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

by Gates, Moses

  But instead I got an excited “Yeah. Fuck yeah.” Steve picked me up, frustrated and scattered from his confrontation, almost crashing the car in distraction as we headed up to the very northern tip of the island of Manhattan.

  Broadway is the longest street in New York City. Starting almost at the southern tip of the island, it heads north, with a gradual slide to the west, until thirteen miles later it passes 220th Street and heads over the Broadway Bridge into the Bronx. We parked the car and took a look at the bridge. It’s a lift bridge, which is a type of movable bridge. Most people think of drawbridges when they think of movable bridges, but lift bridges are more common in New York City. Instead of the bridge deck splitting in half and opening up in order to let boats through, the entire deck stays horizontal while it’s raised into the air by huge cables, which are anchored in the two towers that rise above either end of the deck. The Broadway Bridge actually has two decks, a lower one for auto traffic and an upper one that the number 1 train rumbles across. What we wanted to do was get to the rooms at the tops of these towers where the cables are anchored, and then hopefully find a way to get above them, out onto the very top of the structure. The first part looked simple enough. There was a staircase on the pedestrian walkway that led from the lower deck to the upper deck. From the upper deck, a series of ladders led up to the top. The staircase had a cage around it, boards around the cage, and a door secured with a heavy padlock. This, I supposed, was meant to keep people from ascending the staircase to the train tracks above. So instead of the staircase we used a ladder-like girder next to the cage, which took us about ten seconds to climb. After scaling this we crawled along a beam over to the ladders, and soon were starting to make our way up.

  We headed up the ladders until we were within sight of the lift room. It had been almost a hundred-foot climb and I was a little exhausted. We stopped to rest on the last landing, excited at soon getting up, in, and on top. Steve’s mood had completely changed: he was smiling, in the moment, enjoying life.

  As we headed up the final ladder, something started to smell. It was a familiar odor, but one I couldn’t quite place. I opened the hatch to the top and the odor got stronger. Then I heard a strange sort of breathy, fluttering sound. As I popped my head up into the lift room, it all came together in a split second, but that didn’t stop me from screaming and almost falling down the ladder when I felt something hit me in the side of the face.

  The entire lift room was filled with pigeons. Not one or two—colonies. And they were not happy to see us. They were flying onto our faces, landing on our bodies, scratching and pecking at us. One pigeon landed directly on top of my head and started needling away at my scalp. It didn’t actually seem malicious, more like it was combing through my hair for a tasty bug or two that it thought might happen to be hiding in there. The pigeons were so thick we couldn’t even see where we were going. We had headlamps, which helped us get a slight sense of the surroundings, but the light was also serving to startle and confuse the pigeons into fluttering madly around our heads. I felt like I was in one of those cartoons where a kid accidentally kicks open a beehive, except the bees were actually huge flying rats. We felt around, continually shooing off the birds, until we found the huge gear that operates the cables that lift the bridge deck.

  Trying to navigate a climb up rusty machinery in a swarm of pigeons is a bit tricky. Eventually we managed to make it up on top of the gear, reach above our heads, and grab onto some loose fencing that guarded the entrance to a catwalk. There was about a one-inch toehold as we scooted along the edge of the catwalk, hanging on to the fencing, trying to find a gap where we could get through onto the catwalk proper.

  It was much more of a mental test than a physical one. Lots of seemingly scary climbs aren’t really scary once you realize the secret is simply “Don’t let go.” That’s what this climb was like. As long as we didn’t purposefully relax our grips, we weren’t really in any danger of falling. The problem was that not letting go meant we were completely at the mercy of the birds. We had to use our hands to hold on, which kept us from using them to shoo away the pigeons instead, and had to endure the pecking, flapping, and clawing while navigating the ledge. Climbing this bridge should have been a challenge on an episode of Fear Factor. But not the last challenge, where the “fear” usually involves something like falling off a cliff or crashing a car. The second challenge, the one where they make you eat bugs or bob for pig testicles in a vat full of bile. The lift room was easily one of the most disgusting things I have ever encountered in my life. Finally we found a gap, made it onto the catwalk, frantically beat back the swarm, and spotted the hatch to the top of the bridge.

  Despite this ordeal, as we crawled out onto the top, Steve was buzzing with happiness. His mood started to rub off on me, making what we had just endured fade from my consciousness. There was a full moon, and the view was great. I chuckled in a self-satisfied manner as I took it in, slowly turning clockwise: the Hudson River to the west, with the George Washington Bridge not too far away, the curve of the Harlem River as it swings around the northern tip of Manhattan and heads south, Yankee Stadium off in the distance. As I finished enjoying the panorama and looked downward, preparing to start the descent back into the hatch, I had to hold back a retch. I was completely covered in pigeon shit.

