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Steve Duncan lives dangerously. The urban explorer goes underground, examining the hidden
infrastructure of major cities all over the world — their tunnels, subways, sewers.
In New York City, his favorite underground adventure, he could drown when the tide comes in or
succumb to toxic gases in the sewers. He could be hit by a train or step on the third rail. And if he gets
caught, he would be so under arrest.
So why does he do it? If you could have followed Alice down that rabbit hole, or Jules Verne to the
center of the Earth, or gone to see the mandrake god in Pan’s Labyrinth, wouldn't you do it? It's
seductive. It's mysterious. It's what lies beneath.
Duncan, 32, is a graduate of Columbia University working on his doctorate in urban history at the
University of California. He looks like a human sparkler, with a shock of white-blond hair.
Call him what you will — including crazy. But while you sleep, he's plunged far below the city surface —
headlamp on, an urban mole, exploring the nether regions of New York.
Producer Brent Baughman and I followed Duncan — not down every manhole, but, hey, we stood
anxiously beside a few — on a journey through 25 miles of New York City underground.
We waited in the snow as the explorers descended below, along with a videographer and a New York
Times reporter. The men climbed over a wall and lowered themselves into a freezing stream flowing
into a culvert. They vanished. They would have to walk 30 or 40 blocks, with their waders on, to a climb
out of the previously scouted manhole on the residential street in the Bronx where we would be waiting.
A colleague of Duncan’s patrolled with us.
"Mole men, this is topside, come in!" spotter Will Hunt called into his radio over and over. Just after 5
a.m., they emerged, filthy and elated. They had been in beautiful, double-barreled brick sewers built in
the 1890s. But there had been some water problems; Duncan jettisoned leaking waders.
Then, it was off to cross the Harlem River to the subway, head back south and find a place to sleep. We
had sleeping bags and backpacks. We needed warmth. Columbia University, Duncan's alma mater,
was the target.
The second night out was beginning, and after a brief stop at the New York Athletic Association on
swanky 59th Street — an underground river runs beneath the building — we ended up somewhere off
Delancey Street, contemplating visiting abandoned subway stations. By now, it was after 1 a.m.
Unfortunately, the subways I saw were nowhere near as abandoned as I'd expected. There were no
express trains, but we had to avoid service trains and other, unscheduled locals. Duncan gave this
inspiring speech:
"The big thing here is not to get killed. So don't touch the third rail. If a train's coming, get out of the way
That might mean — in the worst situation I can imagine — that might mean standing in between two
third rails and two pillars with trains coming on either side of you. You will get seen, but you won't get
killed."
"I could have sworn I saw a guy over there," he whispered. And then we were running. Was a train
coming? Were we being chased? I was at the end; who knew? I heard a loud police whistle. A worker?
A security guard? A cop? We ran. At a subway platform, to the astonishment of passengers, the men
hauled me up, backpack and all. Why were we doing this? Well, this part may have been a
miscalculation, Duncan said.
Kagge, who is writing a book about happiness, wanted to interview the "Mole People" who live off the
Amtrak tunnel below Riverside Drive. One of them, Brooklyn, lives in an "igloo," as she put it — a sort of
dump beneath the tracks, which were lined with mural after mural of intense, weird graffiti.
"What do you think people above ground do wrong in life?" Kagge asked her.
"It's called appreciate what you got," Brooklyn said. "And hold on to it. And don't lose it. I don't know
why people are miserable — they got everything that I don't have. And I'm happier than them."
After that, the explorers went on to crawl below Canal Street in lower Manhattan, in an old sewer they
entered through a manhole. It was so narrow, they were soon lying flat. Rats and cockroaches ran past
their heads. Raw sewage splashed them. They showed up at my flat at 7 a.m., frozen and happy and
very, very filthy. But apart from a little scrubbing up, there was no stopping.
The last leg of the journey was through Queens. They had now been in nearly every borough of New
York, and Duncan and Kagge wanted to hike through a storm sewer that emptied into Jamaica Bay. The
manhole was in a forest in Queens. They popped the lid, climbed down rusted ladder runs — and
walked into the Atlantic.
"It was pretty scary ... the tide came in about an hour earlier than I expected and I got wet to my waist.
But it was awesome," Duncan said.
Kagge, the polar explorer, termed it "a proper expedition" — from the North Bronx all the way out to the
Atlantic.
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