Entering the Freedom Tunnel, photo by Joseph Chung
How New Social Media is Changing an Old Sport
By Joseph Chung
Though it’s been three years since he’d last hopped down a tunnel or canvassed through an abandoned warehouse left to waste, Andrew Lynch still vividly remembers the times he’d spent exploring New York’s less glamorous side. “When you go to these places, it’s completely unknown. And one of the things that I’ll never forget is the sound of how quiet it is down there.”
Now a freelance web designer, cartographer, and amateur photographer, Lynch has long since traded in his flashlight, but as he sits down to share stories of his past adventures, it is evident the explorer inside has never quite left him.
“Since the days of the Romans, people explored ruins because it was such a cool thing to do,” he offered. “It wasn’t until we got a bunch of people taking pictures and sharing it that it became a phenomenon.”
From 2004 to 2007, Andrew was what most people would call an “urban explorer.” Armed only with a flashlight and a determination to explore and document the city’s quickly deteriorating structures, he has climbed through abandoned warehouse windows and hopped down onto forgotten subway tracks. Lynch extensively documented the High Line back before the abandoned elevated freight rail line was turned into a park and opened to the public.
To explore this phenomenon, it’s important to understand what urban exploration entails. Urban exploration, or “Urbexing” is the examination of unseen or off-limit urban and industrial areas. They include abandoned subway tunnels, aqueducts, storm drains, factories, hospitals, mental institutes, bunkers, and more. Those who explore these sites represent a diverse group of individuals of all ages and professions. Some like Lynch are interested in understanding the stories these abandoned environments have to offer. Others find simple pleasure in seeing things few people will ever witness. One of the most celebrated early urban explorers for example is none other than Walt Whitman, who in 1861 wrote about his adventures into Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue Tunnel.
While in the past urban exploration has remained relatively obscure except to a small handful of hardcore enthusiasts, in today’s world of Facebook, Youtube, and Flickr, where information moves along much more freely and quickly, knowledge about these sites is no longer such a closely guarded secret. A popular site where urban explorers congregate to swap photographs and stories from around the world is sleepycity.net. From abandoned NASA research centers to decaying utility tunnels in Moscow, the site instructs in its’ disclaimer to “…do as you wish. Climb bridges, run the subways, play in the sewage, go in drains.”
“I think the Internet really turned urban exploration into a real thing because it connected people,” said Lynch. So I would definitely say thank you, internet… for doing that.”
Not everyone is convinced.
Climbing the Queensboro Bridge, photo courtesy of Steve Duncan
Steve Duncan, a mostly New York based urban explorer and photographer who runs the popular site undercity.org, claims social networking sites like Facebook made it “too easy” to be a part of [urban exploration] and may connect him with people he may not necessarily want to connect with. A professional in every sense of the word, Duncan started exploring the steam tunnels under Columbia University while attending school there and has since documented his exploits from the Paris catacombs in France to the tops of New York’s bridges.
“When you have something like a social networking site that hobbies are key-worded, it makes it too easy to just be a part of that and so if you just punch in urban exploration into Facebook, Friendster, or Myspace before that, any of these things, you’ll come up with thousands of people and ninety-nine out of one hundred are not people that are going to pop down a manhole with me or climb a bridge.” While offering that the internet has made it easier for him to get in touch with contacts around the world, he added it’s still “plenty difficult… by making it easy for people to connect, it means you have to work harder to weed out people you don’t want to connect with.”
While enthusiastic about the role of the web on urban exploration, Lynch understands why professional explorers like Duncan might want to keep these places a secret from outsiders. “A lot of places I’ve been into you’ll see kids went in there just to get drunk, have sex, and rip the place up. That really… that’s bullshit. Yeah sure they can do that as a kid but it shows disrespect for that kind of thing.”
To the dismay of some hardcore urban explorers, the internet has also made urban exploration a “fashionable thing to do.”
“Another reason why I’ve not really done it anymore,” added Lynch “is because the aesthetics [of urban exploration photography] is so constructed now.” Even as the internet is churning out new urban explorers everyday (or maybe because of it), to Lynch, urban exploration has become about taking “really angular pictures of the broken glass window.”
Singling out Miru Kim, a Korean artist who has photographed herself naked inside various abandoned structures, Lynch continued, “I explored the Revere Sugar factory down in Red Hook around the same time she did and I remember seeing her pictures before I knew anything about what she was doing. It was like, walking naked around a place? That’s the most dangerous thing you can do. You’re stupid! And it wasn’t until I saw her body of work later that I was like that’s brilliant. No one else is doing a narrative or trying to do anything new. She’s out there saying let’s bring this to the next level.”