(for Bloomsbury):
There was no way around it. Because of the way the building was situated atop the hill, and the way said hill sloped away from the fire escape on the south face of said building, the first twenty feet or so of our ascent would have to be done in plain sight of anyone passing on the road to our right. For the rest of the climb, we’d have an unobstructed view of the street, and would be able to see any oncoming traffic before it saw us, but the buildings at our back would make the first few seconds nerve-wracking at best. At worst, the cops who rabidly patrolled this block between two and three in the morning while babysitting the crowds spilling out of the bars would notice and take exception to two guys scaling a fire escape on the back of the tallest building in town. And then there would be running and hiding. And maybe questioning. And then maybe some going-to-jail. All three of those things seemed unlikely or unthreatening enough though, that when Ernie – standing on top of a dug-up old concrete foundation block that served as a lookout point – waved his right arm in a “go” motion, I sprinted the few remaining feet to where the rusty ladder dangled about eight feet off the ground, above some prickly-looking thornbushes, and I jumped.
Over the thornbushes, fortunately. My feet, out in front of me in case I hadn’t jumped high enough, hit the brick wall at the same time that my hands grabbed the lowest rung of the ladder. I would have gladly hung there for a few moments and gotten a better grip, but I knew the time window was small, that breaks in traffic were rare this time of night, that I was currently in plain sight for anyone driving up the road, and that the footfalls I heard in the gravel behind me were the sounds of Ernie winding himself up to jump up to where I was currently hanging. So I heaved my body up until my shoulders were level with the bottom rung and then grabbed the second rung with my right hand and the third rung with my left. From there it was easy to swing my feet up onto the bottom rung and start scaling.
A few seconds and a few rungs later Ernie hit the bottom of the ladder and the whole thing shook back and forth under the weight. I was in the middle of reaching up to the next rung, and I quickly reached back down and secured a hold while I waited out the reverberations of the impact. It was probably fifteen rungs, all told, until the ladder emptied out onto the first landing, a metal grille about six feet long by six feet wide, and when the ladder stopped shaking I climbed the rest of the distance up to it. I pulled myself up onto the grille, and immediately rolled over onto my stomach, facing the street to the south. Ernie did the same.
We laid on the grille for a few seconds, in the watchful silence that makes up so much of urban exploration. A few cars slid by on the road, one a police cruiser, but he seemed more interested in the crowd milling about on the east side of the road and less interested in the usually abandoned lot and fire escape on the west side. This makes me feel like maybe my paranoia is unjustified; it’s not as if Kent has a Creepy Abandoned Building Investigation SWAT team that intentionally searches out urban exploration addicts. They’re way more likely to be interested in drunk and disorderly misbehavior. On the other hand, I’ve been nearly caught by urban exploring with people who treat breaking into a building like going to a frat party and act like they’re never going to get in trouble. So I guess I prefer a certain amount of paranoia.
After the cars pass, the now-visible road rolls out into the distance like a grey lolling tongue, empty at least for the next thirty seconds even if a cruiser would turn onto it from the closest side street moving at fifty miles an hour. We wind up three stories of the fire escape then stop again, crouching against the acrid glare of the orange floodlights on the roof of the building to the east of us. We become more and more visible as we ascend, but it also becomes less and less likely that anyone will bother looking high enough to see us. We wait out a beat-up Geo Metro and then climb the remaining floors of the fire escape.
The fire escape itself dead-ends into a window blocked off with thick wooden planks. In fact, just about every window on all four faces of the Y2K building is blocked off with thick wooden planks. Except one. Since our method of urban exploration doesn’t include or allow breaking when entering, we’ve effectively constrained ourselves into using that particular window for entry. Fortunately, it’s not terribly difficult to get to.
A short leap from the fire escape (made only slightly terrifying by the seven-story drop below your feet as you make it) to a small ledge where the building juts out a bit, creating a small landing three stories below where the rest of the building stops, and then a little tiptoeing across two-by-fours laid across rotting parts of said landing, and you’ve reached the window.
The hole in the window is a little smaller than I would prefer. The window next to it still has a huge plastic hose shoved through a broken pane – the remains of the last futile attempt at cleaning out the inside of the building a year or so ago. One pane in the entry-window is similarly broken, but there’s no hose. In we go.
There’s a lot of twisting, and yelping and straining and trying hard not to cut oneself on broken glass involved in entering. I become claustrophobic really easily, so this is tough for me. The lure of what we might find inside overrides my fear handily enough, though. Ernie, shorter and thinner than I am, comes through the window quite quickly after me.
