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

by Gates, Moses

  “What now?” I ask.

  “There’s a church I’ve been looking at where I think we can do a climb,” Nico casually mentions in his Parisian accent. He motions south—“Let’s walk this way.” Steve and I follow, finishing off the flask.

  Walking through the city at night is quite unlike doing so back home: Paris has a sense of peace that is wholly lacking from the twenty-four-hour energy of New York City, and we don’t encounter another person the whole way to the Seine. As we walk across the Pont Neuf twenty minutes later, I wonder what church we’re going to and how we’re going to climb it. It isn’t until we hop the short fence into the yard that I realize the “church” Nico’s talking about is the Notre-fucking-Dame. I still have no idea how we’re getting up.

  “OK, so I come here last time and they are doing some work,” Nico says as we walk across the yard toward the back of the cathedral. “I think there is, the metal parts they use when they fix something, what is this called?” I’m confused until I realize Nico is searching for the word “scaffolding,” and while there isn’t any constructed, we quickly find some unused parts lying on the ground. We fit two of the pieces together and form a rickety metal structure that we lean against the building. One person holds it steady while another gingerly makes his way up it, and we’re on the first terrace. We haul up this makeshift ladder and repeat for the second terrace. Now it gets tougher: the ladder won’t reach all the way up to the third terrace. Luckily, Gothic cathedrals such as Notre Dame generally make use of a structural reinforcement—the flying buttress—that in a pinch can also serve as a climbing aid. We use the ladder to make our way on top of one of the flyers, and then manage to scoot along it up to where it connects with the third terrace.

  Now we’re really stuck. The fourth terrace is at least thirty feet above us. Saying I had second thoughts about continuing would imply my first thought was something other than “Let’s get the hell out of here already.” We’ve gotten an amazing up-close look at a beautiful part of a landmark cathedral few ever get to see. Isn’t that enough? Plus I’ve started to feel raindrops. “All right, guys,” I say. “Get your pictures and let’s bail.”

  “Hey, help me look for a way in,” is Nico’s response. Steve is off testing a drainpipe for climbability. I might as well have said, “Nice view, huh, guys?” For my companions, the thought of turning back now is so ridiculous my comment doesn’t even register. I consider quietly slinking off, heading back down the cathedral, and getting out of here before we create an international incident. It is a sickening yet incredibly freeing feeling when I realize there is no way I’ll be able to make it back down without at least one of the other two to hold the makeshift ladder steady. And neither of them seems to be going anywhere but up.

  We find a door. I can tell the lock on the door is a warded lock, meaning that you use a specially shaped key that bypasses “wards,” or small metal guards inside the lock designed to block an improper key from turning and triggering the latch. It’s not a very effective mechanism, hardly ever found in the United States, and is mostly used in old European locks. I’m pretty sure that with some time, effort, and luck I can get it open. Then I notice the entire lockset is simply screwed onto the door. Nico has a Leatherman. It takes us about forty-five seconds to break into Notre Dame.

  The door leads directly to a spiral staircase. We head up and find ourselves at another, similar door at the top of the staircase and exit onto a narrow stone walkway in what’s now a steady rain. On one side of us is a low stone railing, and on the other side is the bottom of the slanted metal roof. The calm, light downpour takes the edge off the adrenaline buzz, and this combines with the menagerie of stone goblin-like creatures dotting our surroundings to add a creepy, gothic feeling to the night. I imagine I now know how Batman would feel if Gotham City was “La Ville de Gotham” instead. The statues are not the restored sculptures that the tourists see up close; some are worn away to the point where you can barely tell they’re supposed to have faces. The rain lets me see the difference between the statues that are actual gargoyles, which function as water spouts, helping to funnel the runoff from the rain away from the building, and the ones that are merely chimeras, which are solely decorative. After a couple of minutes of admiring the view and exploring the terrace, I hear a thunk. I look over and see that Nico has flung himself against the roof, slick with rain, and is somehow managing to inch his way up to the spire without slipping back down. The adrenaline kicks back in again.

  I glance over at Steve. “We going up there?” I ask nervously. In return I get the straight-on look with the slightly crazed glint I’ve come to expect in these scenarios.

