Les secrets de la Ville de Lumiere

We’d had a fast and furious two weeks, and were dead exhausted. Still, since we had a few days left before we had to head back home, and I’m always up for seeing a new town, we decided to hit Amsterdam. Where better to relax and wind down for a couple days?

Amsterdam conjures up certain images - there’s the quaint houseboats and canals, of course, and the strange, sometimes crooked rowhouses with their hooks used for hauling up furniture (the doorways and halls being too narrow). There’s its storied history, and two world-class art museums. Of course, those kinds of images are usually secondary to its most famous low-culture quartet: beer, pot, hookers, and porn.

Those four are all well and good (and cheap - the one time we hit the coffee house I spent more on playing pinball than on weed), but what Amsterdam really should be famous for on a low-culture level is its amazing variety of greasy street food. For every red-light house, coffee shop, or bar there’s 10 kebab carts, pizza joints or French Fry stands. It makes sense - you’re never going to go broke trying to feed people cheap greasy food in the world’s #1 destination for drinking and smoking pot.

I hit the museums and walked around town, but the only tourist attraction we really went out of our way to see was the old Heineken Brewery. After coming back from South America, I had visited a friend in Atlanta, where the main tourist attraction was the “World of Coke,” admission 10 dollars. I shouldn’t have scoffed snobbily at the tourists lined up to get in: the brewery ended up being pretty much the equivalent Dutch tourist trap: the “Heineken Experience.” Well, at least we got three glasses of beer and a take-home glass with our admission.

We did manage to find a great bar though - centrally located, non-touristy, with a great selection of beer on tap (each of which came in its own unique glass). I highly recommend to all of you a night at Cafe Gollem - or an afternoon, as that’s when they have their microbrew sampler.

After Cafe Gollem, we couldn’t resist climbing one more thing in Europe. We headed up to the top of this church. It turned out that I had, in fact, climbed my namesake church - the Mozeshuis (or Moses House in English).

Notice the huge billboard on the outside of the church. A 50-foot tall fashion model gracing a house of God is pretty par for the course there. Amsterdam’s a weird place. Not just for their acceptance and embrace of the more tawdry side of life, but for the way they don’t seem to see any inherent conflict between it and their more highbrow culture. Perhaps this picture explains it best. There was one more interesting “got to love the Dutch” scene we found before we left: this mural of Johnny Rotten. Not really just for the mural though - but for where they thought it most appropriate to put it.

It was a fantastic trip. Despite a bit of an adventure transferring flights at Charles de Gaulle (the most dystopic airport I’ve ever been too - we all but ended up on the tarmac), the journey home was uneventful. Still, we weren’t sad, but exited. We had a great time exploring Paris as extreme tourists, but ultimately we were just that: tourists. Above, around, and below New York City, we’re at home.

Unless otherwise noted, all pictures are copyright of my friend, travel partner, and fellow guerilla urbanist Steve Duncan. Steve is a wonderful photographer, and specializes in underground and urban photography. Prints are available - visit his website at http://www.undercity.org

One of the most interesting things about this trip was getting to see the different layers of Paris. The catacombs themselves had some layers - often there were two different levels above each other, with manholes, stairs, and ladders further adding a three-dimensional element of height and depth. But visiting the catacombs also exposed us to the layers of Paris as a whole. Here’s a few examples.

Our Hotel: View from street level, view of our second-floor room (that’s the cata map on the table), view from the roof, view from underneath in the catacombs.

The Val de Grace: View from street level, view from underneath in the catacombs

The Cemetery Montparnasse: View from above, view from ground level, view from the catacombs underneath the western end, view from the ossuaries underneath the eastern end.

