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

by Gates, Moses

  Down here, if you want to see these things, you walk down an abandoned train tunnel, squeeze through a hole in the ground, and go find them. And if you don’t have a map, you might meet the same fate as Philibert Aspairt. One day in 1793, Philibert went down into the catacombs and his torch went out. His body was found eleven years later.

  There are very few chances to see something truly astounding on your own terms anymore. Today we live in the world of historic preservation, mass tourism, and liability laws. How often can you spend days wandering one of the most amazing urban spaces in the world, without a ticket taker or security guard to be found? This is the thought that finally gets us to dig through the debris at the entrance, take a deep breath, and crawl down the rabbit hole.

  The Night Before

  We’re greeted by a small group of cataphiles, one of whom had already met Steve in New York. She is an immaculately dressed young French woman who instantly earns the nickname “Rosie” from me: it seems to fit the pink skull on the shirt of her otherwise jet-black outfit. With her are a couple of artists from a squat on Rue de Rivoli and a surprise: our friend Miru Kim.

  I’d first met Miru a few months ago outside an abandoned chemical plant along the Queens waterfront, right after she’d moved to town. A few explorers, including Miru, were meeting there for the night to check the place out and also paint some signs for an upcoming event. A homeless guy had seen one of us enter and called us in to the police. I’ve never been able to figure out his motivation for this; my best guess is that he was hoping to get a free dinner from the precinct out of it. As a result, our party was soon broken up by four burly plainclothes officers with steak-thick New York accents. As they took us outside, I saw a slight Korean girl sitting dejectedly by the entrance; she had come late and gotten caught before she’d found us.

  “So listen,” the cops told us. “You guys were spray painting, which is also illegal, so technically we could take you in on burglary because you were committing a crime while trespassing. Handcuff you, run the paperwork, and we’d all get a shitload of overtime. But . . . hey, we were kids once too.”

  Since at least two of us in the group were old enough to be pretty surprised if we got carded buying a six-pack, I suspected this last sentence should have been something more along the lines of “But . . . my wife will kill me if I don’t get home in time to put the kids to bed again” or “But . . . I’m supposed to meet the boys for drinks at the titty bar after my shift,” but I sure wasn’t going to open my mouth and point this out. The cops took our IDs, gave us pink summons slips ordering us to appear at the Queens County Courthouse for a trespassing violation, and let us go. When Miru handed over her ID, I remember wondering what in the world this nice girl was doing here with our degenerate selves.

  Miru says: I had gotten a call to meet some adventurers at an abandoned chemical plant. For me it was an adventurous art project. I didn’t know whom I was meeting there exactly, so when I arrived and there were some men coming toward me with a flashlight, I thought they were the ones I was meeting. But the flashlight was too bright on my face and right away I started feeling very nervous. They were police officers in plainclothes and their manners were rough. They questioned what I was doing there, and I got so frightened that I started stammering. I was the kind of girl who wouldn’t even cross a street on a red light. The first time I do something rebellious—in my opinion at the time, outrageously so—I get caught by the police. So many thoughts were racing through my head. What if I have to go to jail and I get a criminal record? What would my parents think? What would my nice Ivy League friends think of me? Of course, I was the first one to get caught, and soon the police found the others. I had no idea that there were kids with alcohol and spray paint. I felt out of place.

  It was surprising to me that Moe and the others were so calm. In retrospect, it was really not such a big deal—it cost me a couple of hours to get to the court, and a fifty-dollar fine. I probably wouldn’t feel so nervous now if I got caught, but I never know. I still have never felt real handcuffs in my life, and I plan on keeping it that way.

  Back in Paris, while Miru, Steve, and I are making our hellos outside the restaurant, Rosie interrupts. “So, you want to climb a tower?” The last thirty-six hours have consisted of two transoceanic airline flights, a night in Iceland, three bars, one impromptu climb up a construction crane, and zero hours of sleep. So of course the answer is “Let’s go.”

  “Great,” says Rosie. “Then we are off to see Saint- Jacques.”

  • • •

  The Tour Saint-Jacques is the only surviving part of a sixteenth-century Gothic church, the rest of which was demolished shortly after the French Revolution. Nicolas Flamel, the legendary alchemist, is supposedly buried underneath its floor, and Blaise Pascal, the mathematician and scientist who first proved the concept of a vacuum, used it to conduct his experiments on atmospheric pressure (today it also houses a meteorological laboratory). It’s located inside a small park in the IVe arrondissement smack-dab in the middle of Paris, and I can already tell it will afford a magnificent view. It’s one of the highest structures in the central part of the city, only about fifty feet shorter than the towers of Notre Dame, which rise a quarter-mile to the south. It’s on one of the busiest thoroughfares, and despite it being well past midnight, I have no idea how we’re going to pull this off without getting caught.

  The first part is easy: somehow, Rosie’s got a key to the park, which is closed after dark. But there’s still the problem of getting past the eight-foot-tall solid metal barriers that surround the actual tower. If it were just me and Steve, we could probably find a way over, but we have the added challenge of getting the other four folks across. After a bit of poking around, Rosie somehow finds a shovel. Steve gets to digging. I am absolutely amazed that no passersby seem to find this a particularly noteworthy situation. If it were Midtown Manhattan instead of central Paris, we’d be in handcuffs by now. This is when I first learn different cities have vastly different cultures and approaches to the impromptu and unsanctioned use of public space—and Paris’s approach can basically be summed up as “whatever.”

