Cover Story:
The Night Hunter
By Paul Hond
"Urban explorer and photographer Steve Duncan approaches history from a different perspective."
http://magazine.columbia.edu/features/spring-2010/night-hunter
Columbia Magazine - "The Night Hunter"
Columbia Magazine, Spring 2010
Cover Story:
The Night Hunter
By Paul Hond
"Urban explorer and photographer Steve Duncan approaches history from a different perspective."
http://magazine.columbia.edu/features/spring-2010/night-hunter
Cover Story:
The Night Hunter
By Paul Hond
"Urban explorer and photographer Steve Duncan approaches history from a different perspective."
http://magazine.columbia.edu/features/spring-2010/night-hunter
Underground London Rivers - in Croatian!
From VelikaBritanija.net: All Things British, in Croation
"Zaboravljene rijeke"
Piše: Vjeran Stojanac , 01. 04. 2010.
http://www.velikabritanija.net/2010/04/01/zaboravljene-rijeke-london/
"Zaboravljene rijeke"
Piše: Vjeran Stojanac , 01. 04. 2010.
http://www.velikabritanija.net/2010/04/01/zaboravljene-rijeke-london/
I think T.S. Eliot had an urban explorer's sense of history and the past. A couple lines from "Little Gidding" (Number 4 of "Four Quartets"):
...History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern....
...What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning...
...We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Sven Johne
A while back I was contacted by a Sven Johne, a German conceptual photographer, who wanted to integrate my work into a project. I didn't know what a "conceptual photographer" was but the more I found out about his work, the more I liked it. The end result is here: http://www.svenjohne.de/svenjohne_work_nytunnel.html
Slideshow Jan 15, 2010, in Riverside, CA (Near UC Riverside)
Slideshow Jan 15, 2010 at Shutterstories in Riverside; Photos on Exhibit through April 2010
On Friday January 15th I'll be doing my first slideshow/presentation in Riverside, CA. Many thanks to Terry and Melissa Tippie for the chance to do it at their gallery.
This is also my first chance to show pictures from my trip to Eastern Europe this past summer! Amazing tunnels and excellent adventures in Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. You can see some samples on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/organize/?start_tab=one_set72157622892006485
Details:
January 15, 2010
At Shutterstories (gallery/studio space), 981 Iowa Ave., Riverside CA 92507
Doors open at 7pm, come and have a drink or a snack
I start showing pictures at 8pm.
Generally these run about 45 minutes of me presenting, plus time afterwards for questions.
On Friday January 15th I'll be doing my first slideshow/presentation in Riverside, CA. Many thanks to Terry and Melissa Tippie for the chance to do it at their gallery.
This is also my first chance to show pictures from my trip to Eastern Europe this past summer! Amazing tunnels and excellent adventures in Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. You can see some samples on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/organize/?start_tab=one_set72157622892006485
Details:
January 15, 2010
At Shutterstories (gallery/studio space), 981 Iowa Ave., Riverside CA 92507
Doors open at 7pm, come and have a drink or a snack
I start showing pictures at 8pm.
Generally these run about 45 minutes of me presenting, plus time afterwards for questions.
One Case silent auction by Resource Magazine
Four of my prints are being offered as part of the One Case silent auction in New York, organized by Resource Magazine, which will take place January 7th 2009 night at Milk Gallery (450 W.15th St. NYC)
Catalog: http://issuu.com/resourcemagonline/docs/onecase.
Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=228369978620&index=1
Catalog: http://issuu.com/resourcemagonline/docs/onecase.
Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=228369978620&index=1
Photo on cover of novel "My Dead Body"
The recently-published horror/mystery novel My Dead Body features one of my photos from underneath London as part of the cover art:
Creative Time Video
A short video about me, shot and produced by Howard Silver for Creative Time, is here:http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2009/cttv/?p=138
urbanautica.com - "Memories from the Underground"
Some of my photos are being shown on the excellent photography site Urbanautica.com.
On the website: http://www.urbanautica.com/blog/steve-duncan/ (In Italian by default, but you can change to English)
Via Facebook feed: http://www.facebook.com/pages/
On the website: http://www.urbanautica.com/blog/steve-duncan/ (In Italian by default, but you can change to English)
Via Facebook feed: http://www.facebook.com/pages/
"An Urban Spelunker Pursues His Vision"
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/livewire/archived/an_urban_spelun/
by Ryann Liebenthal
An Urban Spelunker Pursues His Vision
It’s 2 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and Steve Duncan is scrambling. The 30-year-old mapmaker, freelance photographer and self-described urban historian has had a particularly busy week, which has taken him from the train tunnels of Manhattan to an underground river in Yonkers, then back to his alma mater, Columbia University, to shoot photos for a university event.
So he’s running late framing pictures for a show his work is in at a New York gallery. His contributions to the series, “Night Moves,” consist of after-hours shots from some of the most remote parts of New York City—stunning views from the top of the Manhattan Bridge, eerie glimpses into sewer tunnels beneath the city streets.
Duncan is supposed to be at the gallery by 4 to drop off his prints. But as the minutes tick by, it becomes increasingly clear he’s not going to make it.
“I’m not usually this bad at this,” he said, looking up from his work. He paused. “Well, that’s sort of a lie.”
Lately, Duncan has lost interest in his map business — and not just because the mapmaking industry, like other tourist-based markets, has suffered in this dire economic climate. Instead, he is more interested in his tunnel explorations, a mostly unprofitable hobby he’s been cultivating since he started at Columbia—where he majored in urban studies—in 1996.
“I had heard that there were these tunnels under the university, and I was fascinated,” he said. But it was an academic emergency that finally led him underground.
“I was procrastinating as usual in this math class I had,” he recalled, “and it turned out there was a big set of stuff that could only be done using programs on computers in the math building.”
It was 11 p.m. The math building had closed at 9.
He convinced another student to take him into a subterranean passageway leading to the math building. “So then he led me into the tunnels,” he said, “and kind of pointed me in the right direction. And then I found myself alone in the tunnels, which was terrifying—exhilarating also, but really scary.”
Then he just kept going.
Duncan’s friend Jacob Press remembers the time Duncan spent eight hours getting into a tunnel by digging through a concrete wall, with a shovel he’d found on the street.
“I’m a little squeamish about tunnels and stuff,” Press admitted. “I never caught on when you started going down those Amtrak tunnels.”
Surprisingly, Duncan said it was his lifelong fear of the dark—“not just the dark per se, but a fear of things jumping out at me”— that drove his desire to go underground.
“Actually I kind of lost the whole fear of the dark thing after a while of going around tunnels, and I was sad,” he lamented. “I lost that sense of going into something…that sense of discovery that I had at first, and that I really loved.”
His expertise was recognized when he worked as an on-air urban historian for a truncated Discovery Channel series called “Urban Explorers.” Five episodes – about Buffalo, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Denver and Milwaukee – ran in 2004 and 2005.
Duncan relies on freelance assignments and income from Opus Publishing, which he runs with partner Arthur Gorelik. The two founded the company in 2002, after noticing a significant gap in the map market.
“A lot of big map publishers had taken a long time to adapt digital files for cartography,” he said. Working with digital data, Opus could update maps much more quickly.
This kind of frenetic, can-do spirit seems to characterize Duncan’s approach to work and life. After dropping his prints off just before 5 p.m., he climbed into his Mazda Accent, and began what at first seemed like a meandering ride back to the office. But then he abruptly stopped the car, and ambled over to a sewer grate in the middle of the street.
He’d been down this tunnel before, he said, looking down.
As he waited for a car to pass, he turned and began describing the histories of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, both visible in the waning glow of late afternoon light.
“It’s not so much that I’m a good historian,” he said, “it’s just that it doesn’t really matter how good a historian you are if you’re not communicating it.”
He knelt down and shoved his flashlight through one of the round holes of the sewer grate. He put his eye right up to the grate and peered down into the tunnel, pointing out the flowing river down below.