While we only visited the Cemetery Montparnasse in order to get a ground-level shot above the ossuaries, I actually discovered a few famous graves - the first being Alfred Dreyfus (of the famous Dreyfus Affair), and his family, (some of whom, as you can tell from the grave, were deported to Auschwitz). The second was a joint grave: Simone de Beauvoir and her “longtime companion,” Jean-Paul Sartre. I felt very French (and was endlessly amused) when I got to tell Steve to literally “meet me at the grave of Jean-Paul Sartre.” I also thought I had found the grave of Dr. Jack Kevorkian (one of the people he helped commit suicide, Merian Frederick, actually used to be our neighbor). I was a little thrown by the “Aram” before the “Jack Kevorkian,” but I figured this quote at the bottom of the grave was kind of indicative of the Jack Kevorkian we all know. But I was wrong - Dr. Jack’s currently still alive and in jail, while it’s lawyer and newsletter publisher Jack Kevorkian who died in 2003 and is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.

The shot of the cemetery from above was taken from the Tour Montparnasse - the best and least appreciated of the observation decks of Paris. In addition to our unofficial views, I had been up the Eiffel Tower on an earlier trip (as related here), and also went up to the roof of the Notre Dame on this trip. My advice is to save your money (and time spent waiting in line) for the Eiffel Tower, go on the Notre Dame tour only for the up-close view of the gothic architecture, and make sure to hit the roof of the Tour Montparnasse. Don’t pay though - just say you’re going up to the restaurant. Nobody checks tickets for the roof. And while the daytime view is certainly nice, make sure you’re up there at night - and you’ll see that Paris has truly earned its nickname of the City of Light.

Unless otherwise noted, all pictures are copyright of my friend, travel partner, and fellow guerilla urbanist Steve Duncan. Steve is a wonderful photographer, and specializes in underground and urban photography. Prints are available - visit his website at http://www.undercity.org  

We took one more quick trip with David into the Catacombs.   There’s plenty written about the catacombs (in fact, David contributed to this book) - unfortunately for me, they’re pretty much all in French.   So while spending hours exploring on our own was great, it was also really nice going with an expert guide who could answer our questions and explain all the interesting things in depth.   We also got to go the fun way again: opening up a manhole in the sidewalk and climbing down instead of schlepping down the abandoned rail tracks. There was pretty much only one place we hadn’t seen that we wanted to: underneath the Val de Grace.  

David set the pace.    Throughout the convoluted, hour-plus journey he didn’t glance at the map once.   It got a bit tricky toward the end: we had to duck under some cables and navigate a shallow archway filled 3/4 of the way high with water, and then wiggle through about 100 feet of this.

We emerged into here, and continued further underneath the Val de Grace.   There’s probably no other area of the catacombs that has more history - both true and apocryphal - associated with it.     It’s most noteworthy for its association with Queen Anne of Austria - and even has a section named for her.   It is said that it was here that she conspired with her Spanish relatives against her husband, Louis XIII (they’re the King and Queen in the Three Musketeers).   Its structure seems to reflect this brush with royalty also.   While understandably most everything in the catacombs seemed to be designed without much regard for aesthetics, under the Val de Grace things, like this gate, seemed to all have a little extra ornamentation thrown in.   It’s also one of the oldest parts of the catacombs, discovered in the 1600s when Louis and Anne commissioned a church and abbey to be built for the celebration of the birth of their son and heir, Louis XIV.  

While tales of royal intrigue are all very romantic, the most interesting thing we came across was much more mundane - the bottom of the Queen’s Chamberpot.   Yes, when residing at Val de Grace, right here is where the Queen’s other dirty business ended up.  

Paris is a small city - at a brisk pace you can walk across it in less than three hours. And Paris also doesn’t have a great deal of geographical or structural diversity - for the most part, a block on the north side of town is going to look pretty much like a block on the south side of town. Because I can’t speak French, it was a lot tougher for me to get a feel for the different types of neighborhoods in terms of the social aspects, but other than an interesting immigrant area around Gard d’Nord, and to a lesser extent the eastern fringes of the city, Paris seemed fairly homogenous from a social aspect as well. Everything you’ve heard about the literati sipping espressos on a quaint little sidewalk cafe is pretty much true (although for the first time in my life, I actively sought out Starbucks. 3 ounce espressos don’t cut it when you’re a caffeine junkie of my caliber). You kind of have to equate Paris with “Manhattan,” not with “New York City,” and I’d venture to say that even the Manhattan of today has a lot more social diversity, and certainly more physical diversity, than Paris.