  After about ten minutes, Steve has managed to create a hole under the barrier big enough for me to slip through. I take the shovel and clear out the other side a bit, so that it’s big enough for the others—one of whom is about six-foot-four—to get through as well. Everyone wiggles under, and we head to the tower.

  The Tour Saint-Jacques is currently being inspected and restored, so we have the advantage of the scaffolding surrounding the tower, which makes the climb pretty easy. We make our way up the metal staircases, stepping over protruding gargoyles, and stopping occasionally to admire the detailed stonework close up. But the real goal, as always, is the top.

  Because of the scaffolding, we can get a close-up look at the giant statue of Saint-Jacques added to the top of the tower in the nineteenth century. Rosie claims that if you look into his eyes you can tell he’s crazy, but I don’t really see it. I’m content to hang out and admire the view while the others take photographs. Paris is a compact city, and it seems like I’m visually stumbling upon another world landmark every thirty seconds: Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Panthéon. I start to disassociate from my immediate environment, start to orient myself in my greater surroundings and form the mental connection with the miles and miles of urbanity spread out around me.

  My mild fugue state is broken by Steve’s voice. “Hey, Moe, hop up on top of that thing, would ya?” he says, pointing to a statue of a winged Gothic creature preening at the corner of the tower. I balk at the request. A big factor in getting to climb the tower was the scaffolding. The scaffolding was erected to assist with the historic preservation of the tower. So I feel like anything that might damage the sculptures—like sitting on them, for instance—is kind of bad manners. Miru, on the other hand, has no such qualms. Her eyes light up at Steve’s suggestion
, and she’s soon making her way over to the statue.

  I know she’s going to add her own twist to the pose. One of her current art projects is the Naked City Spleen, which involves photographic nude self-portraits in abandonments, bridges, tunnels, and other interesting places. Artistic vision is a powerful thing, and Miru is one of those artists for whom the vision is so overwhelming that any obstacle that might compromise it must be overcome by any means necessary. For example, one time, for some reason, she decided her next project had to involve nude photos in pigpens—so she spent months calling every hog farm in the county, and when this didn’t pan out, she drove to the middle of Iowa, snuck into an industrial farming facility, took off her clothes, and spent the next few hours snuggling naked with a bunch of three-hundred-pound sows. That’s the extent Miru will go to in order to scratch her artistic itch. So niceties like historic preservation—or the fact that it’s about ten degrees out—don’t really register with her once she’s hooked on to something.

  You might think it strange to all of a sudden see one of the people you’re hanging out with just up and take off her clothes, but it’s all business: artists need models, and for this project Miru is both. It’s kind of like watching a player-manager in baseball put down his clipboard, pick up a bat, and hit the on-deck circle. My main thought upon seeing this is: “Jesus, she must be cold as hell.” Miru perches on top of the statue and manages to somehow hold her pose while riding the creature through three or four long-exposure shots. After the shoot she’s shivering terribly, barely able to stand, but has a look on her face of pure satiation—the enjoyment of a job well done.

  I’ve been to a lot of crazy places with a lot of crazy people: people who will climb thousand-foot rock walls with no safety gear, people who will fly halfway around the world to rappel into an abandoned hydroelectric tunnel or climb a national landmark, people who will walk for miles through waist-deep, shit-filled sewers for no other reason than to see what’s there. But if I really, really want to get somewhere, really want to do something, give me two people with two things: Five-foot-nothing, ninety-eight-pounds-soaking-wet Miru with an unfulfilled artistic vision. And Steve with a full bottle of Jim Beam.

  We descend the tower through the interior spiral staircase and then go out a small passageway back onto the scaffolding. We clamber back down to the park, attracting the glancing attention of a couple of people on the sidewalk. When we return to the scene of our excavation under the gate, the gang decides to try to fill the hole back in. I know that we’d been seen climbing down the scaffolding, and all I can think of is the irony of getting caught at the end of this excursion filling up the hole we dug to get in. I wait nervously while two of the others pack in dirt and debris, eventually creating a mound of detritus that looks exactly like someone is trying to hide a hole in the ground. Still, fifteen minutes later when we’re safe, sipping tea back at the artist squat, I can forgive our new friends anything. It’s been the most wonderful welcome to a city that I’ve ever had.

  Miru says: The Tour Saint-Jacques is very special for me because André Breton loved this tower. I was a French major and have always favored Surrealist literature. In Mad Love (1937), there is a lovely passage: “I was near you again, my beautiful wanderer, and you showed me, in passing, the Tour Saint-Jacques under its pale scaffolding, rendering it for some time now the world’s great monument to the hidden.” It made the experience for me extra-special that I could see the hidden tower inside the scaffolding and on top of it. I imagine Breton didn’t have that chance. Now, with the scaffolding down and the tower looking all white again, it has in my view lost some vintage charm and mystery, although I guess others would say it’s been restored to its original glory.

