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

by Gates, Moses

  A few years later, I read an interview with the guy who started the anti-fascist group, Joey Olszewski. A quote from that article stayed with me as well:

  If you’re familiar at all with any other anti-fascist movements in the United States, if you’re going to stay non-violent . . . I’m not a fighter. I want to be a history teacher. I can’t get assault charges and things like that. That wouldn’t be good for me at all. You kill a Nazi with exposure.

  “You kill a Nazi with exposure.” I am ever thankful to live in a place where this is true.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Paris, 2009

  I am the best boyfriend in the world. Instead of a fancy dinner or tickets to the opera, I have surprised my girlfriend Sara with a trip to Paris for the weekend. It’s her first time there.

  Of course, most boyfriends during a surprise trip to Paris would probably plan their first day along the lines of, say, a couple of museum excursions, and then a nice dinner followed by a nightcap in a charming hotel room overlooking the Seine. I, on the other hand, have planned a different day. First, I take Sara down a muddy embankment and into an abandoned train tunnel, where a couple of Australian friends of mine are shooting off fireworks. One shoots between us, missing us by about six inches, and we laugh hysterically. After we’re done with this particular nonsense, our plan is to walk for four miles and then sleep in the train station. But of course, if we have enough time, I’ll first take her down the rabbit hole nearby and into the network of abandoned limestone quarries that I spent my first trip in Paris exploring.

  Most girlfriends would probably not like this plan too much. But Sara is having a blast. Because I don’t have most girlfriends. I have a girlfriend who’s had sex on a bridge.

  I don’t remember when I first got it in my head that I wanted to have sex on a bridge. I think it was around my second or third bridge climbed. It seemed so logical: climbing bridges is fun, sex is fun, so sex on a bridge must be really fun. I even had the perfect candidate: the Williamsburg Bridge.

  The Williamsburg is, by far, the easiest bridge to climb in New York. People have put sculptures on top of it, had dinner parties in the maintenance rooms that crown its tower, even done aerial shows hanging from its beams. The logistics, though, are still strictly for the able-bodied: there are a couple barriers to get over and a couple hundred feet of stairs to climb.

  Now, having sex is a two-person operation. And finding someone to have sex with on top of a bridge is tougher than you might think. The sex part wasn’t tough, the heights part wasn’t tough, but as soon as I mentioned, “Listen, there’s a small but realistic chance we might get arrested,” the conversation usually ended there. I suppose I could have just stayed away from the topic altogether, but I wanted everything to be totally up front.

  So where do you turn when nobody in real life will suffice? Craigslist, of course. I put an ad in M4W, Casual Encounters, and Miscellaneous Romance, titled “Need a ‘best place you’ve ever done it’ story?” It got two responses. The first was this:

  Hey. 41 yo female 6'2" rock climber, liberal radical, ready for some Civil Disobedience. Would love to assist in your endeavor, as well as hang a sign that says Make Love Not War sometime on our entanglement on the bridge. Currently fighting a rap upstate, so maybe have to wait til it is resolved, have biners, and slings, harness, but no rope. Willing to purchase to belay you and you set up a TR at the top. Enclosing pic. Peace my brother.

  This one I didn’t write back. The second response was pretty normal (considering the circumstances). We met up and resolved to do it in short order, but each time we made plans for it, she always ended up backing out at the last minute. Other dalliances came and went, but it never ended up happening. Then came Sara.

  I mentioned having sex on a bridge shortly after we met in Mexico City, the spring before we went on our road trip. At first I was a little worried about mentioning it, as Sara was Canadian and I didn’t want her to get deported—in which case I wouldn’t be able to see her again without leaving the country—but eventually I brought it up. She was a little hesitant initially but quickly warmed up to the idea.

  “I sometimes get vertigo, but I think it’ll be OK. Plus my cousins have been talking all this shit about how I’ll never do it. Fuck that noise, I’m totally going to show them.”

