Steve Duncan is after buried treasure and underground labyrinths

Name: Steve Duncan

Age: 32

Hometown: Cheverly, MD

Job description: Urban explorer, photographer, historian
Bio: Ventured throughout New York City's maritime and industrial relics, and underground rivers and sewers; avid bridge climber; traversed ancient Roman aqueducts and the catacombs in Paris; visited Chernobyl Power Plant in Prypiat, Ukraine; keynote speaker for the Conflux Festival

Upcoming projects: Exploring underground urban streams, Western Europe, and potentially parts of Asia.
Select links: "The Wilderness Below Your Feet" (NY Times); "Into the Tunnels: Exploring the Underside of NYC" (NPR); underground exploration with videographer Andrew Wonder; excursion with artist Marie Lorenz, who runs a water taxi; Blog; Undercity.org

Describe your current state of mind.

Overall pretty happy. I like doing talks when I can show off my stuff and get myself out there. I end up meeting awesome people.

How did you get into urban exploration?

I grew up in Maryland outside of D.C. I got to New York in ’96 to come to school here. I was a tourist, at first, and thought the first time I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge was the coolest thing in the world.

I didn’t start running around subway tunnels until I had run around tunnels at Columbia University. At Columbia, the utility tunnels were sometimes used as the pedestrian tunnels up until the ‘80s. And there are legends about Manhattan Project tunnels, which are mostly just legends. But [Columbia’s tunnels] really were part of the Manhattan Project during the early days. Being there as a student, hearing about this stuff, and seeing the network [of urban explorers], just made me want to see more of it.

My first time in the tunnels at Columbia was when I was trying to sneak into the computer lab late at night; I was overdue on some homework. It was awesome going in by myself, terrified of the dark.

I started running around New York more. I went into places that I had heard about as being graffiti spots. [I] found my way into the Riverside Park Tunnel.

Getting to a place satiated me but it also kept inspiring me to keep looking: if this thing exists there must be more!

How do you find out about the places that you find out about?

I was asking you how you choose for your blog, “Oh no, if that’s what you’re interested in, you just got to pick it up.”

What books do you recommend?

Part of it is if I saw something referenced in some old newspaper. I’m more interested in the infrastructure, history, and the multi-layered city, artifacts left over from past eras of the city’s development.

My reading list started with books on the New York underground. There’s a great photo book by Margaret Morton called The Tunnel. She took pictures of people who lived in the West Side line in the late 80s. Her pictures also appeared in Jennifer Toth’s The Mole People.

That has great mythological value and taps right into the idea of people’s love of crazy mole people living underground. It didn’t work for me in the same way but it’s inspiring to a lot of people.

The World Beneath the City (Robert Daley).

[Which] talked about the general utility networks, the steam tunnels, and that kind of thing.

Nowadays, if I was starting out, I’d try to understand how a 3-D city worked. I would go to Kate Ascher's book, The Works: Anatomy of a City and then Julia Solis' New York Underground. But those are all overviews and not specific things.

I really love the water system especially after reading about the old Croton Aqueduct. Gerard Koeppel's Water for Gotham: A History talks about the process of building up until it opened in 1842.

Once you start reading about that stuff it just opens up this whole world about these massive engineering projects that no one really knows much about. You don’t think about it in the same way that you think about the Manhattan Bridge [being constructed].

At Columbia, Avery is a great architecture library.

The first thing I did there was look at the Sanborn maps to track rail lines. . The Sanborn maps were cool because they were usually a couple of decades old. Sometimes older than that. And the old engineering reports were information sources and artifacts in their own right. [Like] the 19th-century, engineering reports from the Croton Aqueduct construction.

That helped me figure out where these places were, [to] see what was left of them - the drawing of how the pipe work was laid, the brick work there. Man, I wanted to go see those bricks in person.

How conscious are you of safety?

That’s arguable.

What’s the best and worst thing about what you do?

If you’re married and someone asks you, “What’s the best thing about being married?”, it’s a hard question. The awesome thing is hopefully that you’re in love with this person.

The best part [about exploring] is that you get to be intimately involved with something that you love in a better way than anyone else.

I like the cities: New York; London; Paris; Seattle; Los Angeles. The icing on the cake is the high five and getting plastered after I go up a bridge, with the deep satisfaction of [seeing] a view of New York that few people would get to.

