by Gates, Moses
One day, a couple years after I had moved to the city, I was waiting for the train after a late-night poker game at a friend’s house. I had won thirty bucks and was feeling lucky, and Leigh and I had been fighting so I didn’t want to go home yet. A train had just passed and the subway platform was empty except for me. I made my way down to the end of the platform, where a dull red sign marked the end of the space freely available to each of eight million New Yorkers, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and marked the beginning of a mysterious world known only to a few small subsets of the city: subway workers, graffiti writers, the homeless. I was sweating as I gazed down the tracks into the dirt and darkness. It was only one step past the sign, but the mental barrier was enormous. We live our whole lives as prisoners of artificial boundaries—boundaries put in place not by mountains, rivers, or walls but by people and institutions who simply tell us that they’re there. Crossing these boundaries, realizing that this prison that has been constructed in our minds doesn’t actually exist, isn’t physically difficult. But for people like me—people who had spent twenty-seven years waiting for the sign to say “Walk” before crossing the street—it can take an unprecedented act of will. I had to steady myself on the “Do Not Enter or Cross Tracks” sign that marked this mental border and physically push my leg forward with my other hand in order to step around it. I went down the short ladder onto the tracks and started down the tunnel. Glancing back, I remembered the Woody Guthrie lyric from the fifth verse of “This Land Is Your Land”—the one they don’t teach you in school or play on the radio.
As I was walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
Of course, Woody Guthrie’s side of the sign probably had open fields and a nice cool breeze blowing, not striped “No Clearance” signs and 600 volts of direct current in the form of the third rail running next to him a foot away.
• • •
As I made my way down the tracks I noticed something interesting. Walking subway tracks and riding over them in a train are two opposite experiences in the exact same point in space. Riding is bright, crowded, noisy, and clean—well, relatively clean. And with the occasional exception of a crazed preacher, it’s fairly relaxed. It’s a familiar place, one that New Yorkers feel a certain comfort in and ownership of. If you would do it in the passenger seat of your car, New Yorkers will do it on the subway: nap, eat, put on makeup, clip their fingernails.
Walking is dark, solitary, quiet, and absolutely filthy. And I was very, very far from relaxed. As soon as I stepped around the sign it was like a switch had been flipped. I was instantly more alert. I got a strange, queasy feeling in my stomach, but one that instead of distracting me made me focus on my surroundings. I could almost feel my pupils start to dilate.
Since that first step, I’ve walked tracks on seven different subway systems around the world. I’ve gotten this same slightly nauseated feeling of nervousness, the same adrenaline-fueled alertness, every time. I never fight it; in fact, I’ve long since learned to welcome it. Subway tunnels are no place to get comfortable. In order for them to be certified to walk on the subway tracks, the MTA makes employees take an eight-hour safety course, and when they’re actually on the tracks they have to have all the proper lights and equipment. Even then it isn’t a hundred percent safe: since 1946 there have been more than 150 cases of workers being hit by a train or electrocuting themselves on the third rail. And that’s just the professionals. Dozens of average citizens—drunks, graffiti writers, suicides—die on the subway tracks every year. I was aware of all of this but I still had to go.
That first time I didn’t go far, or stay long, or really even see much I couldn’t already see from the platform. But the sensation, the feeling of being in a new environment I’d only thought about experiencing, was there. The light, the smell, the air were all different. My curiosity had been satisfied, another perspective on the city gained. To me it was amazing.
When I got back to the platform, panting not from exhaustion but excitement, everything in the station was exactly the same. No alarms had gone off; no overzealous straphangers had “seen something and said something.” No police had suddenly appeared, waiting expectantly for me to return before whipping out their handcuffs with a patronizing quip. The only thing that was different was me. It wasn’t just the act. It was the opening of possibility, the realization that the boundaries that had kept me from sating this desire were totally in my head. In addition to the dozens of neighborhoods and thousands of streets above, more than a hundred miles of tunnels underneath New York City had now been added to my mental geography. And if these boundaries were a figment of my imagination, what other boundaries were as well? I had wanted more, and now I realized that I could have it. The experience was like giving someone who struggles with a small coffee addiction his first hit of cocaine.
TWO
New York City, 2005
OK, so you want to go out the window and I’ll hold the elevator?” I do want to. But I freeze.
Three days ago I had met Steve Duncan on top of a small roof at the end of a hidden alley in an industrial section of Queens. In the couple of years since I had taken those first steps in the subway, I’d met a few like-minded people and spent a good deal of time in the tunnels, ruins, rail lines, and other nooks and crannies of New York. My favorite places became a beautiful derelict courthouse in the middle of a ruined South Bronx neighborhood; New York’s oldest bridge, completely abandoned for decades, built in 1848 over the Harlem River; and an elevated rail line down the west side of Manhattan, overgrown with two decades’ worth of shrubbery over the long-disused tracks.
