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Invisible Frontier: Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York: The Jinx Book of Urban Exploration - Softcover

Deyo, L. B.; Leibowitz, David

 
9780609809310: Invisible Frontier: Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York: The Jinx Book of Urban Exploration
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0609809318 ISBN 13: 9780609809310
Verlag: Crown Publications, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

An adventure-filled guide to New York City's hidden secrets explores a vast urban wilderness that includes subway tunnels, the sewer system, abandoned aqueducts and buildings, the heights of its bridges, and other unusual landmarks. Original. 15,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

L. B. Deyo and David “Lefty” Leibowitz are the founders of Jinx: The Magazine of Global Urban Adventure(www.jinxmagazine.com). They live in New York City.

Aus dem Klappentext

ws of the city waits an invisible frontier a wilderness thriving in the deep places, woven through dead storm drains and live subway tunnels, coursing over third rails. This frontier waits in the walls of abandoned tenements, hides on the rooftops, infiltrates the bridges steel. It s a no-man s-land, fenced off with razor wire, marked by warning signs, persisting in shadow, hidden everywhere as a parallel dimension. Crowds hurry through the bright streets, insulated by pavement, never reflecting that beneath their feet or above their heads lurks a universe.

Led by its two founding agents, L. B. Deyo and David Lefty Leibowitz, Jinx is a stylish urban adventure out?t known for its daring if sometimes ridiculous forays into the hidden wonders that lurk above and beneath America s greatest city, New York. In Invisible Frontier L. B. and Lefty chronicle Jinx s dramatic if sometimes absurd exploration of a Dante-esque Ne

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

LEVIATHAN: THE CROTON AQUEDUCT

Mission: Croton Aqueduct, early summer 2001
Location: The Bronx
Goal: To walk to Manhattan from the Bronx, underground

Officers: Lefty Leibowitz, L. B. Deyo
Team: Gage, Special Agent Renée, Agent Bleach, Thiago El Rojo, Brazen, Nick Science, Salamander X

reported by t

L. B. Deyo

And as I stared through that obscurity,
I saw what seemed a cluster of great towers,
whereat I cried, "Master, what is this city?"
—Dante, The Inferno

In the shadows of the city waits an invisible frontier-a wilderness, thriving in the deep places, woven through dead storm drains and live subway tunnels, coursing over third rails. This frontier waits in the walls of abandoned tenements, it hides on the rooftops, and it infiltrates the bridges' steel. It's a no-man's-land, fenced off with razor wire, marked by warning signs, persisting in shadow, hidden everywhere as a parallel dimension. Crowds hurry through the bright streets, insulated by the pavement, never reflecting that beneath their feet lurks a universe.

EXPELLED

From the sidewalk, I hobble into fluorescent glare. Muscle spasms strum across my back; tendons snag like they're caught in a zipper. It's two a.m. I'm in a Twin Donut in the Bronx.

I raise a forearm to shield my eyes from the fluorescent lights, grab a chair, and sit. Seven agents follow me into the shop, back to the land of the living. Nobody smiles.

"Nick," I call out. "Who invented these lights? Fluorescent lights?"

Nick takes his place in the doughnut line, looking like I feel, splattered mud drying on his glasses. "Fluorescent lights." He nods, screwing in his face. "Tesla invented them. Nikola Tesla."

"Nikola Tesla." I slump toward the floor. My tie's too tight, strangling me, but I can't get it loose. I'm shivering. Sweat beads on my forehead, with the grime. "Damn the son of a bitch. Nikola Tesla. Tinkering bastard." I can't sit still, can't even bend my legs. I get up and take a place in line.

Pain forks through me, forcing my eyes shut. Visions burst across my eyelids, hypnagogic phantoms like the ones you see when you're trying to fall asleep. I see tunnels diminishing to blackness.

I open my eyes and only then do I notice the customers aren't eating. It's late, and there aren't many people here besides us, maybe eight or nine seated throughout. Every one of them is frozen, open-mouthed, staring at us.

"Excuse me," a woman says. She's having a cigarette, sitting with her friend at the table next to me. She's a little drunk, a little bleary-eyed, but she seems all right.

