Children of Darkness

JOE ANASTASIO, a slim, dark-haired Web designer for a Wall Street publishing company, was standing outside Madison Square Garden, dressed in black work boots, a torn blue check shirt and a bomber jacket. It was a brisk Sunday morning in the spring, and among the swirl of tourists clutching maps and hockey fans in Rangers jerseys, he might easily have been mistaken for a Metropolitan Transportation Authority track worker heading to a shift.

That is how Mr. Anastasio likes it. A 33-year-old native of Astoria, Queens, he is an urban explorer, to use a term he and his fellow adventurers accept somewhat wearily, along with urban spelunker, infiltrator, hacker and guerilla urbanist. Urban explorers, a highly disparate, loosely knit group, share an obsession with uncovering the hidden city that lies above and below the familiar one all around them. And especially during the summer, they are out in full force.

Alone and with cohorts, Mr. Anastasio has crawled, climbed and sometimes simply brazenly walked into countless train tunnels, abandoned subway stations, rotting factories, storm drains, towers, decaying hospitals and other shadowy remnants of the city’s infrastructure the authorities would rather he did not enter. Although he records his adventures on his Web site, "ltvsquad.com", anonymity is, for him, a necessary tool.

A few minutes later on this Sunday morning, Mr. Anastasio was joined by a Korean woman in her 20s named Miru Kim, who with her delicate looks and glossy, shoulder-length black hair offered a striking contrast to Mr. Anastasio’s grizzled appearance. The two headed off, bound for the netherworld beneath their feet.

A few blocks west, they looked around cautiously. Several trucks were parked behind a wire mesh fence, its gate wide open, but no one seemed about. Beyond the fence lay an entrance to the Amtrak tunnels that run north-south along the West Side. They stepped through the gate and headed for the tunnel’s mouth.

Almost immediately, the space became not pitch black, as expected, but a dirty gray, lit by sodium lights and narrow shafts of sunlight from the open street crossings every few blocks above. Faded curlicues of graffiti formed a pattern as dense as wallpaper on the concrete walls.

As the two headed deeper, the sounds of the upper world, of voices and cars, faded. A train thundered past, and the two stepped to one side, averting their faces until its red taillights were dots in the distance. After about 20 minutes, the murky outline of a disused, darker tunnel appeared, and they followed it, holding their flashlights carefully.

This new tunnel ended at a strange contraption, resembling a vast air-conditioner on stilts. Near its base sat the abandoned remains of a homeless person’s encampment: bags of filthy clothes, milk crates full of mismatched sneakers, a few swivel chairs and, lying forlornly in the middle of the tracks, a champagne cork.

Only 20 feet above lay Manhattan’s busy streets, but it might as well have been 20,000 feet, the sense of human desolation was so intense. For Mr. Anastasio, however, the setting was perfect. He whipped out a digital camera and clicked away. A few days later, the photos were up on his Web site. “Don’t you just love this dump?” the text read. “About the only real thing left in NYC is the underground, the dirty, filthy underground.”

Trying to calculate how many urban explorers there are puts one in the hapless position of the reporter who asked "Bob Dylan" in 1965 how many protest singers there were. “Uh, how many? I think about 136,” Dylan replied sarcastically.

Many American cities have urban exploration Web sites, as do British, Canadian and Australian cities. New York, whose vast infrastructure provides a mecca for those drawn to such things, has dozens of Web sites devoted to recording their owner’s adventures within it.

At the more extreme end are those like Mr. Anastasio’s and "nycexposed.com", which is run by a teenager named Sean and contained, until recently, a practical if tongue-in-cheek guide on how to cut through chain-link fences, as well as photographs of speeding subway trains perilously up close.

Not surprisingly, the authorities do not take kindly to such activities.

“Trespassing on the M.T.A.’s infrastructure is not only illegal and extremely dangerous, it’s a pretty stupid idea,” said Jeremy Soffin, a transportation authority spokesman, echoing the sentiments expressed by officials for Amtrak, the New York Police Department and other agencies. “I personally took a track safety class recently, and then you really appreciate how dangerous it is ? how big the trains are, how fast-moving they are, and how narrow the spaces are.

“It’s dangerous even for very experienced track workers. There’s no place for urban explorers.”

While Mr. Anastasio and Ms. Kim, a quiet-spoken artist and arts event promoter, have never been arrested while exploring, Mr. Anastasio said he knew some explorers who had been. And many other sites, while they don’t thumb their noses so willfully at authority, are extreme in their own way. Ms. Kim’s site, " mirukim.com", which has made her something of a legend in urban explorer circles, contains a section devoted to a project she calls “Naked City Spleen.”

The site features color photographs of Ms. Kim, naked, posed in abandoned tunnels and structures in New York and elsewhere. In one, she crouches like a cat on a vast slab of rusting steel amid the ruins of the former Revere sugar refinery, now demolished, in Red Hook, Brooklyn. In another, she appears, back turned to the camera, squeezed into the narrow heating tunnels below Columbia University, her alma mater. The effect is powerful, not just because of the eroticism, but also because her nakedness seems to emphasize her human vulnerability.

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