For people like me, there are few finer pleasures in life than a night spent grazing on Doritos in front of the TV. But other kinds of people seek bigger thrills, which is why I am standing on New York’s Williamsburg Bridge at 3am with Miru and SeungJung Kim, fearless Korean-American sisters who have talked me into climbing one of the bridge’s steel support towers, just for laughs.
Miru and SeungJung are part of a loose-knit tribe of thrill-connoisseurs called “urban explorers” (also known as infiltrators, guerrilla urbanists, building hackers, and urban spelunkers, depending on who you ask). These are people for whom scaling bridges and roaming subway tunnels, storm drains, derelict factories, sewers, steam vents and other forbidden infrastructure of the city is considered fun. No place is too improbable or dangerous. In fact, if urban explorers have a unifying philosophy it is simply: “Danger is our business.”
It’s a balmy October night, and with the wind ripping at our clothes and the East River swirling gloomily 100ft below, I can think of several reasons why this might not be a good idea. They are, in no particular order: one, it’s illegal, and according to the New York Police Department can carry a fine of up to $500 and/or a year’s imprisonment. Two, it’s plainly insane, and did I mention we will also be climbing without safety ropes? Three, I am terrified of heights. And four, we’ve all been drinking.
Were more intelligent, sensible beings contemplating this, they would soon retreat to the civilised comforts of sugary snacks and LCD display screens. We forge ahead, though I feel close to vomiting.
SeungJung, a ballerina-tiny, 33-year-old graduate student in archaeology who talks about bridges with the kind of fervour George Mallory reserved for Everest, pats me reassuringly on the shoulder. “You’re doing fine,” she says. “Piece of cake.” In the past few years SeungJung has climbed most of the main bridges in New York.
“I’m fascinated by heights,’’ she tells me. “There’s a physical sense of freedom. Up there, you’re in a precarious position that makes you feel alive, with the world spread out before you.’’ That’s all fine, I say, but I cannot see how, once up there, we will ever make it down. “Don’t worry,’’ she says ominously. “Getting down is the easy part.” I struggle bravely on, one foot after another, up a swaying, precipitous staircase that Department of Transportation workers (with safety ropes) use to access the control-room at the bridge’s summit. A friend showed SeungJung the steps, which are hidden from the pedestrian walkway, in 2005. Squinting up, they seem to go on forever.
When we finally reach the top, sweating and panting, the vantage is beautiful beyond belief. “You see?” SeungJung says a little breathlessly, sweeping her arm out. From up here, New York looks like a future moon-city. Miru, an artist, marvels at the scenery. Like me, this is her first bridge climb. “I’m more into tunnels,” she says.
When we descend an hour later there isn’t a cop in sight, nor one shattered skull among us. I haven’t felt this exultant since surviving Thunder Mountain at Disneyland when I was 11. As we swagger away high-fiving, each of us remarks on how unbelievably easy it was, in this Age of Terror, for a bunch of drunk idiots to climb to the top of a major New York landmark undetected.
Urban exploring might seem like an oxymoron (the Williamsburg Bridge, after all, was “discovered” years before the Kim sisters and I stumbled upon it), yet to those who undertake these acts it’s an obvious and cathartic response to the era of Google Earth, when every fathomable inch of the globe, with the exception of deepest Amazonia, is web-accessible, or at least feels that way.
“When everything has already been explored, here’s a chance to open a manhole and climb into a world you don’t always see,” explains David “Lefty” Leibowitz, 36, one of the founding fathers of urban exploring and the author of Invisible Frontiers: Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York (Three Rivers Press). “There are incredible hidden structures all around us,” Lefty says. “Seeing them can be an intense experience.”
At Horace Mann high school in the Bronx, Lefty formed The Jinx Project, a clandestine “urban adventure” group, and started exploring subway tunnels, aqueducts, storm drains and rooftops around New York, always in a dark suit and sunglasses (to lend it an “espionage feel”) and with an adolescent zeal for unearthing forgotten treasures. “The decay and beauty of it is really something,” he says of the city’s labyrinthine substructure. “It’s a gothic culture.”
SeungJung, who spends half of each year on archaeological digs in Sicily, told me pretty much the same thing: “In some ways visiting the more recent ruins in New York is more surreal. These are places we are completely unaware of, but they’re so accessible. They’re just underground.”
Urban exploring isn’t especially new – graffiti artists have been doing the same thing for years – but it’s enjoying a vogue of late, and not just in New York. While shooting her new documentary, Urban Explorers: Into the Darkness, filmmaker Melody Gilbert followed practitioners into a disused satellite substation in Virginia, an abandoned asylum in Scotland and to a dinner party in the catacombs under Paris. “A few years ago, I don’t think anybody had ever heard of urban exploring,’’ Gilbert says. “Now it’s everywhere. It’s becoming an international hobby.” A Scottish urban explorer called Turbo-Zutek, who appears in Gilbert’s film, recently organised an international UE conference in Glasgow, attended by explorers from Australia, Canada, the US and all over Europe. “Explorers have been around since the dawn of man,” Turbo tells me. “But the popularisation of it through the internet has led more and more new blood into the mix.”
