Urban Explorers and Urban Exploration

This is the thread to discuss the hobby of exploring the urban landscape and the various things this entails.

Note this can have some overlap with other urban hobbies like Parkour as it is handy skill to have for exploration in urban settings.

Urban Exploration From the Other Wiki

Plug Away folks.

I discovered UE through a chain of events that went: Read a magazine article about NYC subway with the URL of a website on abandoned stations->Followed a link on there to a website called Forgotten NY->Followed a link to Long Island Oddities, which really caught my attention with the three legendary state psychiatric hospitals in Suffolk County->Followed a link to a very broad-spectrum UE site called Abandoned But Not Forgotten. This was five or more years ago, and I've been hooked ever since.

However, I have no means of transportation, a great fear of getting arrested, and a general dislike of potentially dangerous or even unpleasant environments. Call me a wuss, fine, but I intentionally let a lot of things get in the way of actually doing much exploring, and I'm basically fine with that.

The best and most major exploration I ever did was when I was at a camp at Amherst College in Massachusetts in the summer of 2007. I was in a digital photography class and when I heard we'd be going to nearby Northampton (setting of Questionable Content!) one day, I recommended that we take a detour to what was left of the long-since-closed Northampton State Hospital. Unfortunately, the main building was no more by then, but there were several subsidiary ones remaining. The only one we felt comfortable going inside was a small, one-story building that may have perhaps been some sort of cafeteria...I'm not really sure. But everyone loved it, so we decided we'd go back and bring another photography class (the film one) with us. I bought nitrile gloves and really cheap dust masks (all that was available under the circumstances, probably wouldn't do jack squat about asbestos) and encouraged everyone to dress properly for safety, because I didn't want to be seen as irresponsible, but the film class kids just kind of ignored my advice. Still, everything went fine...we went back into that same small building and got plenty more pictures. We actually ran into a pair of state inspectors who told us that the large patient ward buildings next door were not safe to go in (we heeded their advice and stayed out) but otherwise, they were fine with us being in the small building on this one occasion.

I got some great photos out of that day, and it's remained a sort of personal Crowning Moment Of Awesome ever since. I've been on many smaller explorations since (several with my then-girlfriend, so that was kind of sweet...) but nothing has measured up to Northampton. It's my dream to visit another major abandoned psych hospital before they're all knocked down, preferably the mighty Kings Park on Long Island, but I'm not sure when that's going to happen.

Fascinating website on the subject.

There was an abandoned school close to where I used to live. My brother and I used to go there all the time as kids, exploring the classrooms, climbing the unstable staircases and jumping from building to building where the walls had collapsed. In retrospect, we were lucky we didn't fall and die or get crushed by rubble.

I discovered UE the same way I discovered TV Tropes; boredom on a Government computer. I found a local UE ring near me, and hit some of those folks up to let me tag along for one of their expeditions. Most UE folks I haven't met get nervous about my career due to the dubious legality of some of the things they do, namely trespassing, but they get over it eventually.

I figure there is nothing wrong with it so long as you hold to the Urban Explorers motto; "Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footsteps."

^^

I'm not a fan of Infiltrations work, my one rule is that I don't UE in places where people still actively work, the most I'll do is trespass in places that Security rolls up on and checks once in a while. To be honest it's a good thing I've never been caught doing it, out of worry for some of the gangs out here in the LA area, I always carry either a gun or a large knife when I go, the first of which is extremely illegal here.

But on the other hand you would need to do an arrest-level search to actually find it, and usually waving a military ID gets a "Go home, don't let me catch you here again." sort of reaction.

edited 30th Jan '11 10:52:56 PM by Barkey

I'm not a fan of Infiltrations work, my one rule is that I don't UE in places where people still actively work, the most I'll do is trespass in places that Security rolls up on and checks once in a while. To be honest it's a good thing I've never been caught doing it, out of worry for some of the gangs out here in the LA area, I always carry either a gun or a large knife when I go, the first of which is extremely illegal here.

But where's your sense of ~adventure~?

-is not stupid enough to explore places that could get one arrested-

Oh I can see the appeal. I've snuck into a few places like that in my time. It's kind of like how I ditched school when I was younger.. Just grab a piece of paper or a clipboard or something, and walk like you've got something you really need to do, like you have a job or purpose you need to attend to. Usually works fine until you start getting uniforms and ID badges into the mix.