The other people I’d met each had their own stories and motivations. There were rebellious high school kids wanting adventure and exploration, artists and photographers trying to capture their aesthetic vision, a couple of people who simply had a visceral love of tunnels—whether it was the space, the solitude, or some unresolved issue from the birthing process, I couldn’t say. But Steve was the first guy I had met who I clicked with on an intellectual level. Chatting with this skinny, shaggy-haired blond hipster with the goofy grin and slight lisp was the first time I’d talked to someone where I didn’t feel the need to ask—or answer—“So why do you do this?” We both happened to be at a small get-together for explorers. I had asked if he wanted to try to get to an abandoned observation deck.
Old guidebooks are the best history books. They give you a sense of the city as it was perceived in the moment, without the clouded judgment of historical hindsight. They’re also a great way to glimpse back into the New York City of yesteryear and begin the hunt for the remnants of it today. By far the best of these old guidebooks is The WPA Guide to New York City, commissioned by FDR’s Works Progress Administration and published in 1939. The WPA guide lists seven observation decks open to the public just in Manhattan, ranging in price from $1.10 (the Empire State Building) to free (the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building on Wall Street). Not listed is our goal—the 512-foot Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower, the tallest building in Brooklyn, and for almost sixty years the tallest building between Manhattan and Paris. Through some research, however, I’m pretty sure that its uppermost terraces used to be open to the public. Built during the excesses of the 1920s, the building boasts a beautiful banking hall on the ground floor and one of those slender prewar towers, which in this case is crowned with a golden dome, giving the building a laughably phallic appearance. Compounding this, the dome also serves as the top of a smokestack, leading to occasional billows of white steam ejaculating from the tip of the priapism. Opened in 1929, it later became known as the “Tower of Pain” for its concentration of dentist offices.
I’ve been frustrated with observation decks in New York for some time now. The Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower is just one of over
a dozen buildings or structures that used to have public observation decks that are now closed or used for private space. In the 1920s, the owners of these skyscrapers had pride: they wanted to build magnificent buildings, wanted the public to get a chance to see how amazing they were. But things have changed now. There’s no need to peacock. New York City skyscrapers are now so well-known and popular, the owners no longer feel any need to show them off. Social value that used to be derived from openness now comes from exclusivity. It seems like the city is conspiring to keep you off its heights.
In New York City, one of the top tourist destinations in the world, there is currently one public observation deck, on the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building (although the reopening of a second one, the Rockefeller Center deck, would happen in a few months). While the view is great, the cost—not to mention the hours-long line—makes the activity an arguable value. The pattern for it, and for most touristy observation decks I’ve visited, seems to be to jazz stuff up with a lot of bells and whistles, charge a ton of money, and advertise it as an “experience.” (A good tourist rule of thumb is to skip anything that is advertised as an “experience.”)
LADDER TO AN ABANDONED OBSERVATION DECK, WILLIAMSBURGH SAVINGS BANK TOWER, BROOKLYN.
Here’s what people want from an observation deck: to be up high, have an unobstructed view of the city, and be able to snap a few pictures. They don’t want $20 souvenir photos of them superimposed in front of the building. They don’t want talking elevators. They don’t want a tchotchke shop the size of Rhode Island to walk through before getting to the deck. But these are the kinds of observation decks we have now. So if you want something different from this, you’ve got to find your own.
Steve and I meet at the entrance to the tower and head in. We’re all ready with a fake story about root canals, but the guard at the entrance doesn’t give us a second look. We head to the tower elevator and hit the floor we think the abandoned deck is on. We’re right, but the elevator door opens into an active office whose workers give us mildly curious looks. Darn.
Luckily we have a Plan B. The terrace is surrounded by masonry that reaches all the way up to the next story. Maybe there’s a way to make our way down it from the outside. We hop back on the elevator and press the button for the next floor up. We’re in luck: this office is empty, about the size of a large studio apartment. Steve holds the elevator for a quick getaway as I poke around. Looking out the window, I realize we’re going to be able to do this: there’s a ladder on the outside of the tower a couple feet away from the window. It won’t be the simplest maneuver, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to grab the side, swing around onto it, and climb down to the deck below.
I relay this info to Steve, who is still holding the elevator, and who suggests I get going. I go to lift up the window. There’s no real reason to be scared. The building is an old prewar one, not likely to have any alarms or much in the way of security at all. Even if we get seen on the terrace by the people in the office, the worst that will probably happen is that someone will come to escort us off the premises. I know this window is just one more of those mental boundaries; that I can lift it up, swing onto the ladder, and climb down to the deck with no more difficulty than it would take to negotiate a simple playground jungle gym. I also know that after hemming and hawing for a while, I’ll manage to do it. But I don’t know how to explain it to the guy waiting expectantly at the elevator door. My hands are at the bottom of the window. I resolve to contract my biceps and force them to pull up on the ledge. Instead I hear myself say, “Uh, you want to check it out and I’ll hold the elevator?”