“And you can smell it too,” he said, hopping back up, his eyes alighting on a sewage construction project down the street.
by Ryann Liebenthal
An Urban Spelunker Pursues His Vision
An underground break-in for the sake of a math assignment led Steve Duncan to the Discovery Channel and a gallery show -- and maybe a new career
ryann.liebenthal@gmail.comIt’s 2 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and Steve Duncan is scrambling. The 30-year-old mapmaker, freelance photographer and self-described urban historian has had a particularly busy week, which has taken him from the train tunnels of Manhattan to an underground river in Yonkers, then back to his alma mater, Columbia University, to shoot photos for a university event.So he’s running late framing pictures for a show his work is in at a New York gallery. His contributions to the series, “Night Moves,” consist of after-hours shots from some of the most remote parts of New York City—stunning views from the top of the Manhattan Bridge, eerie glimpses into sewer tunnels beneath the city streets.
Duncan is supposed to be at the gallery by 4 to drop off his prints. But as the minutes tick by, it becomes increasingly clear he’s not going to make it.
“I’m not usually this bad at this,” he said, looking up from his work. He paused. “Well, that’s sort of a lie.”
Lately, Duncan has lost interest in his map business — and not just because the mapmaking industry, like other tourist-based markets, has suffered in this dire economic climate. Instead, he is more interested in his tunnel explorations, a mostly unprofitable hobby he’s been cultivating since he started at Columbia—where he majored in urban studies—in 1996.
“I had heard that there were these tunnels under the university, and I was fascinated,” he said. But it was an academic emergency that finally led him underground.
“I was procrastinating as usual in this math class I had,” he recalled, “and it turned out there was a big set of stuff that could only be done using programs on computers in the math building.”
It was 11 p.m. The math building had closed at 9.
He convinced another student to take him into a subterranean passageway leading to the math building. “So then he led me into the tunnels,” he said, “and kind of pointed me in the right direction. And then I found myself alone in the tunnels, which was terrifying—exhilarating also, but really scary.”
Then he just kept going.
Duncan’s friend Jacob Press remembers the time Duncan spent eight hours getting into a tunnel by digging through a concrete wall, with a shovel he’d found on the street.
“I’m a little squeamish about tunnels and stuff,” Press admitted. “I never caught on when you started going down those Amtrak tunnels.”
Surprisingly, Duncan said it was his lifelong fear of the dark—“not just the dark per se, but a fear of things jumping out at me”— that drove his desire to go underground.
“Actually I kind of lost the whole fear of the dark thing after a while of going around tunnels, and I was sad,” he lamented. “I lost that sense of going into something…that sense of discovery that I had at first, and that I really loved.”
His expertise was recognized when he worked as an on-air urban historian for a truncated Discovery Channel series called “Urban Explorers.” Five episodes – about Buffalo, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Denver and Milwaukee – ran in 2004 and 2005.
Duncan relies on freelance assignments and income from Opus Publishing, which he runs with partner Arthur Gorelik. The two founded the company in 2002, after noticing a significant gap in the map market.
“A lot of big map publishers had taken a long time to adapt digital files for cartography,” he said. Working with digital data, Opus could update maps much more quickly.
This kind of frenetic, can-do spirit seems to characterize Duncan’s approach to work and life. After dropping his prints off just before 5 p.m., he climbed into his Mazda Accent, and began what at first seemed like a meandering ride back to the office. But then he abruptly stopped the car, and ambled over to a sewer grate in the middle of the street.
He’d been down this tunnel before, he said, looking down.
As he waited for a car to pass, he turned and began describing the histories of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, both visible in the waning glow of late afternoon light.
“It’s not so much that I’m a good historian,” he said, “it’s just that it doesn’t really matter how good a historian you are if you’re not communicating it.”
He knelt down and shoved his flashlight through one of the round holes of the sewer grate. He put his eye right up to the grate and peered down into the tunnel, pointing out the flowing river down below.
“And you can smell it too,” he said, hopping back up, his eyes alighting on a sewage construction project down the street.
"An Urban Spelunker Pursues His Vision," The Westsider, June 18 2009, Front Page
"An Urban Spelunker Pursues His Vision"
The Westsider
June 18 2009, Front Page
Article by Ryann Liebenthal, front page photo by Steve Duncan
Website of the Week at the Evening Leader Newspaper, North Wales
So I was in Russia, running through tunnels under Moscow and being terrified of the militisia (sort of the federal police), when I got this email:
Anyway, regardless of my love of Welsh names, I know I'm in good company because Mark's "Best of the Web" column, in follwing weeks, also included things like Alias' excellent photography (mostly of sites in the UK) at http://www.guerillaphotography.fotopic.net/, and Tom Kirsch's - AKA Motts - beautiful photos (primarily from sites in the NYC region) at http://www.opacity.us.
to: steve@undercity.org
date: Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 6:10 PM
subject: Website of the week
Hi Steve,
Your site has made it onto our website of the week column at the Evening Leader newspaper in North Wales...Keep up the good work. My editor particularly loves your New York photography.
http://www.eveningleader.co.uk/breaktime/Best-of-the-web-.5335134.jp
Cheers,I gotta admit, I was definitely a bit excited about this. North Wales is one of those areas that seemed more legend than reality when I was reading about it as a child. It contained the kingdom of Gwynedd, the Llŷn Peninsula, and has a mountain range called Snowdonia. Rivers have names like the River Dyfrdwy, the River Conwy, and the River Dyfi. Anyone who ever read Lloyd Alexander as a child and fell in love with Princess Eilonwy will doubtless understand my excitement over this part of the world.
Mark
Anyway, regardless of my love of Welsh names, I know I'm in good company because Mark's "Best of the Web" column, in follwing weeks, also included things like Alias' excellent photography (mostly of sites in the UK) at http://www.guerillaphotography.fotopic.net/, and Tom Kirsch's - AKA Motts - beautiful photos (primarily from sites in the NYC region) at http://www.opacity.us.
NYC: The World's Fair Observation Towers
Relics of the World of Tomorrow: Climbing the Astro-View Observation Towers in Queens
It was near midnight in late October, and I was in the Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, staring up at three concrete towers. They look something like three closely-spaced castle spires, with a flying saucer landed atop each one. The flying saucers are in fact huge round observation platforms, 64 feet in diameter; they were built for the 1964 World's Fair as the Astro-View Observation Towers of the New York State Pavilion's attractions.
Visitors to the Fair packed into the streamlined Sky-Streak elevators that ascended on the outside of the towers, getting off at one of the three saucer-like platforms. From there, they looked out over an historic and unique display of mankind's greatest achievements, ranging from Michelangelo's Pieta to the world’s first public display of controlled nuclear fusion. Though the exhibits are now long gone, I desperately wanted to experience the view as well. At least I would be able to clearly see the centerpiece of the Fair, which had also been left standing: the striking 140-foot-tall stainless-steel globe called the Unisphere.
Since the fair's end in 1965, however, the Astro-View Towers have been closed. The fair's governing body, the World's Fair Corporation, collapsed into bankruptcy, leaving the many plans for re-use of the pavilion structures unrealized. Now, decades later, weeds, bushes, and even trees grow around the Astro-View towers, and the rims and railings of the observation decks are thick with rust that is visible even from the ground. One of the Sky-Streak elevators remains, but it is stuck two-thirds of the way up the tower, with all the color faded out of its paint and pieces of its once-sleek shell slowly falling off.
A tall fence with a locked gate surrounds the base of the towers, but I had discovered a slit cut low in the chain-link in an area hidden by thick bushes. I crawled through, trying to stay hidden as people came and went from the nearby Queens Theater in the Park. The theater too was part of the Fair's New York State Pavilion, and it is one of the few structures from the fair that is still used. Adjacent to the towers is the third structure of the Pavilion, the Tent of Tomorrow, a huge round arena that originally had a suspended roof of colorful panels supported by 98-foot-high concrete columns. Like the observation towers, it is long-abandoned, though the huge concrete columns remain, along with the giant terrazzo map of New York State embedded in its floor.