But as anyone in New York knows, the most interesting parts of town nowadays are outside of Manhattan - sometimes well outside. So I decided to take a walk all the way up north to the Banlieues, as the suburbs are called here.

Suburbs in Paris - and in most of Europe - aren’t the same as in the United States. Despite the recent renaissance of some of the larger and more interesting cities in the U.S., the general model is still the poorer inner city and the wealthier suburbs. In Europe, it’s somewhat the opposite. And to boot, in Paris there’s no real industry or even commercial activity. Downtown Paris is government offices and museums, and the rest of the city is basically residential - which is how despite having no residential building taller than 6 stories or so, Paris can have a population density that rivals Manhattan’s. The financial district is located in a Western suburb, and pretty much everything that smacks of anything remotely industrial has long since been pushed out of Paname (as Paris proper is sometimes referred to).

I only briefly visited two Banlieues during my time in Paris - one while dropping off a package for a friend, and the other during this walk. Both seemed, well, fairly normal. I’d heard a lot about the social unrest in the Banlieues that had happened a bit before I got to Paris, but I didn’t really see any remnants of that in the parts of town I wandered into. One was a Western suburb called Clichy - which is basically a little more the type of area that people in the U.S. might think of as a “suburb.” The other was the northern suburb of Aubervilliers, which was heavily industrial, spotted with huge public housing projects. It reminded me a bit of where I live in Queens.

While I felt like I really got to know Paris in terms of the different physical aspects, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to see a great deal of the different types of people that made up the city, or even the region. But we did get to hang out with one interesting crew. Rosie’s friends were squatters. Now, this is much different from what you might think as “squatting” here in the United States. Basically, laws are a lot more liberal. From what I gathered, if you can manage to get in a building - any building - you can pretty much stick around for years. And we’re not talking an old abandoned factory on the edge of town (or in the Banlieues). We saw two different artist squats when we were in Paris - both right in the middle of town. The first was 59 Rue de Rivoli, which was smack-dab in the middle of the equivalent of Madison Avenue. Basically, imagine this right on top of Brooks Brothers. The second was in an old bank in another super ritzy part of town. We got to go down into the vault, where I noticed that even in a bank, Europeans still used the medievil warded locks and keys, instead of pin tumbler locks and keys (take out your house key. That’s a pin-tumbler key). After a quick trip upstairs (where they were having Tango lessons), and to the abandoned front hall, we took our leave. But of course, not before climbing up on the roof. Walking around town, meeting interesting people, and seeing how the nutty Euro artists live are all well and good, but you have to keep your priorities after all.

We were a little Catacombed-out after our 30-hour marathon trip. Still, that didn’t mean we weren’t still up for seeing more of the hidden side of town. Steve wanted to visit the sewers before we left (there’s actually an official sewer tour that’s offered, but he’d already taken that and wanted to see the rest), and I wanted to run around the subway tunnels. Unfortunately, we didn’t get around to either one. Both sewers and subways are a lot riskier than the catas. A little more time, a few more contacts, we probably would have figured it out. But as it stood, we couldn’t even figure out what the third rail was on the subway tracks. Ah well, it’s always good to save something for the next trip.

Instead, we decided to see if we could visit an underground canal we saw on a map. I had been wanting to do a lot more walking around town, so I decided to scope it out on my walk earlier that day, and meet up with Steve later if it looked promising. I found both the north and south ends of the tunnel (the canal continues above-ground on either side). Both looked pretty secure - the walkways had locked fences, and they were arranged so that the only way around involved swimming.

Still, when I met Steve he wanted to see for himself. And it turned out we were in luck - one of the padlocks on the gate turned out to be so old that it broke off in our hand. In we went.