  “Moe, I have no idea where you’re going. But I’m certainly not stopping here.” Steve finds an easier route where two sections of the roof meet and several statues can be used as handholds before a final short vertical climb up protruding gargoyles. I take a deep breath and follow. As I struggle up the last few gargoyles to the spire, I feel a particularly narrow and worn one sort of give a bit beneath my foot. I have a flash of complete panic. I’m going to break Notre Dame. But it holds, I make my next foothold, and as Steve and Nico help haul me up into the spire I start to let myself think that this was actually a good idea.

  Once we’ve made it to the top, we start to relax a bit. The inside of the spire is circular and narrow, perhaps a dozen feet in diameter, with upper and lower platforms connected by a ladder. The interior of the structure is made entirely out of wood, which you can’t tell by looking at it from the ground. Steve and I head up the ladder to the upper level and take a look around. To the west is a beautiful view of the back of the twin square towers that crown the entrance to the cathedral. I take a moment to appreciate the perspective: tomorrow there will be hundreds of tourists on the north tower looking right at where we are now. But none of them will know what it’s like to look back.

  After I have Steve take the obligatory vanity picture of me standing in the spire, I start to get bored. The other two are taking pictures, and Steve is the kind of photographer who is never quite satisfied with his last shot. Each long exposure is inevitably followed with “Cool, cool . . . Let me try one more thing here.” I can tell it’s going to be a while—because of the effort we’ve put in, and the overwhelming unlikelihood of ever returning, I know Steve is not leaving until he gets exactly the photos he wants. So I look around for something to do in the meantime. I chuckle to myself.

  “What’s so funny?” Steve says.

  “This is going to sound really weird,” I reply, “but I kind of wish I’d brought a book.”

  In lieu of reading, I decide to try to see if there’s anything interesting up here that I’ve missed. The spire houses a few bells, and after a bit of poking around I can see that each one is operated by a simple pulley system. I give one of these pulleys a light tug, and a large bell to my right wobbles a bit. I figure a slightly harder tug will result in a soft chime—an appropriate celebration of our accomplishment, no? Unfortunately, the combination of being both heavily drunk and a completely inexperienced bell ringer leads my intended “soft chime” to sound more like a royal wedding has just taken place in the cathedral. In the silence of the winter night, it’s probably the loudest noise between here and the Sacré Coeur two miles to the north.

  Steve pauses his picture taking. “What the hell, Moe?” he says, staring at me with a mixture of disbelief and disgust.

  Now, usually in these circumstances I’d be the first one to insist we blow the joint immediately. But Steve has really only just started taking photos, and Nico, who has wanted to get up here forever, is off enjoying himself on the roof somewhere. And as I feel like I’ve already acquitted myself so incredibly poorly on this excursion so far, I am determined not to let my stupidity completely ruin the night. So instead I put on a false bravado.

  “Jesus, calm down,” I say, trying to put a tone of smug condescension into my voice. “There�
��s no way anyone in there would think anyone is up here. Chill out and take your pictures. I’m going to hang out over here.”

  I know this will convince Steve to stay. There’s a fine balancing act involved in trying to get where you’re not supposed to go, and that balancing act involves not giving in to your fears but at the same time not being a clueless idiot. It’s a narrow tightrope to walk, and one that takes some practice to really get a feel for. If you’re too scared, these nights usually involve staring at a fence for half an hour before convincing yourself that the bum on the corner is actually an undercover cop, and then going home. If you’re too much of an idiot, they involve, well, climbing up Notre Dame and ringing the bell. Steve is always worried about being too scared. I am always worried about being too much of an idiot. So between the two of us, we’ve worked out a pretty good rapport that’s let us get to, and more important get away from, a lot of places we’re not supposed to be. By playing out of position, I know I’ve caused us to lose our balance and fall firmly onto the “idiot” side of things. It’s a trick I reserve only for situations like these, where I’m feeling so particularly insecure about my place in the company of daredevil international adventurers that it outweighs my desire to not end up dead or in jail. If I had just managed to open that manhole earlier, my response would probably have been something smart, like stealthily leading the way back down, or at least making an effort to hide. Instead I decide to play Brando.