From my spot in the bushes, I examined the three towers just as I had on previous visits, looking for a way up. There is a vertical slot in the side of each tower, like a tall narrow window, but the bottom of this window only starts at about third-floor level. Below that slot, there is nothing but blank and featureless concrete. Through the slot in one of the towers, I could see the framework of a stairway.
There was a door in this tower, but it was firmly shut with not one, but two massive locks. Other than the door, the only possible way into the structure was through the slot-like window, but there was no way to climb up to it. A ladder would have solved the problem-but even if I had a ladder long enough, and managed to transport it via cab or subway, there was no way I could have set it up without attracting attention from people at the theater or from one of the police patrols that made frequent rounds in the park. There was only one solution I could think of: a grappling hook.
I knew that it would be harder to use a grappling hook in real life than the movies make it seem. In the Hollywood conception of a grappling hook, the hero throws the hook, pulls at it until it catches firmly on something, and then climbs up the slender rope attached to the hook. But it's very difficult to climb straight up a slender rope; it needs to be as thick as a ship's hawser to give a good grip, and then it's too heavy to throw. I compromised by picking out a mid-size rope—5/16", about as thick as a standard rock-climber's safety rope—and then knotting it every two feet. It wasn't actual climbing gear, just a nylon rope I bought from the hardware store; it was not intended to support a person, but knew it would hold me for the short time I needed it to.
The hook was harder. When I looked up "grappling hooks" on the web, I found everything from cheap ninja-styled toy hooks to antique grappling hooks collected by military enthusiasts. The most exciting thing I found was a $4,000 grappling-hook launcher, looking something like a bazooka, that could send a hook and trailing line nearly 500 feet. The ad copy didn't say, however, how the person who launched it from 500 feet away could see whether or not the hook had caught on anything solid before trusting his life to it. I needed something cheaper anyway. I decided it was time to call on some real talent, and I headed downstairs from my apartment to talk to Dan, the welder who lived on the bottom floor of our converted Brooklyn warehouse. He had once been a bridge-welder, and he had showed me a souvenir of his certification test: a chunk of a weld three inches thick between two steel beams, cut open to make sure there were no air pockets or defects through the entire thickness of the weld. After seeing that, I knew I could trust his skill.
He told me it would be easy enough, but that I needed to find the steel. A few days later I was back with some rusty steel bars—nearly 3/4" thick—that I had scavenged from a construction site.
The most challenging part of the project turned out to be making the eyelet for the rope. In order to make the whole thing as strong as possible, Dan wanted to make this out of the same bar that made the main hook, instead of attaching separate pieces of metal. He heated half the bar until with an oxy-acetylene torch until it was glowing cherry-red, and the air around it shimmered. Then, wearing huge leather gloves and welder's aprons, the two of us heaved at it together like medieval blacksmiths, trying to curl it around the vice that held one end. We even broke the vice loose, but Dan repaired it and we kept on, alternating between heaving at it and re-heating it. The hook end went more quickly. The finished product was not pretty, and heavy as a cannonball, but I was thrilled. I picked it up to admire it but it was still incredibly hot and it burned me even through my welder's glove. We dropped it into a bucket of water to cool, and the water steamed and bubbled.
Three nights later, I was back at the old World's Fair site, and once again I was hiding in the bushes. The parking lot was full of cars. A friend, Jeremy, was with me. I'd lured him out with the promise of the most spectacular view of the night skyline he'd ever seen, and he had come with me even though it was November and the temperature was well below freezing, with one of those driving winds that can make New York in winter seem like the coldest place on earth. Now he looked both cold and worried.
"I thought you said there was no one at the theater this week," he whispered to me.
I had checked the theater's schedule, and had picked a night when there was no show scheduled. I hadn't thought about rehearsals, however, or any of the hundred other things that goes into a preparing a theater for future shows. We waited until past midnight, but the activity showed no signs of abating. It was far too cold to keep on waiting any longer, and we decided to go for it anyway. We would just have to stay inconspicuous and quiet. After crawling from our hiding place, I coiled the rope carefully, and then swung the hook and released it in a perfect underhand throw towards the window slot.
It got less than halfway to the window before the weight of the rope caught at it, and the hook crashed back to the ground in an aborted arc that sent loud clangs of metal-on-stone echoing out into the night. We dove back into the bushes, and waited to make sure no one had heard. A police car came by, and for moment we both thought it was coming for us; but as it went on past us we realized it was just the normal park patrol. Jeremy tried throwing it next, with an equally useless result, and then we took turns: one person throwing it, and the other trying to catch it on the way down before it clattered on the concrete. We mostly failed—it's not easy to catch a falling chunk of heavy metal bars, especially one that falls unpredictably because of the rope drag—and we spent a lot of time diving back into the bushes and waiting to make sure no one had heard us.
Finally, with Jeremy throwing the hook and me throwing the coil of rope behind it, it found the slot. I pulled on the rope and could feel the hook sliding in the interior of the pillar, and then it caught on something solid; the framework of the stairs, I thought. I tugged at it, and then started up hand-over-hand along the knots I'd tied.
I think the hardest part about climbing a rope up a wall is near the top, where my own bodyweight tensions the rope and pulls it so close to the wall that it's hard to get a hand around it. (Lower on the rope, the angle is shallower, and so it's much easier to keep the rope away from the wall.) This climb was doubly difficult because I was worried about pulling the hook free if I changed the angle on the rope or moved it too much. I was able to make it almost to the top, though, without moving the rope, and I reached out for the smooth concrete sill at the bottom of the slot. I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when my foot slipped on a knot. My reaching hand slid uselessly off the smooth concrete, and the full weight of my body came down with a jerk onto my rope hand, mashing it painfully between the knot and the wall. In the first moment I was terrified I was going to fall from the rope. As I caught myself, I was even more frightened that the jerk of my arrest would pull the hook loose from its anchor. I glanced down; I was already much higher than I was accustomed to climbing without a harness and safety gear, and suddenly felt very, very nervous.
I took a deep breath and carefully hooked my fingertips over the edge of the concrete again, before pulling myself up until I got one forearm, and then the other, onto it. There was still nothing to hold on to and I had to keep squirming forward, relying on friction, with my legs and most of my torso still hanging over nothing, before I could get a grip on an inner corner and pull myself all the way in. As I slid through the narrow gap and onto the stairs, I saw for the first time what had been serving as an anchor for my grappling hook and my life: a tiny, rusted electrical box, that looked like it might give way at any moment.
Close up, the staircase inside the tower was a frightening wreck, with some of the metal treads rusted completely off. The framework at least was still mostly intact, although shaky and bent in places. I tied off the rope, leaned out the window, and whistled for Jeremy to tie my camera bag to the rope so I could haul it up. Then I dropped the rope back down again for him to climb. Slowly, and with great effort, he climbed about two-thirds of the way up, and then I could see him pause, trying to gather strength for the rest, before deciding on retreat instead. He made it most of the way back down before his grip weakened and he started to slip, sliding down the rest in a sort of controlled fall that left him sprawled on the concrete. He tried again, using his feet to better advantage, but with his arms already tired from the first attempt it was a hopeless task.
"Go on," he called up to me. "I'll wait."
My disappointment that he wasn't with me was quickly forgotten as I took stock of my situation and realized that I was actually in this thing. Above me was the first of the three platforms, and I started up.
Because the treads were so weakened with rust, I straddled the stairs, with one foot on each side of the frame. In a few minutes I stepped out onto the first platform, which had originally been a cafeteria; I imaged hundreds of people, laughing, eating, and admiring the brilliant spectacle of the fair.
