The Grandfather District Records Hall

A Building That Was Never Meant to Finish

The Hall holds two centuries of pre-Consolidation census data, guild charters, and land registrations, most of which the FAF still hasn't digitized. It has held records since before District Nine had a name, and every generation since has added a wing, because every generation produces more paper than the last one thought possible.
  The original structure, from what survives of the founding plans, was a single modest room. What stands now is four wings, three basement archive levels, and a mezzanine added so recently the mortar still smells faintly of lime.
  Heavy stone. Narrow windows. The kind of architecture that says we take record-keeping seriously here, in a way that also, not so subtly, says we don't entirely trust you.

Why It Keeps Growing

Every archivist I've ever spoken with at the Hall says the same thing, in roughly the same tired tone: they were supposed to have finished cataloguing the east wing three years ago.
  They never do. Something always outpaces the shelving. A guild dissolves and its charters need housing. A census gets retaken after a dispute. A FieldScribe, myself included on more than one occasion, brings back three crates of field notes nobody asked for and everybody now has to store.
  I've asked, more than once, whether anyone has considered simply refusing new material until the backlog clears. The answer is always the same look, somewhere between exhaustion and genuine offense, as though I'd suggested burning half the district's memory to save on shelf space.
  I paid the lift operator twice what the fare required on my last visit, because he hadn't recognized me and that felt like a gift worth rewarding. I was not in the mood for the long version of events, and the Hall, as ever, was not finished being built.
  I doubt it ever will be. I've come to think that's rather the point.
  A finished archive is a dead one, in a sense. It would mean nobody's being born, nobody's trading, nobody's dissolving a guild or dissolving a marriage or dissolving anything worth writing down. The Hall keeps growing because the district it serves keeps living, messily, in ways that generate paperwork faster than any mason can lay stone.
  I find that oddly comforting, on the days the lift is running late and I've nothing better to do than stand outside and watch the newest wing's mortar cure.