The canal itself wasn’t that interesting. What was interesting was the fact that we were right underneath where the Bastille used to be. Despite there being a “Bastille” stop on the subway map, the actual prison hasn’t existed since July 14th, 1789. What’s there now is the Colonne de Juillet, which bears a startling resemblance to the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn. While we were in the Canal, we noticed a door covered with a metal grate. That evening, David told us that when he was a kid you could break open the door, which led to the spiral staircase that went right up to the top of the Colonne. The Prison Ship Martyrs Memorial, which has been closed for decades, is something I’ve always wanted to climb, so when I heard David had gotten up its Parisian sibling, my jealousy was pretty palpable (Note: climbing of the Prison Ship Martyrs Memorial now accomplished. Re-opening to the public expected 2007).

Fortunately there were other climbing options that night. After visiting David, we headed north to the Church of St. Sulpice (which some readers might know from its role in the DaVinci Code). Steve left all his photography equipment back at the hotel. Sometimes you just have to go climb something interesting for the pure fun of it. This one was for us.

The church had scaffolding on the North tower. That was the good news. The bad news was twofold - there was a police station right across the plaza, and it had the same metal fencing as the Tour St. Jacques. This time, however, there’d be no digging under. The fencing wasn’t on grass, but on concrete. We had to find a way over instead.

Our best shot seemed to be this way. We both made it over, and up we went, hoping we hadn’t made enough of a racket that we were heard by the cops across the plaza. When I went back a few days later to take pictures, I noticed somebody had managed to open up another way in.

We got to the top, and after admiring the view and congratulating ourselves, we took the interior staircase down into the bell tower. Some of the Parisians have been all around St. Sulpice. For us though, the top and the bell tower were enough. It was amazing being in there - as opposed to the modern concrete bell tower of the Church in Reykjavik, which we had visited officially on our trip to Iceland, the bells of St. Sulpice were entirely supported by wooden scaffolding over 200 years old. We climbed around a bit, then headed back down. We noticed another interesting tidbit on our way. On the face of the tower was a plaque engraved in Hebrew with the name of God.

Unless otherwise noted, all pictures are copyright of my friend, travel partner, and fellow guerilla urbanist Steve Duncan. Steve is a wonderful photographer, and specializes in underground and urban photography. Prints are available - visit his website at http://www.undercity.org

Despite tossing and turning all night, we woke up later than we wanted to. But that was OK - our big constraint wasn’t time, but water. We decided to stay down and see what we could find until we ran dry.

The first thing we found was the tomb of Philbert Aspairt. Philbert was one of the original cataphiles - one day in 1793 he simply went down and never came back up. It was rumored he was looking for the wine cellars of the monks of Chartuese when his torch went out. Eleven years later he was found holding a ring of keys, just a few steps away from an exit. After hearing this story, I didn’t feel silly for carrying three extra flashlights around with me.

His wasn’t he only memorial to a deceased cataphile we found however - although I don’t believe Mr. HB actually died in the catacombs. And it also wasn’t the only writing we found down there - heck some of it wasn’t even in French.

We then made our way over to Abri Laval, a room mostly noteworthy for its tiled floor. There was also a mural there that made me just a bit homesick (which would have been worse if not for the stupid Ducky Boys). After this, we hit what turned out to be my favorite room, the Salle Z with its huge archways. After almost a whole day of watching my head, this room with its 12-foot high ceilings was a welcome relief.

While all the different rooms were interesting, the backbone of the catas are definitely its tunnels, with its myriads of offshoots, intersections, and splits, (sometimes even splitting three ways). Tunnels and rooms weren’t the only things down there that had variety though; there were also tons of different types of columns stabilizing the entire network.

That’s what the catacombs are: a network. About the same time poor Philbert disappeared, what used to be an unrelated collection of Roman-era limestone quarries were slowly and systematically being discovered, mapped, and stabilized in a process known as “the consolidation.” Below-ground uncertainty affected above-ground development - you never knew when you might start excavating for your dream house and hit a sinkhole caused by an improperly stabilized, long-forgotten tunnel. When large-scale development started above the 14th arrondisment, this “consolidation” became needed. The result is a comprehensive network of stabilized tunnels. To this day it’s overseen and maintained by the IGC (Inspection Générale des Carrières), the governmental agency that was charged with the task of the consolidation. Another result is the map the cataphiles use - which is essentially an updated and annotated version of one developed about 50 years ago by the IGC. Yet another result is yet more writing down in the tunnels.