  It was freezing cold on top of the Tour Saint-Jacques in January. To most people, some things I’ve done for my art projects may seem extraordinarily brave, but I can’t take the credit for that, because it was always to my entertainment. Maybe I have a twisted sense of enjoyment. I had so much fun shooting on top of the tower, and that made the cold quite bearable. I wouldn’t recommend that anyone else do this unless they have fun doing it. Same goes for the pig series. I actually enjoyed rolling around in the dirty pen with these three-hundred-pound pigs that could have killed me in seconds if they had wanted to. Moe often tells me that I should go see a psychiatrist.

  When we wake up the next day, Rosie gives us what will become our most precious possession: a flash drive containing the pdf of the highly detailed catacomb map, which we print out at a nearby shop. We also arm ourselves with plenty of food and water; rubber boots, dry socks, and an extra pair of shoes for the tunnels that are flooded; and an assortment of headlamps, flashlights, and an open-flame carbide torch affixed to a hard hat. Feeling like Magellan about to round Tierra del Fuego, we hop on the Métro, disembark at the Porte d’Orléans station, and make our way down the tracks, through the tunnel, and into the rabbit hole.

  After a little bit of crawling, the tunnel opens up enough for us to stand. We consult our map, get our bearings, and set off for our first destination. It’s an easy decision. When you first gaze over a map of the catacombs, it’s tough to ignore the areas marked by a skull and crossbones.

  SECTION OF THE MAP.

  SIX

  Most visitors to Paris know the catacombs as a forty-five-minute, eight-euro tour through the main Parisian ossuary—basically a giant underground boneyard. The Paris of the late 1700s was one of the densest urban areas in the world. There are many things about managing this kind of urban environment that we just take for granted nowadays—like what happens to what you flush down the toilet, or how freshwater suddenly appears after turning a handle on a faucet—that were developed as ingenious solutions to once intractable problems. Waterborne diseases like cholera would devastate urban communities, a result of sewage mixing with drinking water. Sewer systems, aqueducts—these were inventions of necessity, not convenience.

  The ossuaries were another of these inventions of necessity. In the eighteenth century, Paris was the largest city in the world and, along with London, well along its path as the forebear of the modern metropolis. As such, it had to start dealing with one of the great problems of the modern metropolis: pollution. In addition to garbage, sewage, industrial waste, and all the other things we might think of as “pollutants” today, Paris had another pollutant that had to be dealt with: dead bodies. The main burial ground, Saints Innocents Cemetery, was smack-dab in the center of the city, right next to the main market. The size of Paris had exploded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tripling in population—and potential cadavers—during this time. The mass burials, each of which the parish church took a fee for, quickly overwhelmed the embattled cemetery. The smell of corpses was dominating the city center, with the putrefied remains causing disease. A solution was needed. Burials in the city proper were banned, new grounds were set up on what was then the outskirts of town, and Saints Innocents and other central cemeteries were exhumed, the bones treated and transferred underground to the old quarries.

  Some of the remains of these six million or so dead Parisians can now be viewed on the official catacombs tour. There, the bones are neatly stacked, with the skulls sometimes being used to form patterns. It’s a great tour, and an easy way to see an interesting part of the city. It’s a little over a mile long—about one-half of 1 percent of the total length of the catacombs. We’re headed to the ossuaries that aren’t part of this tour. But first we have to figure out just how the hell to get there. The catacombs have almost two hundred miles of tunnels.

  The first thing I notice in these tunnels is that I can see my breath. But it’s not because of the temperature. While it’s freezing out on the train tracks, this chill fades almost immediately upon the first turn after entering the rabbit hole. The reason I can see my breath is because of the humidity: it feels like we’re almost swimming in the tunnels. I later learn that the catacombs, like natural caves,
have a consistent year-round climate: in this case about fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit and 98 percent humidity. The practical effect of this climate is weird: as we’re traipsing through the tunnels we’re sweating profusely, but when we stop to rest or take pictures we immediately start to get cold. We’re constantly pausing in our activities to take off and put on layers. At one point, having been on the go for a while and not wanting to soak my pants in a tunnel flooded up to my thighs, I find myself running around in my underwear.

  The second thing I notice is that I can’t read the map—as I should have suspected, it’s entirely in French, which I don’t speak a word of. Steve has been reviewing his high school French by reading The Three Musketeers in the original, and has actually been managing to passably communicate with locals. Still, despite my linguistic disadvantage, I insist on being the navigator.

  OFFICIAL TOUR BONES.

  © Lucinda Grange

  “What’s a chatière?” I ask, after seeing that one is coming up ahead.

  “Here, let me see,” Steve says, making a grab for the map.

  I don’t let go but hold the map out to let him take a look. A chatière turns out to be a narrow passageway or other opening, specially dug to connect one part of the network to another. Essentially, it’s a wormhole. There are dozens of chatières marked on the map. After an hour or two of arguing and winding our way through the tunnels, we find a narrow chatière in the tunnel wall, a few feet off the ground. We pull ourselves up and through, and find ourselves crawling on a bed of bones.