Curious to see another, tamer side of urban exploring, I head out to an abandoned nursing home in the New York borough of Queens with Joe Anastasio, a smart, demure, highly likeable web designer with slightly scowling eyes who is a kind of yogi to New York’s urban explorers. Anastasio, 33, has been everywhere and seen everything the locals salivate over, including the infamous Long Island Rail Road tunnel in Brooklyn (where he had one of many close calls, narrowly escaping being flattened by a train – he had not seen or heard it approach but happened to duck into a nook seconds before it whizzed by) and the Roosevelt Avenue subway tunnel in Queens ( “Pretty dangerous,” he says humbly; others tell me it’s probably the most perilous tunnel in New York). Urban explorers bow and tremble in Anastasio’s presence. But it hasn’t gone to his head. He’s goofy and refreshingly un-ironic. And he clearly loves doing this sort of thing.
On a blustery autumn evening, we scramble along a beach of wet sand in Rockaway, the ocean on our left. Seabirds squawk above. After slipping through a fence and past a sleeping security guard, we waltz into the nursing home, which was abandoned in 1998 and looks eerily like Hogwarts.
I follow Anastasio through several floors of smashed furniture, discarded photos, birthday cards and bizarre and frightening medical implements. We peek inside decrepit cinderblock bedrooms that seem ripped from the gloomiest parts of Beckett. It feels suddenly invasive and a little sad, trampling these ancient keepsakes. And I can’t help but think, we shouldn’t really be here. Sensing my disaffection, Anastasio offers an apology of sorts: it turns out he’s been gradually abandoning his white-knuckle subway days for places such as this, because, he says, the cops are cracking down. “It’s getting really hard to get into the subways,” Anastasio tells me, explaining that the Metropolitan Transit Authority has started installing motion sensors in the tunnels to alert the police to trespassers, greatly increasing the chance of arrest. Despite the relative ease I’d had climbing the Williamsburg Bridge, Anastasio says that heightened post-9/11 security has grievously affected local urban explorers. “There’s less and less to explore in the city these days,” he says wearily. “I guess you could say I feel like retiring.”
I’d assumed that part of urban exploring’s appeal was the trespassing aspect, the thrill of going where you’re not supposed to and the risk it entails, either of getting caught or killed or dismembered, or some combination thereof. But it hadn’t occurred to me that the forbidden terrain was shrinking. Anastasio points out the obvious: as once gritty neighbourhoods such as Harlem and the Lower East Side are colonised by the well-to-do, the abandoned warehouses and neglected tunnels in those areas get reclaimed. Urban explorers, it seems, are like those Asian elephants losing their habitat to encroaching farmers, if the farmers drove luxury cars and wore designer labels.
Miru Kim is a funny, quiet 26-year-old with inky black hair and a smile that’s so genuine and spontaneous I can’t believe she’s part of the New York art scene. Until recently, she took photographs of herself naked in subway tunnels and abandoned buildings around New York, sometimes selling the photographs for large sums of money. Her pictures have a spooky, voyeuristic quality not unlike the feeling you get from looking at Weegee’s crime-scene photos. “I’m interested in the city from a psychological perspective,” Miru says. “There’s an urban wildness here if you want to find it.”
We’re walking through an Amtrak tunnel on New York’s Upper West Side. It’s mid-afternoon. At night, the tunnel is a camp for homeless people, but now it’s deserted. We pass shopping carts and ruined clothes and shattered televisions. Rats squeal somewhere behind a wall and Miru, with a huge smile slicing across her face, confesses that it was an obsession with rats that got her interested in urban exploring.
“I love rats,” she says. “Down here I can see myself as a kind of animal, burrowing underground in the dirt and the darkness. You see, it can be so wild. It’s almost like the subconscious of the city.”
The tunnel is one of the last great underground retreats for local urban explorers. It’s easy to access, vast (stretching almost 50 blocks) and oddly beautiful. We pause under a shaft of light spilling through a grate in the sidewalk above. The sound of children playing floats overhead. Suddenly, there is a burst of wind from behind us, followed by a wail like the bellows of a tanker. Turning, we see the lights of a train bearing down and sprint for the safety of the walls. Crouching in the shadows, the train shudders past, no more than 15 feet away, throbbing, eardrum shattering. It’s simultaneously thrilling and terrifying.
“They come really fast,” Miru says as we watch it recede. I’m shaking, and for the rest of our journey I feverishly check over my shoulder for trains.
Unlike Anastasio, Miru hasn’t had any serious close calls, but last year she stumbled across a dead body in Washington Heights. Her most daunting moment, however, came at a cement factory in New Jersey when, she says sheepishly, she stepped in a pile of faeces. “In my bare feet,” she says. “That was worse than the dead body.”
Miru agrees with Anastasio that it has become too difficult to find places to explore in New York, either because of security or gentrification, and so she, like Anastasio, is slowly forsaking the tunnels. She has moved on to other art projects, including video installations, and now rarely explores.
Again we feel the burst of wind, hear the long treacherous wail in the distance. As we run for the shadows, Miru says, “It’s really too bad. Everything is being turned into condos. It’s all disappearing.”
