![]() ![]() ![]() Gates, who works as an urban planner, sees value in projects that reuse abandoned, off-limits parts of the city, like the High Line and the Lowline. He did the most with the least to work with in the history of the city." "Ed Koch dies on a Friday morning and Saturday afternoon, someone has done a piece," said Gates, standing in front of an recent portrait memorializing the mayor. Besides attracting Urban Explorers, the tunnel remains an active canvas for graffiti artists. The Freedom Tunnel was named after the artist Chris Pape, aka Freedom, who spent decades creating graffiti pieces here, including this version of the Venus de Milo. Gates has returned to the tunnel many times since. "The first time I came here was 2003 or 2004," said Gates, several years after the tunnel was re-opened by Amtrak, and after most of the homeless people who were living in the tunnel were displaced. "When I come down here on a weekend, I always run into one or two people," said Gates. The Freedom Tunnel, a three-mile-long active train tunnel under Riverside Park, was once abandoned, and is now one of the most popular destinations in New York for fledgling Urban Explorers. "I thought it would be a good place to end." ![]() The final chapter of Hidden Cities details an overnight trip to Brooklyn's home in the Freedom Tunnel, and takes place a few weeks past Gate's 35th birthday, at a time when he was considering retiring from the Urban Exploration life. His deep attachment to the tunnel stretches back for almost as long. "When friends from out of the country are in town, I shove them through here," said Gates, who has lived in New York for over a decade. He is here to show a group of visiting Urban Explorers around, and to drop off a copy of his book with a friend named Brooklyn, who has lived in the tunnel for decades. Moses Gates is standing inside the Freedom Tunnel, a covered train line underneath Riverside Park. "When you are writing a memoir," says Gates, "it's kind of about what you leave out, not what you leave in." Gates includes stories of having sex on top of the Williamsburg Bridge, being arrested after climbing up the side of the Notre Dame Cathedral, partying in the Parisian catacombs, visiting Brazilian squats, and mucking through the sewers underneath Rome, London, Moscow, and numerous other cities. The book, out today, is a fast-paced travelogue that takes readers along on his journeys with a loose-knit international group of Urban Explorers, who explore off-limits parts of the built environment. He is the author of a new memoir titled Hidden Cities that documents five years of illegal adventures in cities around the world. "Everybody thinks Urban Exploration is cool." Gates would know. "Urban Exploration is a lot less weird than it was 10 years ago," says Moses Gates, looking around at the small crowd of visitors exploring inside an active Amtrak tunnel underneath the Upper West Side of Manhattan. This week, Kensinger does some urban exploration with author Moses Gates. Welcome back to Camera Obscura, Curbed's series of photo essays by Nathan Kensinger. ![]()
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