Watch List: Steam Plant

Although they may not know it, anyone who has lived on East or West Campus has felt the touch of a ghost.

It seeps through hallways and dorm rooms in the cold dark of winter nights. It whispers through the pipes and burns any who come too close. This relic of bygone times haunts the dark space that just a stone's throw from Smith Warehouse. You may notice it at night, painted an eerie blue by hidden lights, towering over the sidewalk valley below. It breathes the steam that heats our campus.

The East Campus Steam Plant finished construction in 1929, when all of Duke's famous architecture was still shiny and new. Since then, though, the coal boilers have been exhumed and replaced with natural gas boilers, leaving the 175-foot smokestack as a silent ghost of its former self.

In the three decades before the renovation started in 2008, the building reportedly fell into extreme disrepair. Ivy and plants took over the walls and trees grew down through the roof. Nobody knows for sure who inhabited the cavernous insides of the building during those wild years.

Even with decades of neglect, though, the structure held out. Its architect, Horace Trumbauer, endowed his plant with two-and-a-half-foot thick walls to bear the load of 100-ton coal cars that parked on the roof of the coal plant and poured their freight directly through the building into a coal bin below. The endurance of that Durham brick has kept the building going through hard times, and it may well last another 84 years and beyond. The past is gone but the steam keeps rising.