I crossed to where the platform intersected the next tower, and continued up its equally deteriorated stairway. There was more and more damage as I went further up, and I was glad for the gloves that protected my hands from the rusted railings that I gripped tightly, in case something under my feet gave way. As awkward as my straddle-legged climbing was, I fell into a rhythm and was surprised when I quickly came out onto the second platform. This was much higher than the first; I stayed well away from the edge, wondering just how sturdy this old concrete was, and crossed over to the tallest tower.
For most of its height, this tallest tower holds only the elevator and electrical wiring, but from the second to the third platform it's the only way up and so the access stairs are built into it. A short climb brought me directly beneath the top platform. Under each of the platforms, I noticed, the stairs were in slightly better shape; the deck itself must have protected the metal stairs from the rain that caused the rust.
The top platform is double-decked, with the upper deck about 15 feet above the lower. The stairs between the two levels were deteriorated almost to the point of non-existence, and I had jump to avoid falling as two of the treads broke loose under my feet and crashed to the deck below. But then I was at the very top, and all around me was New York City, seen in rare and magnificent form.
To the north, I could see the Unisphere, with Shea stadium and the National Tennis Center stadium behind it, and further away the green necklaces of the Bronx-Whitestone and Throgs Neck bridges. As I watched I could see the lights of circling planes, too, waiting to land at LaGuardia. To the south, there was the alien-looking bulk of the Tent of Tomorrow and past that the Long Island Expressway, a great glowing stream of cars, and beyond that Meadow Lake and then Willow Lake, each one reflecting all the lights around it. Just to the east, I saw the Queens Theater building. Far to the west the skyline of Manhattan was nothing but tiny shapes of light in the distance, the buildings recognizable only by their relative heights, and all around me the vast city rippled and twinkled under the moon. I was mesmerized. I don't know how long I was up there, but eventually I realized that I was so cold that I couldn't stop shivering, and I started back down.
SOME HISTORY
The towers I climbed, along with the Unisphere, the Queens Theater, and the Tent of Tomorrow, are some of the most obvious relics of the Fair. In fact, though, much of the landscape that I'd seen from the towers-Meadow Lake, Willow Lake, the entire 1,255 acres of Flushing Meadows Corona Park, and most of the highways-was also a legacy of the '64 World's Fair and of its predecessor on the site, the 1939 World's Fair.
Thematically, both of the fairs expressed a belief in mankind's ability to change the world for the better through technology, and the history of the site itself gives strong support to this belief. Originally, Flushing Meadows and its environs were dotted with marshes, supplied by streams that flowed into the Flushing River and Flushing Bay. It was impossible to build in the marshy ground, and so as the surrounding area urbanized, the meadows became a landfill. By the 1920s, it was a giant ash dump, run by the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company under a man called "Fishhooks" McCarthy. With the entire city running on coal heating, the area was described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in the novel The Great Gatsby as a vast desolate, hellish "valley of ashes" that stretched as far as the eye could see.
When the 1939 World's Fair was being planned, the Commissioner of the Parks Department was Robert Moses, a visionary whose single-minded focus on rebuilding the city to fit his visions was both horrifying and wonderful: horrifying sometimes for what he destroyed to make room for his visions, but wonderful for what he created. In the desolate landscape of the ash dump, where generations' worth of garbage had created hills over a hundred feet high, he saw the possibility of a green and fertile landscape for the Fair—a vast tract of land that, once landscaped, would continue to serve as a city park for generations to come.
Unlike many visionaries, Robert Moses was very good at getting things done. In just three years, between 1936 and 1939, his workers filled in the marshes; re-channeled the Flushing River and built huge sewer tunnels to contain its tributary streams; created the 84-acre Meadow Lake, the largest in the city, as well as the smaller Willow Lake; and landscaped the entire 1,200 acres of newly-habitable land. Moses wrote that his teams "leveled the ash mountains, and rats big enough to wear saddles, with white whiskers a foot long, gazed wistfully at the bulldozers and [those] who disturbed their ancient solitary reign." By 1939, it had become the perfect setting for the fair, the theme of which was, appropriately, "Creating the World of Tomorrow with the Tools of Today."
The 1939 Fair was a tremendous success, and in a multitude of exhibits it expressed the same potent, supremely self-confident spirit that had led to the transformation of the site. At the center of the fair, visitors could enter the huge globe of the Perisphere and see, from a god's-eye view, an intricate model for a futuristic urban utopia called "Democracity." Even more fantastic, for many visitors, were the real scientific and engineering accomplishments introduced at the fair: technologies like television, air conditioning, nylon, color photography, and an early electric calculator.
Twenty-five years later, the 1964 World's Fair was held in the same place. Robert Moses was the driving force behind this fair, even more so than he had been in 1939, and he became the chairman of the World's Fair Corporation. Like its predecessor, the 1964 Fair was a dazzling display that celebrated mankind's progress; there were artistic and historical treasures and technological wonders, including a display of early computers. Many exhibits—like the Apollo rockets that would soon take mankind to the moon—promised more wonders to come.
It was not, however, an unqualified success. Attempting to increase revenue, Moses and the World's Fair Corporation charged fees to exhibitors and also opened it for two successive years, both of which violated standards set by the governing body for World's Fairs, the Bureau International des Expositions. Due to this, very few other nations participated, and so the major pavilions in 1964 were those of American companies, which of course had commercial rather than cultural goals.
In the end, it was a financial disaster. The 50 million visitors were only about two-thirds of what had been anticipated, and at the end of the Fair the bankrupt corporation defaulted on a $24 million loan from the city and paid its other creditors only pennies on the dollar. The majority of the fair's pavilions were demolished as planned, but there was little money available to convert the remainder to permanent uses, and some—like the New York State Pavilion structures—were left to rot.
When I think about the fair, though, these faults seem almost inconsequential. What is most important about both of the World's Fairs is the powerful and hopeful belief they expressed in the ability of mankind to create positive change in the world. The towering relics of the fair are reminders of this, but it is perhaps best shown in the fairground site itself: in what was first an uninhabitable swamp and then a desolate dump, the city created a shining vision of utopia; a place where nearly 100 million visitors came to see the future.
Solo Show at the BoConcept Store in Cambridge, MA, May 21-June 21, 2009
A selection of nineteen of my photographs are being shown at the BoConcept Store in Cambridge, MA from May 21-June 30, 2009
Location:
BoConcept Cambridge
999 Mass Ave
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel. 617 588 7777
NYC: First Time Into the Tunnel
The hole I was digging was about three feet deep and halfway under the wall when I ran into a tarpaulin imbedded in the dirt. It caught at my shovel strangely, and I couldn’t tell what I’d run into in the nighttime darkness until I took out my flashlight. I knelt down next to the hole to see.
The beam of my flashlight showed the dirty blue plastic and then, as I prodded it with the shovel, I saw a half-rotten shoe sticking out of the worm-infested folds. A dead body. The idea filled my mind with a sudden wave of revulsion and horror. For a moment I couldn’t move. Then I reached out and slowly pulled on a corner of the tarp. The shoe tumbled out, attached to nothing, and behind it there was only dirt.
I let out a breath that I hadn’t known I was holding and sagged against the handle of the shovel. My moment of panic was over but my heart was still racing. I didn’t want to keep digging by myself, and so I walked over to the stairs leading into the next terrace of the park and waited for my friend Elinor to get back from her cigarette run. When she returned, she sat down with me and we both smoked a Camel before starting to dig again.
We were in Riverside Park, and the only light came from a crescent moon and from the occasional passing car on the West Side Highway. In the darkness there was nothing visible but the stunted grass of the field, and beyond that the leafless trees were outlined against the clouds that moved raggedly across the October sky. As we returned to our surreptitious nocturnal digging, I felt like a grave-robber in a horror story.
Next to us, the 15-foot stone wall leading to the next terrace of the park was a dark mass, the light barely enough to make out its texture. We kept our flashlights off as we dug so as not to be seen—though it was unlikely anyone else would be in this desolate area in the middle of the night.