  What a trouper. So late one night we hopped the fence, I boosted her over a wooden barricade, and we headed up the dozen or so flights of stairs to the top. This was it: time to do the deed.

  As it turns out, I’m very glad I went with Sara instead of a random Craigslister. Because even on a beautiful spring night, it’s still cold as hell when you’re naked on top of the Williamsburg Bridge. It ultimately ended up being a great time—but it certainly would have made for an awkward moment or two on a first date.

  Sara says:Once we got to the top we looked out for a bit. Then Moe took me to this other part that is like a large utility room with windows. We put down all our stuff and said hooray! I was a little nervous and felt awkward about starting anything physical. But Moses just started kissing me and everything felt normal after that.

  I had found out that there was more to the plan than the room. Moe’s plan was to start things up in this room and then we would have to climb again up these beams and out the window to the actual top of the bridge. That part felt crazy, but fun. To be climbing around this thing all serious and scared about falling while in my underwear. It felt so ridiculous, but I also felt like the coolest gal at the same time.

  So we got up to the top and there were some cold winds a-blowin’. We both got undressed. But we couldn’t really continue fooling around. We took a minute to soak in the view and headed back for the utility room. It was so nice to see the city and the water and feel the wind (in my face—not like being naked in the wind; that felt awful and cold) and see it all totally uninterrupted. No glass windows or wire gates, and you could turn around full circle and see everything. It was sooo beautiful.

  We went into the utility room and were totally happy with ourselves. We warmed up and started fooling around again, and so we tried the top again and it was a success!

  So that was it . . . Surprisingly the sex itself wasn’t awkward, which is a testament to us since we were in a very awkward situation. It was actually a really great time, and at first I thought I was doing it for him and that the part for me would be that I got an amazing view and kind of conquered a fear . . . but it turns out that everything was really awesome, climbing and sex included.

  TWENTY-NINE

  New York City, 2010

  The reason New York will never get rid of graffiti is that everyone writes graffiti in New York. Everyone. One of the biggest misconceptions about graffiti in this city is that it’s done by one specific culture or demographic. Ask your average person in America, “Who writes graffiti in New York?” and they’ll probably think of a teenager from the projects.

  Now, teenagers from the projects certainly write graffiti—but so does everyone else. I’ve seen everyone from nine-year-old kids to college professors throw their name up somewhere. The Bangladeshi immigrants who lived next door to me in a middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn off the F train wrote graffiti. A Hasidic Jewish guy I knew who would lower his gaze when a woman in a short skirt walked by wrote graffiti. There are cops who write graffiti. There are people who’ve been in Hollywood blockbusters who not only write but are some of the biggest graffiti names in the world. Some of the most prolific writers are completely indistinguishable from your average middle-aged midtown office worker. Others are indistinguishable from your average Barnard coed. Put it this way: If you’re a New Yorker—any New Yorker—I won’t be surprised if you tell me you write. If I were walking around town with Woody Allen and saw him pull out a marker and tag up WOOD1 in a doorway, my reaction would be, “Huh, didn’t know you wrote, man.”

  In short, graffiti writers are individuals. And th
e ones I know on an individual level I like and get along fine with for the most part. Graffiti culture, however, is a different story. Every subculture or social circle (and urban exploration is certainly no exception) has its petty jealousies and rivalries, and being involved in it can sometimes feel like you’re an extra in the movie Mean Girls. But in the graffiti world, it’s like the girls are also at a prom where the punch bowl’s been spiked with PCP. In addition to the constant gossip and drama, everyone is also always “beefing”: fighting, painting over one another’s work, and talking shit (mostly talking shit). Compounding this, everyone also views themselves as kind of a modern-day Billy the Kid: part underground outlaw, part minor celebrity. It’s the most ridiculous, drama-filled, paranoid subculture I have ever encountered, and it seems like if you get two graffiti writers within ten feet of each other, you get issues. Every graffiti writer will also tell you this themselves, although each one will blame the drama on everyone else and claim it’s stupid and that all they want to do is paint.

