(rshsdepot) Urban Explorers Lured by the Forbidden

["James Dent" <james.dent_@_itochu.com>]

-From the International Herald Tribune...

Urban Explorers Lured by the Forbidden
Stephen P. Williams New York Times Service  Tuesday, May 8, 2001
NEW YORK Benjamin Deyo and three fellow explorers had gathered to admire a
side of Grand Central Terminal that most people never see.
.
Disguised in the commuter's uniform of crisp suit and buffed shoes, they
entered an out-of-service platform on the lower level, walked to the end,
hopped down to the tracks and climbed up into a hallway lined with pipes.
For the next 100 yards these members of a four-year-old New York group
called Jinx held their ties to their chests as they ducked under scalding
blasts of steam from broken pipes marked "Warning: Asbestos."
.
Inside a dark chamber perhaps 80 feet (25 meters) below street level, as
trains clunked and whirred overhead, Deyo, 30, skirted a pool of water,
climbed a slope of Manhattan schist and took in the view. "This is a purely
utilitarian landscape, and the people who built it never meant for us to see
these structures," he said from his perch. "Yet it is so beautiful here.
Look at all this steel, the tracks, all the work that went into this."
.
Jinx is one New York manifestation of a large and loosely organized global
network of urban explorers who infiltrate tunnels, abandoned hospitals,
missile silos and other forbidden places. The fact that these places defy
traditional aesthetics only makes them more attractive to people who enjoy
architecture's underbelly as much as flaunting authority.
.
The more off-limits a setting, it seems, the better. One group in
Minneapolis kayaks in storm drains. A man in Dover, England, sneaks into the
area's World War II batteries and barracks. In Berlin, people have
infiltrated a bunker under the Alexanderplatz. A group of women in Paris,
the K-ta Nanas, explores catacombs beneath the city.
.
Abandoned architecture has always attracted the curious, but interest in
illicit visits has exploded since the early 1990s, nourished by the
Internet. Jinx, at www.jinxmagazine.com, for example, has links to dozens of
similar groups worldwide.
.
Once inside a narrow train tunnel, with a headlight bearing down on them,
they scanned nervously for an exit, crossing the high-voltage third rail and
ducking into an archway cut into a filthy concrete wall. Just feet away,
oblivious Harlem Line passengers rolled by.
.
Deyo eventually led his crew into Grand Central through an unmarked door on
Vanderbilt Avenue that leads to a bar. "Are you with the party, sir?" asked
the coat check attendant. "Yes," Deyo declared as he continued up a marble
staircase to an out-of-the-way elevator that took the group several stories
higher.
.
Soon the explorers were at the peak of the station's sloped copper roof,
nearly 80 feet above the street, with a stunning view of the Chrysler
Building and the modernist towers on Park Avenue.
.
Deyo, a co-owner of a multimedia design company, is famous among fellow
infiltrators for having crossed this slippery roof to scale a statue of
Mercury, which rises three more stories. Nearly two years ago he hung the
Jinx flag, an exclamation point set inside a yellow triangle (the
international icon for "Danger") on a black field, on Mercury's crown; a
remnant still flapped in the wind.
.
Deyo has also scaled the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, but when it
comes to exploring the New York underground, he bows to Julia Solis, a
writer and translator in her thirties. She is known for leading elaborate
expeditions, such as a formal candlelight dinner party for 40 in an active
subway tunnel in 1999.
.
Among those who have joined Solis is Suzanne Martin, 33, who came to New
York last month to trek down an abandoned 19th-century water tunnel in the
Bronx populated by hibernating bats. Martin said she had previously explored
abandoned farmhouses near her home in Bucks County. "I'd poke around and
kind of soak in that feeling one gets from long-empty places," she said. "It
really hadn't occurred to me that others might share my interest or brand of
aesthetics."
.
Lowell Boileau, 55, who began exploring abandoned buildings in Detroit in
the mid-1970s, said he experiences the same wonderment standing inside the
city's abandoned Michigan Central train station that he first felt at the
ruins of Ephesus, in Turkey, in 1971. His Web site,
www.detroityes.com/index.html, shows dozens of abandoned Detroit landmarks
and attracts about 1,000 visitors a day.
.
Boileau warned that it may be best to enjoy the sites from a computer
screen; he told the story of one explorer who jumped down onto a roof
covered with debris and crashed to his death through a skylight. "Anyone
going into buildings should beware of structural weaknesses from scavengers
and deterioration," he said. "I don't advise it."
.
For some explorers, of course, danger is appealing. Most say that they are
more attracted by the haunting and beautiful environments. Adding to their
allure are the evocative artifacts they discover, like coal bins, elaborate
murals and decorative tiles. As much as they admire these features, they are
careful to say they rarely, if ever, take them. Their unofficial code is
look but don't touch.
.
Marjorie Anders, a spokeswoman for Metro North, was dumbfounded to hear
about those who see the station as an infiltration challenge. "That activity
would be unwise and unsafe and unappreciated," she said. "There are live
third rails and trains moving around and we don't want any fatalities."
.
Solis seemed unperturbed by risks in February during her first exploration
of an abandoned 876-acre mental hospital complex on the North Shore of Long
Island. She and her partner for the day, Chris Beauchamp, 24, scanned the
grounds for an entry point. He dropped down a ladder and lighted an
old-fashioned miner's lamp attached to his hard hat. The three-inch open
flame illuminated Solis as she followed gracefully in black boots, a Prada
skirt and a short shearling coat. ("I always dress well, to get more respect
if I run into guards or the police," she said.)
.
On the basis of an aerial photograph of the hospital campus, which she found
on the Web, Solis believed they were headed toward an old boarded-up,
century-old Georgian-style building she had seen near the tunnel entrance.
(An agreement to not disclose the campus location was a condition of joining
the tour.) After an hour in the dark, she led the way through a narrow brick
passageway supported by steel beams dripping rusty stalactites. They climbed
through a manhole into a 1960s medical building. Layers of colored paint
flaked from the walls like confetti. A torn portrait of Lincoln looked up
-From the floor. The windows were small and escape proof.
.
She had found more interesting things, she said, in abandoned hospitals from
the 19th and early 20th century. In such places she has come across
elaborate bowling alleys, theaters and marble lobbies. But even this plain,
modern building had nice surprises. She climbed out a window onto the roof
and tried to imagine how a mental patient would react to the wide blue view
of Long Island Sound.
.
A quarter mile away she could see the tall, century-old building she had
originally headed for. She knew there had to be a way in, and someday she
would find it.

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