On the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues in Coney Island, the streets stood empty apart from a few people drifting in and out of the subway station. An ice cream shop across the street was shuttered against the chill October air, black grime stuck in the swirls of a giant vanilla cone atop the awning. “Home of the International hot dog eating contest,” boasted a sign outside Nathan’s Famous. Below it, a digital clock counted down to next summer’s event—275 days, 19 hours, 27 minutes, 11.7 seconds—anticipating the return of the warm weather and carnival rides that would bring crowds back to Coney.
As dusk began to fall, Moses Gates, a man in his thirties with facial scruff somewhere between a beard and a five o’clock shadow, emerged from the station. He carried two maps with lines sectioning the city into pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. Each irregular square marked a census tract, a geographic division used by the U.S. Census Bureau to gather population data. There are 2,217 census tracts in the five boroughs of New York City, and Gates is attempting to walk them all.
“I’ve always wanted to see the city—to see everything in the city, or everywhere,” Gates told me as we turned into an apartment complex east of the subway station (Tract 348.02). “It’s just a simple way to kind of quantify the word everywhere.” He moved quickly, hands tucked into the pockets of his leather jacket, and I struggled to match his pace. Walking on weekends or for a few hours after work, Gates has covered around 1,500 census tracts so far and hopes to finish the rest by next year. Although he began the tract project only five years ago, his desire for a holistic experience of the city arose when he moved to New York in 2001. “When you first get here, everything is exploration. Walking down the street is exploration. Eventually, you’ve seen what you can see in your neighborhood—you see other things, you get curious about them,” he said. “Some people will stop, because they’re not curious anymore, or out of laziness, or out of fear. I didn’t want to stop.”
While attending graduate school at Hunter College, Gates supported himself by working for CitySights NY. “One of the things you learn while tour guiding is that 99% of tourists want to see the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty,” he said as we walked through Bath Beach (Tract 282). Gates believes that every part of New York is interesting—or potentially interesting—and says his personal goal is to form “a complete picture of the city as it exists right now.” Sometimes, this takes him through fourteen census tracts in South Brooklyn. Other times, it leads him beyond the streets entirely.
Gates is the only person he knows who has tried to walk all of New York City’s census tracts. But he belongs to a small subculture—a group known as urban explorers—whose essential curiosity in the built environment impels them around, below, and above the city, into places that are forgotten, hidden, or difficult to reach. His census tract project, in its comprehensiveness, lies on one end of the exploring spectrum. At the more extreme end, Gates and a handful of others travel to areas made inaccessible by seclusion or law: abandoned buildings, subway tunnels and sewers, and the tops of bridges.
For Gates, who daylights as an urban planner in a Financial District office building, exploring provides a deeper understanding of how the social and physical elements of the city function together. “The physical infrastructure very much guides the way society works and interacts,” he said. “Everyone has social interactions all the time, and people pay attention to those. But people don’t always pay attention to the physical structures.” Over the past decade, Gates has walked across every bridge in New York with a pedestrian pathway—summiting 11 of them—and traveled extensively underground. Touching the steel girders of a bridge or the walls of a subway tunnel, the relationship of human flesh to city skeleton is impossible to ignore.
Gates denies that urban explorers are thrill seekers or adrenaline junkies, but the activity often places them at odds with physical or legal boundaries: scaling bridges without permission or harnesses, trespassing into abandoned buildings with broken windows and unsound floors, and descending into subway tunnels at the risk of encountering trains or law enforcement. “Oh look, here comes a gang,” Gates joked as we paused on the sidewalk in Tract 398, nodding toward an approaching group of MTA workers, helmets and flashlights swinging from their hands. “It’s like right out of The Warriors, man!” City employees aren’t really his enemies, he explained, and they rarely cause trouble on the few occasions when they bump into each other underground. After all, they share a common interest: “We’re all basically subway nerds.”
The police, on the other hand, are less likely to indulge urban explorers’ curiosity. Gates was recently exploring an abandoned grain elevator in Red Hook, Brooklyn with a pair of documentarians. They spent more than an hour unnoticed on top of the elevator, but just as they were packing up their equipment to leave, a squad car drove by. The three spent several hours in jail before getting released without charges. “If I wasn’t worried about getting a record and stuff like that, I would have done it voluntarily, because it was kind of fun—just to see a different side of the city,” Gates said. “I was like, ‘Hey, I’ve never been arrested! I’ve never been in a precinct!’”
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A week later, I joined Gates at the former Estey Piano Factory in the Bronx, where his friend and fellow explorer Shane Perez was showing photography in a gallery on the ground floor. The pictures were a mixture of city landscapes and shots of nude models on bridges, inside tunnels, and curled up inside the cogs of machines in abandoned power plants. Wearing a black t-shirt and jeans, his dark hair tucked under an olive green cap, Perez circulated the crowd—a mixture of acquaintances, explorers, and curious neighbors—welcoming guests and answering questions about light exposure. Gates greeted Perez, then spotted the small plastic cups of champagne for sale at a back table and left to buy beer.
