by Gates, Moses
Praise for Hidden Cities
“Hidden Cities offers a thrilling glimpse into the secret worlds that surround us. Moses Gates has crafted an endlessly absorbing book that succeeds on many levels—as a compelling travelogue, a nuts-and-bolts how-to manual, and a deep-feeling and highly relatable personal memoir. Anybody who reads it will emerge invigorated by possibility.”
—Davy Rothbart, creator of Found Magazine, author of My Heart Is an Idiot, and frequent contributor to NPR’s This American Life
“Hidden Cities is long anticipated by those of us who have spent the last five years enjoying Moses Gates’s wild dispatches—posts from below, above, and inside quarters of cities that we never would have dreamed of visiting and probably did not know were even there. This book is a measured and heartfelt look at some wild times in some crazy places, but it is most of all a paean to curiosity and where it takes you.”
—Robert Sullivan, author of Rats and My American Revolution
“An intrepid urban sherpa’s impassioned salute to the ‘joy of trespassing.’ Part guidebook, part social history, part coming-of-age story. Dig in: you’ll never look at cities the same way again.”
—Robert Neuwirth, author of Stealth of Nations and Shadow Cities
“I am a yellow-livered coward. I have also never been in shape: I have never seen my abs—I don’t believe I have any. That’s why when it comes to true urban exploration, you need intrepid individuals such as Moses Gates and Steve Duncan, who have the intestinal fortitude to invade places like the catacombs of Paris, the tops of New York City’s great bridges, the sewers of Rome, and the underground rivers of Moscow—and the savoir faire and aplomb to talk their way out of prosecution from the local authorities. Follow Moses, Steve, and others as they truly experience the world’s great cities in ways far removed from how Frommer’s, Fodor’s, or any Michelin guide would encourage you to do. Hidden Cities is a rollicking travelogue packed with secrets of the world’s metropoli that the local constabulary would rather you not discover.”
—Kevin Walsh, author of Forgotten New York
“The strongest human desires, we might agree, are for love, food, a warm place to stay, sex, and the like. These obvious requirements for living a good life are joined, in the case of serious urban explorers, with the NEED to explore. A great city at night is a massive playground, a wonderland imprinted by the dreams, desires, and accomplishments of those millions who have lived and do yet live there. Moses Gates knows this and has beautifully described that yearning some humans have to explore the built environment. Whether you are an armchair adventurer or the most accomplished climber/explorer in the world, you will find the stories in this book charming, inspirational, and filled with examples of that most human of needs: the need to see and know.”
—John Law, coauthor of Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society, Suicide Club member emeritus, and cofounder of the Burning Man Festival
JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, USA
USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com
Copyright © 2013 by Moses Gates
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gates, Moses.
Hidden cities : travels to the secret corners of the world’s great metropolises—a memoir of urban exploration / Moses Gates.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-101-60276-8
1. Voyages and travels. 2. Gates, Moses—Travel. 3. Cities and towns. 4. City and town life. 5. Adventure and adventurers. I. Title.
G465.G38 2013 2012039954
910.9173'2—dc23
Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
For my Grandmother Ethel,
who is the coolest person I know
Contents
Praise for Moses Gates
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PROLOGUE
{PART ONE}
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
{PART TWO}
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
{PART THREE}
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
EPILOGUE
Photographs
Acknowledgments
Notes
Further Reading
PROLOGUE
Paris, December 2007
I have just rung the bell of Notre Dame. It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.
It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, because I haven’t paid an admission fee and queued up to get to the bell. You can’t—this isn’t the part of the building they let tourists into. I’m not a historian, or preservationist, or bell tuner invited up by the cathedral. I’m not a priest, or docent, or security guard with keys and curiosity.
No, I am a dead-drunk New Yorker accompanied by a French preppy named Nico I met three hours ago and my best friend, Steve Duncan, a guy whose favorite place
in the world is a two-hundred-year-old sewer tunnel underneath Lower Manhattan. And how we have managed to access the bell tower in the spire of Notre Dame is by using a combination of gargoyles, flying buttresses, and a makeshift ladder to scale the outside of the cathedral in the middle of the night. In the rain. For no particular reason other than we were down there, and the spire is up here, and this just seemed to be the best way to get from point A to point B. And after finally making it up, I just can’t resist the urge to play Quasimodo. Now I’m hearing “Bonsoir?” from one story down below.
