I could tell you where it is, but I won't.
Admittedly it's part elitism, the relishing of insider knowledge on this matter only hours after its publicity, this solved mystery. But that's a fraction, a sliver. A significantly larger portion is out of concern. For you. For your safety. I have gone ahead; I don't think you should follow. I accomplished it with 3 other large grown men and even then our hearts were fluttering at times. We had to run briefly, slightly out of fear, mostly out of self-preservation. But the largest segment of the pie chart, the commanding majority: if you do want to find it, why spoil all the fun?
Most of you won't go. You can't. Not unless you're in New York City in the next week, maybe two. Past then and there may not be much left that's recognizable anyway. It'll be covered over, either with more graffiti or whitewashed by an embarrassed MTA. Eaten again by the City. And you'd have to be really dedicated to want to actually do this. Honestly, you'd have to be more than a little crazy.
My 11 day absence from New York ended in the early hours of Monday morning. If The New York Times had run the story at any time in that previous week and a half, I never would have known what I was missing. But there it sat, on the front page of the November 1st edition. A feature article describing "The Underbelly Project," a year-and-a-half-long workshop by major and emerging street artists conducted in a long-abandoned subway station somewhere in the five boroughs. The culmination was not an opening to the general public. That will never happen in the proper sense. Rather it was an invitation to only a handful of reporters in the world to cover the exhibit in an article, on the condition of anonymity for the artists' true names and also for the location of the exhibit.
Clearly I had to see it. Mainly for the street art itself, but exponentially more for it being held in an abandoned subway station, and that it was a giant, impossibly-tempting secret. A mystery built of sugar.
I turned my head to Kate, my friend beside me at work.
"You saw this right?"
"Yes. Looks amazing."
"We have to figure out where this is. I have to go."
She gave one of her signature pensive pauses, punctuated by a plotting smirk. "We can do that."
We rattled off the places we knew it could not be; eliminating three of the boroughs instantly. We used the other clues (the station's general size, its proximity to an occasionally reworked line) to narrow it down. Six minutes later she had her hunch. A quick search later that pulled up some images from this likely candidate station confirmed it. We looked at a photo from the slide show, an arresting piece proclaiming "WE OWN THE NIGHT" at the dead end of a track dugout, ringed by concentric rafters above. Then one from an older photo set of this likely station: it was the same dead end from the same perspective, here totally bare. It was the same photo, taken seven years earlier. One more search and she had years-old directions, admittedly vague, on how to get into this ghost station. In under 10 minutes I was set.
I texted my friends from California who were staying with me that week and set a time. 1:30am that night. A bit delayed, closer to 3, we got off the subway and crossed to the opposite side of the tracks for a better view to scout from. Encouraged by seeing an opening matching the directions, we crossed back over, then walked to the end of the platform, walked past the Do Not Enter sign and along the thin ledge of platform used only by workers and trespassers. This time of the morning we were safe from another train passing so soon and we ducked into the opening. A graffiti piece of a large Mayan-looking deity, mouth agape, lay just inside the opening. Not in the directions, but clearly where we needed to be.
We walked around several slanted aisles, each empty, or filled with discarded equipment, bottles. No stairs, no second hidden door. Embarrassed and perplexed, retracing through several times with little of anything to see I thought we had to give up. The only clue was another piece. 4 foot high letters, but the message was far too theatrical to be it. Right?
We looked up to wooden rafters and a barely visible cement ceiling some 30 feet above us. Our eyes traced that back down to see two extremely thin cords descending from the wooden banister, the one on the right making its way down to a loop at the bottom. For a foothold. Convinced this had to be the location and the means to get there, I turned back to the words on the wall. "Get Up. Get God." J______ went first.
Halfway up, "Fuck, fuck, it's breaking. It broke." A false alarm. He sturdied himself with the concrete ledge and used the still-holding rope for the last bit. He shone the flashlight. "This is definitely it. I see 'em."
My hands were already on the cord, my foot in the loop. I made it most of the way up to the concrete ledge that was the last boosting spot to the abandoned platform above, when the cord snapped. I fell back the twelve feet, twisting in mid-air to land on my side rather than with my back, which my camera was strapped to. Almost instantly after landing, before knowing that my jeans were widely torn or that my knee was bleeding, I assured them "I'm fine. I'm getting up there. I'm getting up." With a boost and more reliance on the equally flimsy thin metal pipes along the active line's tunnel than I wanted, I was on the ledge. Seconds later I was over the criss-crossed wooden banister. C______ came up as well while S______ kept lookout.
