Before making omelets, BCC has to crack a vault

"Oooooh!" said Donald Hudson.

"I think I heard it click!" said Robert Messina.

"Keep going," Ron Lalusis told Messina.

A steel-encased bank vault at a 200-year-old Mount Holly building now owned by Burlington County College was being cranked open by Messina, the college president.

Lalusis, the hired vault-cracker extraordinaire, had arranged in recent days to have an 18-inch-wide opening drilled through the side wall. A man had just entered the hole and was working combinations at the vault's 24-bolt, foot-thick steel door from within.

And at 11 a.m. yesterday, heads were craning to see inside.

As part of its curriculum expansion, BCC is planning a 24,000-square-foot culinary-arts center in the building, near High and Mill Streets, which it bought in 2007. The center will include a kitchen laboratory, a demonstration hall, an outdoor-grilling classroom, and a student-run café for the public.

The problem was that the vault sits where the college wants to build the kitchen for the café, said Hudson, the college's director of construction management. It had to be cracked.

College officials had hyped the vault opening, announcing that for the curriculum expansion, the college was "digging into its vault of academic offerings. Literally."

Would it hold some rare historic artifact? Perhaps a valuable relic?

Not quite.

The door opened to reveal . . . a few hundred open safe-deposit boxes.

Messina acknowledged that it was not quite what he expected.

"I was hoping, if we hit the jackpot," he said, "we could balance that budget."