  ELEVEN

  The New York City subway system is the most complicated in the world. Actually, it’s not a system at all. It’s three separate, independent systems, built over the better part of four decades, which were eventually consolidated into the single network that exists today. Since then there have been various additions to this network, a handful of new stations and tunnels, some track modifications, and the remnants of a few failed attempts at expansion. There are express trains, local trains, hundreds of emergency exits, and dozens of strange nooks and crannies. London’s system is longer, Tokyo’s and Moscow’s move more people. Many others run better. Many more smell better. But there’s no underground rail system in the world that can rival New York City’s for sheer complexity.

  Still, the geography of exploring the system is usually straightforward. You step off the end of the station platform and follow the tracks until you reach the next one, seeing what’s there to be seen along the way. I once read a newspaper article about a civilian found wandering “deep in the subway tunnels.” I almost laughed: there is no “deep in the subway tunnels.” It’s rare that you can find a spot in the system that’s more than five hundred yards from the nearest open station, and the places that are are usually almost impossible to visit with any degree of safety. And if you need to bail, there are generally at least three exits immediately available to you: a station on either end, and an emergency exit between them, which is usually a set of stairs leading from the tracks to a hatch set into the sidewalk above. After all, the subway was designed to carry people—a lot of people—not to be a lonely, mysterious labyrinth to explore.

  There are, however, a few exceptions to this. One exception lies underneath the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There you enter a netherworld where active tracks, long-disused tunnels, and half-abandoned stations all flow together. This netherworld has ebbed and flowed—active tracks become abandoned, decommissioned tunnels become reactivated—and during 2006 is at its zenith. You can step off a platform into this network and walk underneath four zip codes interchanging between the three subway lines serviced by nine different trains before reentering an area open to the public. And when you do, you have the option of exiting at one of seven different stations, three different emergency exits, or out onto the pedestrian path of the Manhattan Bridge. It’s the only part of the system where I would say it’s realistically possible to get lost underground, to drift through the tunnels below New York until you don’t know what’s above you.

  One day, just before New Year’s, I’m walking through this world, planning out the coming year in my head. This year, 2006, has gone by quickly—the days spent on
the tour bus, the evenings in class, the nights adventuring through the city. I’ve gotten up half a dozen bridges, done countless trips into the subways and storm drains, made it into long-abandoned courthouses, hospitals, and factories. My favorite trip has been to walk for more than a mile underneath the streets of Harlem through the remnants of New York’s first reliable water supply system, the Old Croton Aqueduct, abandoned for almost a century.

  Steve and I have figured out where we’re going next. Steve owns his own small business producing and selling maps of New York City, and does freelance photography on the side. As such, he’s got a good amount of travel flexibility. He’s already in Europe, back in the catacombs to get some pictures he’d missed out on during our first trip. I’ve worked nonstop on the double-decker tour bus since getting back from Paris, and have saved up enough money that I can take the rest of the winter off to join him in Italy next week for an exploring trip through Europe before heading by myself to South America for a couple months. I originally intended for the South America trip to be a more standard backpacking excursion, but now I’m not so sure: after our trip to Paris, I start to think what else might be out there to discover that doesn’t make it into the guidebooks. I’ll get back in the spring, do the tour guide hustle, and try to finish up grad school. Then I can start in on the traveling again in the fall. In the meantime, though, I’ll make do with what’s in town. And what’s in town is over a hundred miles of subway tunnels.

  Some people are drawn to the tunnels, connecting with them for their own sake, the environment itself being the attraction. These people have existed for as long as there have been subway tunnels in New York City. Exactly one week after the original IRT subway opened in 1904, a Bronx man by the name of Leidschmudel Dreispul was hit and killed by a southbound express train. An article in The New York Times described the aftermath: “the down-town express service of the system . . . suspended for half an hour, no trains running until 6 o’clock, at which time all the down-town stations south of the Grand Central Station were packed with a shoving, grumbling crowd of men, women, and children anxious to get home.” Because of this and other early fatalities from civilians on the subway right-of-way, the IRT had to put up signs—the signs that read “Do Not Enter or Cross Tracks” that we see on the end of each platform to this day.

  I’m not usually the type to visit the subway tunnels just to be there. When I go, I almost always go with a goal: an abandoned station I want to visit, a stretch of track I want to walk, some piece of graffiti I want to see. But tonight is different—I just miss the tunnels. I want to wander them the same way I sometimes get the urge to just aimlessly wander the city streets with no destination in mind, no particular place to go.

  There’s a lot written in the tunnels of New York City, and everything written on the walls tells you something. Many times it’s something practical, something about the train routings or the latest maintenance. Sometimes this isn’t even written in words. The most important thing in the tunnels is told by two alternating colors, diagonal stripes of red or orange and white, colors whose message is, “Stand here when a train’s coming and you’ll die.”

  More often, though, it’s a personal message, written by a pseudonymous author. It’s not a very long message, just a single sentence consisting of one subject, one verb, and one object: “I was here.” That’s not what’s actually written, of course: the message is implied, the author’s signature all that’s needed to convey it. These signatures are most often written in spray paint, or sometimes with a white-oil-paint-based marking implement called a Mean Streak. Many of them are completely illegible to the layperson.