[I] walked across the Brooklyn Bridge with the first girl I ever fell in love with. It was the first time I had crossed it. And years later, I climbed it.

I like being underground, too, but when you’re at the top of something, looking out over the city and [seeing] the million points of light from all of the windows, every little one of those points of light has a story behind it. It’s clichéd [but there are] multiple lifetimes of stories behind them. And you’re never going to get a tiny a fraction of all of those stories, but just seeing it spread out there, and being a part of it, I feel like I’m on top of the world.

What about the worst thing?

You got to keep on doing shit.

How hard is it to keep on doing shit?

I feel like the thrill in life isn’t just to accomplish something. Whenever you accomplish something it’s one-third the thrill of accomplishment, and two-thirds realizing it wasn’t quite as cool as you thought to begin with. Because once you’ve done it it’s not unattainable.

Are there any places that you want to visit again?

There are a lot of places. I’ll go to the top of the Williamsburg Bridge. It’s one of my favorite spots of New York. But it doesn’t have that thrill of new-ness.

How do you feel about being branded as an urban explorer?

Branding myself as an urban explorer gets me [girls] and all that. But I’m branded.

I’d like to think that part of [branding is] what’s hopefully developing into a complete, mature life.

I [also would] like to think that it’s easy for other people to see that I’m just a drunken bridge climber. Because that’s what I sometimes am.

I like branding myself because it gives people a way to understand what you’re presenting. I’d like exploration to be a more [common] brand so that people look at the world that way.

It’s not about being branded as an urban exploration guy. It doesn’t mean to people what I’d like it to mean.

They assume sometimes that you go out taking risks and getting arrested. There’s an element of truth to that but I have yet to find a way to keep the excitement, and also keep the serious side of things.

Serious as in the pursuit of something bigger than the momentary adventure: understanding cities, getting an experience of history in a worthwhile way, and not just accepting your environment as inevitable.

So you tell somebody: “Yeah, so, I went to Moscow and went into a manhole. The military police were right there, and I almost went to jail.”

What was it like almost getting arrested in Moscow?

Terrifying. I’ve heard about tuberculosis going around prisons in Russia.

And the Russians we were with were telling us, “Whatever happens, do not speak English. It’s better to pretend to be a deaf mute than to give them any indication that you might be an American.” Because we were suspicious-looking Americans with a lot of gear, coming out a manhole right underneath the square next to the Kremlin.  Then when the cops did come up, it was absolutely terrifying.

How many people were there?

Four Russians, me, and Moses Gates.

Which tunnel?

It’s within the Neglinka River, which is now part of the sewer system.

What year was this?

Early 2009.

And how did you meet your Russian contacts?

We hadn’t contacted them. We knew an Australian who traveled to Moscow a year before. So he put us in touch with one of them, who put us in touch with the others. We’d done stuff in New York and they were interested in us.

Those of us who were photographers we had seen each other’s pictures. So we kind of knew what we all did and what to expect.

Thank God the rest of the world loves New York as much as they do. A lot of  people have the feeling that if you have adventures in New York, then you’re super cool - even when other cities are more exciting in a lot of ways.

You were there and the police came. So what happened?

We didn’t know this until afterwards.  Even if we had gotten arrested we could have bribed our way out of it. I don’t know for sure. That apparently is more common than I thought it was, even with the military police.

What kind of bribe?

As in a couple hundred dollars.

It didn’t come up because [of] the leader of this expedition.

[The police] did not see us coming out of the manhole. We came out of the manhole, closed it up behind us, and went over to this plaza area by the sidewalk. We were essentially patting each other on the back.

We were in full-chest waiters, backpacks, lights, headlamps, and gloves. We had fled like crazy upstream because the rain had started to come down. We were taking off our hip waiters that had filled up with water and I think when the military police came up we were in the process of pouring out gallons of water from our boots. They were just baffled. Where were you going? Where have you been?

And the leader of our expedition had a few frozen moments when [the police] were starting to look in people’s backpacks. He grabbed either his camera or someone else’s and flipped through non-incriminating pictures that he had shot at the river bank that day.

