Inside The Urban Underground: Exploration Gets Personal

New Yorker Steve Duncan was so desperate to pass his college math class, he crawled through a tunnel to finish it. A computer assignment was due the next day and the software to finish was inside a building closed for the night. In a moment of desperation, Steve came up with a crazy plan: he could sneak inside. Having heard from a classmate about a collection of well-known tunnels connecting the university’s buildings, he resolved to convince the friend to guide him. After escorting Steve to the tunnel entrance, the friend offered vague directions, wished him luck and promptly left. As Steve recalls:

“He took off in the other direction and … here I was absolutely alone – it was terrifying and eye-opening, because every building on campus was connected by these tunnels. I passed the math class, but what always stuck with me was that first moment of being alone in the dark and being absolutely terrified but realizing that if I could face that, I had access to every part of the campus.”

Duncan had educational goals in mind when he entered the underground tunnels that night, but his experience kick-started an interest in an activity he continues to practice to this day: urban exploration.

Urban explorers seek to investigate the centuries of infrastructure created (and sometimes abandoned) by modern civilization: disused factories, historic bridges and unknown tunnels entered using legal, and sometimes illegal, means. The reason they do it is not as easily defined. Urban explorers come from a range of backgrounds, ranging from urban planners to historians to preservationists to architecture lovers, photographers and just plain old thrill-seekers all of whom are often lumped together under the banner of this general term. Just in New York alone, there’s the founders of the website Atlas Obscura, Nick Carr from Scouting New York and Kevin Walsh from Forgotten New York, along with countless others living around the world. These individuals, taken together, are less a community than a loose network of individuals united by a common love: re-discovering and investigating the forgotten and sometimes misunderstood detritus of modern day urban civilization

Yet the popularity of urban exploration confronts an interesting dilemma facing many 21st Century travelers: now that so much of what we seek to “discover” has been Google mapped, investigated and written about ad nauseum, how is our relationship with the concept of exploration evolving? And what does it tell us about the future of travel?

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Steve Duncan – Urban Historian, Explorer and Geographer
It’s been over a decade since that math class first brought Steve Duncan underground, but he’s continued to evolve his approach to urban exploration from his home base of New York City. Styling himself as an “urban geographer” and historian, Duncan continues to direct his energies towards understanding the unseen layers of infrastructure that constitute our urban environment – namely the sewers, bridges and subway tunnels of the Big Apple.

In more recent years, Duncan has gained increasing attention for his adventures, including a week-long expedition through the sewers under NYC with Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge and a short documentary made by filmmaker Andrew Wonder that follows him as he visits New York’s off-limits subway stations and climbs to the top of the Queensboro Bridge.

But Duncan’s urban adventures aren’t undertaken merely for thrills – they’re a means to an intriguing end. In fact, Duncan cares less about being the first to rediscover forgotten places than taking a fresh look at the urban environments we inhabit. Despite the fact more than 50% of our world’s population now lives in cities, Duncan notes, much of today’s travel media continues to focus on outward-looking explorations of far-flung places perceived to be “exotic” – for instance, the wild jungles of Borneo or the ancient temples of Jordan. Steve believes his own adventures constitute an equally exotic form of adventure – a new inward-focused method of exploration.

As he notes, “I’m not interested in going to places nobody’s been before, [but rather] I’m interested in how we shape places.” This life-long history lover views exploration not as a means for public recognition but rather as a way to better understand his personal passion for the ever-changing nature of cities. Whether or not he can “claim the place” as his is irrelevant – he’s more interested in understanding. As he tells it, “All exploration to some extent is personal. It doesn’t matter if someone’s been there before. If it’s new to you, it’s still exploration.”

Taken together, Duncan’s adventures constitutes a kind of inward-driven “time travel” – a concept in which the worlds of history, the growth and decay of cities and adventure travel merge together to define a new opportunity all of us as travelers can take to re-examine the everyday world around us as a source of curiosity.

Dylan Thuras – Cartographer of Curiosities

Not all stories of urban exploration involve spending weeks in tunnels under New York City. For Dylan Thuras, co-founder of website Atlas Obscura, a mind-altering childhood trip to House on the Rock in Wisconsin defined his early travel memories. The strange house is part museum and part hall of curiosities, filled with bizarre collections of artwork, carousel rides and giant biological specimens. As Dylan recalls, “the fact that this could be tucked away in the woods in sleepy Wisconsin made me feel like there were these magical worlds all over the place … if I just knew how to look, I would start to find these fantastical places everywhere”

Ever since that moment, Thuras and his co-founder Joshua Foer of Atlas Obscura have dedicated their website to altering travelers’ perspectives of the places worth visiting on their itineraries. To date they’ve built a worldwide, user-driven database highlighting more sites on all seven continents. As an example of the sites Atlas uncovers, Thuras mentions two sites in Florence, Italy – whereas the Uffizi Gallery is probably on most travelers’ radar, Dylan and Joshua also want to help you discover La Specola, the museum of wax anatomical models that contains a specimen of astronomer Galileo’s middle finger.

As Dylan points out, if an attraction isn’t listed on the top ten list in a guidebook “… it is easy to slip into anonymity, obscurity and disappear. I want to give people a sense that there is so much more than those ten things and that they might find that they have a better time if they venture into new territory.”

The style of exploration advocated by Thuras seeks to shift the context of the worlds we already know. That’s a far cry from the conception many travelers have in their heads of an idealized explorer discovering uncharted lands. Says Thuras: “This isn’t [exploration] in the Victorian sense of climbing the tallest mountain, or finding the source of a river … but in the sense that every one of us can find new and astonishing things if we look for them … it doesn’t always have to be about far-flung adventures.”

