Escaparse de Nueva York

There is a public toilet not 50 feet away. Even if I couldn’t make it that far, there’s a fairly well concealed public park right in front of me. But no, here I am peeing right on the street. Why? Well….

“What?! We are in France!” my companion for the night replied when I tell him I’m going to head down the block to the public toilets. “Here, I have to take a piss too.”

“You know what the most Latin country in the world is?” he asks me as he lets a stream go right on the sidewalk next to me. “Not Italy, not Spain. France.” My companion knows well of what he speaks. He’s been relying on that relaxed Latin “can’t be bothered” attitude for quite a while now.

My flight back to New York is out of Charles De Gaulle airport, so I’ve got a couple nights in Paris. Last year, we had quite the adventure journeying above , around, and especially below the City of Light. This time, while Paris wasn’t a priority, there were a few things I wanted to mop up. One character, who I had met before in New York, I arranged to do a little exploring with before I left. He was the one currently taking a piss right next to me in the middle of Rue Daguerre.

Paris is absolutely unlike any other city in the world when it comes to urban exploration. The combination of large, dedicated, fairly well-coordinated core groups of adventurers with the aforementioned incredibly relaxed attitude to recreational municipal trespassing (as well as pretty much anything else that would lead to a hassle on the authorities’ part), lead to probably the only major western city where you could get away with stuff like this.

While I’m sworn to secrecy as to our exact adventures that night, let’s just say the methods of entry and discovery are a far, far cry from the “wait until 3:00 AM, jump the fence, and pray you don’t get seen” kind of style we generally employ in New York. “What, you don’t have people working on the key problem? Or the alarm problem?” my companion asks incredulously.

Well, no we don’t. Maybe we should. But it’s not just the attitude of the authorities that’s the problem. Paris is a very old, and very stagnant city. The problem in places like New York is that it doesn’t have nearly the history needed to create a subterranean network like exists in Paris. Places get closed up (and less often, re-opened) in Paris all the time - it’s just part of the game. There’s always more than enough other stuff to occupy the hard-core explorers, casual cataphiles, and “rivioli” (as my companion calls the young and naive embryotic adventurers). In New York, if one of our favorite underground niches gets closed up, it’s a blow. There’s a very limited amount that are regularly accessible by your average curious bear, especially in this day and age. And the more people that know about them, the greater the chance they’ll get closed, so we tend to keep them pretty well under our hats - we certainly wouldn’t let the word get out to the amount of people needed to fill up a small movie theater, for instance.

The other problem is that Paris basically has not changed in about 300 years. Nothing new really gets built in the city proper, and historic preservation laws are draconian. In New York, you can’t count on an interesting space being there tomorrow, much less for the 18 months it took to set up the underground cinema. The town is always changing. Old things go, new things come, spaces get filled in, or dug up, or sealed off.

Still, the folks in Paris inspire me. There’s so much more we could do. Some folks in New York have been mildly successful going the legitimate route - ironically, that same Latin attitude that makes the clandestine route so easy in France makes the legal route next to impossible. And every once in a while someone manages to pull off a good, extralegal event without getting the place shut down. But for the most part it’s still a few folks, a nutty idea, a impromptu adventure, and that’s a wrap.

Maybe it’s laziness. Maybe it’s fear. Maybe it’s the dregs of the post 9-11 paranoia. Maybe it’s just the fact that we don’t have the positive feedback feedback loop France has - the more you pull off, the more people get into it, the more attempts are made, the more it becomes just a part of the city.

But mostly I think it’s just a different culture. New York is not really the type of city to have too many secret arty gatherings. That’s a Euro thing, and Paris is pretty much the definition of Euro. New York, at least at its best, is raw, dirty, and in your face. We’re much more likely to insult the mayor on the side of the Brooklyn Bridge (and not even make it look pretty), than throw a secret dinner party. The energy and effort that’s put into Guerilla Urbanism in Paris is put into one of our most famous cultural innovations - Graffiti - in New York City.