And they wanted to see other people’s cameras. I think I had my tripod out and I was the most obvious, so they came over to me. I just had that kind of heart-stilling moment of absolute fear. But I took it out slowly and took the memory card out in the process, figuring I’m not going to get away with this. But I did get away with it and there was nothing there.

Then I fished out another memory card; I had shot a wedding in New York on it. I showed them: “See, nothing.” And they did the sign language, asking what the hell we were doing there. They were asking me and I set up my tripod and showed them that I was doing long exposures at nighttime. Which they thought was more ludicrous. And eventually they just go tired of us and went off. Our Russian friend said they yelled at us: “We know you’re up to no good but we can’t prove anything.” Or, “We can’t figure out what, so get out of here.”

Instead of taking you out back and –

Shooting us?

There’s so much corruption. People get kidnapped for no reason all the time. It’s weird that they would say, “Oh, we don’t have any proof.”

We were also six people with gear who smelled like sewers.

So the lesson is whenever you’re in a place, and you’re about to be incriminated, cover yourself in feces.

It would work in a lot of cases.

You went to the Chernobyl Power Plant. What was that like?

There are official tours. You have to sign up well in advance. It was me, my girlfriend at the time, and one other guy, a Russian. There’s a lot more access to it than there was in the States, since it’s radioactive. But you still have to go through this whole shebang of checkpoints on the way out. You have to stand on this Geiger counter thing to make sure you’re not too radioactive. And guides who do it are only allowed to be there three days a week, to minimize exposure. Our guide at the time was a woman, who used to be an explorer and let us bend the rules a little bit. She was trying to send her son to school in the States so she ended up working there six days a week; she would trade shifts with people. I found out two years later that she had died of cancer. No idea if it’s related, but it could very well be.

How old was she?

40 or 50.

Tell me about some of your injuries.

One of the first times I had an accident was at this abandoned hospital. The stairs looked in tact with marble slabs. I was up on an upper level when some of the stairs beneath me just vanished. The camera shattered and I thought I had broken a leg. I ended up with a spike of metal driven through my nail and the finger. We were on an island in New York Harbor so we had to wait til morning. I had to go the emergency room, have them peel off the fingernail, and eventually get it out. [It] was a strong reminder to pay attention.

Another time I fell into an underground river and punctured my hand. I did go to the hospital and get it patched up. But it still blew up with an infection the next day. My hand was pus-y. By the time I got through the triage it was swollen up to my shoulder, and I had red streaks down my chest. They told me another 6-12 hours, I would have lost a hand. Another 24, I would be dead. I was in the  hospital a week, getting rid of that infection.

After going through sewers in Naples, I had this bone cancer that left places for germs, which were deeply rooted in the hip joint. I’m sure I picked up in one of these sewers. I had to give myself an IV injection every morning.

What are some tips for new explorers?

If people aren’t used to underground places then the standard protocol is to take three sources of light so that you have back ups: a headlamp, a backup headlamp, and a keychain light sort of thing.

I worry about new people in the subways just because the third rail can be pretty bad. In New York, the third rail switches sides. It's easy to assume when you see the third rail on the other side of the tracks that it’s not there on your side. A lot of the time it’s shadowed so it can actually be hard to tell. But they overlap. So always be really careful where you’re putting your feet.

What's your opinion on a place being haunted?

I’ve never seen a ghost but I would love to. Why? Do you know of any?

I saw something in my house back in Kansas when I was 12, after a tornado hit my neighborhood.

I don't believe in places being haunted. For example, in hospitals in asylums where there is evidence that people have suffered in these places it’s easy to have the associative feeling of the lives that were there, as a sort of haunted-ness. Instead of thinking of it as our subjective experience of the past of a place, as we see evidenced in what’s really there.

With that disclaimer, I always feel like the places with the actual bones are the most haunted. Because you don’t get much closer to a past life that’s now gone. Some of the older cemeteries around the outer boroughs [are] not well-kept. There are mausoleums that have been abandoned where vandals have found ways to get in, so you see old head stones and just bones.

What was your childhood like?

Boring. I read a lot of science fiction. I wasn’t allowed to watch TV. My mom’s kind of a health food nut. I went to a Catholic, Montessori school up until 6th grade, that was run by Benedictine monks. And there were no girls from 6th to 12th grade.

Are you religious?

No.

Do you have strong political views?