It’s dark. The kind of dark you associate with a cave, not a building, and the transition is momentarily shocking. As my eyes adjust, I can pick out points in which the sulfur lights outside weasel their weak light in through mostly-blocked windows. The wan yellow light illuminates the inside of a building that could have been taken from a war zone. About ten feet in front of me there is something that would have once resembled a counter; otherwise, everything in the visible vicinity is crumbled, broken, and laying in piles on the floor. Exposed wires hang from the ceiling. Pipes end in cracked, nasty-looking tips halfway down the wall. There’s no way to traverse the floor silently, as plaster and God knows what else cracks and pops under our footsteps. We give up the idea of silence immediately. If there is anyone else in the building (homeless people and squatters are a constant concern in urban exploration), they’ll hear us before long no matter what we do. I honestly can’t begin to figure out how a building used as a restaurant and bar as recently as five years ago could be this absolutely destroyed inside.
After a few minutes of exploration, we find something on the floor that’s intact: a stairwell, on the far side of the building, that leads both up and down.
The next hour or so consisted of exploring the bottom six floors of the building by cell-phone light, and then finding a basement and exploring that. All the floors were pretty spectacularly destroyed, but it was worst on the ground floor, the floor that apparently had served as the main dance floor. We could still make out bits and pieces of late-90s-era wall decorations, and parts of what appeared to be the main bar were still intact. There was a pristine mini-fridge behind the bar with cans of Diet Pepsi with the early-90s Pepsi logo on them. It was a bit like looking into a time capsule and a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie at the same time.
Up on the eighth floor, the staircase abruptly ended, and it took a good amount of searching with our improvised cell-phone flashlights (which were by now rapidly running out of charge) before we found a ladder that actually came down in the middle of the floor from a hole in the ceiling. Climbing up to the ninth floor was easy enough, and there wasn’t much worth examining on the floor itself. Climbing up to the tenth floor was another matter entirely. The ladder continued up, but passed through a hole barely wide enough for me to fit through even if there hadn’t been a ladder going through the hole at the same time. I had a moment that combined claustrophobia with the plain fact that there just wasn’t enough room between the ladder and the wall behind me to reach my arms up to the next rung. Then I realized I could climb using just my legs. It’s not as if I was going to fall backwards.
At the top of the ladder was a small room with what looked like the heating or the cooling apparatus for the building in it. There were a number of tools scattered around on the floor. Then my light illuminated a sleeping pad and bag, and a half-empty bag of groceries. I started for a moment until I realized that the pile of belongings had been abandoned, or at least the room wasn’t occupied at the moment. Whoever was squatting here must be have been out for awhile, or had left for good. Either way, good news for us.
Based on looking at the building earlier from the outside, we guessed that we were in a small room that was actually built onto the roof. Which of course was our ultimate goal. What’s the point of going into a really tall building you’re not supposed to be in if you don’t go on the roof? There isn’t one.
A few minutes of work later, and we had propped open and extremely heavy window with a chair and slithered underneath the sill. Unfortunately for me, there was a pretty significant drop of at least five feet to the roof itself from the sill and I took the drop headfirst, splashing down into a puddle of collected rainwater. I advised Ernie to come out feet first. He obliged.
The entire rooftop, not unlike the landing we had traversed earlier, was pockmarked by holes, some of those holes covered by tarps. You could tell where the covered holes were by looking for accumulation of rainwater. Over the larger holes there were more two-by-fours, forming walkways. It occurred to me now for the first time that maybe those two-by-fours had all been so conveniently placed not by repairmen, but by our resident squatter.
The view from the highest hill in town, crowned by the tallest building in town, was fantastic. Everything was painted in sulfur-light haze on the ground, contrasted with the crystal clarity of a star-filled winter night, for miles in every direction.
I was facing off the north edge of the building, and strangely enough, as I looked down, I noticed that there was a small garden growing on plastic flats in the northeast corner of the roof. Another accoutrement of our squatter, no doubt.
I decided to take a few pictures, with the idea of maybe using one as the cover of the album I was working on. I was still a little skittish about using the flash, not knowing how visible it might be to people on the ground, so the pictures, by and large came out very blurry. And dark. And then I learned a valuable lesson, one that tourists learn by the thousands every year, and which I just happened to learn instead on a rotting rooftop while trespassing at four in the morning.
Do not try to walk and use your camera’s viewfinder at the same time. It is not the same as walking and using your own eyes. It makes you do things like misjudge where you’re putting your feet. And then you put them where they aren’t supposed to be. Like on a clearly rotted and unsafe ceiling beam, for instance.
A section of ceiling about three feet by three feet collapsed underneath my weight with a resounding crack, and down I went. I fell through the ceiling, dropped for what seemed like ten seconds in the agonizing slow-motion of adrenaline, and then hit something hard that crunched underneath me. My left side exploded in pain, and everything went black.
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