How far would you go to be the first? The only?
All the great cities have become theme parks, and all the theme parks feed lots, Burning Man a millionaires’ mud-wallow, Everest an overbooked junkyard, even the once-infamous Area 51 is a tourist trap. But the most thrilling excursion you’ve never taken could be right outside your door some hundred stories straight up—or down.
All it takes is some creative urban exploration, more commonly called “urbex,” which is an umbrella term for a varied suite of renegade leisure activities tied together by the drive to go somewhere you’re not supposed to and let everyone in the world know about it.
In my new novel, Vertical, a crew of fame-addled thrill-junkies travel to Moscow in order to “hack” what will soon be the world’s tallest skyscraper, and get into insane amounts of trouble, thanks to urbex.
To be sure, the urges and activities at the core of modern urbex are nothing new. Henry Gardiner, the first popular “human fly,” free-climbed Detroit’s 14-story Majestic Building in 1916 at the behest of The Detroit News, and George Willig’s 1981 record climb up 110 stories of the WTC still stands, according to Guinness Book, because modern urbex “roofers” usually take the elevator—Like every other weird human activity when the Internet is applied to the mixhas become a global subculture with its own rituals, language, celebrities, sacred grounds, and revered martyrs.
Ask the urbexers what drives them to risk their lives for kicks and clicks, and you’ll get all kinds of answers. Obviously, the hunger for online attention is a factor, but some will say they’re just latter-day explorers. In the Anthropocene, there are no blank spaces left on the map, but there are vast tracts of forbidden, forgotten, remote or dangerous territory beckoning to the pre-apocalyptic pioneer possessing more nerve than common sense. But unlike treasure hunters or vandals, urbex culture’s prime directive is “take only pictures, leave only footprints”—a slogan unironically pilfered from the National Park Service.
In Vertical, the fictitious Les Furies crew uses urbex as a platform for snarky political pranks, touting their trespasses as edgy acts of subversion or protest, of reclaiming commodified and privatized public space. This brand of maverick behavior isn’t much in evidence in real life; stunting on the wheels of capitalism tends to yield harsh penalties, as the Occupy Wall Street crowd discovered. While enjoying some philosophical overlap with the street art/graffiti movements also critical of corporate or governmental sequestering of public spaces, most active urbex athletes are so not idealistic. Far easier, and more lucrative if one cares about that, to let their online vidcos be the statement, with the kicks their own reward.
Certainly, the thirst for forbidden thrills and instant infamy can make the urbex athlete a little extra cash, but more revealing would be to ask what the urbexers seem to be missing. Watch Free Solo or The Walk (based on the World Trade Center high-wire walk of Phillippe Petit), and you see an eerie absence of the natural fear of heights we all share to varying degrees. What most of us feel when looking down from a great height can range from a tingle of excitement to a crippling anxiety, fraught with intrusive thoughts of falling or even stepping off said height, absent any conscious desire for self-destruction.
What the French call l’appel d’vide, “the lure of the void,” is a morbid fascination with our own end that reminds us of danger, but can paralyze or panic us and make the uninvited fantasy come true. When we see urbex athletes blithely posing for selfies on radio towers, or doing chin-ups off the end of a crane atop a skyscraper, our hearts leap into our mouths as if we are standing on that ledge ourselves.
If dangling from a great height isn’t your idea of fun, maybe the “-ex” part of urbex is more your bag. The desire to go where you’re not supposed to has been killing cats since the Stone Age, but now there’s a global audience. Whether “infiltrating” an active, inhabited building, “hacking” an abandoned one, or going “draining” in sewers or flood control tunnels (or “digging,” as it’s known in Russia), social media abounds with amateur videos of varying quality and veracity, detailing “extreme” exploits like bargain basement versions of the Blair Witch Project, though the danger of colorful injuries and exotic infections do add grit to the quotidian risks of getting tagged with a misdemeanor trespassing or basic vandalism charge.
Like many an underground scene, urbex has become a victim of its own popularity, with social media turning cherished clandestine spaces into over-trodden tourist destinations. Out of respect for the deceased, these videos avoid showingthings going wrong, the lethal lapse, which has the perverse effect of making it look too easy, no doubt contributing to a slew of fatal accidents in New York City’s subway system, thanks to teenage thrill-seekers “surfing” on the roofs of subway trains. (But if you’re up for some “safe” subterranean hijinks, the abandoned subway lines in Rochester and Cincinnati await your holiday planning.)
Urbex is to Russians what soccer is to the rest of the world—an outlet where underprivileged youth can find diversion, danger and even notoriety.The decision to set Vertical in Moscow was the proverbial no-brainer. Urbex is to Russians what soccer is to the rest of the world—an outlet where underprivileged youth can find diversion, danger and even notoriety. The capitol is a target-rich environment for urbex activity, a veritable skatepark of abandoned Soviet era projects; from the secret subway escape route Stalin tunneled beneath Moscow, to the rusting high-rise hammer-and-sickle monuments cluttering Moscow’s sprawling skyline.. But in a country where anything goes unless you protest anything, urbexers can and have been prosecuted for “high treason” for any display more controversial than a selfie.
In popular culture, urbex has served as the perfect excuse to get young, disposable people into places no sane person would otherwise explore, in novels such as David Morrell’s Creepers, and horror thrillers like As Above So Below and Chernobyl Diaries. In my novel, the Furies are forced to put their money, and their lives, where their professed ideals are when the skyscraper they’ve hacked gets much more dangerous than they bargained for. Our heroes are brutally stripped of their bubble of invulnerability as Americans; to do more than merely survive, they have to learn how to use that privilege for the benefit of others. And so did I.
This resonated deeply with me as I delved into the horrifying abuses of Putin’s regime while writing Vertical, and again as he invaded Ukraine. I’ve always felt that a thriller devolves into a contrived, meat-grinding waste of time when it tries to skirt what is so often dismissed as politics. If I was doing this for something more than money, if this novel wasn’t just little more than a selfie snapped on a tower of bodies, it would have to confront directly the very real villainy of Russia’s leadership. Any work of fiction steals someone’s story, and all crime fiction appropriates the malfeasance and suffering of others; but if it enhances our understanding of the real world and lets us live other lives, then it’s a urb worth ex-ing.
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