Every time a tunnel was inspected, stabilized, and mapped, notes were carved on the wall. At minimum, they consisted of the year of inspection (I’m not sure what the 25 C is - it might be a date). Most of the time, the initials of the head engineer (here it’s “GG”) are also carved in. Here, “HT” is the chief engineer, while the ‘I5′ on the left signals the 5th general consolidation. The consolidation wasn’t a single process - several were done over the course of decades to make sure the underground of Paris was sufficiently stable. And as you can also see, most tunnels also have the name of the street they run under engraved on the walls.

On our last excursion with David we got one of those surprise glimpses into history that makes these kinds of trips so worthwhile. In a certain section of the catas, we started running into engravings that looked like this. David told us those were dates also - just using a different calendar: the French Revolutionary Calendar. This tunnel was inspected and consolidated on March 25th, 1805 - or the 4th of Germinal, 13th year of the Revolution. The *49 above and on the right means that we were directly underneath number 49 of the whatever block we were on - probably a large mansion that was a memorable street presence.

I wish we could say that we were happy to see the light of day after our 30 hour entombment - but unfortunately it was about 2:00 in the morning. Steve caught a cab, but I wanted to walk home. The route back to our hotel took me directly over the amazing area where we had spent the last day - I even passed by the entrance to the official tour. I didn’t need a map. My time spend figuring my way beneath Paris had somehow given me an almost instinctual sense of navigation and understanding of the city streets. I realized Paris had clicked for me - I completely understood the geography of the town. I might not have known all the shortcuts, but I knew I’d never really be lost again.

The moment when you realize you truly know something on a deeper level than before is an almost mystical experience. It’s one of those things that makes life worthwhile. My goal on this trip wasn’t to spend a certain amount of time underground or break into a certain amount of places or see a certain amount of interesting things. My goal was to get to know Paris. As I turned the corner onto my hotel’s street of Rue St. Jacques - where 24 hours ago I’d made the exact same turn 100 feet below - I realized I could leave Paris with no regrets.

Unless otherwise noted, all pictures are copyright of my friend, travel partner, and fellow guerilla urbanist Steve Duncan. Steve is a wonderful photographer, and specializes in underground and urban photography. Prints are available - visit his website at http://www.undercity.org

The more we saw of the catacombs, the more we wanted to see. Since we were told that there’s usually more people (and cops) on the weekends, we decided to take Saturday off and prep for a marathon trip. Our intention was to do 24 hours. We ended up doing 30. It seems like a long time, but it’s actually not that much - David spent over a week down there once as a teenager.

The catacombs are a constant 50 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, with about 98% humidity. The practical result of this climate is weird: you get really hot while you’re moving around - to the point wearing shorts and a t-shirt - but when you rest a while and cool down, you get pretty chilly. And if you’re trying to take a nap, it’s like the stone floor is sucking the heat right out of your body. Since a 24-hour trip entails sleeping, and I needed a sleeping bag anyway, we hit Aux Vieux Camper to pick up some gear. A couple hundred Euros later, we were off.

It didn’t start out so good - we tried to get to the abandoned tracks that led to the entrance a different way than usual. A few hours, a couple locked gates, and several confused passersby later, we decided to forget our bright idea, walk about a mile to the entrance we knew, and go from there. By the time we got down onto the tracks, it was dark already.

Still, we were determined to spend an entire day down there, and we were also determined to see as much as we could. The first thing on our list was the German Bunker, constructed during the Vichy Period. There’s also a French Resistance bunker in the catacombs - and both sides never found out the other was down there. That’s how big the catacombs are.

We couldn’t get into the French Resistance bunker - the entrances had all been sealed up by the IGC. Rosie told us that there had been a way in about a week ago, but it was filled up with concrete now. That’s the way the catas are: parts are sealed up by the IGC and (less often unfortunately) parts are opened back up by the cataphiles. For tourists like us, what we get to see is just pretty much just the luck of the draw.