We were trying to get into the West Side Line tunnel, a two-and-a-half-mile long tunnel that runs underneath Riverside Park from 72nd Street to 123rd Street. The tunnel was created in the 1930s when an existing line—the New York Central Railroad’s West Side Line, that dated back to 1849—was lowered beneath ground level and covered over. The line was abandoned in 1982 and the massive subterranean space was taken over by a community of homeless New Yorkers who were quickly dubbed the “Mole People.” The squatters built plywood shacks and wired in electricity from streetlights on the surface; water for drinking and washing came from Riverside Park’s public bathrooms or occasionally from tapping into pipes that ran close to the tunnel’s walls. Then Amtrak acquired rights to the tunnel; they kicked everyone out, bulldozed the shacks, and began running trains again in 1991.
From what I had read—researching in old newspaper articles, and the few books that mentioned the tunnel in recent decades—it seemed like the last of the mole people were gone by 1995. I hadn’t been able to find any information about the tunnel since then, though. I was intrigued; I wanted to see it. I wanted to see what traces of the one-time community remained, and I wanted to know—is anyone still down there?
One of the newspaper articles had mentioned that, during the heyday of the underground community, the residents who lived close to the center of the tunnel had created new entrances by digging underneath a retaining wall in the park. When the Parks Department found these holes, they would fill them in, but the mole people just dug new ones the next day, according to the article. It sounded easy and quick, as if it was just necessary to clear some dirt from under the wall to make a space big enough to slip through. We’d even found a place where the ground looked like it had been dug up and replaced, assuming that it would be easier to dig through the site of an old, filled-in tunnel than through undisturbed ground. But we had already been digging for more than two hours, hacking through the rocky earth, and when we finally reached the bottom of the wall, we found it was solid concrete at least two feet thick. We would have to actually tunnel underneath it. Even without the tarp slowing down our progress, it was clear we’d be digging for a while longer before we could get all the way under the wall.
Later, I would find out how foolish our labor was—there are far easier ways in at the ends of the tunnel, although there is no entrance within a mile of where we dug that night. Now that I’m more experienced, I’ll usually look at current and old city maps, review satellite images, and walk at least some of the route on the surface when I’m trying to get into a new tunnel. But this was the first city tunnel I had tried to get into, and at the time it seemed reasonable that I would have to dig my way into something underground.
Eventually, I had dug out enough that I could reach through and feel empty space. We cleared out a little more dirt so we could squeeze our bodies through. I put my flashlight in my mouth, and then pushed myself headfirst down and into the hole. It was a tremendously awkward entrance. I pushed with my elbows, scraped my ribs, got dirt and trash down my shirt collar, and even thought I was stuck for a moment, but eventually I was through.
I stood up with the eerie sensation that I get when I go from a warm sunny day into the dim, hushed coolness of a cathedral. At first it seemed that the space just stretched on forever around me. Even when I realized it wasn’t infinite, I could still see that it was very, very big. My flashlight beam barely showed the far wall, a little over 60 feet away. The tunnel is about 30 feet high, and I was standing in a sort of concrete compartment built about two-thirds of the way up one wall. It was about five feet deep and twelve feet long, bordered at each end by massive rusty I-beams that support the roof. The top of the tunnel is wider than the bottom, like the cap of a mushroom, and we had dug underneath the edge of that outer cap; the compartment I was in is basically the dead space where the top section fits over the main structure of the tunnel. If I were to sit or lie down, I realized, I’d be invisible from the track level, making it a perfect little bedroom niche. I’d already felt that there was debris under my feet, and now I looked and saw that I was standing on the rotting remnants of a long-ago squatter’s life: mouldering shoes, clothes, damp and blackened books, bottles and cans, more shoes, and something that was once a blanket, everything mixed together into the disgusting strata of a landfill and so damaged by water and time that all the items were now the same shade of a fetid dark gray. The tarp and shoe that had so frightened me earlier had been part of this mass of garbage.
Elinor kicked her way through our little hole. She brushed ineffectually at the dirt smeared into her shirt. After crawling through the trash and dirt, I felt like I was covered with crushed worms and spiders too, but no matter; we were in.
Elinor got out the cigarettes as she stared around and I reached for one. As I smoked I looked down at the floor of the tunnel below; we might be able to drop down without hurting ourselves, but I couldn’t see how we could climb back up. It was fifteen feet or more, and the smooth concrete wall offered no holds.
“How the hell can we get down?” I said, wishing we’d thought to bring a rope. Elinor suggested we use the tarp. “We can tie one end to that thing. Hopefully those cables aren’t still being used.” She pointed her light at her feet, where rusty bolts held up two old electric cables that were strung along the wall.
The tarp was a little rotten and a little torn, but still strong enough to support us. I worried more about the sixty-year-old bolts. We slid down one at a time, arms and legs wrapped around the makeshift rope, getting even dirtier in the process.
The air was dusty enough that I could see the particles glittering faintly in the beams of our flashlights as we walked along the wide expanse of dirt on one side of the tunnel. In the center there are two parallel tracks, for trains running north and south. Amtrak’s Empire Service line is the one that passes through the tunnel, and the trains continue north across the Spuyten Duyvil Bridge to the Bronx and then on up the Hudson Valley. We stepped hesitantly and slowly, not talking, afraid to disturb the ominous quiet and unsure what to do now that we were in.
We passed a huge mound of old trash bulldozed against a wall, evidence of the people who had once lived here and the subsequent clean-up by the Amtrak workers. Dozens or hundreds of niches like the one we’d entered through lined the upper portion of the tunnel’s west wall, and I wondered how many had housed people.
Graffiti was scattered throughout the tunnel, both simple tags and huge colorful pieces, all layered on top of each other and mixed together with aphorisms and messages—“This city will chew you up and spit you out,” and “R.I.P. SANE,” and “’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the tunnel, not a creature was stirring, not even a rat…” On later visits I came to understand that the most desirable spots for murals are the places where ventilation gratings let sunlight in, and this is part of why so many pieces are drawn over each other in clustered layers of paint.
Some of the only murals left undisturbed were the giant black, white, and silver paintings done in the 1980s by a painter named “Freedom.” The murals range from about ten to twenty feet tall, and were pained with the help of a ladder. They range from a Dali-style melting clock, dripping its way down the wall, to a replica of a Ted Williams baseball card, to huge portraits of tunnel residents that are now long-gone. Freedom first found his way into the tunnel when he was 14, and visited constantly for years, making friends with the residents and creating the murals specifically for them, his only audience. These murals have a tremendous impact when they suddenly appear in the beam of a flashlight, the faces gleaming like an old albumen photographic print. Most were already more than a decade old by the time I first saw them, and the fact that so many remained unscathed demonstrated the respect Freedom had earned from his fellow writers. A portrait of the Mona Lisa’s face was one of the few Freedom works that had been tampered with; a new piece of graffiti covered the bottom half of with ten-foot-high mural. But the newer tag had itself been painted over with the words "Where's your respect, toy?"
We walked on the tracks, stopping to see the things that leapt out of the blackness into the beams of our flashlights, with no idea of how far we’d come or how long we’d been underground. Eventually, we realized it was almost five in the morning and decided to head back.
On our way back to the hole, we heard a train coming. It was just a low rumble at first, coming from all around us, and for a few moments I thought I was just imagining it. Then Elinor heard it too and we both stopped and looked down the tunnel behind us. Far away, the darkness of the tunnel was inexplicably brightening like an underground dawn in the moments just before the orb of the sun is visible. Then the headlights of the train itself appeared around the curve, moving dangerously fast, and the full roar of the engine hit us.
We sprinted for a wall, turning off the flashlights as the light and noise of the train filled the space around us. After so long in darkness and the silence, it was deafening and blinding; the air hummed with the brightness of the light, and the concrete wall shook with the sound. Then the engine flashed past and the beams of the headlights swept on down the tunnel. I caught a quick-flash filmstrip view of heads silhouetted through the windows, the smell of dust and steel, and the clashing of the steel wheels on the rails.
