a semi-trailer. I believe we'll fill a second one of those before we finish cleaning the storage areas. We also have put aside about three tons of scrap metal that someone is hauling off for us. Luckily, most of that scrap was from the ground floor and we did not have to carry it up the stairs.
I am quite relieved that I was able to finish that first room this weekend. It was almost overwhelming to begin with. After about five hours I realized I would be able to finish the area and it made the last three hours much easier to bear.
Mike, the current owner, is coming in on Monday afternoon with three other guys to finish the rooms. The back two rooms seem to have less stuff in them, by volume and weight. I hope they can finish up so we can move on to the other basement and the other two storage rooms.
I took a lot of pictures of the basement area before cleaning it and will put them on the Flickr site, along with "after" pictures, soon.
