by Gates, Moses
• • •
London in early 2007 turns out to just be finding its groove. Siologen and Dsankt soon arrive in town and, along with some others, set off a chain reaction of urban exploration. Everything falls. First up are the rest of the lost underground rivers, and when those are found, the crew starts in on the abandoned Tube stations. We all considered these next to impossible, especially after the Tube bombing that July, but over the course of the next four years every last one is infiltrated. It doesn’t stop there. They summit every major construction site, including the Shard, which is slated to be the tallest building in Europe. They get up onto the dome of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, down into Winston Churchill’s subterranean bomb shelter, up the chimneys of the old Battersea Power Station. They even manage to take a ride on (and crash) the queen’s personal underground mail delivery train. All the surveillance, all the “Do Not Engage in Anti-Social Behavior” signs, all the paranoia, turns out to be for show, a muscle-bound bouncer who can barely throw a punch. I visit London a few more times during this blitz, each time tagging along, essentially as a tourist, to something I’d thought impossible on my previous visit.
SEVENTEEN
Paris, February 2007
After London, I take the train to Paris to visit some Parisian explorers before heading back to New York for a day and then on to South America. My second night there I meet up with one of them on a street corner in the XIVe arrondissement. There is a public toilet not fifty feet away from this corner. And even if I couldn’t make it that far, there’s a fairly well-concealed public park right in front of me. But no, here I am peeing directly into the middle of the street. Why? Well . . .
“What? We are in France!” my companion for the night, Eric, replies when I tell him I’m going to head down the block to the public toilet. “Here, I have to take a piss too.
“You know what the most Latin country in the world is?” he continues as he lets a stream go right in the gutter of Rue Daguerre. “Not Italy, not Spain. France.” My companion knows well of what he speaks. He’s been relying on that relaxed Latin “Can’t be bothered” attitude for quite a while now.
Paris is absolutely unlike any other city in the world when it comes to urban exploration. Combine large, dedicated, fairly well-coordinated core groups of adventurers with an incredibly relaxed attitude toward recreational municipal trespassing—or really anything that would lead to a hassle on the authorities’ part. What you get are things like a clandestine movie theater—complete with open bar—that operated completely unknown by the authorities in an abandoned rock quarry about five minutes from the Eiffel Tower. Or a group that spends a year, totally illegally and completely unnoticed, repairing a clock in the Panthéon, one of Paris’s national landmarks and the burial place of such luminaries as Voltaire, Marie Curie, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. After the repairs were completed, the administration of the Panthéon was so embarrassed that they ended up taking this group to court, where the prosecutor called the charges “stupid” and the tribunal head was flummoxed as to why they didn’t simply thank the repairers and start operating the clock again. That’s Paris for you.
After peeing, we wait for our companions. “Where’s the manhole?” I ask.
Eric looks at me sideways and chuckles. “No manhole,” he says, in a tone that doesn’t invite a follow-up question.
His companions arrive a short time later. “OK, come with me,” he says. “I think we’ll use the easy way.” That’s when I notice we’re right by the entrance to the museum that leads to the official catacomb tour. One rule of Paris is that oftentimes secrets are hidden in plain sight. Eric simply takes out a key ring and tries a couple, and the door opens. “Stay along the wall so you don’t get seen,” he says, pointing to a solitary security camera in the corner. “I don’t mind the eight euro,” he continues, “but going this way is much better: you don’t have to worry about tourists, you can take tripod photos, you can—”
I can’t take it anymore. I have to ask. “How did you get the keys?”
He chuckles. “What, you don’t have people working on the key problem? Or the alarm problem?”
Well, no, we don’t. Maybe we should. But it’s not just the attitude of the authorities that’s the problem. Paris is a very old and very stagnant city. New York has a few interesting nooks and crannies but doesn’t have nearly the history needed to create a subterranean network like the one that exists in Paris. Places get closed up and reopened in Paris all the time; it’s just part of the game. Our first time in the city we heard of an entrance to the catacombs, only to find it welded shut when we got there. We assumed the game was over: the police had found it, sealed it, and that was that. I ask Eric about this entrance during our time on the street together. It turns out the entrance has been reopened and closed back up half a dozen times in between my visits. There’s always more than enough stuff in Paris to occupy everyone from hard-core explorers to casual cataphiles. In New York, if one of our favorite underground niches gets closed up, it’s a blow. There’s a very limited number of these that are regularly accessible by your average curious urbanist, especially in this day and age.
Paris has also not changed much for about 150 years. Nothing new really gets built in the city proper, and historic preservation laws are draconian. In New York, you can’t count on an interesting space being there tomorrow, much less for the time it takes to transform it into a movie theater. The town is always changing. Old things go, new things come, spaces get filled in, or dug up, or sealed off. Every once in a while someone manages to pull off a good, extralegal event without getting the place shut down. But for the most part it’s still a few folks, a nutty idea, an impromptu adventure, and that’s a wrap.