For the short moment that the train was actually passing the tunnel had been bright as day and we felt exposed—we must have been seen, there seemed no chance that all these people could pass 15 feet from us and not know we were there. But the bright-lit faces in the windows had all been staring straight ahead; and then it was gone, heading uptown, across the river, and out of the city, and we were left with the darkness and silence again.
We made our way back to our starting point and climbed up the tarpaulin to the debris-filled ledge with our hole. We decided to walk north along the ledge before going back to the surface. We edged past concrete partitions and climbed around the huge, rusty steel I-beams that support the roof of the tunnel. After walking a few hundred feet, we found a bed—a sleeping bag laid over slabs of foam padding. It had obviously been used recently. Though we stepped over the bedroll and walked on, I felt nervous. It was clear we weren’t the only ones to come to the tunnel, and I wasn’t sure what kind of people the others would turn out to be. These residents already lived on the very margin of the city; would they be angry that, after they had been pushed out of our world, we had invaded theirs?
I could tell Elinor was feeling worried, too, though she seemed less affected than I was. She suddenly dropped down on her knees to look through a narrow space between girders. "Here kitty—come here, kitty…"
I peered over her shoulder and saw two cats, wary and fierce-looking, standing immobile and staring at her. I moved for a better view between girders and suddenly realized that I was looking into an entire room built into the side of the tunnel: clothes were hung on a line stretched from corner to corner, a dingy table was sitting next to a battered chair, and an antiquated radio kept company with a couple more cats perched on the table. The more I looked, the more cats I saw: half-hidden behind the clothesline, perched in the shadowed areas of the girders on the sides, and looking back at us from every corner of the room. All of them were staring at us warily, their eyes gleaming wickedly in the light from our flashlights.
We all stood still for a moment.
"Wow," said Elinor, "look at all those cats."
The cats seemed well-fed and at home; along one wall we could see a messy row of food bowls, disposable aluminum trays, and water dishes made from the bottom halves of plastic gallon jugs. The scene was bizarre; who would make a home here, buried in this nocturnal room with two dozen cats? I felt something in my stomach halfway between nervousness and fear.
In following years I would get to know Brooklyn, the woman who lived in that room and fed the cats. Homeless as a teenager, she had found her way into the tunnel the first time by following the half-wild cats that she’d begun to feed in Riverside Park.
“I came, I looked under the wall, I said ‘Oh! Look at all these cats!’ and then I felt sorry for them. I fell in love with the cats so I would come everyday and bring them cat food. And my cats love me. I’m all they have…” she told me, years after that first visit.
At the time, however, I knew none of this. Instead, I felt the weight of all the darkness behind me like a rising tide, and I wanted nothing more than to escape to the surface.
We headed back, passing the bed and then climbing back over the partitions and past the steel beams. When we got to the hole, Elinor went through first. I handed through the flashlights and then squeezed myself through, pushing with my feet against a half-buried cooking pot. I'd stopped noticing that the tunnel air was dusty or stale, but when I finally took a breath of New York City air, it was the purest, sweetest, cleanest thing I've ever tasted and I could smell the open space, the autumn breezes, and the light of the first fingers of dawn.
The beam of my flashlight showed the dirty blue plastic and then, as I prodded it with the shovel, I saw a half-rotten shoe sticking out of the worm-infested folds. A dead body. The idea filled my mind with a sudden wave of revulsion and horror. For a moment I couldn’t move. Then I reached out and slowly pulled on a corner of the tarp. The shoe tumbled out, attached to nothing, and behind it there was only dirt.
I let out a breath that I hadn’t known I was holding and sagged against the handle of the shovel. My moment of panic was over but my heart was still racing. I didn’t want to keep digging by myself, and so I walked over to the stairs leading into the next terrace of the park and waited for my friend Elinor to get back from her cigarette run. When she returned, she sat down with me and we both smoked a Camel before starting to dig again.
We were in Riverside Park, and the only light came from a crescent moon and from the occasional passing car on the West Side Highway. In the darkness there was nothing visible but the stunted grass of the field, and beyond that the leafless trees were outlined against the clouds that moved raggedly across the October sky. As we returned to our surreptitious nocturnal digging, I felt like a grave-robber in a horror story.
Next to us, the 15-foot stone wall leading to the next terrace of the park was a dark mass, the light barely enough to make out its texture. We kept our flashlights off as we dug so as not to be seen—though it was unlikely anyone else would be in this desolate area in the middle of the night.
We were trying to get into the West Side Line tunnel, a two-and-a-half-mile long tunnel that runs underneath Riverside Park from 72nd Street to 123rd Street. The tunnel was created in the 1930s when an existing line—the New York Central Railroad’s West Side Line, that dated back to 1849—was lowered beneath ground level and covered over. The line was abandoned in 1982 and the massive subterranean space was taken over by a community of homeless New Yorkers who were quickly dubbed the “Mole People.” The squatters built plywood shacks and wired in electricity from streetlights on the surface; water for drinking and washing came from Riverside Park’s public bathrooms or occasionally from tapping into pipes that ran close to the tunnel’s walls. Then Amtrak acquired rights to the tunnel; they kicked everyone out, bulldozed the shacks, and began running trains again in 1991.
From what I had read—researching in old newspaper articles, and the few books that mentioned the tunnel in recent decades—it seemed like the last of the mole people were gone by 1995. I hadn’t been able to find any information about the tunnel since then, though. I was intrigued; I wanted to see it. I wanted to see what traces of the one-time community remained, and I wanted to know—is anyone still down there?
One of the newspaper articles had mentioned that, during the heyday of the underground community, the residents who lived close to the center of the tunnel had created new entrances by digging underneath a retaining wall in the park. When the Parks Department found these holes, they would fill them in, but the mole people just dug new ones the next day, according to the article. It sounded easy and quick, as if it was just necessary to clear some dirt from under the wall to make a space big enough to slip through. We’d even found a place where the ground looked like it had been dug up and replaced, assuming that it would be easier to dig through the site of an old, filled-in tunnel than through undisturbed ground. But we had already been digging for more than two hours, hacking through the rocky earth, and when we finally reached the bottom of the wall, we found it was solid concrete at least two feet thick. We would have to actually tunnel underneath it. Even without the tarp slowing down our progress, it was clear we’d be digging for a while longer before we could get all the way under the wall.
Later, I would find out how foolish our labor was—there are far easier ways in at the ends of the tunnel, although there is no entrance within a mile of where we dug that night. Now that I’m more experienced, I’ll usually look at current and old city maps, review satellite images, and walk at least some of the route on the surface when I’m trying to get into a new tunnel. But this was the first city tunnel I had tried to get into, and at the time it seemed reasonable that I would have to dig my way into something underground.
Eventually, I had dug out enough that I could reach through and feel empty space. We cleared out a little more dirt so we could squeeze our bodies through. I put my flashlight in my mouth, and then pushed myself headfirst down and into the hole. It was a tremendously awkward entrance. I pushed with my elbows, scraped my ribs, got dirt and trash down my shirt collar, and even thought I was stuck for a moment, but eventually I was through.
I stood up with the eerie sensation that I get when I go from a warm sunny day into the dim, hushed coolness of a cathedral. At first it seemed that the space just stretched on forever around me. Even when I realized it wasn’t infinite, I could still see that it was very, very big. My flashlight beam barely showed the far wall, a little over 60 feet away. The tunnel is about 30 feet high, and I was standing in a sort of concrete compartment built about two-thirds of the way up one wall. It was about five feet deep and twelve feet long, bordered at each end by massive rusty I-beams that support the roof. The top of the tunnel is wider than the bottom, like the cap of a mushroom, and we had dug underneath the edge of that outer cap; the compartment I was in is basically the dead space where the top section fits over the main structure of the tunnel. If I were to sit or lie down, I realized, I’d be invisible from the track level, making it a perfect little bedroom niche. I’d already felt that there was debris under my feet, and now I looked and saw that I was standing on the rotting remnants of a long-ago squatter’s life: mouldering shoes, clothes, damp and blackened books, bottles and cans, more shoes, and something that was once a blanket, everything mixed together into the disgusting strata of a landfill and so damaged by water and time that all the items were now the same shade of a fetid dark gray. The tarp and shoe that had so frightened me earlier had been part of this mass of garbage.
