Hidden Cities: Travels to the Secret Corners of the World's Great Metropolises; A Memoir of Urban Exploration

by Gates, Moses

  There are a lot of different types of people involved in urban exploration—I’ve met everyone from artists to ironworkers to doctors—but at its essence, the urban exploration subculture is a branch of greater nerddom. An adventurous branch, to be sure, but a branch nonetheless. You can readily tell this through the most common day job among the crowd, which is (like Dsankt) far and away computer programmer; in fact, sometimes urban exploration is referred to as “reality hacking” or “place hacking.” The creative problem-solving aspect, the search for small holes in security to exploit and infiltrate, is what attracts a lot of these people to the hobby. Or it might just be the chance to come as close as you can to playing Dungeons & Dragons in real life.

  But another way to tell this is by the amazing array of goofy monikers explorers have taken, which they will refer to themselves as with a complete lack of self-consciousness. I’m not just talking about a silly nickname used among their particular group of friends—there are grown men who will introduce themselves with names like “Shadowstalker,” “Geronimo-X,” or (far and away my favorite) “Spungletrumpet.” Some of these monikers come out of the graffiti or art worlds, but most are just the same online handles people use on the urban exploration message boards. Discussing this with Molly once, she told me, “Oh, yeah. If Steve called himself, like, ‘Dr. Infiltration’ or something, he’d never have gotten to first base.”

  Generally the folks who are trying to gain some artistic or academic credibility from the hobby (like Steve, who is constantly trying to sell his photographs) will start using what’s on their birth certificate or at least a reasonable derivative, but not always. One of the most influential people in the scene, the late Jeff Chapman, was actually appointed a director of the board of the Toronto Architectural Conservancy despite being best known as “Ninjalicious.”

  Another one of these exceptions is Dsankt. Notoriously secretive, he guards his face and real name with a zealousness usually reserved for supervillains and turncoat mobsters in the witness protection program. His bio on his Facebook page is of a child with Down’s syndrome taken on a worldwide adventure by the Make-A-Wish Foundation. If I let slip so much as his first initial or the color of his hair, I’d never hear the end of it.

  Dsankt is one of urban exploration’s heavy hitters—and like most of these heavy hitters, he’s a young, itinerant Australian and a member of the Cave Clan, a group formed in Melbourne, Australia, in the mid-eighties. The Cave Clan’s primary purpose is to go in drains—their unofficial motto is “Go in Big Drains!”—although they’re usually game for pretty much anywhere interesting and off-limits. This isn’t the first time we’ve hosted one of their members. A guy who goes by the name Siologen came to town earlier. Silo is largely considered the goodwill ambassador for urban exploration and one of its main trailblazers—someone who’s been in five hundred storm drains around the world and needs very little prompting to go in one more. He travels around the world going in drains because he just loves drains—the same way some people love to travel around visiting baseball stadiums or ancient ruins. He has a nearly incomprehensible accent, a product of some strange mix of his childhood in Canada, Scotland, Trinidad, and Australia. Silo’s favorite topics are storm drains, tits, abandoned subway stations, and booze, in that order.

  One time we’re talking about the hazards of exploring storm drains. Silo can rattle off a list of them, as well as stories of near-death experiences involving each one—rain, bad air, accidentally falling in a collection pit, which is a giant hole in the ground filled with a combination of sewage and storm drain runoff. This is all par for the course, part of the standard prattle that explorers have over a beer. I’ve heard some of these stories before and am tuning out a little bit.

  Then I hear, “Yeah, the only part of this that really bothers me is the itchy bumhole problem.”

  I know of no such problem. This gets my attention.

  Silo explains. “You know. The itchy bumhole problem. You’re always having to keep yourself from scratching at it or you’ll spread the worms.”

  Silo sees the expression on my face, which causes him to adopt a tone like he’s trying to explain to a four-year-old that there’s no monster in his closet. “Look, mate, I’m not talking about some huge African tapeworm here. Just your average pinworms. You’re always picking them up in the drains. Nothing really awful—they just make your bumhole itch.”