"Yes?"

"Do you mind if I ask"-the woman leans in slightly and blinks twice-"what you all been doing?"

Fair question. Here are eight agents fresh from the trenches, in a North Bronx Twin Donut Shop, wearing sunglasses at two in the morning on Puerto Rican Day. The men wear suits and ties; the two women wear cocktail dresses. Several of us have miners' helmets or headlamps. We're encrusted with mud and crystalline mineral deposits, and our shoes have lately been underwater.

"We were exploring the Old Croton Aqueduct," I tell her, "the original New York water supply line. It runs right beneath here."

"For real?" She squints. "You all look like a bunch of lawyers."

THE BODY

For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body.
—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Social structures form at every level of scale, from the country village to the multinational corporation, from the conversation in a doughnut shop to the transcontinental alliance. Of all these structures, none is fitter, more adaptive, than the city.

It's a macrocosm of the human body, living through its anatomical processes. Its immune system attacks infection through police and emergency workers. Its circulatory system pumps goods throughout the marketplace in huge arteries; these fan out in every direction, branching into finer vessels and capillaries. The nerves of the city pulse with signals, animating, electrifying, communicating, and uniting millions of differentiated cells into an organism. As in a human, these systems are mostly automatic. Without the direction of a central executive, the city breathes and sweats, consumes and excretes.

Nikola Tesla understood that a place can be a living thing. Tesla was the inventor of the Tesla coil, an amplifier of electrical charge. With the Tesla coil he ionized the very air into a conductor, closing the circuit of a current to a slingshot loop, ramping up the voltage by a thousand times, which manifested itself in the slithering arc seen in Frankenstein laboratories. In 1899 Tesla built his largest coil, atop a two-hundred-foot tower, in the skies of Pikes Peak, Colorado. The Jovian engine came alive, hurling lightning bolts in every direction. It inspired the RKO Pictures logo and blacked out the city of Colorado Springs.

For months before he built the tower, Tesla spent his hours measuring the summit's inherent charge. He concluded that the earth itself was "literally alive with electrical vibrations." The tower's genius was to tap into

the conductivity of the mountain. Rather than generate power, Tesla's tower would derive it as an antenna receives its radio signal, passively accepting the system's energy. The result was the greatest electrical discharge yet harnessed by man, and it split the night sky.

Few modern cities benefit from Tesla's wisdom. In design, they squander natural vitality. Today's urban planners, impatient with growth and infatuated by theories, impose the limits of their own imaginations. They build soulless, congenitally defective abominations: Los Angeles; Phoenix; Houston; Toronto; Celebration, U.S.A. Failed experiments, bereft of life.

On the other hand, there is New York. The Empire City was designed as a simple grid, ensuring long vistas and fluid movement. As the blueprint came to life, and construction proceeded up the island, the grid worked as the lattices of a fence, allowing wild growth of vines and ivy through a loose and simple matrix. Like the interlocking pattern of Tesla's tower, the grid plan bridged the gap between the artificial order and natural chaos, shaping and focusing an explosion of energy. Over the centuries, the city has evolved into a New World Leviathan. Operation C-1609 would be Jinx's journey through the living body of New York.

The plan was laid out as a list of targets, each a badlands outpost, each offering its own empirical promise. We would proceed upward from the depths, from the intestine labyrinths of the aqueducts and subway lines, through condemned buildings and landmarks, up into the bridges and rooftops until we reached the top of the antenna on One World Trade Center, at more than 1,726 feet the closest place to heaven in New York.

For the first mission of our operation, Jinx set out to probe the city's guts, marching down into the mouth of New York. In the geometry of the tunnels we sought an evolutionary snapshot, a fossil record in progress. The goal was to explore as much of New York's water intake and drainage as we could without drowning. As water moves through the five boroughs, it mostly runs in prohibitively cramped steel pipes. To get our feet wet, we'd want the aqueducts that bring fresh water from up north, tunnels you could drive a car through. We picked the

Old Croton Aqueduct...

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Verlag
Crown Publications
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0609809318
ISBN 13 
9780609809310
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
222
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