The Edward W. Morley Chemistry Laboratory was built in 1910 and contains chemistry labs as well as a lecture hall, and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. It is located at 41.5037525° N, 81.60744846° W. It was planned by Edward Williams Morley, professor of chemistry, before his retirement in 1906 and was named in his honor. The initial gift toward the Morley building was made by the Chamberlain family in honor of their grandfather, Joseph Perkins, a trustee from 1846 to 1885. A high-capacity mercury still was constructed in the building in 1927. An addition was constructed in 1966. The building was evacuated and later closed in the mid-eighties (exact date unknown) due to a hazardous mercury spill. All the equipment and chemicals in use at the time were left there during the evacuation.

The following was posted on the Case Forum by Richard Drushel, a faculty member in the Biology Department.

So what's the truth?

No part of it has been closed for 18 years that *I* know of. I was last in it in September 2004. It had been abandoned in place for 2 years before that. While Clapp was being built, and Millis and Biology (now termed DeGrace after shaking down a donor to pay for various overruns for the entire Pytte Science Center project) were being renovated, Morley was swap space. The Biololgy Department offices and significant faculty were relocated there. The Dept. Office was just up the main stairs there; the Chiel lab was to the right; and on the second floor, the Ritzmann lab, and faculty offices (Ritzmann, Westin, me, DiIulio, Rosenberg, Cavallius).

There is a large lecture hall, Morley 205, which is sorely missed...my freshman chem classes were there, some Biology classes, for a few years in the early 1990s we had our Dept. Seminars there. It too has motor-driven blackboards (that are still black). There is a demonstration table with sink and lab fittings. I can remember John Fackler standing there mixing fuming HCl and concentrated NaOH and drinking the resulting NaCl, after the enormous exothermic reaction display...and cackling over 1980 Nobel laureate Paul Berg's B grades in chemistry (they pulled his grades from the Chemistry Dept. Office when his award was announced). The fire escape on the Strosacker/Rockefeller side exits from Morley 205, and that was the standard way out at the end of class in my day. (There was a similar external exit in the far right corner of DeGrace 312, formerly Biology 303, but it was removed when the renovations were done.)

Chemistry still occupied part of the 2nd floor and all of the 3rd. We were often hit by floods (so what else has changed in Millis?). The place was left full of giant cockroaches which escaped from Ritzmann's lab (he is a cockroach locomotion biologist).

There is a *ton* of abandoned furniture and equipment. I scavenged a lot of it for my office in Millis and the Anatomy/Physiology Resource Room I set up in Fall 2004. There were whole rooms of abandoned boxes of glassware and 132-column greenbar printouts from the old DECsystem 2060 mainframes of the 1980s. I have a few nifty goodies that I picked up (like a bright red glass Erlenmeyer flask, or some funky colored-glass eyeglasses that make you look like Harry Potter the chemist). Some of the offices have 19th-century wood cabinets and bookshelves built in.

The icky thing about Morley is that it is a maze of internal half-levels and landings. There is no one "floor" that can be traversed from north end to south end without stairs. This makes moving anything by yourself (like scavenged furniture on a 2-wheel cart) very difficult :-) The building will *NEVER* be ADA-accessible unless they totally violate the architecture and put external elevators or something on it.

The one elevator is at the south end of the building. You can see a one-way door that opens at the sidewalk level on the Millis side. On the other side of that door is a 45-degree ramp sloping down from a stairwell which opens into the elevator. This elevator is also 19th-century vintage, a genuine Otis IIRC, and with metal accordion cage doors that you have to pull open and shut all by yourself in order to make the elevator go. It is slow and powerful, but not very big -- not big enough to get a steel desk or bookshelf out of -- so the only way to move furniture is up/down the main staircase.

After Clapp opened and Millis and DeGrace reopened, and everyone moved out, they left Morley keyed for Biology and Chemistry for more than 2 more years. I often would go in there to sit and think, on an old couch that was part of the anteroom to Nancy DiIulio's office. The first-floor swap space for the Chiel lab became a dumping ground for old student chair-desks, wooden-topped lab stools (from the old 3rd-floor Millis teaching labs), and some of the original green vinyl secretarial-type chairs that were purchased when Millis opened in 1960. AFAIK that stuff is still there. Whenever I needed to do some noisy or messy construction-type work (like cutting plywood or 2x4s for lab equipment), I would go over to Morley to do it, because it was not disruptive and it was easy to sweep up the sawdust from the tiled floors.

In the last months before they locked it down, it got kind of stinky inside, as the traps in all the sinks and toilets dried out (nobody running the sinks or flushing the toilets) and sewer gas came up. Sometimes I would run water and flush toilets just to do it. I finally got to see what the women's restroom looked like inside :-) There was only 1 women's room in Morley and it was on the 2nd floor. I am sure that originally there were none. Anyway, the most interesting thing to me was the ancient santitary napkin dispenser machine, coin-operated (25 cents I think). It was empty and open.

I have been on the roof of Morley once. It wasn't a prank, it was accompanying a Plant Services guy while we looked for the source of a leak, while the building was in use for swap space and I was working in the Chiel lab.

Anything else you want to know, just ask :-)

• Rich* (remember I am Class of 1984 and have been here continually since August 1980)

Interior Pictures of Morley Chemistry Laboratory http://drushel.cwru.edu/morley/photos/

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