We wandered around mesmerized, I with the only camera snapping as many photos as I could. We navigated both the platform ledges and the drop-offs to the lower track-level six feet down in total darkness. After the initial shock and relief faded, something we weren't expecting became apparent. I saw them during the fractional flashes of my camera light, but had to switch to the play mode to read the tiny words on the viewfinder. That's how I learned we were being threatened.
Admittedly it's part elitism, the relishing of insider knowledge on this matter only hours after its publicity, this solved mystery. But that's a fraction, a sliver. A significantly larger portion is out of concern. For you. For your safety. I have gone ahead; I don't think you should follow. I accomplished it with 3 other large grown men and even then our hearts were fluttering at times. We had to run briefly, slightly out of fear, mostly out of self-preservation. But the largest segment of the pie chart, the commanding majority: if you do want to find it, why spoil all the fun?
Most of you won't go. You can't. Not unless you're in New York City in the next week, maybe two. Past then and there may not be much left that's recognizable anyway. It'll be covered over, either with more graffiti or whitewashed by an embarrassed MTA. Eaten again by the City. And you'd have to be really dedicated to want to actually do this. Honestly, you'd have to be more than a little crazy.
My 11 day absence from New York ended in the early hours of Monday morning. If The New York Times had run the story at any time in that previous week and a half, I never would have known what I was missing. But there it sat, on the front page of the November 1st edition. A feature article describing "The Underbelly Project," a year-and-a-half-long workshop by major and emerging street artists conducted in a long-abandoned subway station somewhere in the five boroughs. The culmination was not an opening to the general public. That will never happen in the proper sense. Rather it was an invitation to only a handful of reporters in the world to cover the exhibit in an article, on the condition of anonymity for the artists' true names and also for the location of the exhibit.
Clearly I had to see it. Mainly for the street art itself, but exponentially more for it being held in an abandoned subway station, and that it was a giant, impossibly-tempting secret. A mystery built of sugar.
I turned my head to Kate, my friend beside me at work.
"You saw this right?"
"Yes. Looks amazing."
"We have to figure out where this is. I have to go."
She gave one of her signature pensive pauses, punctuated by a plotting smirk. "We can do that."
We rattled off the places we knew it could not be; eliminating three of the boroughs instantly. We used the other clues (the station's general size, its proximity to an occasionally reworked line) to narrow it down. Six minutes later she had her hunch. A quick search later that pulled up some images from this likely candidate station confirmed it. We looked at a photo from the slide show, an arresting piece proclaiming "WE OWN THE NIGHT" at the dead end of a track dugout, ringed by concentric rafters above. Then one from an older photo set of this likely station: it was the same dead end from the same perspective, here totally bare. It was the same photo, taken seven years earlier. One more search and she had years-old directions, admittedly vague, on how to get into this ghost station. In under 10 minutes I was set.
I texted my friends from California who were staying with me that week and set a time. 1:30am that night. A bit delayed, closer to 3, we got off the subway and crossed to the opposite side of the tracks for a better view to scout from. Encouraged by seeing an opening matching the directions, we crossed back over, then walked to the end of the platform, walked past the Do Not Enter sign and along the thin ledge of platform used only by workers and trespassers. This time of the morning we were safe from another train passing so soon and we ducked into the opening. A graffiti piece of a large Mayan-looking deity, mouth agape, lay just inside the opening. Not in the directions, but clearly where we needed to be.
We walked around several slanted aisles, each empty, or filled with discarded equipment, bottles. No stairs, no second hidden door. Embarrassed and perplexed, retracing through several times with little of anything to see I thought we had to give up. The only clue was another piece. 4 foot high letters, but the message was far too theatrical to be it. Right?
We looked up to wooden rafters and a barely visible cement ceiling some 30 feet above us. Our eyes traced that back down to see two extremely thin cords descending from the wooden banister, the one on the right making its way down to a loop at the bottom. For a foothold. Convinced this had to be the location and the means to get there, I turned back to the words on the wall. "Get Up. Get God." J______ went first.
Halfway up, "Fuck, fuck, it's breaking. It broke." A false alarm. He sturdied himself with the concrete ledge and used the still-holding rope for the last bit. He shone the flashlight. "This is definitely it. I see 'em."
My hands were already on the cord, my foot in the loop. I made it most of the way up to the concrete ledge that was the last boosting spot to the abandoned platform above, when the cord snapped. I fell back the twelve feet, twisting in mid-air to land on my side rather than with my back, which my camera was strapped to. Almost instantly after landing, before knowing that my jeans were widely torn or that my knee was bleeding, I assured them "I'm fine. I'm getting up there. I'm getting up." With a boost and more reliance on the equally flimsy thin metal pipes along the active line's tunnel than I wanted, I was on the ledge. Seconds later I was over the criss-crossed wooden banister. C______ came up as well while S______ kept lookout.
