I had seen a few articles and Boing Boing posts on The Black Hole store in Los Alamos, NM. It is where a lot of the high-tech junk has ended up as it goes surplus from our defense/industrial research complex in Los Alamos.
The Black Hole store in Los Alamos
I dragged the family there last Saturday,(pics) on one of those bright blue, perpetually sunny days as the aspen leaves are turning bright colors, and the breeze was still warm.
From pictures, and from this video (Coudal Partners are amazing) I had imagined this place all wrong. It is in a former Piggly Wiggly store, though almost all remnants of that are hard to spot, as they are buried in what looks like 3 acres of trailers, and assorted defense-junk outside. It is in a neighborhood, with houses across the street, not in some industrial park.
icosahedron?
Outside, there are something-hedrons made of bowling balls and broomsticks, and flowers made of bomb casings. Inside, the world turns a bit more claustrophobic, as there are rows and rows of everything. Need an old analog Tek scope? Aisle 3. (Rolling stands are outside next to the vacuum cleaners) Johnson controls timer, ca. 1967? Yep, right next to the capacitors in Aisle 4. Every possible BNC connector? Gas valves? Check. There was a display of calculators from TIs to HPs to Sharps… every possible type. Those wall bricks we get with every device we buy? An entire room of them.
We found books that had been burned through by acid (pages with sculpted holes that no mouse could have done), and strange looking caps that look like head bandages with 120V plugs on them… (?)
Used fountains in Los Alamos
Out of the back of the store, and perhaps more poignant, was an entire room of household items. Fans, heaters, yes, but a mug with “mother” on it? Coffee makers, flower vases, birthday cards… All this became a reminder to me that people live and have lived in Los Alamos, doing the work that some say kept us safe this last century.
If you were to take about 1000 sq feet of The Black Hole, it would represent the kind of place I grew up in. My dad is a retired engineer from this defense-fueled era, and I grew up in a house with a basement and garage crowded with the very same castoff equipment. We had piles and racks of defunct 8-bit tape readers, telephone switching equipment, rods, printer platens, you name it. It became raw material for my father’s creativity, and provided a backdrop for much of my learning about machinery and engineering. It’s Make Magazine before there ever was one.
What do you call this situation? Most of us have one of these places in our lives… Its where all the “stuff” goes when we aren’t sure what to do with it anymore. We all know that hard drive has pictures on it… but its too much work to sort it out, and just maybe too valuable to throw away. We know there are treasures somewhere in there, but the pile is just too formidable. At the store, my son asked about some item, and the man behind the counter said, “If you can inventory everything here, you can have it all.” I think that says it best.
