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 loved Naples. I felt comfortable there. I think it’s the kind of city I could eventually even feel at home in. But I know I’ll never truly know the city. Not if I lived there the rest of my life and learned fluent Italian tomorrow. It’s too deep.

Some cities are shallow, some are deep. It’s not a value judgement, and it doesn’t have much of a bearing on how much I like a town. But it’s there. Paris is a shallow city. Despite not knowing French and only spending two weeks there, I can tell you I know Paris. Maybe not all the nooks and crannies, not all the shortcuts, but I know the city. London is pretty deep, but mostly I’d define it as broad. Still, while I don’t feel like I know London, I definitely feel like I could one day, and probably not in the very distant future.

New York is different. It’s deep, but in a very different way than a city like Naples. New York is almost defined by its transiency. This is especially true of Manhattan. Even before colonization it was transient: the local natives would set up shop in the summer, do some hunting, and then leave in the winter. It’s a very rare thing to find a person who has been born, grew up, lived their adult life, and died all on the island of Manhattan.

More than any other city I know of, knowing New York is a choice: it’s all there if you want to put in the work, but it’s going to be a heck of a lot of work. And the work never ends. New York changes so fast that you’re constantly playing catch up. And it changes so fast that I’ve always held that it’s really the relative newcomer that knows the city the best at any given moment - old timers are always looking at it through the distorted lens of a city that’s no longer there.

Naples has none of this history of transience. Well, it does but only in one direction - out. As one the main emigrant cities of the world over the last 150 years or so, Naples is now undergoing an interesting transition. I have yet to look up the statistics on this, but I would not be surprised if lately more people have been entering Naples from other countries rather than leaving it for abroad.

I would by no means call Naples cosmopolitan. But it’s not entirely homogenous either. In addition to the staples of pretty much any European city nowadays - West Africans street merchants, Australian hostel managers - there’s a few other communities in Naples: Albanians, Sri Lankans (mostly refugees from the renewed fighting), and Eastern Europeans - more so now that Bulgaria and Romania have ascended to the European Union. I would have liked to be able to have stayed a little longer and talked with a few more locals about the impact this has had on such an insular city.

In addition, I couldn’t pass. This is weird for me. I almost always pass as a local (at least before I open my mouth) in pretty much any city where it’s plausible someone of my particular appearance might live. I’m not quite sure why this is other than the fact that I tend to feel comfortable in cities and maybe project that comfortability. Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Madrid, I blended right in. I got asked directions twice my first day in Rome. Not in Naples.

I had the same feeling of comfortability. It wasn’t tourist season (not like there’s that many tourists anyway). My basic outfit of jeans, sneakers, and my leather jacket wasn’t particularly out of place. But nobody ever mistook me for anything but an outsider. Nobody even started speaking Italian to me. It was obvious to me that I was standing out in some way. This didn’t happen anywhere else in Italy - or even anywhere else in Europe for that matter. It didn’t even really happen to me in Rio where they can spot a tourist a mile away (I’ve been told it’s in the walk). It wasn’t me - it was the city.

I left feeling like we couldn’t really crack Naples. I was frustrated, but somewhat resigned. In some cities that feeling of frustration is much worse, because you know if you had stayed a little longer, prepared a little better, took a few more chances, you could have had it. Not Naples. I think I could have stayed forever and not really gotten that much farther. It’s just too deep.