Over the last few years I’ve been to a lot of places, in a lot of cities, where your average tourist shouldn’t be—and many more that your average tourist doesn’t even know exist. I’ve become part of the world of people who break into national monuments for fun, put on movie screenings in storm drains, and travel the globe sleeping in centuries-old catacombs and abandoned Soviet relics rather than hotels or bed-and-breakfasts. A world where I party with people living in the tunnels under New York, squatters in an abandoned Paulo mansion, and Ukrainian teenagers in Cold War bunkers and partisan hideouts under Odessa. Where I discover ancient Roman ruins in the sewers beneath the Capitoline Hill, dodge trains and the third rail in five of the ten largest subway systems in the world, and manage to avoid entrance charges for landmarks from Stonehenge to the minarets of the Bab Zuweila gate, built over nine hundred years ago to guard the city of Cairo. I’m part of a loose-knit worldwide network of artists, historians, adventurers, and other assorted nutcases sometimes called “urban explorers.” All of it has been fascinating. And all of it has been completely illegal. And now I’ve gotten caught. I take a moment to assess the situation. I’m about to get arrested. In a foreign country. On top of the most famous cathedral in the world. Drunk.
When Steve and I first met Nico, three hours beforehand, we were fairly unimpressed. Decked out in an argyle sweater over a collared shirt, knit scarf, and designer jeans, he was sitting at a bar, drinking a glass of red wine with a posture that indicated he’d be more comfortable discussing the merits of Foucault and Sartre than crawling through catacombs or scaling medieval stonework. He looked like a French version of Zack Morris from Saved by the Bell, not a daredevil urban adventurer. But then again, nobody we’ve met in the world of daredevil urban adventurers has really looked the part. Not the shy Korean girl from a wealthy family who takes naked pictures of herself in abandoned power plants. Not the London bus driver with a weakness for lager, mince pies, and well-endowed women who is halfway to his goal of visiting every abandoned subway station on earth. Not the flamenco dancer with the soft Quebecois accent who travels the world rappelling into storm drains. And certainly not me, a mild-mannered midwestern Jewish boy who got nervous sneaking cigarettes between classes in high school. So we sat down and introduced ourselves. A mutual friend, part of the underground world of French cataphiles with whom we had spent long hours exploring the tunnels that snake below the XIVe arrondissement, had set up the meeting. “I think you will have fun together,” she had said in her halting English. “Nico likes to climb too.”
After we meet Nico we decide to head out to see what we can find. It’s still kind of early, so Nico suggests we hit the Canal Saint-Martin, an underground river constructed by Napoleon in 1802 to bring freshwater to the exploding population of central Paris. It’s guarded by a locked gate, but Nico explains that this is no problem; he climbs up the gate, which isn’t quite flush with the ceiling of the tunnel. Then he grabs the tiny ledge at the top, maneuvers around a corner, and goes hand over hand by his fingertips ten feet above the canal before swinging around the other side. Not a move your average preppy could do. Steve and I follow, and we’re in.
This gets the night started. We walk down the ledge on the side of the underground canal, taking pictures and marveling at the point in space that we happen to occupy. To get to the canal gate where it enters the tunnel, we’ve walked along the side of a marina. This marina was originally dug as a moat—a moat whose purpose was protecting the fortress imprisoning the political opponents of the Bourbon kings of France. Three centuries ago we’d have been standing in a dungeon in the basement of the Bastille. We slowly make our way north along the canal, telling stories and making sure we don’t fall in. Steve, as usual, has brought a flask of whiskey and breaks it open. I don’t know if France has an open-container law, but it doesn’t really matter: one of the side benefits of being in places outside the public realm is that you don’t have to worry about the rules of the public realm. After about a mile and a half of walking, we encounter a tunnel that branches off to the side. This turns out to be a connection to Paris’s 150-year-old sewer network. With some rubber boots and an air meter, we probably would have gone wandering off into the 1,200-plus miles of the system, but without these there’s really only so long you want to hang out in a sewer. After a short time spent taking pictures, we figure the quickest way to get back to the street is to just pop open a manhole.
I’ve never popped a manhole before and feel embarrassed about it. It’s the urban exploration equivalent of being a lawyer who hasn’t ever argued before a jury, just sat with a stack of papers and whispered in the lead counsel’s ear from time to time. So I tell Nico and Steve that I’ve got this one.
