Nobody is quite sure how long the four-and-a-half foot tall safe was nestled in the back half of a closet at the Old Pine Community Center in Society Hill.
It had been there so long — turned backward so its handle and dial didn’t show — that staffers at the center assumed it was just a large metal box or an outdated piece of mechanical equipment. And the wheels on the bottom of the heavy object were so rusted that nobody could move it, said executive director Mark Atwood.
“It was a part of the place,” he said. But when the Old Pine Community Center, which has been the only tenant of the building at Fourth and Lombard Streets since it opened in 1977, was in need of more room this year, they called in a junk-removal company to help get rid of it in October.
“A large guy got it rocking, got it moving, and got it out,” Atwood said. “And that’s when we realized it was a safe.”