I walked around the gallery, stopping in front of a photograph of an empty room lined with immense Doric columns. Pallid light entered through a far window, illuminating the weathered and discolored walls and ceiling. A naked woman knelt at the base of the nearest column, skin pale as marble—in this ruined temple, a statue left miraculously whole. The smooth curve of her hip lay against a broken place in the floor, where dirt and a few green plants pushed through the crumbled stone. The scene felt more sacred than erotic, the woman’s nudity emphasizing the privacy of her surroundings, her presence suspended between encroachment and natural habitation.
Gates joined me in front of the photograph, bottle in hand. “I see this and I’m like, ‘Hey cool, I know where this is! I remember that!” he said, gesturing at the columns. “I don’t look at it as art.” It takes concentration before he can recognize the aesthetics of a place, he explained, as memories of his actual experiences take precedence in his mind. Later that evening, Perez told me that he’d snapped the shot inside the Red Hook grain elevator, where Gates—fully clothed—had just been arrested.
Gates and Perez met a few years ago through their mutual friend Steve Duncan, another urban explorer living in New York City at the time. “When you have a very narrow, strange hobby, and you meet someone else with the same narrow, strange hobby, it’s very easy to become friends,” Gates said. Both accept the label “urban explorer,” but find its connotation slightly misleading. “I prefer ‘recreational trespassing,’” Perez told me. “I’m not exploring something—I’m not discovering something new.” After all, he pointed out, city employees visit many of these places every day. Gates agreed: “It’s a city—somebody built it,” he said. “Nobody’s going to name it after you.” The real exploration, they said, is personal.
Perez, who installs home entertainment systems for a living and shoots part-time for the New York Post, became a photographer mostly by accident. He started exploring abandoned mental hospitals while in high school, and was struck by their beauty. He took to carrying a point-and-shoot camera tucked inside his cargo pants, soon becoming frustrated with its limitations. “I wanted to translate the experience of being there to somebody looking at the picture,” he said. As years passed, he bought better equipment and taught himself to use it, then added models to play with narrative possibilities. Now, Perez sometimes lugs eighty pounds of camera gear on his trips around the city.
Artistry is not all that draws him to exploring, though: Perez finds the places he explores not only beautiful, but alien. He has always been driven by the desire to pull apart and understand unfamiliarity in his surroundings. As a kid growing up in Miami, Perez was obsessed with phone systems. He read everything he could on the subject, learned how the systems functioned and how they could be hacked, and figured out how to open telephone boxes to plug himself into people’s conversations. Knowing that a fourteen-year-old made an unconvincing repairman, Perez would travel to construction sites or abandoned places where he could run wire into boxes without arousing suspicion. Gradually, his interest turned to the places themselves. When he moved to New York in 2006, it was largely for the greater variety of places to explore. “A lot of it for me is trying to learn how things work, experiencing things first-hand,” he said, standing among his photographs in the gallery. “I want the visceral experience.”
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Walking with Perez along a set of abandoned subway tracks in lower Manhattan, all of my senses were amplified. Light bulbs lining the walls only called attention to the darkness, casting a dim glow on the underground. The rails were rusted, the wooden tracks scattered in places like pick-up sticks. But the bordering tracks were active, and I tensed each time a train rumbled in the distance, the sound magnified and dislocated by the acoustics of the tunnel. Perez warned me to watch out for the third rail, 625 volts of electricity coursing through a metal bar beside the tracks. While the subway’s electric propulsion system meant that trains emitted no soot as they whisked five million passengers around the city each day, the tunnel was still filthy. My fingers trailed across the wall as I crept through the dark, and my hand came away covered in fine black powder. Steel dust, Perez explained, generated by train brakes scraping against the rails. He had dressed accordingly in a black jacket and ripped jeans, a camera bag slung over his back.
As we moved through the tunnel, signs of life were both absent and everywhere. Graffiti brightened the walls in colorful swoops and swirls and slashes, and garbage—soda bottles, helium balloons, newspapers—littered the empty tracks. “A guy used to live down here,” Perez whispered as we entered an abandoned station. The platform was deserted, but a flowered carpetbag lay crumpled underneath a staircase, beside a pallet stacked with bedding, and the air was acrid with the smell of urine. Staring at the scene, moving in its utter stillness, I remembered the figure in the grain elevator: intimacy achieved through trespass. When Perez lifted his camera, the click of the shutter ruptured the silence underground.