The German Bunker happened to be open - but just barely. This was the only way in. I refused to make the place our bedroom - I couldn’t stop worrying about what would happen if the IGC decided to seal up the entrance during the night.

Near the German Bunker was a room strangely reminiscent of an old bathroom (the sink’s in the foreground and the toilet’s in the background) - and judging by the smell, the cataphiles use it for its original purpose. While the architecture was incredible, we understandably decided to not to sleep there either. We ended up bedding down (and freezing) in this humble sanctuary a little ways away.

The German Bunker is in the far north of the catacombs. The entrance we used was on the opposite end, about two miles directly south. And, to put it mildly, the structure of the catas is not such that you can just enter and walk straight on over to the other side. It took hours of studying the map and winding our way under the 14th arrondissement before we found it. This, in combination with our late start, made us pretty much ready to call it a day when we found the bunker, a little disappointed that we hadn’t seen more. Again though, our biggest frustration was simply the timing. Just a day before we arrived in Paris another entrance 10 minutes from the German bunker had been welded shut. The worst part about it was that it was also 2 blocks from our hotel. Ah well - international urban adventure’s not supposed to have the luxury of curbside check-in anyway.

One of the current cause celebes of the Downtown Brie and Chablis set is the High Line. Abandoned since 1980, this former rail line runs about a mile and a half down the West Side of Manhattan, and currently enjoys a quiet life about 20 feet above the streets a bit west of 10th Avenue. It’s an interesting enough walk - not that much more interesting than the other abandoned rail lines scattered throughout New York, but it has a certain appeal. And for some reason, the highbrow crowd has absolutely fallen in love with thing - just check out some of the “prominent individuals” on this list. Martha Stewart’s 8th from the bottom.

Pretty soon though, it’s not going to be the “remote natural habitat” described in this article. The City of New York is starting construction to turn it into a landscaped walkway, patterned after the Promenade Plantee in Paris. I decided to take a walk up there to see what the High Line’s going to end up looking like in a few years.

It starts off as a viaduct near the Plaza Bastille. I climb up the stairs and head under these gates up onto the walkway. It continues east above the streets for a while, has a short section at street level, and then goes through a couple tunnels into and open cut. It ends at this staircase, where I climb back up onto the streets near the edge of Paris.

Here I find another abandoned - and unrenovated - rail line built in the late 19th century, the Petite Censure. This is actually part of the same line that we walk along to get into the catas. The southern part, where we get in and out of the catas, is an open cut occasionally going through some tunnels (one of which contains an entrance to the catacombs). The eastern part, near the end of the Promenade Plantee, is slightly elevated. I find a way on, and it’s remarkably like the High Line as it exists now. I’m tempted to start walking, but I know I’ll just end up where I started - after circumnavigating Paris. The Petite Censure (little belt) is a ring railroad running just inside the city borders. So instead I take a few shots of the graffiti and hop back down. By the way, if someone could translate this piece, I’d appreciate it.

If you want to visit the High Line that resembles the Petite Censure, and not the Promenade Plantee, do it now. And I’ll tell you exactly how: go to 33rd street between 11th avenue and the West Side Highway (closer to the West Side Highway). Walk through the gate on the north side (it’s always open) into a truck parking lot. On the other side of the lot, the tracks slope downward. Head on over and hop on. It’s that easy. I’ve gone in broad daylight with a cop parked across the street. You have to slide under one metal barrier (as seen in this goofball picture), but that’s about the only tricky part. I actually tried to organize a snowball fight on it not too long ago, but only one other person showed up.

The High Line is one of those “technically off-limits” places that really shouldn’t be - especially now that it’s owned by the City of New York and not a private railroad company. Yet the highbrow folks (who somehow all manage to go visit themselves) still parrot the official line of “please do not trespass” (to which I wrote this response to the Village Voice article - third letter down), without giving anything close to a reason why not. Because, of course, there is none.

