They waited quietly, careful to avoid an eight-square-foot abyss where a portion of the wooden floor had once been. Five feet above Malice’s head, Steve Duncan was on lookout duty, perched in the bell tower’s cupola. “This is one of the dangers of the game. I call it hide and seek,” Duncan told Tibbie X, who stood on the creaking floor next to Malice. “I’ve been in closer calls than this,” he told her. “We’ll be okay.”

St. Augustine’s Monastery is a vacant crumbling brick building on Staten Island overlooking New York harbor. Built as a school over a century ago, it was converted into a monastery run by the order of St. Augustine.  It has been abandoned for decades. The walls of the building are fighting a losing a battle with climbing ivy, overgrown grass and piles of rubble fill the rear courtyard where a cross-shaped fountain once gurgled and a large section of the roof has collapsed after a fire gutted part of the superstructure.

The keepers of the site have made a great effort to keep out the curious. Besides the no-trespassing signs warning of prosecution, an imposing industrial lock holds the front door closed and the windows of the first two stories are sealed with cinderblock and mortar. But Michael Malice, Steve Duncan and Tibbie X were not simply curious and they were not going to be deterred by stonewalling. Standing outside the building earlier that afternoon, the three cast their eyes up to the bell tower, their goal for the day.

They are members of the Jinx urban exploring society, part of a growing global network of extreme hobbyists that view no-trespassing signs not as a barrier but as a gauntlet. They investigate places most people would hurry by-- derelict buildings, abandoned subway tunnels and towering bridges. These explorers see cities like New York not only as a developed urban metropolis, but also as a trove of unexplored mystery and adventure. They look to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge as Europeans once looked to the head of the Nile and snap digital photos of rare graffiti as if they were runic tablets. They are amateur historians, archeologists, photographers, and artists -- post-modern Indiana Joneses who call themselves urban explorers. There is a simple credo reminiscent of the outdoorsman’s code: leave only footprints, take only pictures and (especially for explorers like Malice, Duncan and Tibbie trapped in the monastery tower) don’t get caught.

“A city is different in many ways from the wilderness,” said L.B. Deyo, who co-founded Jinx and served as its president until January 2004. “A map of the wilderness will stay current for years and decades while a map of a city is only going to be current for maybe days or weeks. The fluidity of life and change in the city is what makes it unexplored and a compelling place to discover and rediscover as an explorer.” Indeed, some of the buildings he has explored have been razed-- erased from the city landscape. Because of this mutability there is often an urgency to explore a site before it is demolished, renovated or bricked up.

The masons at St. Augustine’s had done a thorough job sealing the structure against invaders, but a pile of rubble at the rear of the courtyard looked promising. Steve Duncan made his way up the mound of debris and surveyed a window several feet above his head. He dropped a large yellow and black climbing pack from his shoulders. It was filled with camera gear-- tripods, digital and film cameras, speed lights and a headlamp. Duncan planned to document the inside of the building on film. When he is not exploring abandoned buildings, he works for a map publishing company, with a sideline in urban landscape photography. His subjects are found on his explorations: cavernous tunnels, graffiti and historic urban structures.

Like many of the places Jinx ventures, there is history and lore surrounding the old monastery. Its real name is the Augustinian Academy, owned by nearby Wagner College. Malice calls it St. Augustine’s Monastery, but then again, Michael Malice is not his real name.  (Given the nature of their hobby, urban explorers like Malice and Tibbie X often hide behind pseudonyms.) Rumor is that the bell tower is haunted and that the old school has been the site of satanic worship since the clerics fled its hallways. Malice, Duncan and Tibbie have also chosen the site because it is isolated, away from routine police patrols. Plus, the years of abandonment mean that the walls inside are covered in graffiti and other signs of urban life that will make for interesting photographs.

Duncan shifted his weight to his right leg (his left was injured in a rock climbing accident in Yosemite several months ago) and jumped onto the wall of the school. Clinging to the brick sill, he pulled himself up on the ledge with the aid of rusty frames that swung out from the boarded window. Crouching on the sill, Duncan tested the strength of the plywood barrier. The board gave way with a small shove and he was inside.

