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MAC’s Hidden Places

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FACES OF MAC

FACES OF MAC

There's more than meets the eye to the club's 600,000 square feet.

BY JAKE TEN PAS

Any organization as old as Multnomah Athletic Club is bound to accrue scuttlebutt. Ask the right people, and you’ll hear ghost stories, tall tales, and wholecloth fabrications. Some legends might even be true, although good luck verifying them given the club’s multiple locations, many phases of construction, and the coming and going of staff.

One such tale suggests that there is a secret tunnel under the club that runs along Tanner Creek, and it was used in bygone eras to discreetly enter and exit MAC. For those who don’t know, the name of the club’s recurring pizza pop-up is a tribute to the small waterway that once ran above ground from the West Hills down to Southwest Portland, supporting everything from vegetable gardens tended by Chinese immigrants to Portland founding father Daniel Lownsdale’s tannery, from which it took its name.

Now mostly encased in a brick-lined culvert, Tanner Creek flows anywhere from seven to 50 feet underground. Attempts failed to verify the reality of a tunnel following its course, but MAC Facilities staff did point out that the corner of Handball/ Racquetball Court 1 is often in need of repainting due to moisture encroachment and matches roughly with the spot where the creek is closest to the surface.

Photos by Brandon Davis
Photos by Brandon Davis

If there was a secret passage to this alleged tunnel, it likely predates the construction of the modern clubhouse and almost certainly no longer exists. The good news — for lovers of club history, local mystery, and secret spaces in general — is that MAC is still packed with hidden treasures, vestigial nooks, and crucial crannies. Since these areas support the club’s vital systems, they’re off most members’ beaten paths, but are the backbone of the amenities that they enjoy every day.

So, don an imaginary headlamp and get ready to take a trip through the nondescript doors, underground chambers, and cramped crawlspaces of MAC’s hidden world.

Curious Caverns

MAC is the world’s largest indoor athletic club at 600,000 square feet. The number 33,000 square feet might seem small by comparison, but when one discovers that’s the area dedicated to just boilers, electrical, HVAC, and other systems designed to keep the rest of the club functioning, it grows in significance.

Even without this additional real estate, members have reported finding the club’s eight floors somewhat, if not entirely, labyrinthine, and it’s not as though employees are exempt from this perception. Maintenance Facilities Manager Lauren Craft has held a staggering array of positions here, from lifeguard, swim instructor, and licensed massage therapist prior to COVID to fitness attendant in the Parking Structure during the pandemic. From there, she became a fitness operations supervisor before getting noticed for her performance and promoted to her current role roughly four months ago.

Pretty much every day in each of those roles, she’s learned new things about the behemoth that is MAC. As a lifeguard, prior to improvements in club wayfinding, she got lost all the time. During an emergency situation in the 50-meter Pool, she took the service stairwell to get to the first floor. “Turns out what I thought was the first floor was the exit for the men’s locker room, so I ran in there by accident, then ran back out and screamed,” she says.

Maintenance Facilities Manager Lauren Craft stands inside a giant plenum — a duct or chamber that acts as a central distribution point for air. A narrow tunnel (opposite, bottom) wraps around the newly updated Sun Deck Pool, and a large HVAC unit (top) fills a cavernous space near the Climbing Gym.

Even before she moved to the Facilities team, she began peppering Maintenance Crew Lead Alan Bennett with questions like, “Where does this go?” and “What does this do?” Upon receiving the keys to the kingdom, she made it her business to safely explore every space she could and reports that what she once thought of as simply “huge” has been upgraded in her mind to “absolutely massive.”

Just behind that door she’d walked by hundreds of times, assuming it was a closet, turned out to be a gargantuan HVAC unit hiding a ladder leading up to an air duct big enough to film a horror movie inside it. At one end of this liminal space you can look down on the Indoor Track, and from the other, the sounds of the Sports Pub drift up.

Underneath the glowing skin of MAC’s social and athletic spaces lie bones as bursting with life-giving functionality as those in the human body. Although, thanks to four phases of construction that happened across more than 30 years, some of those bones are about as useful as wisdom teeth.

Take for example the fragment of stairway off the Ballroom that goes nowhere and can’t be reached, inviting comparisons to California’s Winchester House. Then there’s the former viewing platform under the 50-meter Pool, from which coaches once critiqued the form of their swimmers, but is now obscured by an immoveable cement block. On the cover of this issue, members can even see the shaft behind the climbing wall. While it serves no purpose — aside from a nap-ready hidey hole — it does preserve the last visible remnant of the distinctive green that once defined the entire gym back when it was dedicated to badminton.

Mechanical Marvels

Such anachronisms make for tasty trivia, but since MAC prioritizes efficient stewardship of member resources, it’s worth noting that they’re anomalies. For every funky holdover, there are seemingly at least 10 hidden rooms that are deeply necessary to everyday functionality.