We wandered around mesmerized, I with the only camera snapping as many photos as I could. We navigated both the platform ledges and the drop-offs to the lower track-level six feet down in total darkness. After the initial shock and relief faded, something we weren't expecting became apparent. I saw them during the fractional flashes of my camera light, but had to switch to the play mode to read the tiny words on the viewfinder. That's how I learned we were being threatened.
The article stops short of the turn of the screw. Perhaps intentionally. The exhibit was not pristine when we came across it that early morning, as it appeared in the Times. The antique wooden table and chairs with a dinner set for two described by the writer was destroyed, a pile of wooden shards, except for one of the chairs which stood 40 feet away alone in an abyss. The look of a watchman's chair vacant, temporarily. About half of the works had been defaced, simple tags of static, intentionally ugly tags over complex works. Dogs pissing on every hydrant they pass. “GET OUT!”...."Fuck You, Fuck You" .... “Y'all Don’t Belong.....No No No No No”.... “The Tunnels Are OURS.” Words of anger, but ambiguously like those of a woken cyclops. One muttering in disbelief. Still debating how best to respond.
They were tags by the squatters of Hell Hou$e, their apparent chosen name for the station, furious that their turf had been breached, commercialized by whom they view as privileged, pompous outsiders. If such bile for the artists, what view of us? Something like groupies rather than guerrilla aficionados.
As arresting as the spotlight before me was, briefly illuminating scrawled threats, letting them come into existence, my mind was possessed by what our spot beam wasn’t showing. The other 330 degrees of world shrouded behind me, beside me. I kept half-expecting my camera flash to capture a figure lumbering towards me. Lumbering if I was lucky, rushing if I was not.
Down the sunken track dugout to the far side, still 15 feet from its end, my tiny miner’s light arched upon it. Upon him.
“Go. GO. Gogogogogo.”
I was briskly hurrying after saying the second, but J______ and C______ didn’t follow me until after I was done, when their lights had come across him as well. A man motionless on his side, an uncoiling fetal position, sleeping. But he did not stir with J______’s shocked yell and we never heard him afterwards. We regrouped at the opposite end, around a corner.
“It’s fine. Listen.... it’s fine. Just keep our distance, make it clear we're not trying to disturb him or anyone else.” In retrospect, absurd. The second we’d crossed the “Do Not Enter” sign back at the functioning station platform, we were intruding, disturbing him. Them. Trespassing, both on MTA property and inside Hell Hou$e, but only the latter really troubled me. (Y'all Don’t Belong..... No No No No No)
We carried on. About seven pieces later, J______ announced our warning call. “The spot has a minute left in it.”
I’d led us up but I wouldn’t keep us there without it. I photographed a few more pieces before returning to the path of our initial dugout, marked at the end by an American flag by Faile with a zig-zag pattern instead of stripes. We followed that track back to the middle and broke for the wooden banister. Five minutes of hesitant footholds, of easing down the others as they repelled, and frantic inhales of woken dust, inches of soot, and we were reassembled. Just in time for a train to rush past feet from us. We scurried around a corner, momentarily leaving our bags at the base. I doubled back to grab the gear and after hearing the line of cars pull away farther into the coming morning, we emerged back onto the ledge, then onto the public platform. The light, our first aside from the handhelds in over an hour, revealed our new layers of filth. We were covered in stagnancy, in time turned to soot, ash, and dirt.
The article came out yesterday morning. In this age of the instancy, I knew I wasn't the only asshole to figure out where it was. What surprised me was that there wasn't NYPD or MTA already waiting on the platform, blocking any possible access. What shocked me was that our hour up there wasn't filled with other groupies, other guerrilla tourists. That in all of New York City, for a full hour plus it was only us, the art, the art's backlash, the sleeping squatter we saw and any others that we didn't. That we spent an hour alone in the Underbelly. In Hell. Probably for the best that no one else tried to come up there too. Because the tunnels are theirs. And we don't belong. No no no no no no.
(post-script 11.11.10) The NYPD and MTA began sealing this up the following day. I actually suspect that the pile of wooden planks that we walked by in the alcove was a set of makeshift ladders that they had disassembled earlier that day, immediately after the article hit the public. Other people did manage to sneak in, but only a handful, and the only other pictures that I've seen were taken with a cell phone camera. A far larger number of people tried to break in and were either detained or arrested. But if you're moronic enough to attempt to break into a public transport station in New York City while wearing a keffiyeh over your face, you really have that arrest coming:
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Great post. Read the NY Times article too. Incredible story.
ReplyDeleteForget great post, incredible post.
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