  Steve goes back to taking pictures. I relax again. My little speech has had a bit of an auto-hypnotic effect, and I’ve actually convinced myself that all will be OK. I am wrong. A few minutes later we hear voices. I peak down and see flashlights coming up the ladder below us. I make a silent vow to never again let myself think stuff like this is a good idea.

  We see the first policeman’s head pop up through the hatch. He looks around, sees us, and says something sternly in French that I assume translates out to “Don’t move, assholes.” He motions down for his companions, and as he steps up the last few rungs of the ladder to our landing, I hear Steve say dryly, “Well, I hope this isn’t like the last time I got caught climbing a cathedral.”

  {PART ONE}

  ONE

  New York City, 2001

  It has been six years since Steve last got caught climbing a cathedral. Three months after the destruction of the World Trade Center, he decided it would be a great idea to scale the rusty scaffolding on the side of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The 121,000-square-foot behemoth is best known for being the largest cathedral in the world. It’s also home to something of a hero of ours, Philippe Petit, the man who tight-roped between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Despite being open to the public for over a century, Saint John’s has never actually been completed, undergoing continuous construction since 1892. This construction is on and off, but nowadays mostly off. In the 1980s, work was started on the south-side tower, but Saint John’s soon ran out of money; in 1990 the workers went but the scaffolding stayed.

  Eleven years later, this now rusty, decrepit structure was an invitation for curious Columbia University students such as Steve to climb up to the roof at night and take pictures. Once he was having such a good time, he decided to stay up there after the sun came up. An overly paranoid passerby saw him, mistook his camera’s telescope lens for an automatic rifle, and called 911. Fifteen minutes later, a forty-person SWAT team was there for him. It ended up not being so bad. He spent the night in jail with a bunch of guys arrested for smoking pot, and the charges were dropped the following morning. Had he been caught on top of the George Washington Bridge, which he climbed September 9, 2001, it probably would have been a different story.

  While Steve Duncan, urban adventurer extraordinaire, was out climbing bridges and getting arrested on top of cathedrals, I, like so many other bright-eyed recent college graduates, had just moved to New York City and completely fallen in love with it. In the summer of 2001, Leigh, the woman I would be marrying in four months, and I had scored a great sublet on Riverside Drive, about a ten-minute walk from Saint John’s. She had just finished her second year of law school and had gotten an internship in Brooklyn, and I had a summer job with a local nonprofit doing outreach to city council candidates. Life was good: I was in the right place with the right person. What more can you ask for than that?

  There are two separate human tendencies when settling into a new place. The first is to nest—to make your home comfortable and familiar. The second is to explore—to get a sense of your surroundings. It’s probably evolutionary, something about needing to survey the territory for food, water, and enemies while also needing to fortify your home base against invaders. Everyone has both tendencies, but usually one is dominant. Some people are nesters, some are explorers.

  Leigh was a nester. After unloading our meager belongings on the corner of 116th Street and Riverside Drive, she stayed behind, eager to set up the new place. I could have cared less about unpacking a single box. I’m an explorer: the first thing I want to do is to know my surroundings, get the lay of the land. This was New York City; there was a lot of land to get the lay of. I started east on 116th Street.

  “You! You, you!” I hadn’t gotten halfway down the block when an elderly Asian lady started shouting at me. Thinking I should put on a “tough city-guy” façade, I attempted to ignore her and just continue on my way. Obviously this must be one of the many crazy New Yorkers I’d heard of. But I was wrong. This lady had actually judged that I was both a trustworthy and friendly enough young man that, despite my best attempts to ignore her, she could grab me walking down the block, press her car keys into my hand, and get me to parallel park for her. “You park! You park!” she said, pointing at a car angled awkwardly in the street—one of those classic bulky American sedans that seem like you’re piloting a yacht when you’re behind the wheel. Her voice indicated that the topic was not remotely up for discussion, so I hopped in, put the car in gear, and managed to squeeze it in between its neighbors. Expecting at least a “Thank you” upon exiting the car, I instead got a curt nod as I handed her back the keys. Well, that’s just the way things were in New York, I supposed.