I was going to say, No, because I don’t have a clear-cut political agenda. But then I realized [the] people that I think are wrong, I definitely hate very strongly.

What’s the most difficult thing you’ve ever had to do?

You know that little bridge over the Gowanus Canal that says "No faster than walking pace"? Moses and I decided that we had to be on top. We push each other. That’s how we get a lot of stuff done. One of us does it and then the other person has to do it. Actually, we've short-cut it at this point. Moe just goes out somewhere and he'll be like, "You’re going to do it if I don’t, huh?"

We were drunk and he was like, "I’m going to go up this bridge." I'm like, "I'm going to go higher." So we found ourselves trying to each balance on one foot at the highest point. Not very high. It was like 20 feet in the air. But we were drunk and it would have been catastrophic.  It was very difficult.

Poking up the larger-sized manholes. Those things are so insanely heavy. I tried to open one of those things on my own one time.

How do you do it?

I ended up having to wedge a lever underneath it...it’s like 600 pounds.

It’s probably for a reason.

Yeah, probably. [laughs]

What are you most curious about?

What have other people said?

I had an artist say the ocean. So that’s taken.

The underground. Like actual underground. Not the underground scene.

It’s funny. The more I research cities, it’s amazing how many scholarly books there are about the urban underground that have nothing to do with the physical, urban underground. They talk about the urban underground of people’s imaginations. They talk about the underground scene, or the metaphorical underground: underground economy; night time life of the city; or what goes on in basements.

If you could have more of something, what would it be?

Finding more hidden worlds, that one manhole in New York that leads to a labyrinthine bat-hole full of people who have never seen the light of day. Hidden treasure. The cool thing about the underground is when you haven’t found it yet; it could be anything.

Are there any films that attest to that imagination?

C.H.U.D. Cannibalistic, human underground dwellers. One of the best movies about underground New York. Not all completely realistic, but the general idea is that radioactive stuff spilled into the sewers of New York, and it mutated people who lived in the subways into rat, flesh-eating zombie-types. The rest is fantastic. Something like the Goonies. That appeals to a lot of people. People resist that because it does seem a little infantile.

By nature, are you a tightwad or spender?

I’m a spender. Unfortunately that means I don’t have any money so then I have to be a tightwad.

How would you spend your money if you had a limited budget?

I would have a significant amount of money for travel. I would eat very cheaply and I would drink a little immoderately, but economically.

In real life, I spend much more than I intend at bars and on gear, which is a worthwhile investment. I think I take cabs much more often. For example, I came down from a bridge and I thought, I deserve this.

I spend more on immediate things and don't preserve enough for long-term investments.

What about if you had an unlimited budget?

Mamiya medium-format, digital SLR, with a medium format censor. It's $30,000 or so.

It's hard to imagine, at least on my budget, to take a $30,000 camera into a sewer. But you'd get beautiful images.

Right now, I take $10,000 worth of equipment with me. Which already seems like a lot. But it's fully insured; that's always a big reassurance. And once that stuff depreciates, maybe $4,000 or $5,000 worth of stuff is what I have when I'm going to take pictures.

If I had an unlimited budget, it would sure help with things like buying reflective vests or a long static line. Then you could do things like rappel off bridges  We can already with the lines we have. But there are some things where you need a 600-foot line.

Some places I want to get to you have to have one or two people.

What kind of places?

Even little things like getting into and out of some sewers and getting out. Some places you'd have to put the manhole back on, going in. You wouldn't want to just pop that thing up because a car would just run over it. So that's when you'd need somebody on the ground.

What’s your greatest fear?

I am Indiana Jones. My greatest fear is snakes.

I have no fear. Name something. I’ll tell you if I’m afraid of it.

Are you afraid of heights?

Terrified. That’s what makes it fun.

What’s your philosophy on love?

I think falling in love is the best thing ever. Being in love is a bit tougher and it prevents you from falling in love again. So that worries me.

A relationship and a love that I want to have is one where I don't get bored. Where you're not thinking, Man, I’ve seen this person naked. You have that sense of wanting to discover something new every day you're with them. Not every day. Let’s be realistic. You’ve told each other all your stories. Just that feeling of excitement, the revelation of being with the other person. The way I’ve been able to imagine love really working out [is] if I feel about a girl the way I feel about New York.