People look at the tops of dozens of manholes every day. But not many have actually been in the other side. Generally speaking, below that metal circle on the ground is a vertical cement tube, about the same diameter or slightly larger, with either a ladder leading down, or more often just a set of rungs set into the cement. This tube might go down five feet or fifty feet, and at the bottom is an entrance to the drains, or sewers, or telecommunication tunnels, or some other guts of the city. Our tube has the embedded rungs and is about fifteen feet deep and perhaps three feet in diameter.
Manholes are not designed to be opened, or “popped,” from the bottom. When workers want to enter, they take a tool, yank off the manhole cover, leave it over to the side, and then set up safety cones or fences around the open hole in the ground. Once they’re finished with whatever they’re doing, they climb back out and use the tool to yank the manhole cover back into place. Popping them open from below is generally reserved for people who run around these places for fun. As such, there’s no real proper—or safe—way to do it. But even if there was one, it’s still a pretty bad idea. Best-case scenario in popping open an unfamiliar manhole from below is climbing out into a park with some curious picnickers giving you funny looks. Worst-case scenario is sticking your head up out of the hole and having your last sight be the tire of an SUV coming at you at fifty miles an hour. So I listen at the manhole for a while. When I don’t hear the telltale thunk-thunk that indicates that traffic is passing over it, I determine we’ll exit onto the sidewalk. Now it’s time to get the thing open.
Over the years, urban explorers have figured out a few different methods of popping open manholes from below. I’ve just learned a new one, which is to stand with the rungs at your side, grab them with both hands, flip yourself upside down, and then shove as hard as you can against the bottom of the manhole cover with your feet. I haven’t actually tried this yet, but it seems like a lot of fun, and I resolve to impress my companions with my mastery of this advanced manhole-cover-popping technique. Steve reminds me to grab separate rungs with each hand, the purpose being that in case one breaks or comes loose, I’ll still have a grip on the other, and as such won’t plummet fifteen feet headfirst down the shaft. This is important: when a physical structure is out of the public realm, the usual rules of safety and maintenance that we are all unconsciously used to don’t apply. The manhole could have last been opened yesterday or never. The rungs could have been set into the cement fifteen days or a hundred fifty years ago. It could have a faithful civil servant doing inspection, maintenance, and upkeep on a regular basis, or be completely off the official map. I grab, flip, and start to push. Paris’s manhole covers weigh about two hundred pounds. Ten minut
es later I’m still hanging upside down and the manhole cover hasn’t budged. The other two are losing patience. “Come on, let me do it,” Steve says.
I am not letting Steve pop the manhole. The whiskey has given me an inflated sense of the moment, and getting it open has now become a test of manhood. But I accept that I don’t have the technique to do it the cool way, so instead I flip back down, move up a couple rungs, place my shoulder against the manhole cover, and shove. The feeling in my abdominal muscles makes me question if I just gave myself a hernia, but I feel the metal disk budge. One more shove and it comes loose.
Now comes the scary part. The lid has been “popped,” meaning it’s not flush with the sidewalk anymore, and is now hanging at a shallow angle half in, half out of the hole. What I’m supposed to do now is balance on the ladder rungs, reach up with my hands, and shove this thing off of the hole and onto the sidewalk so we can climb out. The problem is that I have heard stories of people who have had a lid settle back into place while they were trying this, crushing—or even severing—their fingers. So instead of gripping the edge of the cover and shoving, I try to nudge it along from the bottom, never putting my hands in a position where I could potentially lose part of them. The manhole cover goes nowhere. My companions become more and more anxious, because in addition to wasting time we are now hanging out below a suspiciously half-open manhole on a sidewalk. I finally give up and let Nico do it, feeling like a baseball player who’s just stepped up to the plate in the bottom of the ninth, taken a couple pitches, and then headed back to the dugout and asked the manager to pinch-hit for him. And not even because he’s a particularly bad batter but because he’s scared of getting hit in the head with an inside fastball.
We clamor out of the hole. Nico has managed to shove the manhole cover halfway down the sidewalk in one try. I try to cover up my shame by insisting on putting it back, but after seeing my earlier ineptitude the other two are having none of it and quickly put the cover back in place themselves.