Maybe it’s laziness. Maybe it’s fear. Maybe it’s the dregs of the post-9/11 paranoia. Maybe it’s just the fact that we don’t have the positive feedback loop France has: the more you pull off, the more people get into it, the more attempts are made, the more it becomes just a part of the city.
After heading into the museum, we turn out to have a pretty nondescript excursion, at least for this group. A secret passageway, an illegal key, an undiscovered tunnel below the XIVe arrondissement, some wine and cheese. Just your average night out in the City of Light.
New York City, February 2007
After I finish my trip to Europe, I have one day back in New York before leaving for South America, which I use to visit Steve in the hospital. Molly is there taking care of him, and he seems in reasonably good spirits.
“Hey, Moe. Welcome to the other half of my life,” Steve says by way of greeting, and I feel honored that I’ve been invited into this half as well.
“How was the trip back?” I ask.
“It was OK. The plane wasn’t too full, and the attendants let me lie down across three seats since I couldn’t really bend my leg. And on the way to the plane I got to ride on one of those little carts you sometimes see in the airport terminals.” He looks lovingly at Molly. “And then when I landed, it turned out this wonderful lady had managed to mobilize half the airport staff with her worry about me. I got carted through customs at JFK in about three seconds. Except for the fact that I was in blinding pain the entire time, the whole thing was actually fantastic.”
“How long’s it going to take for the break to heal?” I ask.
“Well, actually it turns out my leg isn’t broken at all,” he says.
“Really? So what’s the deal?”
“So I went to the emergency room the night I got back. But apparently, in New York, if you go into the emergency room in blinding fucking pain but with no readily apparent source of that pain, they think you probably just want drugs. So I spent about the most hideous twelve hours of my life not getting drugs before they realized my complaint was actually real.
“They operated on me the next day—the surgeon was really good,” he goes on. “Afterward, he explained to me that I
have this raging infection in my hip. They cut out a lot of stuff in there when I had the cancer, so there’s all this space for infections to kind of fester and grow. The surgeon actually had to scrub out the hip socket from all the pus and infection. I’m not really sure how exactly he actually did it, but I’ve got this image of him just industriously scrubbing away with a toothbrush, getting the gunk out. After the operation he asked me where I could have possibly picked this up.” Steve gives me a knowing chuckle. “I couldn’t stop laughing when he asked that.”
“Uh, I’ve been all the same places you have,” I say, thinking of strange bacteria hiding in the crevices of my joints and tendons, just biding their time before they’re ready to eat away at my bones.
“Nah, you’re good,” Steve replies. “I actually asked the doctors about this, and they said if you were going to get anything, you definitely would have gotten it by now.”
I temporarily consider abandoning my upbringing as a staunch atheist before deciding instead to give the credit to my peasant ancestors and their hardy immune systems that have been passed on to their lazy and undeserving progeny in America. Because I’ve got no time for doctors. I’m on a flight to Brazil in three hours.
EIGHTEEN
Paulo, February 2007
He’s a well-dressed fellow, tall, with thinning hair. He speaks fluent English with a clipped Portuguese accent. He pretty much resembles the successful Brazilian businessman that he is, running an import-export shop. What he doesn’t look like is the type of guy who spends his spare time bribing security guards and making his way through shantytowns in order to explore abandoned buildings in Paulo.
Still, this is what Jorge does with much of his spare time. It’s what we are planning to do the night I arrive in Paulo. But an hour after I arrive, the rain starts, and this being Brazil, it does not let up. The abandoned mansion we were planning on going to has recently been condemned due to water damage, so it’s not safe at all in this kind of weather. We’ll have to wait. Jorge tells me the mansion used to belong to a coffee baron a century ago, when this now run-down part of central Paulo was the ritzy area, one of the first wealthy neighborhoods built for the coffee barons who controlled southern Brazil during the post-colonial era. In fact, the neighborhood’s official name is Campos Elíseos—Portuguese for “Champs-Élysées.” Today, though, is a very different story; in fact, a couple blocks south of where we’re going is a neighborhood colloquially known as Cracolândia—or, in English, “Crackland.”
I had met Jorge in New York the previous year, and he had invited me to call him up for an exploration if I was ever in Paulo. A few hours ago, when we were at a posh function at a museum downtown, he introduced me to a couple other people, Gabriel and José Rodolfo, who belong to the NGO Jorge had formed, the Associaçao Preserva Paulo—Preserva SP for short. I loved the juxtaposition of being at a fancy event, knowing that later we were supposed to be exploring old dilapidated buildings. Jorge’s group is mainly an architectural and preservation organization, but I soon discovered that Jorge, Gabriel, and José Rodolfo were always up for a conversation or exploration on anything that has to do with cities. On meeting them for the first time, I felt an immediate professional kinship.
