Doherty Hall is an academic building at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Specifically, it houses the departments of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, and Biology. It is connected to the adjacent Wean Hall (which contains faculty offices for Mathematical Science and Computer Science) via a series of hallways and stairwells that are placed at their junction. Sometimes, this is confusing. However, it creates an ideal setup for the games of Capture the Flag with Stuff that are played in the two buildings.
Doherty Hall is eight stories high, with no two floors having identical layouts. From ground to top, the floors are D, C, B, A, 1, 2, 3, and 4. It is not possible to walk from the front of the first floor to the back (You have to detour onto the second floor or the A basement.), as a wall separates the two parts of the building there; supposedly, this has to do with Andrew Carnegie’s backup plan to convert the building into a factory in case the whole university idea didn’t pan out. Also, the third and fourth floors exist only in two small towers with are not connected to each other. In addition to the connections to Wean Hall at five floors (one of which includes an outdoor access at the ground level), the building can be accessed through the main entrance on the first floor, as well as through a door at the bottom of a lovely garden area on the side of the building, which leads into the A basement.
On one memorable occasion, Doherty Hall made it into the evening news. You see, it had long been common knowledge at CMU that gay men were having anonymous sex in the men’s bathroom in the A basement of Doherty Hall. Eventually, the police got wind of this and arranged a stake-out that resulted in the arrests of ten men.