Elinor kicked her way through our little hole. She brushed ineffectually at the dirt smeared into her shirt. After crawling through the trash and dirt, I felt like I was covered with crushed worms and spiders too, but no matter; we were in.
Elinor got out the cigarettes as she stared around and I reached for one. As I smoked I looked down at the floor of the tunnel below; we might be able to drop down without hurting ourselves, but I couldn’t see how we could climb back up. It was fifteen feet or more, and the smooth concrete wall offered no holds.
“How the hell can we get down?” I said, wishing we’d thought to bring a rope. Elinor suggested we use the tarp. “We can tie one end to that thing. Hopefully those cables aren’t still being used.” She pointed her light at her feet, where rusty bolts held up two old electric cables that were strung along the wall.
The tarp was a little rotten and a little torn, but still strong enough to support us. I worried more about the sixty-year-old bolts. We slid down one at a time, arms and legs wrapped around the makeshift rope, getting even dirtier in the process.
The air was dusty enough that I could see the particles glittering faintly in the beams of our flashlights as we walked along the wide expanse of dirt on one side of the tunnel. In the center there are two parallel tracks, for trains running north and south. Amtrak’s Empire Service line is the one that passes through the tunnel, and the trains continue north across the Spuyten Duyvil Bridge to the Bronx and then on up the Hudson Valley. We stepped hesitantly and slowly, not talking, afraid to disturb the ominous quiet and unsure what to do now that we were in.
We passed a huge mound of old trash bulldozed against a wall, evidence of the people who had once lived here and the subsequent clean-up by the Amtrak workers. Dozens or hundreds of niches like the one we’d entered through lined the upper portion of the tunnel’s west wall, and I wondered how many had housed people.
Graffiti was scattered throughout the tunnel, both simple tags and huge colorful pieces, all layered on top of each other and mixed together with aphorisms and messages—“This city will chew you up and spit you out,” and “R.I.P. SANE,” and “’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the tunnel, not a creature was stirring, not even a rat…” On later visits I came to understand that the most desirable spots for murals are the places where ventilation gratings let sunlight in, and this is part of why so many pieces are drawn over each other in clustered layers of paint.
Some of the only murals left undisturbed were the giant black, white, and silver paintings done in the 1980s by a painter named “Freedom.” The murals range from about ten to twenty feet tall, and were pained with the help of a ladder. They range from a Dali-style melting clock, dripping its way down the wall, to a replica of a Ted Williams baseball card, to huge portraits of tunnel residents that are now long-gone. Freedom first found his way into the tunnel when he was 14, and visited constantly for years, making friends with the residents and creating the murals specifically for them, his only audience. These murals have a tremendous impact when they suddenly appear in the beam of a flashlight, the faces gleaming like an old albumen photographic print. Most were already more than a decade old by the time I first saw them, and the fact that so many remained unscathed demonstrated the respect Freedom had earned from his fellow writers. A portrait of the Mona Lisa’s face was one of the few Freedom works that had been tampered with; a new piece of graffiti covered the bottom half of with ten-foot-high mural. But the newer tag had itself been painted over with the words "Where's your respect, toy?"
We walked on the tracks, stopping to see the things that leapt out of the blackness into the beams of our flashlights, with no idea of how far we’d come or how long we’d been underground. Eventually, we realized it was almost five in the morning and decided to head back.
On our way back to the hole, we heard a train coming. It was just a low rumble at first, coming from all around us, and for a few moments I thought I was just imagining it. Then Elinor heard it too and we both stopped and looked down the tunnel behind us. Far away, the darkness of the tunnel was inexplicably brightening like an underground dawn in the moments just before the orb of the sun is visible. Then the headlights of the train itself appeared around the curve, moving dangerously fast, and the full roar of the engine hit us.
We sprinted for a wall, turning off the flashlights as the light and noise of the train filled the space around us. After so long in darkness and the silence, it was deafening and blinding; the air hummed with the brightness of the light, and the concrete wall shook with the sound. Then the engine flashed past and the beams of the headlights swept on down the tunnel. I caught a quick-flash filmstrip view of heads silhouetted through the windows, the smell of dust and steel, and the clashing of the steel wheels on the rails.
For the short moment that the train was actually passing the tunnel had been bright as day and we felt exposed—we must have been seen, there seemed no chance that all these people could pass 15 feet from us and not know we were there. But the bright-lit faces in the windows had all been staring straight ahead; and then it was gone, heading uptown, across the river, and out of the city, and we were left with the darkness and silence again.
We made our way back to our starting point and climbed up the tarpaulin to the debris-filled ledge with our hole. We decided to walk north along the ledge before going back to the surface. We edged past concrete partitions and climbed around the huge, rusty steel I-beams that support the roof of the tunnel. After walking a few hundred feet, we found a bed—a sleeping bag laid over slabs of foam padding. It had obviously been used recently. Though we stepped over the bedroll and walked on, I felt nervous. It was clear we weren’t the only ones to come to the tunnel, and I wasn’t sure what kind of people the others would turn out to be. These residents already lived on the very margin of the city; would they be angry that, after they had been pushed out of our world, we had invaded theirs?
I could tell Elinor was feeling worried, too, though she seemed less affected than I was. She suddenly dropped down on her knees to look through a narrow space between girders. "Here kitty—come here, kitty…"
I peered over her shoulder and saw two cats, wary and fierce-looking, standing immobile and staring at her. I moved for a better view between girders and suddenly realized that I was looking into an entire room built into the side of the tunnel: clothes were hung on a line stretched from corner to corner, a dingy table was sitting next to a battered chair, and an antiquated radio kept company with a couple more cats perched on the table. The more I looked, the more cats I saw: half-hidden behind the clothesline, perched in the shadowed areas of the girders on the sides, and looking back at us from every corner of the room. All of them were staring at us warily, their eyes gleaming wickedly in the light from our flashlights.
We all stood still for a moment.
"Wow," said Elinor, "look at all those cats."
The cats seemed well-fed and at home; along one wall we could see a messy row of food bowls, disposable aluminum trays, and water dishes made from the bottom halves of plastic gallon jugs. The scene was bizarre; who would make a home here, buried in this nocturnal room with two dozen cats? I felt something in my stomach halfway between nervousness and fear.
In following years I would get to know Brooklyn, the woman who lived in that room and fed the cats. Homeless as a teenager, she had found her way into the tunnel the first time by following the half-wild cats that she’d begun to feed in Riverside Park.
“I came, I looked under the wall, I said ‘Oh! Look at all these cats!’ and then I felt sorry for them. I fell in love with the cats so I would come everyday and bring them cat food. And my cats love me. I’m all they have…” she told me, years after that first visit.
At the time, however, I knew none of this. Instead, I felt the weight of all the darkness behind me like a rising tide, and I wanted nothing more than to escape to the surface.
We headed back, passing the bed and then climbing back over the partitions and past the steel beams. When we got to the hole, Elinor went through first. I handed through the flashlights and then squeezed myself through, pushing with my feet against a half-buried cooking pot. I'd stopped noticing that the tunnel air was dusty or stale, but when I finally took a breath of New York City air, it was the purest, sweetest, cleanest thing I've ever tasted and I could smell the open space, the autumn breezes, and the light of the first fingers of dawn.
On the cable of the GW Bridge - With permission!
New York Post
April 14, 2009
Article by Don Kaplan
My deepest thanks to Don for taking me along as the photographer on such a fun assignment! Don is an excellent writer and a deeply interested & thoughtful reporter. It's too bad that it didn't get more space to run-- I think that there should have been more of both his article and my photos.