Urban Exploration – What’s Next?

Duncan and Thuras may appear to occupy different ends of the urban exploration spectrum, but their motivation stems from a distinct similarity. After years of endless exploring, categorizing and searching, both have arrived at the realization that our mundane daily worlds can be unknown places of curiosity and wonder. The challenge of getting there then, isn’t in the physical act of getting there. Explorers like Duncan do face large risks of injury in their wanderings, but it’s not on the scale of Ernest Shackleton, Captain James Cook or Edmund Hilary.

The difference in these explorers’ adventures thus seems to be a mental reframing of what we conceive of as exploration. Their perception of what is worthy of our consideration and interest as travelers is gradually shifting from the physical towards the mental. In the relentless search for finding the most far-flung undiscovered locations on earth, all of us as travelers have neglected to look right in front of our faces at the places we inhabit everyday as worthy of discovery. Unlike Steve Duncan the journey might not require a crawl through a sewer to appreciate, but ultimately it can be just as rewarding.

Undiscovered New York: An interview with Scouting NY



When Gadling first started the Undiscovered New York series, our goal was to bring New York visitors a totally different perspective on this famous city. To show you the amazing forgotten places and stories that lie just below the surface, waiting to be explored.

Our passion for uncovering these forgotten spaces is exactly how we stumbled upon Scouting NY, the blog of a New York City film scout who spends his days scoping out potential NYC locations for use in feature films. We recently had a chance to speak with the creator of Scouting NY, the writer known mostly as “Scout,” to talk about New York’s undiscovered spaces, urban exploring and some of NYC’s most unique spots. Take a look:

Tell our Gadling readers what you do here in New York.
I work in New York City as a film location scout. Basically, I get hired by film productions to help find and secure locations for shooting in the New York area.

In the early stages, this means searching for any location mentioned in the screenplay: a back alley, a luxury penthouse apartment, a subway station, etc. Sometimes we turn to locations we know of from experience, other times we literally walk street by street. We try to provide the director with as many options as possible. Sometimes, we find the perfect place immediately. Other times, it’s more of a grind, often in part because the director does not know what he or she wants. I was on a job where we scouted about 200 different apartments to find the perfect one, for a scene that was no longer than 30 seconds in the final film.


What was your reason for starting your blog, Scouting NY?

My job is basically to stare at New York, and when you really take the time to stop and look around, you start to notice things you NEVER see on your daily commute. I kept a mental list going for a while, and would point places out to friends, often generating the reaction: “I’ve walked by that a zillion times and never noticed that!” Almost a year ago, I decided to start documenting my finds on a blog, in part to draw attention to things that have a bad tendency of disappearing forever.

How did you get interested in exploring the “forgotten” places of New York?

I have a natural curiosity for trying to find the hidden places and gems of a city. I’m not sure where it stems from, but I always seem to find my gaze landing on some unusual stuff. Everyone else will be staring at the Empire State Building, and I’m looking across the street at an ancient Bloomingdale’s building ad. Maybe it’s just a short attention span?

What is it about undiscovered areas of New York that makes them worthy of a visit?

New York is a city that is shared by millions, and yet, in finding these hidden treasures, you can sort of claim a piece of it for yourself in spirit. Also, New York has more history crammed into it than nearly anywhere else in the US, in part because Manhattan is an island. Because the city couldn’t sprawl, it had to constantly tear down and rebuild. Luckily, remnants of older times have a way of sticking around, and I find it to be very interesting to know that your apartment building might have a history of being, say, both an old age home AND a brothel.


You’re a big advocate of the preservation of historic buildings and places. Why is it important we preserve these spaces instead of redeveloping them for new uses?

It is important because they’re one of a kind works of art, testaments to an older generation which valued quality and craftsmanship far higher than we do today. Once historic buildings and places are torn down, they’re gone forever. You cannot rebuild them. It looks like the amazing Admiral’s Row mansions in Brooklyn will soon be torn down in favor of a supermarket parking lot, and it saddens me that the only reason this is allowed to happen is because they’re not in a particularly wealthy community.

I don’t believe that any historical structure should simply exist as a museum piece – it should function with the community, and there is always a way to do this without tearing anything down. You can always build another supermarket parking lot. You will NEVER see a mansion built in the style of Admiral’s Row.


Imagine you visit New York for the first time and want to “get off the beaten path.” Where should you go?

Before doing your requisite Times Square/Chinatown/Wall Street tours, pick a neighborhood off of your map and just go walking around without a guide book. Though I’m a travel guide addict, when I go to ANY new city, I always spend the first day walking around without a guidebook, getting a natural feel for the city. It’s only on day 2 or 3 that I pick up the guide book and start delving into what I might have missed. Personal favorites for visitors in Manhattan are: Morningside Heights, the West 70s/80s near Central Park, and the West Village.


You’ve been all over visiting unique New York locations. Do you have any favorites?

I’ve put together a list of my favorites which you can find here.

Manhattan is probably the most heavily visited Borough by out-of-town visitors. Tell us about one unexpected spot in Manhattan that’s “hidden in plain view.”

At 1st Street and 1st Ave, perched on the roof of a four-story brick apartment building is a Cape Cod beach house. No joke.

Do you have any tips for readers on how to find “unexpected” places of their own as they visit New York? What has helped you make some of your discoveries?

Stop worrying about how quickly you can get from Point A to Point B, and try looking up for a change. It’s all hidden in plain sight – all it takes is the desire to pay attention.

A special thanks to Scouting NY for the interview and for granting permission to use a few photos. Make sure to check out all the amazing places and photos at www.scoutingny.com.