John the Divine on the Upper West Side, only to be arrested by dozens of police officers when he came down.īut Lynch and I have not yet transgressed. Steve Duncan, a living legend of the New York urbex scene, scaled the exterior of the Cathedral of St. Twenty-seven-year-old recreational climber Robert Landeta died in 1998 of a fall from the Brooklyn Bridge. Usually they surf undetected through the city’s circulatory system, but there are stories of arrest, fines, even death. Urban explorers are seen by others, and tend to see themselves, as adventurers, renegade urban historians who map forgotten places.
The best “urbex” handbook offers extensive advice about sneaking and hiding. This kind of exploration is illegal, and urban explorers, some of whom openly maintain websites about their hobby, occupy a dicey legal gray area in their public statements about it. Up ahead looms the gaping tunnel mouth, a deeper dark against the dark of the night around us.
It’s the coldest night of the season so far, already around 32 degrees and dropping. I’m wearing the scarred leather hiking boots I inherited from my father, which he wore across the western United States and which are older than I am. We’re clad nearly head to toe in black-black wool peacoats, black gloves. Once over the fence-there used to be a hole in the chainlink, but Amtrak employees replaced that part-we try to be nonchalant as the headlights of passing cars wash over us. At one point we’re forced to duck down behind the trees as a police cruiser glides past on the road below. The way he’s mapped out for us takes us over a chainlink fence behind a stand of trees at the top of an incline and then along a rocky path beside a highway. By then Lynch has already consulted with a friend who knows the tunnel and has conducted advance reconnaissance on points of ingress and egress. I reached out to him over email, and that led to a sit-down in a Starbucks near Grand Central Station-an unwise choice on the day before Thanksgiving-which led to more emails and finally to meeting up at half past midnight in the McDonald’s at West 125th Street, our starting point for the incursion into the city’s substructure. I’d come across Lynch’s website while researching urban exploration in New York City. By night-not every night, and increasingly fewer nowadays, but some nights even now-he’s an urban explorer. By day he sells real estate on the Upper West Side. My companion this night, Andrew Lynch, is one of this number, young and blond like me, but taller and less muscular, lanky with an easy stride. And so one cold night I take it upon myself to walk for nearly 60 blocks through the underground waste of the Riverside Tunnel, known colloquially as the Freedom Tunnel after Chris “Freedom” Pape, a graffiti artist whose murals made it famous among a certain subset of the population for whom spending time in dark tunnels is not unusual, and is even considered fun. For nearly half a year the only vistas have been vistas of human habitation.
In December 2011, after five months of living full-time in the mundane city, I need a vacation, a respite not so much from the beloved city herself but from what cities increasingly consist of: light, noise, human and automobile traffic, crowded streets and stores and subway cars, trash and blackened gum on the sidewalks, the appalling tons of flotsam that wash up around us. One of these is the mouth of the Amtrak tunnel that runs under Manhattan’s Riverside Park. In New York City, when night falls, a number of doors and less obvious passageways open onto another city.
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