  But on occasion longer, more literal writings are also found. These are stories, usually written in black letters on a swath of tunnel that’s been whitewashed, although sometimes the background is a dull faded yellow or light grey. Almost all of these are written in the same aggressive font where the letter O has a slash through it and the letter A looks more like an equilateral triangle, are dated sometime in the 1990s, and bear the signature REVS or a variation. I don’t remember a lot about these. I’m always alert, even anxious, when walking subway tracks, always have my adrenaline going. One of the side effects of adrenaline is that it wreaks havoc on your short-term memory. The same way you can’t remember the blow-by-blow of a bar fight, instead having only vague recollections of emotion, reaction, stress, and violence, you can’t really remember more than a few words strung together that you read while in an adrenaline-fueled state. I would go line by line over these stories again and again in the tunnels, each time sure I would remember exactly what they said, only to forget everything but an isolated snippet or two when I exited. I remember reading one once, being sure I’d gotten it, and only ultimately recalling something about a “fat Greek kid.”

  REVS has left dozens if not hundreds of these longer stories, each one waiting to tell me something I’ll soon forget. He’s left plenty of short messages around as well, the ones marked only by a signature. And he’s left some things that fall in between. This night of wandering, as I come around a bend, I see a stark white four-word sentence painted in large block letters about seven feet above the track. It also tells me something. It’s something I won’t forget, because it’s something I already know. It’s something I’ve never admitted to myself, but now the four words are staring me right in the face. They read “None Of This Matters.”

  I have always operated under the conceit that exploring the city is somehow important, something that has some sort of professional value. Sure, it might not have a direct impact on the job one might be doing at the moment, but it matters in some other indirect way. Urban planners work with cities, and cities are a combination of the social and the physical. The two shape each other: people create our urban environment, and our urban environment affects much of people’s lives. In order to be a good urban planner, you have to know both sides. Planners understood long ago that the social side of the city—the citizens, the communities, the neighborhoods—cannot be learned in the abstract, from on high. Planners need to be in the community, need to talk to the residents, need to learn how what they’re doing affects the citizens of their municipality. They need an up-close, hands-on knowledge of the people they’re working with—and working for. Ever since the days when a neighborhood activist named Jane Jacobs led the fight in the 1950s against the routing of buses through Washington Square Park by New York’s powerful “Master Builder,” Robert Moses, the planning community has learned this lesson fairly well. The days of engineering giant highways through the hearts of neighborhoods, focusing on transportation times and not people displaced, are long over, as they should be.

  © Eric Ruggiero 2012 – www.ericruggiero.com

  But the urban planning community has not learned this lesson when it comes to the physical side of the city. We plan drain systems without so much as gazing down a manhole, subway systems without ever walking the tracks. We leave this nitty-gritty to the engineers who design it, the contractors who build it, the members of the Laborers’ International Union of North America Local 147, better known as the Sandhogs, who dig the tunnels. I always thought that what I was doing—seeing the city in an unmitigated way, raw and up close—was important. That doing this would somehow infuse me with a knowledge and perspective that would trickle out in my professional life and end up having some social value, contributing something positive to the city. I might not be getting course credit in my grad school program for these nocturnal adventures, but I still consider them an integral part of my education.

  But when I see this four-word message, all the insecurities that I’ve neatly hidden away in the back of my mind suddenly ram their way forward. I know I’m fooling myself, simply trying to justify my loneliness, my obsession, my desire to be different, exclusive. Adventure and exploration of all stripes are inherently egocentric hobbies, to the point of being colonial. The first person—or at least the first colonial explo
rer—who climbs a mountain gets to name it. This tradition’s been followed to some extent in all cultures of exploration, even ours: in the draining world, the person who finds a drain also gets to name it. But it’s silly: that drain’s been visited countless times before—constructed by laborers, inspected by engineers, maintained by sewer workers. Like all colonial pursuits, urban exploration is making the noteworthy for the newcomer out of the ordinary for the old-timer. Abandoned subway stations are just convenient places to store equipment for the track workers. Old observation decks are where the office nicotine addicts go to grab a quick smoke. Climbing up bridges is all in a day’s work for the guys who change the lightbulbs on their cables. And kids have been running around the tunnels of New York City for decades—exploring, writing graffiti, or just as a rite of passage. Plenty of people have even called them home. What the hell was I, a thirty-something divorcé, doing in an abandoned tunnel under the Lower East Side? What was I looking for? What did I hope to accomplish, to prove by this? Did any of this mean anything at all?

  {PART TWO}

  TWELVE

  Naples, January 2007

  There are few feelings in life like waking up early, drinking a cup of coffee, going downstairs, and having an entirely new City at your feet. And Naples is just that—a City. Capital C.

  Naples is loud, chaotic, and incredibly densely populated. Vespa scooters are the preferred mode of transportation through the narrow streets of the city center, sometimes carrying an entire family—and sometimes driven by children who look barely out of diapers. Add to this cars, trucks, and of course people. A lot of people. Stop signs and even traffic lights are taken as loose suggestions at best. Yet despite all of this, I never feel the least bit unsafe walking anywhere in the city.