Of course, that’s not to say there isn’t graffiti in Europe, the same as there’s plenty of Guerilla Urbanism here in New York. And, of course, the two cultures intersect in both cities every once in a while. Euros still come here to paint trains, knowing full well they’ll never run. Now, part of this is because most young Euros desperately want to be from the Bronx in 1982 for some reason. But part of it is also a homage to the fact that despite the changes over the last years, NYC was, is, and always will be the origin, home, and personification of the graffiti bomber. The best way I can put it is that in Paris, they generally clean up after themselves, their goal being to leave no trace. Here in New York, the goal is always to make our mark.

Our adventure ended well past midnight. I wandered the streets of Paris for a few hours before hopping on the first train of the day to the airport, to catch my flight back to New York. Of course, I was only home for a little more than 24 hours. I still had another continent to conquer in the 7 weeks left of my trip.

I got back to London from Stonehenge at about 9:30. I was already pretty happy, but there was still a reason I had stayed one more day. I caught the last Underground from Earl’s Court, and was in the Square Mile around 1:00. This time there was no hesitation. A quick look around, and I boosted myself up and over the wooden barriers. I was in.

I’m generally used to a certain type of climb. Anything under construction or renovation that has scaffolding usually is the same type of deal. Once you get on the scaffolding, you make your way around until you find the ladders or stairs. From there it’s a straight shot to the top. This building, however, was different. It was being renovated, and there was scaffolding. However, it seemed to be pretty much placed at random - some sections had it, some didn’t, and there was never a connection for more than a flight. I had to monkey around for about 20 minutes before I finally managed to find a way into the fire stairs of the building itself. 26 flights later, I was on top of London.

I had chosen a great focal point. The old stock exchange is right on the fulcrum of the old part of the City of London, and the new part of the City of London. To the east was the brightly lit, new post-modern skyscraper city. To the west was the centuries-old classical London, anchored by with St. Paul’s cathedral. Off in the distance I could make out the London Eye, uncharacteristically lit up in red.

The view was great, but I wanted more. There was a construction crane on top of the building, and I meant to head up as far as I could. For some reason it was surrounded by wooden barriers, and locked off in two places. I can see maybe locking the cockpit to prevent unauthorized use, but honestly, who is going to steal a construction crane from on top of a 26 story building? And of course, it didn’t prevent a thing. After another 5 minutes on the jungle gym, I managed to make my way to the small platform 20 feet or so above the cockpit. I was rewarded with a crystal clear, unobstructed view of the Tower Bridge lit up at night, which you couldn’t see from just the roof.

I had been up the Tower Bridge (or the “Tower Bridge Experience” as they call it) a little earlier. Biggest waste of $11 I can think of. The ideal observation deck (official or not), should be in the open air, with completely unobstructed, 360 degree panoramic views. In other words, it should basically just be on a flat roof. It doesn’t need to be the tallest building in town, but it should be high enough to provide an overview of the whole city. The Tour Montparsse in Paris, 30 Rockefeller Center in New York, and the top of the construction crane on the old Stock Exchange where I was all fit the bill. The Tower Bridge was the complete opposite. You could walk between the two towers of the bridge, but it’s indoors and you can only peek out a little window every once in a while, and when you’re in the tower, they don’t even let you climb up to the very top. If it were more unobstructed it might have a decent view of the Thames, but it’s not close to tall enough to get a good view of even just the surrounding part of the city. The Fire Monument is a little better, as it’s outdoors, but it’s still fairly short and the view is surrounded by fencing. Tower 42 (which you have a great view of from the Stock Exchange), has a bar and restaurant on the 42nd floor, but it’s indoors, expensive, you need reservations, and they’ll politely ask you to leave if you start wandering around disturbing people’s dinner in order to snap photos.

I came down after an hour or so of admiring the view. I was absolutely ecstatic. The best explanation of the feeling of the extralegal urban climb was written up by an Aussie friend of mine after we had climbed the Manhattan Bridge. As I completed the three hour walk back to where I was staying, I couldn’t help but repeat to myself the question from the last line of his essay - “am I the only one to embrace my human frailty and venture high above the city this night?”

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