Then the woop woop of a train horn cut through the dark, its haunting sound bouncing off the walls, swelling through the tunnel. As a train rushed by on the parallel tracks, we could have reached out and touched the rivets of the cars. The lights curved away into the distance, sweeping passengers through the underground. Perez motioned for me to follow as he slipped through an archway and across the tracks where the train had just passed. In an instant, we were back inside an inhabited station. It was a mirror image of the abandoned one on the other side of the wall—with the exception of a man leaning against a column, headphones over his ears, waiting for the next train to emerge from the darkness. He didn’t look up as we scrambled from the tracks onto the far end of the platform. Perez told me later that he enjoys riding the subway home covered in steel dust after a night of exploring, sitting next to businessmen heading to work, hinting at the existence of a city they don’t know.
The more a city develops, the easier it is to take for granted. “Most people are able to coast through their daily lives without understanding how things came to be there, or why they’re there, or how they exist,” Perez said, back on the sidewalk. “Things just arrive. Water just comes out of the fountain. You don’t have to go down to a well or pull it out of the ground—it just comes out. Sewage just goes away. The train shows up on time and you just get on it.” As he spoke, traffic rushed by in a steady stream. “In doing this stuff, I get to see how that’s done.”
The hazards of urban exploration are obvious. Perez and his friends have escaped approaching trains by just inches, had stairs collapse under their feet, and maneuvered across bridges where one wrong step could result in a fatal tumble. But, he argues, the activity encourages personal responsibility. In a society where every staircase has a handrail and hot coffee comes with a warning label, it’s easy to live thoughtlessly. That’s not possible while exploring. “When you’re in one of those places, you have to be in a hyper-aware state where you have to constantly think about every little action you take. You can’t be careless. And it’s not a way that most people are used to being, or existing, these days.”
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Late on a fall night, Perez drove through Brooklyn toward the Williamsburg Bridge. Gates was stuffed into the backseat with a group of their friends, including Steve Duncan, who had flown in from California for a conference on psychogeography—the study of how the environment affects the way people feel and behave. As we neared the bridge, I was the only passenger who appeared to be nervous. “Which one of us has the coolest facial hair?” Duncan asked me over the dance music blasting from the car speakers. “I always come out first,” he added, grinning.
“I always come out first!” Gates protested.
“Yeah, you’ve never won that contest, Steve,” Perez said from the driver’s seat.
At the base of the Williamsburg, everyone piled out of the car and headed up the pedestrian pathway. Gates wore his leather jacket; Perez carried his camera bag. After checking for onlookers, we swung over the guardrail onto a staircase inside the suspension tower. Moving upward, heart pounding from a mixture of exertion and exhilaration, I could see the East River rippling between gaps in the steps. “The more you keep a crazy death grip, the more likely you are to get tired,” Perez informed me as we climbed.
When he and his explorer friends get together, he said later, “We mostly talk about girls and climbing stuff. When we’re climbing, we just talk about girls.” They sometimes sing Johnny Cash songs while scaling bridges, and usually start off their adventures with liberal amounts of alcohol. What could seem like gratuitous risk-taking is actually meant to prevent the over-thinking that can lead to a fall. “A lot of people would say, ‘You’re an idiot,’” Perez said. “But I challenge them to try it both ways and see the difference.”
On the broad summit of the suspension tower, watching the lights of the FDR Parkway reflected in the water 300 feet below, it felt as though we were standing on solid ground. Built around the turn of the twentieth century, New York’s earliest suspension bridges were designed by engineers with rudimentary construction knowledge, who compensated for their ignorance with extra girders. The Williamsburg, begun in 1897, is a mass of clunky steel lattices. On top of newer bridges, Perez told me, built with better technology and fewer materials, you can actually feel the metal flexing underneath your feet. Standing on the sturdy summit of the Williamsburg, it was possible to sense—literally—the history of the city in the structure underneath us.
“Do you want to go out on the suspension cables?” Perez asked. Swooping between the bridge’s towers, the slender cables possessed the tense grace of a ballerina’s trailing arm. Stepping off the tower and edging out over the city, clutching guard wires for balance, I could see the skyscrapers of Manhattan sparkling against the cold blue air, headlights crowding the dark streets, a helicopter gliding over Brooklyn. In the middle of everything, the northern towers rose like dumb beautiful ministers over the pulsing city.
Perez followed me out onto the cable. “Do you feel it moving?” he asked. Twenty stories below, the JMZ train rumbled toward Brooklyn. The suspension cables trembled slightly, dancing with its passage. Beneath my feet the bridge felt alive, moving with the city even as it allowed the city to move. We stood far above New York, both removed from and intensely connected to it. Swaying gently with the cable, I shivered—no longer from cold or fear, but from the sheer life of it all. On the opposite side of the bridge, Duncan sat facing Manhattan, his legs swinging free over the traffic below. Gates, meanwhile, had disappeared—on to the next adventure.