Hidden Cities

January 14, 2013
Urban exploration with Gates makes for wildly entertaining reading. Whereas most travel authors highlight the museums, fashionable streets, and restaurants of the great cities of the world, Gate’s passion lies elsewhere. He revels in surmounting contrived barriers, whether in New York, Paris, or Ukraine. “We live our whole lives as prisoners of artificial boundaries—boundaries put in place not by mountains, rivers, or walls but by people and institutions who tell us that they’re there.” Gates chronicles his exploits exploring subway tunnels in New York and Stockholm; climbing the Lateran Obelisk sewers in Rome; ringing a bell on the top of Norte Dame; and traipsing through abandoned buildings in Brazil. Gates, an urban planner and licensed New York City tour guide, has a practiced eye for seeing the details of off-the-radar environments, as well as the peculiar qualities of the characters that pursue out-of-the-ordinary urban adventures. His memoir also describes facing adulthood after he loses his job his marriage breaks up. “After I turned thirty, I found myself shivering in an abandoned firehouse across from a power plant. After I turned thirty-five, I found myself in a rusting emergency train exit under a park. I don’t want to turn forty and find myself hanging out in a steam tunnel.” A solidly entertaining ride for those seeking a gritty travel experience.

April 1, 2013
A handbook of spelunking's edgier, smellier cousin--navigating the secret passageways of urban areas, particularly sewers and subway tunnels--with a liberal dose of ego and occasional misogyny. Gates, a tour guide and urban archaeologist, began venturing into the vast substratum below Manhattan ostensibly since he "wanted to see everything in New York City," but it quickly becomes clear that the places that catch his interest are only those where the normal life of the city is absent--the drains and shafts and catwalks that form the hidden infrastructure of the metropolis but that, to the untrained eye, seem primarily distinguished by their rivers of raw sewage and colonies of rats. Occasionally interesting and often befuddling, the narrative chronicles the author's travels on five continents, hosted by an itinerant but close-knit community of urban explorers who break into cathedrals in the dead of night, climb suspension bridges while intoxicated and practice seduction techniques gleaned from pickup artists. The historical interludes, minilectures on the catacombs of Paris, the aqueducts of Naples, or the Nazi-era bunkers of Odessa, are the book's redeeming feature, but the occasional lazy sociocultural commentary--e.g., a bizarre paragraph explaining Italy's "lack of macho territorial energy that is so prevalent in countries with a more Anglo-Saxon heritage"--will make readers question the author's judgment. Neither living human society nor the natural world elicit much more than a passing glance here. An epic road trip from Brazil through Bolivia to Peru merits barely three pages, much of which is devoted to a qualitative analysis of the smell of the polluted Choqueyapu River. Lonely Planet for the realm beyond the "No Trespassing" signs.

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February 15, 2013

A self-styled urban explorer and certified New York City tour guide, Gates sees the world from unique vantage points: atop Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, underground in the ancient sewers of Rome, and across the many bridges, derelict buildings, and abandoned subway stations of New York City. He shares his experiences with a worldwide community of fellow urban explorers, all of whom are drawn to these forbidden challenges. One can hope that Gates wrote much of this memoir with his tongue firmly in cheek, but at times he comes across as an overgrown teenager anxious to brag about stealing beer from a 7-11 in Stockholm, having sex with his "trooper" of a girlfriend on New York's Williamsburg Bridge, and generally outwitting fences, No Entry signs, and the police. The few, mostly black-and-white amateur photographs add little. VERDICT Readers intrigued by the novelty of Moses's story will find this a mildly entertaining read that can be continued on his blog, walkallcitynewyork.com. Those interested in unusual perspectives on the world's great cities will find many more interesting and better illustrated choices such as Dan Haga's Urban Atrophy and Sylvain and David Margaine's Forbidden Places: Exploring Our Abandoned Heritage.--Linda M. Kaufmann, Massachusetts Coll. of Liberal Arts Lib., North Adams

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2013
It's easy to imagine people from many different fields of study picking up this book after reading its title. Throw in cover photos of lone nightwalkersone perched on a suspension bridge overlooking skyscrapers, and another shining his headlamp down a long, fully cobblestoned tunneland what readers with interests in history, architecture, creative writing, or urban planning can resist? Sadly, it quickly dawns that this book is for a privileged group of hearty-partiers, mainly dudes who are often so totally gonna get busted if they don't bail, dudes who fancy themselves as rightful rebels against wrongful restrictions. Unlike charmingly inept dissenters from, say, Edward Abbey, nothing endears or titillates here. When the author isn't drunkenly using historic gargoyles as climbing holds, he is defining himself by purposefully urinating in a Paris street. The book is padded with museum-plaque data on various destinations, and the characters are so immature it sounds gratuitous when we learn one had cancer or that the author has ancestors from the Holocaust.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)