Michael Malice also carried a digital camera and a flashlight, tucked into the pocket of his jacket. Malice is a writer and also runs a website overheardinnewyork.com where readers transcribe and post snippets of conversation they overhear. It should be noted that Malice and Duncan both wore black business suits and stylish dark sunglasses. Tibbie X, the singer in a punk rock band, wore black pants, an ankle-length black coat and a long blonde ponytail that hung to her waist. She wore two pairs of sunglasses, one hugging her ears and the other strapped with an elastic band to her forehead. Their clothes were specially chosen “urban camouflage,” designed to hide them in the stream of passengers on the Staten Island Ferry and set them apart from other urban explorers. Dark suits and sunglasses are the official uniform of Jinx explorers.

“When you are dressed in a suit you tend to take yourself more seriously, and people take you more seriously. It is also a kind of camouflage in the city to be dressed in a suit,” David “Lefty” Leibowitz, co-founder of Jinx, told a crowd of skeptical middle-aged patrons of the Municipal Arts Society in September. “Urban exploring is a lot of fun, but it’s something we take seriously. Plus we can pretend we are spies.”

While there are groups of urban explorers across the world, few have taken the adventure hobby as seriously as Jinx. There are monthly meetings of the Jinx Athenaeum Society to discuss philosophy, history, art and politics as well as their latest urban explorations. Leibowitz and Deyo publish Jinx Magazine and have recently written a book on their adventures.

Sir Richard Francis Burton was one of the Victorian era’s greatest adventurers who became famous for discovering Lake Tanganyika at the headwaters of the Nile. He spoke 25 languages, was ordained in several religions, and was a noted swordsman, infamous spy and the first to translate the Kama Surta and the Arabian Nights into English. In 1857, he embarked on perhaps the most famous urban exploration of all time, when he disguised himself as a Muslim hajj and was the first European to enter the cities of Mecca and Medina, documenting his adventures in travelogues. The stakes were higher than a $100 trespassing fine -- had Burton been caught in the cities he likely would have been beheaded. 

“We got into urban exploring because we wanted to have those type of adventures, but we didn’t have the money to fly someplace exotic like Malaysia, and we had no resources to get to Africa,” Leibowitz said. “So we went to find exploration in our own environment.”

Leibowitz and Deyo went on their first urban adventure at the age of 16. After one of their friends bragged about having seen the roof of Grand Central Station, the two managed to get atop the building one afternoon. Their timing proved to be their undoing however, as they were quickly spotted by workers in nearby office buildings, arrested and hauled before a judge on trespassing charges. They escaped with a warning.

Politics is also part of the Jinx experience.   “Today, there are no scientific, literary, or philosophical questions, but the Jinx Athenaeum Society carries on the athenaeum tradition as best it can. The Society holds monthly meetings at which resolutions are debated, lectures are heard, and beer is drunk,” reads the Athenaeum’s mission statement. The society even has its own flag, an exclamation mark on a black field that has been mounted for photographs on bridges and atop a flagpole at the United Nations. Jinx members even tried to explore the offices of the Trilateral Commission.

“We tend to lean towards the profound in conversations even if it is only for one night a month,” said Todd Seavey, a member of the Athenaeum society who has debated issues like the value of Libertarianism and the morality of prostitution.  Seavey, who works as the Director of Publications at the American Council of Science and Health, said the meetings provide a forum for discussion and debate that is rarely found outside of a college or a courtroom.

Jinx Magazine focuses on worldwide urban adventure with articles from Somalia, Croatia, Mexico, an abandoned submarine base in Latvia and New York City. Deyo and Leibowitz have also written a book, Invisible Frontier: Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins and Rooftops of Hidden New York. The book follows Jinx on a series of their adventures: crawling through the Croton aqueduct, summiting the 59th Street and George Washington bridges, and a return to the roof of Grand Central Terminal—all while dressed in suits (dresses for the ladies) and sunglasses in accordance with the Jinx code.

It was afternoon outside and Michael Malice, Duncan and Tibbie removed their sunglasses to let their pupils adjust to eerie twilight inside the monastery. (While the glasses and suits convey a certain authority amongst the urbanites, the dress code can be more of a hindrance when actually crawling through a tunnel or creeping through the pitch-black void of an abandoned building.) Their shoes made loud and echoing steps as they walked across the debris and rubble-strewn floor. Bits of masonry and burned particles of the building covered the ground and each step sent puffs of stone dust into the chilled and stagnant air. Their flashlights illuminated swaths of the room’s interior. It was nearly a hundred feet long, almost the entire length of the building’s east wing. Layers of multicolored graffiti coated the walls.