I used to do this, I've been in and out of abounded buildings and not abounded buildings, got onto the roof an old mini-mall that was set to be demolished (yet was still open), back in high school I used to sneak into MIT because they had an arcade.

^^Sure, there's plenty of appeal but...

...there are way better ways to get thrills and chills than risking ones crime-free record.

I've entered homes that are under construction/up for sale before. That's about it.

^Heheh, an arcade huh?

edited 30th Jan '11 11:28:15 PM by TheMightyAnonym

Infiltration also runs the risk of deliberately placed hazards to deter intruders. Like armed guards and other barriers.

I've been meaning to go urban exploring for a while, but from what I hear, the New York City government cracks down hard on it.

edited 31st Jan '11 7:42:54 AM by Wicked223

I've gone college exploring, but never urban exploring.

My most interesting experience was when I snuck into a building that was right across the street from another building that was being demolished. Got a shock when a group of people showed, up, but turned out they weren't supposed to be there either. Got some good photos.

I essentially did urban exploring on my college campus. Our oldest science building had been somewhat emptied out in preparation for eventual demolition, but it was still fully open with a ton of junk lying around in it. An acquaintance and I stumbled upon it while hopelessly lost trying to find our assigned faculty advisors during freshman orientation. I came back several time to take photos and documented its gradual closing-down and demolition. Now it's completely gone, and I had the sobering realization that an entire class of freshmen arrived and will never know it existed. That's why I consider my photos to be an important record.

Mind you, it was built in 1957 and, as is the case with most buildings built around then, painfully ugly by modern standards. It had obviously been on a bit of a downhill slide for years, and when we built our shiny new science center in '08 or so, it became obsolete. They were actually demolishing to make way for the theoretical Phase 2 of the new building, but we never actually had enough money for Phase 2. Or maybe we did, but Madoff got it all, I'm not quite sure.

Doing it at colleges is common.

Oh, vadding. If only we had tunnels worth exploring at my school.

I'll be back with more on college UE later, but I have to go meet with a professor.

I'd try it myself, but my campus is new, small, and boring, and you can't really just buy lockpicks from a store.

As I mentioned before, I like to do vadding but I've never gone anywhere that was explicitly illegal.

The thing is, we might have steam tunnels that I don't know about. We have steam something, because our heating systems are mostly steam-radiator-based in the older dorms, and I see countless manholes labeled "steam", but I've never heard anything about tunnels and frankly they don't interest me that much.

The much more interesting thing is my dorm, which the oldest major building on campus and was designed to resemble a castle. Contrary to an absolutely indestructible myth that says it was built from the outside in, it was built in a perfectly logical and beautiful manner as the centerpiece of a previous university on the property, then massively altered when the current school bought it about 60-65 years ago. It was continually altered overtime as the campus grew and the castle was gradually no longer needed to serve any function other than housing students. As such, it's now a confusing mess and barely retains any of its original elegance, so the school just shifts responsibility off of itself by blaming everything on the original architect.

It's still far and away the most interesting dorm on campus and has some of the most aesthetically pleasing (though not the newest and cleanest) rooms: many are pie-slice shaped and/or have very high ceilings, like mine. And it's full of passages and maintainence areas and spare unused rooms and all sorts of stuff that they'd prefer people don't fine. There's the graffiti room that quotes Gurren Lagann, the little hand-decorated purple room designed to be accessible only to a group of expert climbers (also very nice, smart people, and Shakespearians) who got in through a window, the tight squeeze up to the roof of one of the towers, which I was personally too scared to try by myself...and so on. Cops take people clambering around the castle pretty seriously, because of liability issues I presume...when I attended a roving, somewhat casual production of Hamlet that used all manner of castle areas as its sets (organized by the same girl who created the purple room, and who had played Hamlet 2 years prior, but not in a castle...), the first few scenes were made rather tense by the pair of cops searching for one of the performers who had been spotted climbing one of the towers to get to a spot where he was going to perform from. Thankfully they didn't find him and didn't interrupt us ground-based people.

edited 31st Jan '11 12:14:06 PM by frog753