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Outside Magazine October 2001

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Adventure
Wild in the Streets
With a little help from the Web, the urban exploration phenomenon gains momentum

By Brad Wieners


	Shadow over Gotham: Steve Duncan, of the urban-exploration group Jinx, clowns around at the Roosevelt Island Smallpox Hospital

RAZOR WIRE is a bitch. We're confronting this incontrovertible fact as we contemplate the sharp coil that snakes along the top of the chain-link fence separating us from the southern tip of a splinter of earth less than two miles long in the middle of New York's East River between Manhattan and Queens, accessible via the Q train. It's Friday, pushing 11 p.m., a balmy summer night, and eight of us are on a mission to investigate, without permission, the ruins of the Smallpox Hospital on Roosevelt Island, which has been off-limits for half a century. In 1856, the year this facility was completed, one in every 100 New Yorkers died here. Today, its crumbling walls are a centerpiece of urban exploration, or UE—an odd adventure trend that's sweeping cities from Sydney to San Francisco.

"If you're willing to sacrifice a sleeping bag, that can work," says our leader, Benjamin "Laughing Boy" Deyo, eyeing the wire. Deyo, 30, is a cofounder, with his high-school chum of the same age, David "Lefty" Leibowitz, of Jinx. By day, "Jinx" refers to a New York-based Web-design firm; by night, to a self-styled corps of urban explorers famous for clandestine midnight jaunts up the suspension cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, descents into the filth and dark of subterranean Gotham, and infiltrations of the occasional abandoned mental asylum. Deyo sports a short, thick Brillo of red hair, one of those silly spit-catcher patches of beard, and the "full Jinx uniform"—suit, tie, and sunglasses—which, under the circumstances, looks pretty ridiculous. "We'll find another way in," he assures us.

Moments later we do, squeezing between a fence post and a workman's trailer. Once inside, we dash for the crumbling brick walls like kids advancing on a haunted house. The building's but a skeleton now, left to rot behind a grand limestone facade dramatically lit on the Manhattan side by floodlights financed by apartment owners across the river who crave a gothic vista. Shored-up brick walls form a decrepit maze that shelters a Sendakian forest of trees. Aside from the cheap thrill of trespassing, it's clear why the Jinxsters like coming to places like this: They're eerie, surreal, full of unknowable histories. Shining a penlight up into the rafters, Leibowitz turns to me.

"Cool, huh?"

Urban exploration, aka infiltration, aka urban adventure, aka sneaking into places where you don't belong and performing impressively risky—albeit somewhat pointless—acts of derring-do, may not be especially new, but it's enjoying quite a vogue of late, all around the globe. No one knows how many partake in UE, but part of the buzz is that individuals and groups are finding each other, sharing intelligence, and competing in a new set of elaborately contrived games via the Web. From Sydney's Cave Clan and Rome's Subterranea-philes to Toronto's Ninjalicious, some groups emphasize athletic feats (in Rotterdam, for example, one climber has developed special hooks for scaling high-rise apartment buildings) while others focus on creating "events" (sit-down dinners and improvised skits in rusting industrial parks and shuttered military bases).

Among the more innovative individuals in the field is Julia Solis, 31, of Brooklyn. The German-born Solis, a professional translator, heads up Dark Passage, a loose group of 25 that convenes about three times a year for clandestine adventures. This October, she will join forces with a San Francisco-based UE group (that declines to speak with the media) for an elaborate role-playing game loosely based on a Dashiell Hammett novel. While details were still being sorted out at press time, players will likely use pay phones to conduct simultaneous treasure hunts in the two cities, relying on real-time information from their counterparts across the country to advance their own searches.

Of all the UE outfits, Jinx makes itself the most accessible to the media. Just as George "The Human Fly" Willig clocked his 15 minutes back in the late seventies by shinnying up high-rises, Jinx has parlayed its G-man aesthetic into a book contract with Random House (an almanac of its adventures is due next year). This commercial agenda chafes Deyo's more purist UE peers, who fear that his group will give up New York's truly secret trapdoors while drawing unwanted attention from the police. Deyo, however, insists there's enough urban adventure for everyone, and the cops are nothing to worry about. "There's a lot of paranoia out there—as if the police were really going to set up special task forces and set traps for us," says Deyo. "C'mon. What we're doing is barely more criminal than jaywalking." Plus, it seems to be the only game in town. "We'd love to do National Geographic adventures through Borneo," says Deyo, "but we can't afford that. So we've taken to exploring the frontier right out our door. The invisible frontier of the city.

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Brad Wieners is a senior editor at Outside.

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