Don’t get me wrong: I understand if the authorities don’t want random people climbing bridges or running around subway tunnels - although I think controlled tours, similar to the Sidney Harbor Bridge Climb, or the tours of the old City Hall Subway Station the Transit Museum used to conduct are great ideas. But the High Line? It’s not dangerous, and it’s certainly not any kind of terrorist target. I’m guessing the only reason for any sort of disclaimer at all is because of lawyers being concerned about liability.

In fact, during Open House New York (a great idea that I’m in no way discouraging), the good folks at the Committee for a Free New York decided to pull a little Highline Hijinks by heading up there and attaching a few banners where they’d be seen at the “viewing spot.”   Hey - just because you and I don’t know Martha Stewart doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get to see what we want to see - in Paris, New York, or anywhere else.

What I really wanted to do was crawl up out of the abandoned railroad tracks after 12 hours in the catas, hail the nearest cab, and say “To the Louvre!” Unfortunately, I was so dirty that no cab would stop for me, so I had to take the subway instead.

This was probably the best idea I had in Paris. There were two juxtapositions that made this an almost surreal experience. The first is that during the entire time in the catas, the foremost thing on my mind was “don’t get lost.” We were always stopping to check the map and make sure that we knew where we were. When I got to the Louvre, I didn’t even glance at a map. After 12 hours of pinpoint navigation, I wanted to just get lost and see what I ran into.

The second was the fact that in one day (and in the same clothes - although I did take off the helmet and galoshes), I could see the absolute best of what two vastly different cultural worlds had to offer. In order to truly get to know a city, you have to try and obtain the broadest experience possible. We had a great opportunity to see a side of Paris few got to see, and I was determined to make the most of it. But I also wanted to spend some time seeing the highbrow side of Paris - the side everybody gets to see. Both kinds of excursions had equal importance in my mind - to me they were flip sides of the same coin. The big difference was just that one was easier than the other.

I spent a couple hours wandering the Louvre. The building is itself is so amazing it’s almost worth the price of admission alone. But the art wasn’t bad also. My personal favorite was a mural on one of the ceilings showing the fall of Icarus. I also ran into the Mona Lisa. I had seen the Mona Lisa before on a previous short trip to Paris. All I can say is, I understand the hype. It’s probably one of my personal five favorite paintings in the world.

Another museum, the Musee D’Orsay, has another of my favorites - Summary Judgment Under the Moorish Kings of Granada, by Henri Regnault. This painting you really have to see in person. An image, or even a print, really doesn’t do it justice. When you view the original, it’s absolutely haunting how you can see the silent communication taking place between the eyes of the executioner and the eyes of the just-decapitated. The Musee D’Orsay is a great visit in its own right. It’s smaller than the Louvre, and you can see everything in one visit without getting tired of it. It’s also in a great venue - an old train station on the left bank of the Seine.

I also made time to visit the Picasso Museum (not as good as the one in Barcelona), and the Rodin Museum (not as good as the one in Philadelphia). If you’re a penny pincher, the best thing to do is to skip the actual Rodin museum and just pay the one Euro to visit the garden. The garden has pretty much all the famous stuff: the Thinker, the Burghers of Calais, Balzac, and the Gates of Hell, foremost among them. If you don’t want to shlep all the way to France, the MoMA has a cast of Balzac, the Met has a cast of the Burghers of Calais, and the aforementioned Rodin Museum in Philadelphia has casts of both the Thinker and the Gates of Hell - although the Paris cast of the Gates of Hell is in much better repair than the Philadelphia cast. The plaster original, restored in 1917 and used for the three original casts (Paris, Philadelphia, and Toyko) is the Musee D’Orsay. I really wanted to visit the Musee National d’Arte Moderne also, but when you’ve only got two weeks and you’re spending days at a time underground, there’s only so many museums you end up having time for.

Later on when we spent the weekend in Amsterdam, I also visited their two famous art museums: the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum (which has perhaps the most annoyingly designed website ever). The Rijksmuseum was undergoing restoration, so only a small selection was on exhibit - including this painting.