Duncan quickly disappeared into the bowels of the school, his bright headlamp ducking down a flight of stairs. Malice and Tibbie examined the graffiti along the walls and found a waterfall in a frozen cascade from the floor above. The stairs were covered with ice as well, which made the going difficult. There were no railings and the explorers had to brace themselves against the walls of the stairwell to maintain balance. They found Duncan in a long chapel taking pictures. He set up his tripod and a line of cameras under a disintegrating wooden balcony and went to work. In a small sacristy behind the main chapel Malice and Tibbie found the satanic messages they have been searching for. Letters scrawled in crude spray paint warned the urban explorers that Faust could be summoned in the bell tower.

“Shhhh! Shut up,” he hushed, ducking below the level of the window. The three explorers froze. In the silence they could hear a voice from the front courtyard. A policeman was pacing around in the snow, looking up at the dilapidated structure and talking on a cell phone.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Tibbie said, as she watched a Land Rover with an official seal on the door pull into the circular driveway.

“We have two options,” Malice said. “We can stay here and wait them out or we can try to walk out like we own the place and hope they let us go.”

“If the police do catch us, we should say we just stumbled upon the building and went in out of curiosity. Don’t mention urban exploring,” Duncan said. Admitting to premeditated trespassing would mean more serious charges, he thought.

They decided to wait.

“This is one of the dangers of the game. I call it hide and seek,” Duncan said. “I’ve been in closer calls than this.”

In December 2001, Duncan climbed to the roof of St. John the Divine with his camera and telephoto lenses to take pictures of the city. Workers in a nearby office tower spotted him, thought he was a terrorist with a sniper rifle and called the police. Duncan said he was surprised to learn that the five police cars and two ambulances that arrived at the front door of the cathedral had come for him. “It’s the risk of urban exploring,” he said. “But if you are not hurting anyone, causing problems or being stupid, people tend to leave you alone.”

Urban Exploring is inherently dangerous. Falling from a bridge support, down a broken stairwell or through the floor of an abandoned bell tower can be deadly. There are security guards, police and, since 9-11, a nation armed with cell phones and a healthy suspicion of people doing unusual things.

While working on their book, Deyo and Leibowitz had made plans to climb the antenna on the World Trade Center. After the terrorist attacks they abandoned all exploration for nearly a year. “Security is a concern, and more than that, we were concerned about distracting police and firefighters from their jobs. They had more important things to do than try to rescue us if we got stuck somewhere,” Leibowitz said. “But risk invites risk, and we are as careful as we can be when we are exploring.”

Still, in late December, six men were arrested outside an ethanol plant in St. Paul, Minnesota and had to spend several days explaining to authorities that they were not terrorists but urban explorers. Dressed in black clothes, walking single file down the sidewalk and carrying bags jammed with ropes, night vision goggles and radios, the six had a difficult time explaining their hobby to the police. The national threat level was at code orange and, despite their excuses, the officers put them in jail.  

In 1994, Vadim Mikhailov and a group of underground explorers in Moscow discovered the Spetzmetro, a secret Stalin-era subway line that was the stuff of cold war legend. The group became so proficient at exploring that they filed for government recognition. Mikhailov gained notoriety again in 2002 when he used his knowledge of the Moscow underground to help lead Russian commandos through a tunnel system into the Dubrovka Theatre held by Chechen terrorists.

But Urban Explorers are also involved in organized crime, minor though it may be, and they are becoming a target for police. In February, Robert Pless was charged with criminal trespassing and burglary after he posted 30 pictures of an abandoned New Jersey waterworks on his website abandonedandbeyond.com. Authorities nabbed Pless, though at least two other urban exploring websites displayed nearly identical photographs of the same site.  “They are making an example of me but it won’t stop people from going into buildings, even that building, again,” Pless said, adding it was the first time he had heard of an urban explorer being sanctioned for posting pictures. “If you leave the doors open someone is going to want to see what’s inside.”

Other cases have unfairly tarnished the urban exploring community. Last year, Chicago police caught Daniel Konopka in a system of tunnels below the University of Illinois. They later learned he had a stash of drums containing cyanide stored under the city’s “L” system. Konopka, who was sentenced to a 13-year prison term, reportedly attended several meetings of a Chicago urban explorers club.