  I’m a pretty novice drainer. I’ve been in a few, looking forward to being in a few more. I’m even looking forward to being able to trade some near-death stories with the likes of Silo someday. But the casualness with which he mentions intestinal parasites as a standard hazard of the trade makes me reconsider pursuing this particular side project.

  Luckily, Dsankt doesn’t have much interest in an easy drain trip, parasites or no. He’s already spent the last week running through live subway tunnels and exploring underground rivers. After he gets done with New York, his plan is to infiltrate a semi-abandoned power plant in Niagara Falls, rappel into a gigantic, century-old drainage tunnel over one hundred feet below the surface, make his way through this tunnel to the back of the actual falls themselves—and then somehow manage to get back out. We don’t want to disappoint the guy: it’s time to step it up a bit and shoot for something new. The Manhattan Bridge.

  We’re spooked. I’ve never climbed a suspension bridge before, although one bitterly cold night Steve, another friend, and I summited the Hell Gate Bridge—an arch bridge that’s part of a rail viaduct between Queens and the Bronx. The Hell Gate is a beast. Opened in 1917, it consists of twenty thousand tons of steel, and according to Discover magazine, if all humans disappeared from the earth tomorrow, a thousand years later the Hell Gate would be the last human-made structure still standing in the city. It’s the direct inspiration for Australia’s Sydney Harbour Bridge, a similar, if somewhat larger, version of the same design, completed sixteen years later. The Sydney Harbour Bridge is the most famous landmark on the continent, and the most famous bridge in the entire hemisphere. The Hell Gate, if I’m being generous, is perhaps the fifth or sixth most notable bridge within a ten-mile radius. This is how head and shoulders above the rest of the world New York is when it comes to its bridges.

  People have been climbing the bridges of New York City ever since they’ve been built, and even before. Prior to the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge span in 1883, thrill seekers were, for a short time, permitted to ascend one tower via a temporary spiral staircase and take a footbridge, constructed for the use of the bridge workers, over the East River to the other tower. Perusing newspaper archives from the turn of the twentieth century turns up headlines like “FIGHT WITH MADMAN ON BRIDGE TOWER: Demented Russian Walks up Cable of Williamsburg Bridge,” “WOMAN’S DARING FEAT ON BRIDGE CABLE: Climbs with Man 335 Feet to Williamsburg Tower,” and “TERRIFIED BRIDGE PAINTERS: A Finnish Sailor Walked up the Cable, Stood on His Head on the Tower and Waved His Legs.” (This last article ends with the sentence “To-day Hingrend will be examined as to his sanity.”) In more recent times, there was a secret society formed in San Francisco in 1977 called the San Francisco Suicide Club, which, among other clandestine activities, made a sport in the 1970s and 1980s of getting up the type of bridges that, since September 2001, have been subject to the kind of security usually found in federal prisons.

  John Law is a former Suicide Club member, one of the founders of the Burning Man festival, and the author of The Space Between, four short stories about bridges. For over two decades, from 1977 to 2001, he scaled dozens of bridges from the Golden Gate to the Verrazano-Narrows. He recalls how he first fell in love:

  I was the best climber in Big Rapids, MI. Possibly the only climber. There were no cliffs or really much in the way of rock walls anywhere about, and the culture of climbing that one might find in, say California or any other state with mountains, was nowhere to be seen in the area. I could climb things like nobody’s business: trees
, buildings, telephone poles, swing-set structures. . . . . maybe a bridge? Nobody else much cared. Not only was climbing things NOT cool in Big Rapids, like say, being good at football or maybe hockey was, but it was actually a bit frowned upon by my peers. They thought I was kinda nuts. I could care less. I had liked climbing things, anything really, ever since at age five I had climbed the tall swing-set pipes, all the way to the top. Then, sliding down, legs wrapped tightly around the pipe, I experienced a fabulous tingling in my crotch. It was the first time I felt that particular sensation, one I still identify with climbing . . .

  The attraction of the Maple Street Bridge was then, two fold for me. Just getting out onto those mysterious, heavily overgrown islands was part of it. Maybe no one had ever been out there! Also, the idea of climbing onto that massive, imposing structure was very enticing. Knowing how climbing made me feel, well . . . you can imagine. Could it really be done? I determined to find out. I was eleven years old and that was how I saw things.