A lot of people I’ve traipsed around cities with—explorers as well as more standard urbanists and tourists—have a certain inability to see or respect anything beyond their particular interests. Hard-core explorer types don’t see the point in wandering the streets; indeed, some have a rather disdainful view of anything that doesn’t involve trespassing. In contrast, more highbrow urbanists can take the attitude that the guts of what actually make a city run are unimportant next to architectural detailing and landscaped parks. Many people interested in how a city is structured aren’t interested in actually having a conversation with the individuals who live there, and others who are interested in the communities and social aspects of a city don’t understand that its physical structure plays a large role in dictating how these develop. What frustrates me the most are people who think that the only areas in an entire city worth visiting are populated—or about to be populated—by people like themselves. And many of these people don’t really grasp that any other kind of place even exists—that there are dozens of neighborhoods and millions of people for whom their life is completely irrelevant. Not everyone is able or willing to walk for hours in unfamiliar areas, or climb bridges in the middle of the night, or strike up a random conversation with the guy next to them at the lunch counter. But I’ve always found it hard to respect people who don’t even show an interest in the parts of the city that are outside their zone of familiarity or, even worse, think that they have a complete knowledge of the entire city based on the narrow part they do know well. This shared philosophy was why I got on so well with the people I met in Paulo. We spent several days conversing, exploring, and debating pretty much all aspects of their town, from the sidewalk tiling, to the layout of the street markets, to what should be done with the distinctive antennae on the roofs of the skyscrapers that line Avenida Paulista. After the rain finally lets up a few days later, we head to the mansion.
• • •
Many, many urban explorers start off in this hobby because they find beauty and intrigue in abandoned buildings, factories, and hospitals. There are countless websites with heavy use of phrases like “the majesty of decay” and “tenderness in rust” to document these kinds of places. I’ve always thought the places interesting myself, and have certainly never turned away from an open door to an old abandoned building. Many times abandonments are noteworthy because they’re some of the very few places where the past hasn’t been painted over or bricked up, offering an unmediated glimpse into history. Exploring them, you often find clues to how people lived and worked twenty, or fifty, or sometimes over a hundred years ago, the experience falling somewhere in the crack between sociology and archaeology.
In addition, many urbanists and explorers look at the city like doctors look at a human body. Abandonment and urban decay is part of the life cycle of many cities the same way death and decomposition is part of the life cycle of the human body. In medical school they offer classes on geriatrics as well as obstetrics, and both are important in understanding and caring for people.
But there is a big difference between being a doctor and being a mortician. Some urban explorers’ interest in urban decay can become fetishistic, almost ghoulish in a way, leading to what many people have dubbed “ruin porn.” Especially in cities that are facing challenges of disinvestment and depopulation, an attitude of fascination toward this decay—even if meant appreciatively—can be construed as akin to visiting an oncology ward to observe the aesthetics of the patients.
Abandonment is vastly different in different cities. In economically strong cities like New York, abandonment is usually a transitional phase: it’s usually only a matter of time before the building is either restored or torn down to make way for something new, with the few that aren’t usually having a unique, case-by-case reason for stagnation. In cities that have shakier economies but a general sense of optimism, abandonment is an investment. Old buildings are secured until it’s profitable to restore or replace them. In cities with bad economies and declining populations, abandonment is simply part of the urban landscape.
Exploring abandonments in these three types of cities is different too. In the first kind, where abandonment is actually fairly active, you’re generally looking for a friendly worker to let you in or some kind of easy unsecured entrance during inactive times. The second type of abandonment is the toughest: an inactive site leads to none of the many possibilities of entry that become available when a site is continually being entered and structurally changed. However, the fact that it is also perceived as having potential value often results in its being heavily secured and sealed, at least by abandoned-building standards. Fencing is added and topped with barbed wire, entrances are cinder-blocked up, occasionally security guard
s are even stationed there. These are the ones that take a little work. In the third type of city, exploring is generally as easy as walking down the street and going through a hole in the wall.
• • •
But these three types of abandonment really apply only to the cities of North America and Western Europe. Most cities in South America and other more recently heavily urbanized parts of the world follow a very different pattern. Even in cities with depressed or only mildly vibrant economies, there is still enormous population growth and a huge housing crunch. This leads to a different type of abandonment, one in which the buildings aren’t really abandoned but populated informally by various squatter communities. This is the case with the abandoned coffee baron’s mansion that we are going to visit in Paulo—as well as pretty much every other abandoned building of significance.
• • •
Squatting was also common in the New York of yesteryear, at least by American standards. New York never experienced the heavy depopulation of other large northeastern and midwestern cities. At its worst, in the late 1970s, New York’s population was off only about 10 percent from its peak. Compare this to Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Cleveland, and numerous other cities that have lost 50 percent or more of their population. St. Louis today is home to a little over a third of its peak population. As a result, there is simply not much of a housing crunch in these cities. Sure, you might run into some empty buildings populated by squatters, but not very often. The reason is simple: there are a lot more empty buildings than there is need for them. In New York, even at its worst, this was never the case. In addition to less depopulation, abandoned (or sometimes occupied) buildings were likely to be actively destroyed—torched by the landlords for the insurance money, by the tenants to gain preference for homeless housing, or just accidentally, victims of disinvestment and a failure to follow the fire code—rendering them uninhabitable, even to the homeless.