The scope of the urban exploration movement is difficult to gauge. While there are unknown numbers of people who investigate boarded-up buildings or visit construction sites out of simple curiosity, such activities do not rise to the level of urban exploring. It is not difficult to try one’s hand at exploring, there is no high-tech equipment to get from Best Buy, there are no membership dues (even for the Athenaeum Society) and the actual risk of getting caught in most cases is negligible. “When I go into a site it is about the experience, I am not looking for anything in particular,” said Pless. “You’ll be walking around inside, seeing what has been left behind and wondering, why did these buildings die? What made people stop coming here?”

Jason Chapman, who uses the handle Panic! on his Austrian-based website Urbanadventure.org, writes that the communal nature of the explorers has given new value to his hobby. “It is more than just the exploring, it is also community. I email friends from all over the world to discuss adventures, retell expedition reports and discuss technique. There are a lot of people out there taking part in UE related activity.”

“Some people seek an escape through use of drugs, alcohol, cigarettes or caffeine,” Chapman writes. “My escape is exploring. It’s cheaper, but probably just as addictive. Once you get the exploring bug it is hard to let go. I get an urge to go exploring if I’ve been away from it too long.”

The Internet has fostered urban exploration in the past decade. There were only a few pages dedicated to urban exploration in the mid 1990’s. Now there are thousands. From Moscow and Paris to Sidney and rural Ireland, websites showcase narrative articles on exploration and photographs of explorers perched on bridges, in the depths of long forgotten passages and tunnels, inside power stations, military complexes, and perched atop bridges. 

Urban exploration has almost become mainstream despite, or perhaps because of the dangers. Deyo and Leibowitz toured the city giving public readings from their book, which sold out its first printing. Explorers have appeared on talk radio shows and been published in numerous magazines. Steve Duncan was recently even approached by television producers interested in turning the hobby into a reality show. “Some people are opposed to getting media attention, for the obvious reason that more people will take notice of what is going on and it will be harder to access places,” Leibowitz said. “There also is the feeling, among some, that having lots of people interested will ruin the nature of it. We have taken heat for talking to people and being more public about what we are doing, but that’s our decision.”

There are few places that are truly off limits to the worldwide network of urban explorers. Across the world, explorers write of “infiltrating” tunnels, missile silos, forts, construction sites, office buildings, boats and climbing buildings, bridges and towers. Many say urban exploration began in Paris, where residents explored the network of catacombs that wind their way under the city. While this may be a popular nexus of the hobby’s roots, probably there has always been some form of urban exploration as long as there have been urban environments to investigate. “It is really a phenomenon that is more common in smaller towns where there is an abandoned house or old hospital or jail,” Deyo said. “There is an attraction to places like that. It is a bit like being a kid again and exploring the unknown. There is a natural curiosity about what is behind a locked door. It all starts with curiosity.”

Michael Malice was grumbling in the growing darkness of the monastery bell tower. His hands were cold, he had to pee and the police waiting for him outside were ruining an otherwise successful mission. But the explorers had decided to wait out their pursuers and, three quarters of an hour later, after the Land Rover drove away and the voices stopped and the sun had set behind the trees, they decided the coast was clear. For another hour they explored the dusty upper floors of the school and shot more film, before descending into the basement.

Even if daylight could have reached inside the monastery, it would not have found its way down the two flights of stairs into the basement. The place was coated in a darkness so consuming that the very air swallowed the beams of their flashlights.  As the three explorers came to the bottom of the stairs they realized that the basement was not going to be as easy to navigate as they had hoped. It was flooded with at least 15 inches of water but the freezing temperatures were cold enough that the water had hardened. Since there had been no disturbances, the entombed liquid had crystallized so clearly that when they shone their lights through it they could read the lettering on crumpled newspaper resting on the floor.

Duncan moved gently from the stairs out onto the ice. He spread his legs to distribute his weight and clung to a rusted pipe along the ceiling. His headlamp glowed ahead of him as he shuffled along, the ice gently breaking and crackling as he moved. He guessed the ice to be four or five inches thick and below that, cold water. He slid his way down the corridors of the basement and found a room of pipes and wires he said must have been refrigeration units. The walls in the basement were not coated with spray paint, as they found upstairs, but mostly clean. 

“This is some cool stuff down here. You can tell that since the place was flooded there haven’t been people down here in a long time,” Duncan said, skating gingerly along the surface of the water. Casting his light around the darkened corridor, he moved as far as the pipes above him would allow. Taking one step too far he broke through the ice.  He swore as the frigid water engulfed his booted foot. Duncan jumped back atop the ice and clung to the pipe again, making his way back up the stairs. “This kind of stuff is what exploring is all about.”

© 2004