  Steve has already climbed a few of the suspension bridges, and had actually been up the Manhattan Bridge before, but now there’s a new obstacle: security cameras by the four possible starting points to the climb.

  Now, security cameras are not the end point of discussion when it comes to getting somewhere other people think you shouldn’t be; they’re more like the first, tentative salvo of the security state. It’s pretty unlikely anyone is watching them consistently, if at all. Instead, they’re usually there to record evidence in case a crime is actually committed. These cameras are covered by an opaque dome and are pretty high up, so I can’t tell what they’re pointing at. Probably they’re just recording the pedestrian pathway in case there’s a mugging. And even more probably, nobody will ever even check the footage unless there’s cause to, which we certainly don’t intend to give them. But they weren’t there a few months ago, and I can’t help worrying that my conventional wisdom has no bearing on things that might be considered terrorist targets.

  “So why do you want to do this bridge if you’ve been up it already?” I ask Steve. I tend to be very goal-oriented about these adventures. Once a particular place is checked off the list, I don’t much see the point in going back.

  “My pictures from the last time suck,” he answers. “I’ve actually been wanting to climb it to get better ones for a while, but I was away and then I was out of commission with that hip thing for a bit. But what I really want to climb is the Brooklyn Bridge. That one I’ve never done. I can’t really imagine I’d get away with it, though. But I’ve thought a lot about it.”

  I’ve thought a lot about it too. There’s only one way up the Brooklyn Bridge: to climb up on the suspension cables, navigate around the suicide guards—metal gates on the cables designed specifically to keep people from scaling them—and then balance on the cables, hang on to the guide wires for dear life, and hope a gust of wind doesn’t come along. It’s no laughing matter: in 1999, Robert Landeta, a twenty-seven-year-old who wanted to set a Guinness World Record for most bridges climbed in one day, decided to start with the Brooklyn Bridge that morning. He made it about two-thirds of the way up the cable before he fell to his death. Landeta did the climb in broad daylight, had a friend videotape it, and even attracted a small crowd of curious onlookers egging him on. But this was a different time. Before 2001, people bungee jumped off bridges in the middle of the night with a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” understanding with the police. But now we’re deep into the security age. Not long ago three guys were arrested after being seen coming down from the top of the Williamsburg Bridge, another suspension bridge, about a mile north of the Manhattan Bridge. Our plan to get up the Manhattan Bridge tonight seems risky enough. Climbing the Brooklyn seems insane.

  “You know there’s no way to get up without being seen, right?” I say to Steve. “But maybe you could get away with it if you pretended you were crazy or something.”

  “Yeah, I thought of that. But the thing is I really want photos. So my plan’s to take an old camera, get my pictures, and then toss the camera off the side, swallow my memory card, and pretend I’m a potential suicide. I’m guessing I’ll just get sent for a psych evaluation and get out of the mental hospital after a day or so.”

  Hey, sounds like a plan.

  We meet Dsankt on a side street in Brooklyn and head to the Manhattan Bridge. I’m incredibly jittery. Steve and I banter back and forth about the pros and cons of taking a shot at the climb, or our backup plan of ascending the construction site just north of the approach. This debate is peppered with talk about girls, traveling, and anything else we can think of that will take our mind off police SWAT teams and Rikers Island cellblocks. But despite our attempts, I can’t manage to make my thoughts stray very far from these scenarios.

  “Dude, we’re totally going to get arrested,” I say.

  This does not deter Steve in the least. “C’mon Moe. If you don’t get arrested every once in a while, you’re not really trying hard enough.”

  Once again I marvel at the casual insanity of the situation I’ve put myself in. I do, however, realize Steve’s actually right. You’ll never know when you’ve left the artificial boundaries completely behind if you don’t run up against the boundaries of harsh reality every once in a while. I just hope I don’t run up against them the way Robert Landeta did.