  After this encounter I spent the next fourteen hours wandering the streets of Manhattan, just trying to take it all in. I can’t remember where I went or what I saw. The details weren’t important. The process was—the ability to experience my new surroundings, the chance to have encounters with stern ladies in need of talented parallel parkers. I finally staggered back to the Riverside Drive apartment at three in the morning, still in awe of my new home.

  It was a great summer, one of the happiest times of my life. In August 2001, a couple months after arriving, Leigh and I were visiting a friend who was the manager for the Gap store in the basement of the World Trade Center. On a whim I took a trip up to the observation deck while they stayed behind. It was a beautiful day, admission was only ten dollars, and there wasn’t even a line. They let us up on the roof, and I remember the amazing feeling of freedom. I looked down, and the huge skyscrapers of Manhattan looked like Monopoly houses. I marveled at the fact that I lived in such a city and that I had the rest of my life to discover it all. A month later, I got a harsh reminder that I didn’t necessarily have the rest of my life to see the city. Everything can be gone tomorrow. So I’d better start right now.

  • • •

  It all began innocently enough. New York is an amazing place, and like all new arrivals to the city, I had the fresh eyes to appreciate the wonder. Just by turning the corner on a nondescript Bronx block you come across Edgar Allan Poe’s old cottage, the concrete playground where Hip-Hop started in the 1970s, or the tenement where your grandmother grew up. There are skyscrapers and shacks, slums and mansions, people from every country on earth, every walk of life. For someone with a healthy sense of curiosity, New York is a sort of drug. Every block you go, you want to see what’s on the next one
. Every interesting person you meet, you want to meet another. Every answer you get brings more questions. Every perspective of the city you can see just makes you try harder to see the ones you haven’t. The questions just keep getting tougher, the new experiences harder to find. For most people, this thirst to see and discover is eventually satisfied or subsumed by life’s other priorities. But for a scant few others, it just keeps getting worse. Eventually, if it gets bad enough, you can start to get yourself into trouble.

  My problem was that I didn’t know how to get myself into trouble yet. Like so many others, I didn’t truly grasp that the “Do Not Enter or Cross Tracks” sign at the end of the subway platform is nothing more than a painted piece of metal that you can step right around, or that you can duck through a hole in the wall of a foreboding industrial hulk of a building and spend hours wandering inside, or that many times the only thing stopping you from sitting on the roof of a skyscraper and gazing out at the most magnificent skyline on earth is a bored guard at the front desk, a set of stairs, and a doorknob.

  So for a short while I satisfied my curiosity in small, everyday ways: taking a subway ride to a new stop and heading up the stairs, turning left instead of right while walking home, talking to strangers I’d meet at a lunch counter in Flushing or a shop on the Lower East Side. I stumbled across many little corners of the city this way, and each was rewarding. But it wasn’t enough.

  Good medical students—the ones with true passions for being doctors—aren’t content to just spend their education reading books and listening to lectures. They want to be in the operating room, examining the inner workings of the human body up close and personal. I felt that same need with the city. I enrolled in graduate school for urban planning, I got my tour guide’s license, but I wanted something more. I wanted a knowledge and experience that went beyond what was normal and easy. I would cross the Brooklyn Bridge and wonder what the city looked like from the vantage point of the people who had stood on the massive stone towers a century and a quarter ago spinning its steel suspension cables—cables that looked maddeningly inviting to ascend. I learned about century-old abandoned subway stations, an empty brick aqueduct that ran for miles just a few feet below the streets of Harlem and the Bronx, a secret train platform underneath the Waldorf-Astoria once used by Franklin Roosevelt, and the half-dozen disused observation decks on our Art Deco skyscrapers. I would stay up nights wondering how in the world I could get to these places, how I could manage to see them for myself. I got a horrible itch—an itch that made me wake up in the morning thinking, “Someone else got to go there . . . so why can’t I?” Everyone has an itch like this—a feeling that other people are living the dreams and doing the things that they want to do. Some people want to be rock stars. Some want to climb mountains. Some want to be the president. I wanted to see everything in New York City.