  Now, the paranoid attitude is not entirely unwarranted: the authorities often treat graffiti writers as criminal masterminds on par with Professor Moriarty, devoting an amazing amount of police time and prosecutorial energy to going after people engaged in a crime on the level of yelling in church or reading Juggs magazine on the N train. (Literally. Making graffiti; disruption or disturbance of religious service; and public display of offensive sexual material are all class A misdemeanors in New York.) Because of this persecution, discretion is something that’s ingrained: talking with graffiti writers, even ones where there’s a mutual trust and friendship, can feel like talking to a member of the mob—you just don’t ask certain things.

  Politicians, police, and the establishment in general all hate graffiti with an unbridled passion because it’s a constant visual reminder of the limits of their control. In the battlefield for public space, graffiti writers are the front-line shock troops for the rebellion, the faction that fights back against this push for ever greater control of every inch of the urban landscape. Maybe it would be different if I had experienced the New York of thirty or forty years ago, the one in which a lack of control of public space was a genuine problem. But in our city’s current incarnation, the one in which the pendulum has swung so severely the other way, I’m always heartened when I see this challenge shouted in any way, shape, or form, from the tunnels, to the streets, to the rooftops. The authorities hate graffiti way more than exploring. If you’re caught somewhere you shouldn’t be, it’s a good bet the difference between a gruff warning and an impromptu vacation at Rikers Island is going to be the Sharpie in your front pocket.

  So when I find out there’s a secret art gallery under way in an abandoned subway station, I know the name of the game is now going to be “Don’t let the cat meow too loud, much less make it out of the fucking bag alive.” I also know it will eventually lead to drama, as it’s the magic combination of a secret, something that’ll get a ton of press, and graffiti. What I don’t know is that it would lead to my first arrest in New York.

  The merits and appropriateness of graffiti are a constant discussion among urban explorers, among whom the prevailing attitude can be summed up as “I don’t like graffiti, except for the graffiti I like.” It’s part of the blanket discussion of the “ethics” of what we do. Some people try to make a code of ethics, mostly along the lines of the naturalist “Take only photos, leave only footprints” variety; others rip it apart; still others say how silly ethics are in general and then illustrate their own attitude, which they expect everyone to follow. The whole thing is an exercise in futility, almost a paradox. You are, by definition, dealing with people who will ignore rules that they think are stupid. Why do you think whatever you come up with is going to be treated any differently from the legal code?

  The gallery isn’t really a graffiti thing, though. It’s the work of the street art crowd. The difference between “street art” and “graffiti” doesn’t really have a lot to do with the end product or even with the people who do it. There are people from all different walks of life in both scenes. There’s plenty of stuff that looks like graffiti that’s done by street artists, and plenty of stuff that looks like street art that’s done by the hard-core, old-school graffiti writers. And there’s plenty of overlap between the two worlds; in fact, some of the biggest graffiti writers out there have pieces in this secret art gallery. The difference is cultural, tribal. When you think about it, it’s not like there’s a whole lot of difference between the Serbians and the Croatians, or the Northern Irish Protestants and the Northern Irish Catholics. But they’re two groups of people fighting over the same little slice of land, each wanting their own small differences in the unspoken rules, each wanting respect.

  And where the project is taking place isn’t actually an “abandoned” station at all, which would imply that it was at one time in use. Instead, it was built almost eight decades ago but never put into service. It’s a small glimpse into a kind of parallel dimension, a New York City that came close to happening but never did.

  New York City is successful in large part because of foresight. Many of the key components of the city—the street grid, the subway system—weren’t built for the city that existed at the time; they were built for the city that was due to exist in the future. The street grid was surveyed and planned out 142 blocks beyond the northernmost actual street at the time. The subway system was built miles and miles into farmland and wilderness, on the premise that development would follow its path. Many cities are organic, the people determining how it develops by speaking with their feet, with infrastructure built as a reaction. Not so with much of New York.

