Urban Explorers: Finding Beauty Amidst the Grime

Every city has its secrets. Most of them are right there before our eyes, obscured perhaps by force of habit or by grime, but they are there nonetheless, in the very bones of the buildings, waiting to be revealed.

To discover them is the self-imposed role of an emerging breed of thrill seekers looking for a new kind of fix – urban explorers. These modern day adventurers are the pioneers of a new final frontier, whose borders lie not in space or at the bottom of the ocean, but in the deepest recesses of the city itself with its seemingly endless maze of infrastructure. They scour and scavenge the forgotten corners of our metropolis, looking for its hidden history and reclaiming its abandoned buildings as ghostly monuments of a not-quite faded past.

The New York Times published a lengthy article about them today, and the stories that are told are truly fascinating, revealing a side of NYC often considered but rarely beheld in the flesh.

“About the only real thing left in NYC is the underground, the dirty, filthy underground.” writes Mr. Anastasio, one of the most well-known perpetrators of this illicit tourism. This apparent relation between filth and beauty may be the central thread connecting these disparate individuals together, underlining the vertiginous heights people will go to just to catch a glimpse of the “real” New York City, not the one of shops and crowds but the one of boarded tenements and abandoned waterfronts.

One explorer, Steve Duncan, discovered the room where the atom was split. Another, the artist Ms. Kim, poses nude in abandoned structures and tunnels, revealing her sleek, feline body in stark, otherworldly contrast to the decaying machinery around her. Another climbs a grain silo in Red Hook to catch one of the best views in the whole city.

Their stories are all available, with photos of course, across the various blogs that have inevitably developed along with the activity itself. Check them out, it’s well worth it.

NYT: Children of Darkness