Thirty seconds later I hate myself as I hear, “Come on, Moe, it’s totally cool,” coming from one story down.
I let the elevator go, the journey out the window now easy after the trail has been blazed. As I take the last step off the ladder and look around, I’m expecting some great views and maybe to hear a deep voice say something like “Excuse me, gentlemen, could you tell me what you’re doing here?” What I’m not expecting is a history lesson on the Revolutionary War.
There are seven signs surrounding us, each one attached to one of the fences that surround the deck. They’re numbered from 9 to 16, with number 10 missing. On the other side of the abandoned office there’s another window with another ladder, which leads down to the second deck, which houses signs 1 through 8. Each sign has three components: an illustration, some text, and a photograph. Looking closer, I see that each illustration and text is a short description of a specific action by either the British or the Continental Army—the British landing at Gravesend Bay, Washington’s night retreat from Brooklyn to Manhattan—in the Battle of Brooklyn, during the early days of the American Revolution. As I read the description of each event, I can see the entire terrain—from Staten Island, to Flatbush, to the island of Manhattan—where it played out over two hundred years ago. The photographs are of the view from the deck itself, with a red dot pointing out where the event in question happened. Sign number 12 reads “Washington Calls a Council of War.” The illustration is of Washington conversing with his advisers over a map. The text describes the decision of the Continental Army to retreat from Brooklyn. The red dot on the photo is pasted just to the left of the Twin Towers. I later learn that these signs were put up to commemorate the bicentennial in 1976, and that in 1977 the building was landmarked with the signs still up.
New York City has one of the strongest historical preservation laws in the world, one where designation as a landmark means (allowing for only a few small loopholes) that you can’t legally alter any part of the structure that is visible to the public. A short time after the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower was landmarked, the observation decks were abandoned. Since you can see the backs of the signs from the street, they’re now considered part of the landmarked façade, which means they can’t be removed. So they stick around the abandoned decks, a lost little part of an older New York City, waiting to impart their lessons as a reward to the lonely few whose curiosity leads them to venture there.
Steve and I take our time. I examine the signs and admire the view; he takes photo after photo after photo. We climb back up the ladder, shut the window, and head back down the elevator, through the lobby, and past the guard, who grunts at us as he reads the paper.
Once we’re outside, I turn to Steve. “So are you into the subway?”
Steve says: When I first met Moe, the thing I remember is being really unimpressed with his fashion sense. He was wearing pleated pants and these beat-up dress shoes that looked like he’d just walked for a couple hundred miles in them. But I was at a point where the only people I could get to go into tunnels with me were two high school kids, so I was excited to meet someone who was into this, and to have an exploring partner.
THREE
New York is a new city, relatively speaking. In cities like Rome and Paris the underground world is enormous: centuries-old (if not millennia-old) quarries, ossuaries, and aqueducts exist that catacomb huge sections of the underground. Archaeologists and underground societies spend years documenting these abandoned worlds, and are constantly discovering new offshoots and networks.
The underground world in the cities of the western hemisphere is different. There are a few unused nooks and crannies underneath New York, but for the most part anything underground is going to be part of the currently-in-use infrastructure of the city. Somewhere in between these two worlds lie the abandoned and never-used stations of the New York City subway system.
BROKEN ANGEL.
© John Hill
The most famous one of these is the gorgeous City Hall station, built in 1904 and abandoned a little over forty-one years later. It’s the most architecturally noteworthy, featuring an arched tile roof, stained-glass skylights, and hanging chandeliers. It’s also probably the trickiest one to sneak into, involving running a single-track, no-clearance tunnel where you simply have to
pray you’ve timed the trains correctly, although a more stress-free way to get there is to join the New York City Transit Museum and take one of its members-only tours. Another of these abandoned stations lies two miles north on the same line, directly below 18th Street under a posh neighborhood on the East Side of Manhattan. That’s our goal tonight.
Steve tells me to meet him at his place, which turns out to be a shabby loft on a somewhat derelict industrial block of Bed-Stuy. There’s a crazy house on the corner that looks like something out of a Tim Burton movie, with a sign that reads “Broken Angel” over the entrance in a dagger-like font. Later the block becomes semi-famous as the “Block” in the Dave Chappelle film Block Party, but my introduction to it is Steve’s response to my request for directions: “So you go up Downing and then go around the bend when it ends. Don’t worry about the idling cars. This is just where the hookers usually take johns because it’s almost like a dead-end street.”
