It was an empty office floor on the 61st floor of the city's famed Chrysler building. ![]() But it wasn't Top of the Rock at Rockefeller Center or the Empire State building. "I've been seen coming out of a hole in the ground in Paris at 2 in afternoon on a busy street and I'll get a few funny looks," he said.Ī few weeks ago, Gates visited another favorite spot of his, high up on a New York City skyscraper. "In Paris, going underground especially to the catacombs is just kind of thought of something that maybe not everybody does but people do and it's not a huge deal," Gates joked, adding that the catacombs will "always hold a special place for him" because it was the first place he went underground, just to look around. "For every one neat thing you find walking around town there's twenty times you walk around town and find nothing that neat." he said.Įven a place like the catacombs of Paris, a 200-mile maze that holds the remains of six million people, making it one of the world's biggest mass tombs, isn't too scared for urban explorers. The payoff of discovering a new vantage point, Gates said, outweighs the hazards of illegality. The urban explorer "scene" is not an organized group, according to Gates, but technically, they are professional trespassers. Cities are increasingly our environment." "Half the world's population now lives in cities now. And it's natural if you're in nature and it's also natural if you're in cities," Gates said. "People are curious about their environments and people like to explore their environments, and it's a very natural thing. Gates describes his immersion in the worldwide subculture of urban exploration how he joined a world of people who create secret art galleries in subway. Gates is a new breed of adventurer for the 21st century and will inspire readers to think about the potential for urban exploration available for anyone, anywhere. For them, every skyscraper, sewer and scaffold is a space begging to be scaled. In this fascinating glimpse into the world of urban exploration, Gates describes his trespasses in some of the most illustrious cities in the world from Paris to Cairo to Moscow. Learn how to uncover more abandoned places and the techniques used. Urban explorers dive in the bowels and scour the heights of cities across the world in search of a new way to see what there is to see. If youre looking to dive deeper into the world of urban exploration, this book is for you. ![]() His explorations of New York have been featured on the History Channel, the Travel Channel, WNYC, and in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian. Gates, a 37-year-old urban planner based in New York City, is part of a group of people dubbed "urban explorers" - a kind of Indiana Jones of concrete jungles. Urban Explorer, Author Moses Gates is an urban planner, licensed New York City tour guide, and visiting assistant professor of demography at the Pratt Institute. But Moses Gates is not like "most of us." June 14, 2013— - Most of us don't descend into subways unless it's to catch a train, and very few people view skyscrapers as mountains to be conquered and climbed.
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