There’s only a handful of works of art - be they paintings, sculptures, songs, movies, stories, or anything else you could conceivably call “art” - that will provoke a genuine emotional reaction from me. For some reason, a reason I can’t really figure out, that painting made me cry. And as admirable and impressive as the art in both the catacombs and the Louvre were, this was the only thing I saw that really made me feel something. And isn’t that what art - no matter what kind and where you might find it - is supposed to do?

Unless otherwise noted, all pictures are copyright of my friend, travel partner, and fellow guerilla urbanist Steve Duncan. Steve is a wonderful photographer, and specializes in underground and urban photography. Prints are available - visit his website at http://www.undercity.org

One of the most interesting and rewarding experiences of visiting publicly inaccessible places is coming across amazing artwork that you never would have expected. In New York, the most famous of these “Underground Art Galleries” is probably the Amtrak Tunnel on the West Side of Manhattan. Throughout the 2 1/2 mile long tunnel, huge murals and elaborate graffiti pieces are painted on the walls. The most famous of these is probably an interpretation of Goya’s 3rd of May by Freedom and Smith that’s about 10×15 feet. In fact, this tunnel is sometimes called the “Freedom Tunnel” after the artist Freedom, who painted about a dozen or so murals down there. It’s actually not very difficult to get to, but only about a few dozen people visit it every year. And although the murals would definitely be worth seeing even if they happened to be painted along a busy street, I’d be lying if I said this exclusivity isn’t one of its appeals.

There’s a few other interesting things you come across while perusing the underground of New York (the most famous of which are probably pages of REVS‘ journal), but in comparison to the stuff we found in the Paris underground, it’s an entirely different ballgame. Just for starters, subway graffiti is way more elaborate - somewhat due to a different mentality over in Europe (by both the painters and the authorities), but I think mostly because the trains stop running for a few hours late at night, while in New York you’ve got to dodge trains 24-7. And when you get to the catas, things get just ridiculous.

After hitting the bones on our first trip, Steve and I headed off to some of the most visited rooms - rooms where artists had spent countless hours painting and sculpting for an audience of pretty much themselves, friends, and whatever other random people happened along. A lot of the murals (especially the ones we saw later in the German Bunker), were by a group called “The Rats.” Other than the castle, the room it was in contained sculptures of four different gargoyle heads (well, not technically gargoyles), and we came across various other carvings during our trips in. As far as the painting went, most of it was in larger rooms rather than tunnels - two of which were La Plage (which translates to “The Beach - check out the floor), and the Egyptian Chamber.

The tunnels themselves were interesting. They were either generally spotless, or completely covered in tags. I thought it was cool that people got to enjoy the freedom to paint and write graffiti to their hearts content, yet some of the tunnels were left to be enjoyed in their natural state. We left our mark also - Miru painted her rat she does a few times (which was kind of neat when we ran into it later), and on another short trip with Rosie and friends, Krisprolls threw up a few tags and a piece, and another guy did some work on a sculpture that had been started by somebody else.

It’s not just the catas that the cataphiles graffiti though - for instance, there’s also this seven-story high writing on the scaffolding of the Tour St. Jacques. F.C. stands for “Frotte, Connard!” Rosie told us this translates out to something like “erase, assholes!” It’s a challenge to the anti-graffiti crowd to try and erase their stuff. In addition, I’m pretty sure there’s one of those double-entendres that a non-local just isn’t going to understand in there also: “Frotte” is also a slang term for having sex. Translate the rest of the writing on the tower, and you’ll see this theory probably has some merit.

Still, as rude as that might be, it should be noted that the Tower itself was untouched - again, a nice balance of expression and respect. We also saw “FC” a lot in the catas - like in this entirely blue room. That piece of paper you see below the “FC” is a tract: usually just a piece of paper (might have a story, cartoon, party invitation, who knows) that people leave in the catas. You’re supposed to take it and leave another. A similar idea is actually trying to catch on in New York.

It was a great trip. Steve and I crawled out the same hole we went in about 12 hours earlier. There was only one place to go next: La Louvre!