Places of the World's Great Cities
Moses Gates is not
your typical tourist with a passion for cities.
He is an urban planner, a
licensed New York City tour guide, and a visiting assistant professor of
demography at Pratt Institute.
He has an adventurous
streak that leans more towards Indiana Jones than that of a starry-eyed Smartphone
carrying photo-snap-happy tourist from the Midwest where he grew up.
Gates is not
searching for the Ark of the Covenant or evading Nazis like Jones, Harrison Ford's character in the movie Raiders of the Lost Arc.
He is not satisfied
sauntering across the Brooklyn Bridge to marvel at its beauty and enjoy the
views of the New York Bay and the lower Manhattan skyline. It is just as hard
to picture Gates entering the magnificent Gothic Cathedral of Notre Dame in
Paris, or any other noted world destination in as a normal tourist.
Why? Gates thinks
differently. While most people are content to walk across a famous bridge, Gates
wants to climb it. He wades, no he dives head first into the underbelly of the
cities he visits and unveils their hidden secrets and shares his stories with
us.
In his book Hidden
Cities: Travels to the Secret Corners of the World’s Great Metropolises; A
memoir of Urban Exploration we learn Gates is a thrill-seeking urban adventurer
with a wanderlust for going where very few people have ventured before him.
In the first sentence
of page one of his insightful and humorous memoir he writes,
“I have just rung the
bell of Notre Dame.”
Gates and several
companions, including his best friend and the ultimate urban explorer Steve Duncan, are drinking at a Paris bar when they decide to investigate the city’s
1200-plus miles of underground canals. After squeezing through a locked gate
they walked for a mile and-a-half before they stopped realizing it is tough to
wade through a sewer without rubber boots and an air meter (this is an
adventure for another day). They exited the sewer by popping open a manhole
cover. Next they opt for the Cathedral of Notre Dame and its bell tower. They
reach the bell not with a tour guide or by ascending the 387 steps of its
narrow spiral stairwell but by scaling its exterior. They climb its gargoyles; flying
buttresses and a makeshift ladder at night, in the rain, and tipsy.
His adventures span
four continents. He has dodged third rails in five of the world’s ten largest
subway tunnels including New York, Stockholm, Paris, London and Moscow. He has roamed
the catacombs, water and sewer tunnels of these cities as well as Naples, Rome,
and Odessa. Besides the Brooklyn Bridge he has climbed the George Washington,
Williamsburg, Manhattan, Hell’s Gate Bridges (Gates calls it a beast of a
bridge and a direct inspiration for the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge) and the Moscow
Bridge in Kiev. Climbing is challenging and dangerous, especially at night,
his preferred time in order to lessen chances of getting arrested.
There is only one way
up the Brooklyn Bridge he writes: “climb the suspension cables, navigate around
the suicide guards – metal gates on the cables designed to keep people from
scaling them…then balance on the cables, hang on to the guide wires for dear
life, and hope a gust of wind doesn’t come along.”
Gates writes about
these dangers and his adventures in a casual matter-of-fact style like someone
visiting the Statue of Liberty or the pyramids for the first time. His tales
are funny. He writes about his “Sex on the Bridge Club” and his own rendezvous
on the Williamsburg Bridge, of getting karate kicked in the face by a homeless
woman named Brooklyn at 2 in the morning at her birthday party in the train
tunnel under Riverside Park in New York City, and walking the streets of Rio de
Janeiro dressed in drag and losing his negligee after getting drenched in a
downpour.
With Gates we enter ancient Roman ruins in the
sewers beneath the Capitoline Hills in Rome, and German bunkers in Paris. We
explore the city’s catacombs and wind past ossuaries filled with skulls and
bones neatly stacked together. We discover the tomb of Philibert Aspairt who
disappeared in the Paris catacombs in 1793. Legend says his torch expired while
searching for the wine cellars of the Chartreux monks. We travel through many rooms and a cave
several stories high, and sliver through two-foot-high tunnels.
This is the ultimate reference book for those
travelers whose curiosities know no boundaries. For the rest of us it may not
inspire us to risk our lives climbing famous landmarks but it will certainly
stir our interest to learn about the secrets of our hidden cities.
Buy his book: Hidden Cities: A Memoir of Urban Exploration
Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, Paperback Edition 2013
Follow Moses Gates on Twitter.
•His notes at the end of the book are an invaluable resource. His black/white and color photographs are priceless.