The Boiler Room houses three units that heat 12,000 gallons of water a day — or 4.3 million a year — for club uses such as pools, showers, kitchens, and keeping member areas warm. Then there’s the chiller and 25 air handlers that filter particulate matter while keeping the club cool during the summer with 250-340 million cubic feet of air. Each pool has its own supporting room for filtration, temperature control, PH testing, and more, and the West pool has a separate space for the mechanism that raises and lowers the bottom to accommodate a variety of uses.

Describing a room’s function only begins to get at its sense of wonder, though. The expanse under the West Pool, for instance, contains a 9,500-gallon overflow cistern, its subterranean illumination conjuring images of an urban grotto. The view through a grate in a room above the elevator creates vertigo while giving Die Hard daydreams. Pipes in a second-floor chamber flow through seemingly impossible geometries as they whisk hot and cold water between a variety of club uses.

“I think sometime in the last eight to 10 years, they finally got those labeled,” Craft says of the pale PVC snakes. “What used to happen, I think, is their previous supervisor would walk you around and say, ‘What does this pipe feed to? Is this hot or cold? Which direction is it going to? What pump does it go to?’ It was a really good way for people to learn the layout, but I couldn’t imagine having to learn without the signs telling you which way the water’s going and whether it’s hot or cold.”

As that anecdote illustrates, the club’s approach to maintenance has only gotten more organized and intentional as time has gone by. Facilities System Engineer Woody Benecke (profiled in this issue’s Faces of MAC) describes past practices that bear little resemblance to MAC’s currently well-ordered methodology.

“When I first came to the MAC, the Metasys control system, the PC where you would operate the building, make temperature change adjustments, that kind of thing, was locked up in the maintenance room corner office with a blanket thrown over it and a note that said, ‘Do Not Touch,’” he recalls. This was during the implementation of programmable logic controls (PLC), networked together with direct distributed controls (DDC), which automated and streamlined building systems adjustments.

Facilities Systems Engineer Woody Benecke carries a ladder down a service corridor in the subbasement. HVAC units (opposite, top) featuring nautical-style portholes and pipes (bottom) create evocative landscapes and fascinating shapes as they carry air and water to a variety of club uses.

The DDC system was another technological game changer to occur during Benecke’s early days, with the club converting to it from pneumatic controls. However, he adds, there are still miles of plastic tubing in the walls, remnants of a bygone era.

Those imagining inserting their paychecks into transparent cylinders and hitting a green button to make their deposit at a bank are dating themselves at this point, but also entirely forgiven for their confusion. There are pneumatic tubes, and then there are pneumatic tubes. The kind Benecke mentions used to be standard in HVAC systems, but now the club uses direct distributed controls (DDC)and puts the power to manipulate MAC’s systems into the hands of multiple highly trained employees.

Maintenance staff has also continued to improve the staying power of the parts within that system by regularly and preemptively checking and servicing them. “Just because some study says a piece of equipment needs to be replaced, it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s true. Our upkeep of the equipment is so good, our stuff lasts way longer than other facilities in Portland,” he says.

Constant Change

Walking the roof at MAC is a great way to see just how much the neighborhood continues to grow and transform. Across 18th Avenue, construction on new high-rises contrasts starkly with photos from the early days of the current clubhouse, in which MAC was at least partially surrounded by fields and flat parking lots.

“The Phase 1 club [circa 1965-1972] used to burn oil for heat, and the tank was under the sidewalk on 18th, just outside the Boiler Room loading doors,” Benecke explains. “I’m guessing that changed in 1980 with the construction of Phase 3, when the boilers became natural gas fired. The club’s current set came around the year 2000, when the Loprinzi Wing was built.”

In June, the club celebrated the opening of the new Sun Deck Pool, which — along with the relatively recent reinvention of Splash — entices members to catch some rays, and views. Beneath the pool, a long, thin hallway lined with conduit and pipes covered in yellow foam insulation stretches back to a crawlspace that wraps around its cozy waters. A scooter allows maintenance staff to traverse this tight fit semi-gracefully as they ensure the Water Fitness practitioners above can exercise without a care in the world.

Around the corner from the pool, a corrugated metal structure where meats were once smoked onsite now houses refrigeration units and other storage, enabling quick access from Splash and the Sunset Bistro, where a new pergola keeps members shaded and comfortable in the summer and covered even during Oregon’s inevitable rains.

MAC remains a microcosm of the larger Portland community, blending new construction and state-of-the-art offerings with traditions, and physical structures, that stretch back into the past. For members and staff, it’s a fascinating place that houses endless possibilities for exploration.

Currently engaged in an audit of nearly all club assets, which are meticulously tagged and tracked these days, Craft’s sense of awe and commitment to constant improvement sum up in their own way the spirit of MAC.

“I am a student for the rest of my life, and that’s how I like to look at things. There’s no mastering. There is always new information and technology available. There are always new tools, guidelines, and techniques that come out.

“This position is like a dream come true, and the facilities really are the bones of MAC. You don’t see them, and you don’t really know about them until there’s an issue, but there’s always a way to fix it.”

Special thanks to Reed Van Sickle, Chad Failla, and Kevin Pollack for their additional contributions to research for this story.

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