[UA] A place to start my UA campaign

[Tim Toner]

> If you don't like landlocked, try Detroit (great lakes).  You have the
> capitol of the rust belt (until two years ago the murder capitol of
the
> US--Oakland finally beat it recently).  There's a large
cuban/carribbean
> black population (or at least there used to be) that gives you voodoo.
> There's a few universities in the area, and the economy is totally
> depressed:  Creates desperation.  Desperation can attract otherwise
normal
> people into the occult underground.
 
Ah, Day-Twah.  Great town.  I went to high school in one of its affluent
suburbs (Bloomfield Hills) that bordered utter squalor (Pontiac).  The
school was pretty cool in its own right.  Cranbrook was built on the
Booth family's farm, and the architect/planner used the layout of the
farm as inspiration for the design of the school.  So the silo became an
observatory, and the big barn became the dining hall with a wondrous
vaulted ceiling.  But you could never shake the fact that this was once
a _farm._  And if there's a town with a sub rosa occult underground,
it's Detroit.  Sure, there's no college to speak of, but Ann Arbor is
pretty damn close, and the University of Michigan holds the distinction
of being the home of the first fraternity house.

If I could send out an utterly useless suggestion, may I recommend
Champaign-Urbana, home of the University of Illinois.  It's halfway to
nowhere, built on land that no one wanted anyway.  When school is in
session, the population of the cities almost double (75,000 to 130,000).
The thing is, it's so classically un-occult, it's not funny, but it _is_
a source of high weirdness, such as the Morrow Plot, the first
experimental corn field, where various fertilizers and growing methods
have been tested continuously since 1880.  When it came time to build
the undergraduate library, they decided to park it next to the graduate
library, which meant that it would border the Morrow Plot.  Then, after
all the papers were signed, someone noticed that the new four story
structure would, on occasion, cast a shadow on the Morrow plot, thus
interrupting 80 years of carefully controlled data.  It was then decided
to build the Undergrad Library DOWN, so that only a small entrance was
visible from ground level.

Perhaps the coolest U of I story involves the acquisitions of the Rare
Book room.  Seems that when the university was in its infancy, it had a
real inferiority complex, so a handful of generous donors sent a newly
hired librarian to Europe with a blank check, to purchase "whatever he
needed").  Soon after, crates started showing up, crammed with
palimpsests and incunabula.  He had caught Europe during one of its
great shudders, when old estates were going fallow, and purchased their
collections for a song and a half.   All of it was, of course, dutifully
cataloged, but what they have on hand is quite surprising, given the
location of the University.  As a result of this legacy, U of I
continues to have one of the best Library programs in the States.

Just a thought.



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