  This foresight sometimes takes unexpected twists. Central Park—planned and developed decades before apartment buildings lined Fifth Avenue and Central Park West—was put where it was in part because it was regarded as one of the least valuable places in Manhattan. At the time, as throughout the vast majority of its history, New York’s economy was based on maritime activity. The closer to the waterfront, the more valuable the land, which is why the avenues near the East and Hudson rivers are closer together than those in the middle of the island—more valuable street frontage in the most valuable part of the island. The land that would become Central Park, a good three-quarters of a mile to the nearest river, was seen as almost expendable. Today, Central Park is the most valuable undeveloped 843 acres of land in the country, perhaps even the world. In 2005, the property appraisal firm Miller Samuel estimated its worth at a smidge under 529 billion dollars.

  But not all of this foresight has worked out every time, either as planned or as a fortunate accident of history. In addition to the successes, there have also been failures—parts of the city developed for a future use that never came to be. The subway tunnels are filled with these forgotten failures: beginnings of route extensions that never happened, extra tracks that have ended up being useless, blocks’ worth of tunnels dug for lines that were never installed. One of these failures is a giant concrete shell, the unfinished remains of a station meant to be a transfer point for two separate lines, neither of which was ever built. This is where the art gallery is currently being created.

  This is the easiest of these hidden places to get to in the whole system. It’s at the unused end of one of the least-used stations on one of the least-used lines. You don’t even have to walk any tracks: just slip around the red sign and you’re there. It’s our go-to place for friends who want to see something interesting in the subway but don’t have the willingness to actually get in the tunnels and dodge the trains. But as a result of the need for secrecy concerning the project, this is no longer our chill place to bring friends. Steve and I had taken a couple of journalists there a few years ago, not thinking much of it at the time. As the project is going on, consumed in “Don’t say a fucking word to a fucking soul,” there’s a detailed account of exactly how to get there online in GOOD magazine.

  While
the organizers had a plan not to mention the exact location of the gallery until they were done with the project and the story hit the papers, I knew this was an exercise in futility: subway enthusiasts, not to mention the MTA (the Metropolitan Transit Authority, the agency in charge of the subway system), would easily be able to figure it out from the description and photos, and the place would almost certainly become known and sealed. For the organizers, this would simply be collateral damage, but for us it would be a bit of a heartbreaker. And it’s a shame that while the project is going on we have to take a step backward, not mentioning that the place even exists to anyone who doesn’t already know. But I accept it, an inevitable consequence of circumstance. The organizers just have an idea—a good one—and are trying to bring it to life. It’s not their fault that municipal authorities are so uptight about this kind of thing.

  Sometimes there’s no choice—sometimes greater knowledge of a place leads to less access, not more. The more people learn of a place, or how to get entry to a place, the greater chance there is that someone will bring its unsanctioned use to the attention of the authorities somehow. Someone will get caught entering it, or someone will trash it, or (as most often happens) someone will simply put a story about it on the Internet that’ll get seen by the wrong person. I wasn’t worried that perhaps an odd subway worker or two knew what was going on in there. After all, there had been graffiti in the abandoned station for years, before the project had even started; workers had to know that people hung out there from time to time. What I was worried about was the publicity. There were big names and big concepts involved in this, and it would be a big story if it came out. And there’s a big difference between knowing that some people like to hang out, or even write graffiti, in a place where you happen to work and having your boss come up to you, slam down the newspaper, and go, “What the fuck is this shit?” when this fact is plastered all over the front page. We had learned this lesson a while ago with one of our favorite places, the Old Croton Aqueduct. In 2006, Steve took a New York Times reporter there. The week after the story hit the paper, all of the entrances were sealed with cement. And with a project like this art gallery, sealing it with cement would almost be a best-case scenario. A worst-case scenario would involve arrests, restitutions, and grand juries. All we can do is to try to keep it quiet until the project runs its course and the story hits the papers in an orderly fashion as planned.