April 14, 2009
Article by Don Kaplan
My deepest thanks to Don for taking me along as the photographer on such a fun assignment! Don is an excellent writer and a deeply interested & thoughtful reporter. It's too bad that it didn't get more space to run-- I think that there should have been more of both his article and my photos.
Hudson River Railroad- Question for Readers:
Dear Readers,
I'm trying to determine for sure when the Hudson River Railroad along Manhattan's West Side Line first opened, and specifically when the first railroad bridge opened that carried the line across the Spuyten Duyvil Creek. Can you help?According to this 1988 article from the NY Times, the railroad:
"...crossed Spuyten Duyvil Creek, now the Harlem River, on a wooden drawbridge. The bridge was built no later than 1848, when service was extended to Fishkill. Later, service was extended to Albany, and points west and north."http://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/06/realestate/streetscapes-spuyten-duyvil-swing-bridge-restoring-a-link-in-the-city-s-lifeline.html(This statement is already a bit suspect because the mouth of Spuyten Duyvil Creek is not technically the "Harlem River," but is rather part of the Harlem River Ship Canal that connects the Hudson and Harlem Rivers.)
A more comprehensive, but contradictory history of the bridge is here:
http://www.washington-heights.us/history/archives/spuyten_duyvil_swing_bridge_30.html
This article by James Renner says that "The New York & Hudson River Railroad was incorporated on May 6, 1847" and that:
The first tracks were opened on September 29, 1849, running from Manhattan (Chambers Street) to Peekskill along the eastern shore of the Hudson River. By December 31st of that year, the system was extended to Poughkeepsie and then finally to Albany. At the Spuyten Duyvil a wooden trestle was constructed to connect Manhattan with the Bronx.
So we have 1848 and 1849... and on top of that I've also seen 1851. Of course I'm more inclined to believe James Renner's account, as his detail is much more extensive. But does anyone have any authoritative references or primary sources on this? Please email me at steve@undercity.org
Rome: Looking for the Cloaca Maxima
A story of searching for the oldest sewer in the world, Rome's Cloaca Maxima. This story of our adventures is by my friend & exploration partner Moses Gates. Visit him at http://www.allcitynewyork.com.
“You have made a very big mistake!” Here I was being chewed out, in English no less, by a homeless Gypsy fisherman with a neatly trimmed mustache on the east bank of the Tiber River. My crime? Trying to visit the Cloaca Maxima - the world’s oldest sewer.
Ancient Rome had a problem - a lot of people, even more animals, and no way to get rid of all their poop. To cope with this problem, a rudimentary sewage system was dug around 600 BC, flowing through town out to the Tiber River. True to Roman form, it even came complete with its own goddess, Cloacina, a statue of whom was placed above the part of the Cloaca that now runs underneath the ancient Roman forum. The Cloaca is so old, nobody really knows if it started as a tunnel, or a ditch, or even a natural river. It’s been in use in some form or another ever since, although in modern times its remaining passages were consolidated with the rest of the sewer system of Rome.
I wasn’t quite sure of the big mistake I had made. A little research had led us to the approximate location of the outflow of the Cloaca Maxima. I decided to head over there and see if we could get in. One possible entrance had a couple of guys camped out in front of it, obviously making it their home. One was digging in the mud in front of the entrance with a shovel, so I asked him (as best I could), if it was the Cloaca Maxima. He seemed friendly enough when he gestured to keep walking down the path by the river. But as I turned to walk away, I heard some very rapid, very angry Italian being hurled at me. After repeated “no parlo Italianos,” he said “OK you speak English? - you have made a very big mistake!”
Apparently I had in some way gravely offended some sensibility of his in our brief exchange. I had no idea what to do, or what he would do. Luckily, after a good deal of further berating, he took my apologies enough that I could walk away without fear of further offense. Still, I glanced over my shoulder more than once. He was so mad, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him running after me, shovel in hand.
Well, here was another obstacle I’d put in our way. Instead of manholes and fences, now we had angry Gypsies to contend with. The next morning Steve and I, armed with our peace offerings of cigarettes and beer, went down to try and talk our way in.
We had determined earlier that day that the tunnel by the Gypsy campsite was almost certainly the actual outflow of the Cloaca. The guy who had yelled at me wasn’t there, but his friend was. He only spoke Italian, Romany, and Russian fluently (got to love Europe, with a trilingual homeless population), but we somehow ended up managing a mangled conversation with him in French. 10 minutes and a couple beers late we were in. Imagine our disappointment when the tunnel ended in a brick wall after 10 feet.
Undaunted, we decided to explore a little further down the river to see if there were any other possible entrances. We were in luck: only a few dozen feet down the river was a sewer entrance, close enough that it might lead to the Cloaca. This time the obstacles were different. There was a heavy gate in front of the entrance, although luckily it wasn’t locked. And there was another obstacle one might associate with sewers: namely sewage. While the other entrance had been kept fairly clean by the Gypsies camped out there, this one had no such caretakers. Flies were swarming all over us as we were up to our ankles in the muck of whatever Romans flush down their toilets trying to pry open the gate. This time it took a little elbow grease and a heck of a strong stomach instead of two beers and decent French to make it in.
Once we were in it got a little better - most of the sewage had caught on the gate at the entrance, and there was only a trickle down the middle of the tunnel. The tunnel itself was big, and looked relatively new. It began to curve toward the direction of the entrance to the Cloaca, giving us hope that it would eventually connect with it, but stopped at a flood gate before very long.
With the Cloaca this close, we had to go on. Luckily for us, there was a ladder. Up the ladder, into the gatehouse, across a catwalk, and down another, much rustier, ladder and we found ourselves in the sewers beneath the Capolitine hill. On we went.
These sewers made the one we were just in look like the Sistine Chapel. We were on a narrow, somewhat slippery catwalk maybe a foot wide right next to the bodily waste of millions. One wrong step and we would literally be up shit’s creek without a paddle.
Still we pressed on to see what we could find. After 50 feet or so a smaller tunnel branched off to the side. This had no sewage in it, and was made out of brick - brick that looked incredibly similar to what ancient Roman ruins were made out of. Could this be the remnants of the Cloaca? We went as far as we could, stopping to take some pictures. The tunnel was only about 5 feet high or so, and ended in a strange chamber, complete with brick arches. We were under the oldest part of the city - even if it wasn’t the Cloaca, it was a fair bet this tunnel was at least a couple millennia old, and was host to the kind of history we had only read about.
We left this strange offshoot behind and carried on. Here was where Steve started to get worried. We had brought an air meter, which would tell us if the oxygen content got too low or if there was anything poisonous in the air. But Steve wasn’t worried about air - he was worried about water. We hadn’t checked the forecast that day. If it started to rain, or even just drizzle, there was a good chance the water level of the sewer would rise considerably. The catwalk was only a few inches higher than the effluence next to us. If it rose just even a little, we would be swimming back out. And if it rose a lot…well, let’s just say I could think of a lot better ways to go. We offered up a quick prayer to Cloacina and pressed on.
A little further and the sewer split in two. The big problem was that this was also where the catwalk ended. The tunnel to the right had no catwalk, and there was a 6 foot gap until the catwalk picked back up on the tunnel to the left. Jumping it was out of the question. We tested the water with the camera tripod to see how deep it was. The river of shit swallowed the 5 foot tripod with room to spare. We were out of options.
We had no idea if our quest was successful - we had been almost exactly in the path of the original Cloaca. Some remnants of it could have been the brick tunnel or the catwalk-less offshoot. The most likely possibility was that it was a bricked up archway that we had passed. But we had gone as far as we could without Hazmat suits. It was hard to head back out without knowing for sure if we’d accomplished our objective, but we couldn’t very well expect a big sign saying “welcome to the world’s oldest sewer!” We negotiated the other ladder and the gate, and made it back to the city before nightfall, passing our old Gypsy friends along the way. We gave a friendly wave and smile, and were honored when we got a slight nod of the head back.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)