old movie theatre

[kakcsdad]

i have the opportunity to go under an old building that was a black movie theatre built in the 30s.. i know that back in the day old houses would have been used as a refuse area per say...i wrked there in the 80s and found old movie posters that they used and was wondering if anyone that has experience searching under buildings like that old ever found anything?just wondered if it would be worth the effort to detect under it....got plenty of height under it abt 3 to 4 ft to wrk with..sry if this is in the wrong place but this gets the most looks....just looking for opinions

thx
jeff

 

[NOLA_Ken]

We hunt under old houses here whenever we get the chance, a bit less room under most of them though. I'd start with a garden rake to pull modern trash away from an area then hit it with a detector. use the rake to dig in a bit and you might start hitting bottles.

 

[jeff of pa]

Every place with dirt is worth Swinging a detector.

You just never know till ya do

 

[stefen]

We hunt under old houses here whenever we get the chance, a bit less room under most of them though. I'd start with a garden rake to pull modern trash away from an area then hit it with a detector. use the rake to dig in a bit and you might start hitting bottles.

My first thought...

As with any old building, you never know what was tossed under them...probably a lot of booze bottles, maybe a lot of needles from current times...

Wanna bet you'd find guns, knives and other stuff...

 

[Tom_in_CA]

If this movie theater was in a down-town district, then odds are, there was something there even before the 1930s, when it was built. So even if nothing made it through, or under, the floor of current building, still check when old buildings are torn down in old-town districts, since sometimes a 1930s building is "2nd generation" where earlier temporal "board and batton" type buildings were in earlier times.

And even if it was the original structure on the site, still go ahead and give it a try, because it never ceases to amaze me how stuff can actually get through to underneath buildings. I routinely find coins that post-date the date of const. of the building, proving that the coins somehow get underneath. Reasons can be varied, but here's a couple:

a) persons scuttling underneath to work on plumbing and wiring and such. Because think of it: they'd be in a scuttle / sideways /belly position, right? And even though no one may go under there very often, yet when they do, they're in a "prone" position which is most condusive to coins and objects coming out of their pockets.

b) in the old days, before modern refrigeration, homes and businesses had "ice-boxes", where you'd put a big block of ice into the refrigerator, which would last for several days or a week or whatever, before it melted away. For this reason, proprietors of bars and restaurants (and in your case, perhaps the concession stand area, for instance) would make a "drip grate" to go underneath their leaky drippy refrigeration soda sales area, to let the drips harmlessly drip to the sub-floor crawl space. One time I found 150-ish old coins, in an area no bigger than 5 ft. square, underneath where one of these drip grates had been under one of those old soda machine locations. Because I guess the people would take off their bottle caps and throw them through the grate. But so too would coins occasionally make it through the grate too.

 

[Produce Guy]

Try searching the attics or the basement and if it has a wooden floor try looking under the floor boards,I recently helped a friend run some PVC pipe under a wooden floor in a building and we found all kinds of old glass bottles and jars(all were broken),but it was neat finding all of that stuff.

 

[oldcoon]

I knew a guy years ago who hit a gold mine working under an old arcade built up on stilts. This was back in the late 70s or early 80s. I remember he used a Compass detector. He told me the arcade still had a decent roof but the floor boards were kind of spaced apart to allow easy sweeping. According to him the ground remained dry and the digging was easy.