  So why risk death and jail just to be able to rise a few hundred feet more above where you already are? Not only “because it’s there,” George Leigh Mallory’s great rationale for climbing Mount Everest, but because it’s there and you’re being told you can’t climb it. There’s something about exclusivity, about not being allowed to go somewhere interesting, about being told “No, that’s not for you,” that can drive a person mad. I had become palpably jealous of the workers I saw on top of New York’s great bridges every once in a while. I wondered if the best thing to do wasn’t maybe to just grab a vest and hardhat and head up one some random weekday afternoon.

  But it won’t come to that. It’s happening this night. Something feels different, unfamiliar, as we three walk back and forth across this bridge that I’ve walked countless times before. It takes me a bit, but I realize the difference is that I know I’m going to be on top of it soon. I don’t know how I know this, but I know.

  “We’re going to do it,” I say, mostly to solidify to myself what I’ve just realized. Ever since that night I’ve found I can intuitively tell if these adventures are actually going to happen, or if I’m just involved in an elaborate process of bullshitting myself. This intuition doesn’t, however, make anything easier, or calmer, or even give it that sense of inevitability that allows me to disconnect from my anxieties and enjoy the moment. In fact, after saying these words out loud, I almost throw up.

  Finally, when there are no people on the pedestrian path, we make a break for it. Luckily, bridge workers have left the camera partially covered by some black netting. There’s a short section of climbing up the superstructure, perhaps twenty feet, where we’re exposed and can be seen from the pedestrian path or by oncoming traffic. We navigate this as quickly as we can and reach a catwalk where we’re able to hide. That’s the easy part. Now comes a two-hundred-foot climb up an exposed ladder. It’s the kind of thing you wouldn’t think twice about doing if it were on a conveyer belt contraption at the gym where you’re never more than a few feet off the ground. But it’s a lot different when one misstep and they’ll be scraping you off the top of the D train.

  “OK, let’s chill out here for a while, see if everything is cool,” Steve says. This is easily the worst idea I’ve ever heard. We’re already committed, already where we shouldn’t be; there’s no sense in stopping now. If we’re going to get caught, it’s going to be after accomplishing our goal, not sitting here within spitting distance of the roadway, relaxing and rolling cigarettes. Besides, I’m in the zone. I can’t let myself stop and think about this. I wait for a short break in traffic, hit the ladder,
and start climbing.

  You wouldn’t think there’d be a whole lot of technique to climbing a ladder. And there isn’t for about fifty feet. But after that my grip starts to go, my forearms start to tighten, and I start to repeatedly bang my knees into the rungs while climbing as my body compensates for my deteriorating upper-body strength by shifting my weight forward into the ladder. I switch my hands to grip the outside of the ladder instead of the rungs, which takes some of the strain off my forearms, and point my feet slightly outward as I ascend the ladder. This helps. Now I’m about halfway up. Even if I wanted to go down now, it wouldn’t matter: gripping the ladder in order to keep from falling backward is what’s tiring me out, and I have to do this no matter if I’m heading up or down. Adrenaline and the obvious unfeasibility of letting go to rest my arms propel me on my strange, panting shuffle the rest of the way up. Eventually the ladder reaches a narrow catwalk. I’m actually inside the structure now, and the only source of illumination is the bridge lighting coming up through the grate of the catwalk I’m standing on. I, of course, have forgotten to bring a flashlight. I carefully fumble my way along the catwalk, coming to another, diagonal ladder. Despite the fact that Steve and Dsankt aren’t here yet, or that I can barely see my hand in front of my face, the need to be on top of the structure has completely overtaken me. Up, up, up, is all I can think. I manage to navigate this last climb, doing pretty well until I bang my head against the hard metal roof. There’s a hatch. I pray it isn’t somehow alarmed, push it open, and I’m on top of the world.

  Moses’ mother says: We used to call him “Sir Moses Hillary.” I have a picture of him climbing the side of his crib at about eight months old. When he was ten months old, we found him on top of the refrigerator. In the time it took to turn away from him to cut up some fruit, he had gotten up on a stool near the counter, mounted the counter, and clambered up on top of the refrigerator. He was surveying the territory beneath him and crowing with delight.